Scientists have zeroed in on a culprit that spurs damaging inflammation in the heart following a heart attack. The guilty party is a type of immune cell that tries to heal the injured heart but instead triggers inflammation that leads to even more damage.

While images of crimson-colored lava erupting from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano continue to captivate the world, one of the greatest concerns is toxic sulfur dioxide gas emanating from every new fissure in the volcano.

Sulfur dioxide (SO2), which mixes with other air pollutants, can harm the eyes, skin and the respiratory system. At a minimum, it causes short-term breathing difficulties and is particularly hazardous for those with conditions like asthma or emphysema.

Mucus and other airway secretions that are expelled when a person with the flu coughs or exhales appear to protect the virus when it becomes airborne, regardless of humidity levels, a creative experiment conducted by the University of Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech discovered.

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.