The amount of mercury extracted from the sea by industrial fishing has grown steadily since the 1950s, potentially increasing mercury exposure among the populations of several coastal and island nations to levels that are unsafe for fetal development.

A new approach to killing C. difficile that silences key bacterial genes while sparing other bacteria may provide a new way to treat the most common hospital-acquired bacterial infection in the United States, according to researchers.

Physicians may want to dig a little deeper into their closets, or grab their white coats on the way out of the operating room, if they want patients to view them favorably, according to the largest-ever study of patient preferences for doctors’ attire.

For decades, intensive groundwater pumping has caused ground beneath California’s San Joaquin Valley to sink, damaging infrastructure. Now research published in the journal Nature Communications suggests that as pumping makes the ground sink, it also unleashes an invisible threat to human health and food production: It allows arsenic to move into groundwater aquifers that supply drinking water for 1 million people and irrigation for crops in some of the nation’s richest farmland.

Newly published results from a study on nutrition, food security and the environment in Saskatchewan First Nations show that food insecurity is a major concern and that many households would like more access to traditional foods.

A popular aquarium fish may hold answers to how tumors form in a childhood cancer.

Muscle precursor cells called myoblasts are formed during normal fetal development and mature to become the skeletal muscles of the body. Rarely, a genetic error in which pieces of two chromosomes fuse together occurs in a cell related to this process and triggers those cells to multiply and behave abnormally. A particularly aggressive form of the muscle cancer rhabdomyosarcoma results.

Pilot study results indicate that a sleep and yoga intervention has promising effects on improving sleep disturbance, sleep-related impairment, and sleep health behaviors.

If you’re up there in age and feel like you can coast as a couch potato, you may want to reconsider. A new study suggests, for the first time in women over age 70, that working up a sweat can reduce the influence one’s genes have on obesity.

MIT researchers, working with scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light.

Asthma and respiratory viruses don't go well together. Weakened by the common cold or the flu, a person suffering an asthma attack often responds poorly to emergency treatment; some must be hospitalized. This is especially true for preschoolers.