Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, has once again brought American exceptionalism on gun violence into stark relief.

You eat a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. Plastic is omnipresent. Plastic is cheap and easy to make and mold. We use this miracle polymer to store and transport food, make our clothes and cosmetics, cars and boats, detergents and fertilizers, transfuse our blood and floss our teeth.

It may soon be possible to diagnose people with aphantasia, the inability to picture images in their head, using a simple test.

Placebo effects have already been proven to work on the immune system. But this study could show for the first time that they work in a different way — that is, through an act of will. “As far as we know today, the placebo responses in the immune system are attributable

Health authorities in Spain have confirmed that a health worker at the Carlos III Hospital in Madrid, Spain has been infected with the Ebola virus. This is the first time anyone has contracted the virus outside of Africa. The woman, a nurse technician, had worked in the room where two

A recent study in PLoS Currents: Outbreaks suggests that the chance of getting at least one imported case of Ebola in the United States by late September could be as high as 18%. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), there were 4,336 confirmed cases of Ebola

The 2014 Ebola outbreak is the largest in history and the first Ebola outbreak in West Africa. This outbreak is actually the first Ebola epidemic the world has ever known — affecting multiple countries in and around West Africa. Although the current epidemic does not pose a significant risk to the

Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation’s top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze. Airborne diseases are spread when droplets

Improving the U.S. health care system requires simultaneous pursuit of three aims: improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs of health care. Preconditions for this include the enrollment of an identified population, a commitment to universality for its members, and the