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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. In 2018, Darryl Young was hoping for a new lease on life when he received a heart transplant at a New Jersey hospital after years of congestive heart failure. But he suffered brain damage during the procedure and never woke up. The following year, a...

In promising experiments, phage therapy forces bacteria into a no-win dilemma that lowers their defenses against drugs they’d evolved to withstand Peering through his microscope in 1910, Franco-Canadian microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle noticed some “clear spots” in his bacterial cultures, an anomaly that turned out to be viruses preying on the bacteria. Years later, d'Hérelle would come to use...

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. This story was originally published by ProPublica. Series: America’s Mental Barrier - How Insurers Interfere With Mental Health Care Early one morning in February 2023, before the sun rose over Phoenix, Ravi Coutinho went on a walk and, for a brief...

Mitochondria actively divide, multiply and move around in your cells. Nanoclustering/Science Photo Library via Getty Images ~~~~~ In 1817, a British physician named James Parkinson published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, describing for the first time cases of a neurodegenerative disorder now known as Parkinson’s disease. Today, Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative...

Frederic Bertley is an immunologist and educator who has helped develop DNA vaccines for HIV/AIDS and has worked on global health projects in Haiti, Sudan, and the Canadian Arctic. Since 2017, he has been president and CEO of the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), a 320,000-square-foot science museum and research hub in Columbus, Ohio. He also co-created and hosts the television show QED...

Whether to wear a face mask to prevent respiratory illnesses has been one of the most divisive debates during the pandemic. After a Cochrane review in 2023 found that face masks made “little or no difference” to the spread of respiratory viruses, the issue became highly politicized. Tom Jefferson, lead author of the Cochrane review, told me “There is just no evidence that they make any...