The benefits of getting a shingles vaccine seem relatively straightforward: It will prevent you from getting shingles, a painful rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. ...

Two disease outbreaks are dominating the news: Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and hantavirus, which started spreading on a cruise ship. The U.S. has a one-of-a-kind me...

When Lewis and Clark crossed the United States in the early 1800s, they recorded their wildlife observations along the way. Now, more than 200 years later, an expedition is following ...

On Monday, Pope Leo XIV presented his encyclical, an open letter from the church, on AI. The 42,000-word document covers a lot of terrain—from screen time to resource extraction to jo...

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed clouds on a hot gas giant exoplanet called WASP-94A b, some 700 light-years away. But these clouds aren’t your usual wis...

It’s common knowledge that many diseases and conditions have some kind of genetic link. But that wasn't always the case. In 1990, long before the Human Genome Project tied so many hea...

Old creepy houses are a horror cliche, but why? Why do they freak us out? According to new research, it might have something to do with infrasound: a sound that’s below the range of h...

We recently got a call from a SciFri listener in Florida who has autoimmune arthritis. He told us that over the years he’d taken 10 drugs, and each out eventually stopped working. He ...

The herbicide paraquat is so toxic it’s banned in over 70 countries. But its use in the U.S. is growing, despite known links to Parkinson’s disease. In southeastern Mississippi, an in...