The supermarket cans that hold canned peaches, soups, peas, or other foods are nearly always lined with a thin layer of plastic to prevent foods …
Author: Jennie Dusheck
In Stanford study, a social exercise app got people moving
Everybody wants to exercise more, but many of us get caught up in day-to-day demands and never get around to it. A profusion of phone …
New Stanford Medicine grad puts precision health to work for African Americans
Anyone who's ever experienced a painful deep vein blood clot -- often triggered by sitting still for a long period of time -- learns it's an emergency. …
The effects of urinary incontinence spill over into relationships with loved ones
When I first realized just how common urinary incontinence was and how isolating it could be, I knew I wanted to write about it. So …
Gigantic datasets reveal unexpected insights into global medical treatments
In a first demonstration of the power of really big data, Stanford bioinformatician Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, and an international team asked some simple questions …
Neanderthal inbreeding left mark on our genome
Neanderthals are the real-life version of aliens from another planet, different but also fascinatingly intelligent and similar to us. Now it's starting to look as …
Reproducible research: A hunt for the truth
Last week, the journal Nature published the results of a survey asking scientists if they thought the published scientific literature is mostly correct. The exact …
Countdown to Big Data in Biomedicine: Building bridges for massive amounts of information
It’s not often in science that a doctoral dissertation becomes the basis for a lifetime of work, the infrastructure for international efforts to build effective …
CRISPR or RNAi? Which gene switch is better?
I knew almost nothing about the much vaunted tool for editing genes called CRISPR when a journal article on the topic showed up in my inbox …
Playing to win: Gamers will compete to save lives
An update for a biomedical computer game that casts gamers in the role of citizen biomedical researchers launches this week. And winners of the game …
Stanford study sheds light on wealth, zip code and lifespan
We all know that for optimum health we should exercise, eat a healthy diet, get plenty of sleep and not smoke. What we hear less …
Smokers struggle to find jobs
Smoking is an expensive habit. Smokers die a decade sooner than nonsmokers and suffer from a variety of afflictions, such as lung cancer, at higher …
Ask Y: Modern humans lack Neanderthal Y chromosome
Forty thousand years ago, the last Neanderthal men and women died out, leaving modern humans alone on a planet they inherited from an entire family …
Finding the heart of precision health
When I first started working at Stanford Medicine last July, my new bosses explained that part of the reason I was hired was that they …
Genetic research now integrated into Stanford’s MyHeart Counts app
Stanford Medicine and 23andMe, the personal genetics company, have collaborated to add a new module for Stanford's free MyHeart Counts app. The 23andMe module allows MyHeart Counts users who …
Federal government releases National Pain Strategy
The federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services today released a National Pain Strategy (link to .pdf) that makes a series of recommendations for improving …