Sara Kiley Watson is science journalist and graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill.
She writes about the environment, animals, health, food, technology and education.
Women struggling with symptoms like vaginal dryness and pain during sex, may be drawn to treatments, marketed as "vaginal rejuvenation," that claim to fix such issues. Providers who offer the treatments, often dermatologists or plastic surgeons' offices, often claim they can not only cure discomfort, but also tighten the vagina and give it a more "youthful appearance."
For a doctor, learning that a patient has died is often an emotional moment. Emergency room physician Roneet Lev wondered if telling doctors when their patients die of an overdose might motivate them to rethink their prescribing behavior. "I asked other physicians if they would want to know if a patient had died," says Lev.
The first rule of soccer is pretty obvious: don't use your hands. But soccer's signature move, heading the ball, can cause a detectable impact on players' brains. And according to a study published Tuesday in Radiology, female players are more sensitive to the impact than males.
You can buy water with electrolytes, minerals or completely "purified." You can buy it with the pH changed to make it alkaline. You can purify your own tap water or even add nutrients back into it. But after seeing a video of a pricey, high-tech filter (about $400 U.S.
Read these sentences aloud: I never said she stole my money. I never said she stole my money. I never said she stole my money. Emphasizing any one of the words over the others makes the string of words mean something completely different.
When Shennel E.P. Henries was a little girl growing up in Liberia, maybe 5 years old, she remembers seeing a woman speaking out to get help for people who needed it. For people displaced by the country's civil war. For homeless people. For kids who didn't have enough to eat.
Did you notice the emoji explosion on social media this week? Tuesday was World Emoji Day, and a lot of brands and celebrities weighed in. Dolly Parton shared this emoji-inspired tweet using the butterfly and music notes emoji. Ellen DeGeneres shared a recipe for a pride heart emoji-shaped cookie.
In 1998, 25 weeks into her pregnancy, Sara Arey's cervix dilated and her amniotic sac started to descend into the birth canal. She was rushed to a hospital an hour and a half away from her home near Hickory, N.C., where she stayed for more than a week before her baby was born via emergency C-section.
For most women under 65, a visit to the gynecologist often includes an unpleasant necessity: a Pap smear to check for cervical cancer risk. The test involves letting a doctor or nurse scrape cells from the back of the cervix which are visually inspected for signs of abnormality.
For more than 25 years, many developed countries, including the U.S., have been sending massive amounts of plastic waste to China instead of recycling it on their own. Some 106 million metric tons - about 45 percent - of the world's plastics set for recycling have been exported to China since reporting to the United Nations Comtrade Database began in 1992.