New research finds four genetic variants that may raise the risk of dying by suicide, regardless of environmental factors. The study also identifies hundreds of other genes that require further analysis and that may also raise the likelihood that a person dies by suicide. Middle-aged men are at a higher risk of dying by suicide.…
The typical pregnancy has three trimesters and lasts around 40 weeks from the first day of a woman’s last period. In each trimester, the fetus will meet specific developmental milestones. While 40 weeks is the usual time frame, a full-term baby can be born as early as 37 weeks and as late as 42 weeks.…
Last month, when I was flying from New York to Dallas to report about how airlines use social media for customer care, I was having trouble with the online check-in for my Spirit flight. So I decided to conduct a quick experiment: I would call customer service and tweet at the same time, to see…
If you really want to cause a stir at the family table this Thanksgiving, don’t bother with gun control, reproductive rights, kneeling during the national anthem or her emails. Just say you don’t like turkey. For the last 90 years or so, we have been living in an era of poultry correctness. According to the…
NAME Zena Haddad AGE 45 HOMETOWN Beirut, Lebanon, where Ms. Haddad lived for the first three months of her life, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where she grew up until she left for a British boarding school at the age of 9. NOW LIVES In the Mayfair neighborhood of London. BACKGROUND Ms. Haddad took…
At this point, it is hardly a surprise to learn that even top scientific journals publish a lot of low-quality work — not just solid experiments that happen, by bad luck, to have yielded conclusions that don’t stand up to replication, but poorly designed studies that had no real chance of succeeding before they were…
Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, has been known to take provocative positions. He has argued that women are intrinsically different from men, that we are more driven by our genes than academics like to acknowledge, and that society is getting less violent over time — despite the mass shootings and other atrocities we…
Cancer has an insidious talent for evading the natural defenses that should destroy it. What if we could find ways to help the immune system fight back? It has begun to happen. The growing field of immunotherapy is profoundly changing cancer treatment and has rescued many people with advanced malignancies that not long ago would…
Only a fool would try to place limits on the reach of science, which fumbles upward by trial and doubt. To be clear, I’m all in favor of reaching for whichever stars — so to speak — might be calling to you. But at the risk of sounding incurious or unscientific, there are some questions…
The most common risk factor for serious disease is old age. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurological conditions, diabetes — all increase radically with advancing years. And the older a person is, the more likely he or she is to have multiple chronic illnesses. Some scientists hope one day to treat all of them at once…