Health
Harvard Has a New Center for Happiness
There's more to health than the absence of disease.
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Projects
Parenting and Punishment
Image Source / Corbis The Strong Evidence Against Spanking
A review of the available research finds that physical punishment is significantly linked to bad outcomes for kids.
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The Harm in Blindly ‘Going Gluten Free,' Cont'd
Jim Hamblin has a new piece up for Celiac-Disease Awareness Month. Money quote: [Avoiding gluten…
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Edmon de Haro There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
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jumpingsack / shutterstock / The Atlantic Tracing Zika Back to Patient Zero
Researchers must work their way backward to understand the mutations that made the disease a pandemic.
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Carolyn Kaster / AP How Republicans Finally Got a Victory on Obamacare
A federal judge’s ruling against the administration vindicated the GOP's try-anything strategy to derail the Affordable Care Act.
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Stephen Chernin / Getty Fancy Starbucks Drinks and the Special Snowflakes Who Order Them
Food customization is more than a craze in America—it's a reflection of identity.
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Jim Young / Reuters The White House Launches the National Microbiome Initiative
Half a billion dollars are being pledged to study the microbes in humans, crops, soils, oceans, and more.
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Should You Map Your Microbiome?
The health implications of knowing your microbes could be enormous. But for now, personal microbe mapping is too preliminary to take seriously.
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'When My Mom Was Depressed, She Was a Stranger'
A reader responds to the heartbreaking story of Destiny, the 14-year-old reader whose mother died three years ago after a…
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Mark Dye / Reuters Repairing Wounded Soldiers' Sex Lives
Creative therapies are teaching veterans with genital injuries alternative ways to be intimate.
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Leon Neal / Getty Can Maggots Heal Your Wounds?
Once a popular treatment for infection, the creepy-crawler is making a medical comeback.
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Young Kwak / AP Doomed to be the Biggest Losers?
The key to avoiding regaining the weight you lost, like the reality-show contestants did, might be in how the dieting is done.
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Damir Sagolj / Reuters About That Scary Swaddling Study
A new meta-analysis seems to link infant swaddling with a higher risk of SIDS. But there’s more to the data than that.
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Jeff Roberson / AP Why Doctors Still Need Stethoscopes
The instrument may have outlived its use, but it hasn’t lost its power. An Object Lesson.
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Sean Gallup / Getty Society Is Messing With Your Sleep
A new study of different countries' slumber habits hints at how culture shapes bedtimes.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters How Consciousness Explains Ventriloquists and Religion
The brain projects its own qualities onto the world around it—for better or worse.
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Producer / Shutterstock / U.S. Army / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic The U.S. Military Is Failing to Support Its Sickest Kids
The military health-care system serves 2 million children, but there are only a handful of full-time pediatric social workers across the Defense Department’s sprawling network of hospitals. In the civilian world, this kind of staffing is “unimaginable.”
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Little Pill, Big Changes
It can be found in nightstand drawers or stashed away in purses. Each day, women across the world wrestle the…
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Annie Ling In the Land of Independent Mothers
Women with children are neither “single" nor “unwed” in Iceland, the most feminist country in the world.
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Srdjan Zivulovic / Reuters Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking
The author of a new book says she didn’t beat her disease—science did.
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Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters Spirituality May Help HIV Patients Survive Longer
A new study suggests certain coping techniques are associated with longer life spans in sick patients.