The old diagnostic subcategories were erased for good reasons. But the single “autism spectrum disorder” label now covers everything from round-the-clock care needs to social awkwardness at faculty dinners, and the cracks are showing.
News & Analysis Science & MedicineFrom Kanner’s 1943 case studies to the CDC’s latest 1-in-31 figure, the autism spectrum has been redrawn, renamed, and fiercely debated. Here is what the science says, who still gets missed, and why the fights over language and labels matter more than ever.
News & Analysis Science & MedicinePain is not a signal that travels from your body to your brain. It is something your brain constructs. Understanding that distinction is reshaping how medicine treats chronic pain, and why pills alone were never going to be enough.
Evergreen Science & MedicineThe gut microbiome is real science with real clinical breakthroughs. It is also a multi-billion dollar industry where most products have never proven they do what their labels imply. Here is what the evidence actually supports.
Evergreen Science & MedicineA major study of nearly 250,000 heart disease patients found the shingles vaccine cut serious cardiac events by 46% and deaths by 66% within a year. Combined with evidence on dementia, biological aging, and inflammation, the findings suggest the vaccine does far more than prevent a rash.
Evergreen Science & MedicineA massive Swedish study found semaglutide users had 42% fewer psychiatric hospitalizations. The reason may reshape how we understand depression: not as a chemical imbalance, but as an inflammatory disease.
Evergreen Science & MedicineBacteria do not just survive antibiotics. They evolve past them, accumulate genetic workarounds, and reach a state where reversing resistance would require undoing multiple independent mutations at once. Here is how the ratchet works, and why it is so hard to turn back.
Evergreen Science & MedicineA vaccine does not just introduce a weakened pathogen and hope for the best. It triggers a precise molecular cascade, from pattern recognition receptors to germinal center reactions, that rewires your immune system to remember and destroy threats it has never truly faced.
Evergreen Science & MedicineCRISPR has cured sickle cell disease and produced the first personalized gene therapy for an infant. But the gap between what gene editing can do today and what headlines promise remains enormous. Here is what actually works, what does not, and why.
Evergreen Science & MedicineDecades of neuroscience research show that addiction is not a failure of willpower. It is a complex interaction between brain chemistry, genetics, and environment, and the treatments that actually work reflect that reality.
Evergreen Science & MedicineAmericans pay almost three times more for drugs than people in comparable countries. Here is how the pricing chain actually works, who profits at each step, and what recent reforms will change.
Evergreen Science & MedicineHalf of men lose their hair by 50. The explanation involves a potent hormone, a gene on the X chromosome, and a biological paradox no one has fully solved.
Evergreen Science & Medicine
