A 19-year-old's chest pain after cheering turned out to be air escaping into her chest. Her first X-ray and ECG missed it entirely.

A good way to follow the health of a nation is to glance at what is known as period life expectancy. This calculates how long a person born today would live if the current death rates remained exactly the same for the rest of their life. This had two major turning points in the UK over the period: a marked slowdown in improvements from around 2011 and a sharp, historically unprecedented fall in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of how genetic risk leads to disease has remained hidden. In many cases, genetic variants linked to disease do not act on nearby genes along the chromosome. Instead, they influence genes located far away along the DNA sequence. This happens because DNA is folded inside the cell, bringing distant regions into physical contact.

Traditionally, obesity has been classified primarily using BMI, a measure of weight relative to height that provides limited information about whether excess fat is actually affecting a person's health. BMI levels have historically played a central role in determining eligibility and priority for metabolic bariatric surgery—operations on the stomach that help people lose weight and treat health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes.

Within the brain, neurons compute by generating electrical impulses. These signals travel throughout neurons, which are in turn connected in vast networks that control brain functions such as sensory perception, memory formation and movement.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared Eve (Wandercraft), the first self-balancing personal exoskeleton for eligible adult wheelchair users living with spinal cord injury.

Nature never sits still, and neither does anything living within it, since paths keep shifting as things move through the world. Decisions work the same way, changing shape as we go rather than settling once and for all. You set out on a certain route to the office, then traffic forces you onto another, or you plan to cook a certain meal, then realize you're missing an ingredient and end up making something else with whatever's in the fridge. Our brains' ability to adapt to changing situations plays an important role in this process.

The internet's obsession with "maxxing" has turned almost every aspect of self-improvement into a trend.

Researchers have developed a technology for building more compact point-of-care medical imaging devices by creating a material that acts as two devices in one.

Haswitha Sabbineni has an idea that could lead to a targeted treatment for prostate cancer. To obtain the rare isotope she needed to test the treatment, she turned to the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The lab is one of the few places in the world capable of making many specialized isotopes—among them, rhenium-188 (Re-188), which is produced when tungsten-188 (W-188) undergoes radioactive decay.