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When most people hear the word bacteria, they think of disease: pneumonia, E. coli, tuberculosis, infections you want nothing to do with. But what we rarely stop to consider is just how deeply bacteria are woven into who we are. In fact, your body is home to tens of trillions of bacterial cells living on your skin, in your gut, and throughout your body. For a long time, scientists even thought humans were 90% bacteria; today we know the number is closer to a one-to-one ratio,

Tracking infectious disease outbreaks early is crucial to stopping them before they spread widely. But traditional disease surveillance systems can be slow or incomplete, especially during disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic, when measles vaccinations and reporting were affected worldwide. A recent study by Wang et al. asks an exciting question: Can Google Trends, a free tool that shows what people are searching online, be used to monitor outbreaks of diseases like measles

If you’ve ever been bitten by a mosquito, you probably brushed it off as an annoying itch. But for millions of people around the world, a single mosquito bite can be deadly. That’s because some mosquitoes carry Plasmodium , the parasite that causes malaria, a disease that still kills hundreds of thousands every year. We’ve tried insecticides. We’ve tried mosquito nets. We’ve tried medications. But mosquitoes and parasites are incredibly good at adapting. So scientists are ask

Why Humans Struggle With Aging In humans, regeneration ability fades as we age. Stem cells become sluggish, the immune system goes haywire with chronic inflammation, and fibroblasts produce stiff collagen fibers that turn into scars. This is why wounds heal slowly in older adults. Age-related diseases like arthritis and heart failure often come with tissue damage that the body can’t properly repair. So the big question is: how do axolotls keep their regenerative toolkit switc

Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to human health today. Many bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs we normally use to kill them. This makes once-treatable infections dangerous or even deadly. One promising alternative is phage therapy, which uses bacteriophages—viruses that naturally infect bacteria—to infect and kill them. But there’s a catch: bacteria can evolve resistance to phages just like they do with antibiotics. This raises a big question: co