Let’s talk about Coronaviruses. Coronaviruses are a whole family of viruses, and they cause all kinds of diseases in chickens, pigs, cows, and many other animals. They’ve also infected humans. There was the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2002-2003, the MERS coronavirus in 2012-2014 and the newest coronavirus...

You know that characteristic buzzing and that itchy feeling that comes with a mosquito bite.  As you scratch your new bite, you may wonder exactly why mosquitoes are so attracted to you in the first place.  The female Aedes aegypti mosquito needs protein from blood to lay her eggs....

What’s up with Ticks? Ticks transmit more than 10 different human diseases. The most common is Lyme disease. It’s estimated that bites mostly from the blacklegged or deer tick cause about 329,000 cases of Lyme disease per year. That’s a little less than half the population of Boston. Lyme...

Necrotizing Fasciitis or, as it is more commonly known, flesh-eating disease is a rare but deadly infection of the skin and soft tissues. It infects around 200,000 people a year with a mortality rate of about 30%. That’s like losing 10 chapters worth of words out of the final...

Climate and weather seem like they’re two words for the same thing, but they actually have two different meanings. The word weather refers to the air at a specific spot on Earth at a specific time, and it can change from day to day and even from minute to minute....

It’s 9am and I’m freaking out. 45 minutes. I have 45 minutes before the stage that I’m staring at is all mine. 45 minutes before I tell a room full of amazing people from over 40 countries about my idea to change the world. And how long am I on...

In 2016, an estimated 595,690 people died from cancer in the United States. That’s a little less than the population of Boston. New advancements in treatment have lowered the cancer death toll, but we still have a long way to go. Part of what makes cancer so hard to...

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Michael Young, Dr. Jeffrey Hall, and Dr. Michael Rosbash for the discovery of the molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms. Because I’m not on the nobel prize selection committee, I can’t tell you exactly why they picked this...

Have you ever seen ants walking in a line and wondered how they do it? Scientists have known for a long time that ants use secreted chemicals called pheromones to communicate complicated social signals including which trails to walk on. While we knew that ants fluently speak pheromone, we...

Whenever I go to the beach I have to slather on the sunblock and hide under an umbrella, and even then I still sometimes get burnt. UV exposure is the leading cause of skin cancer. Although everyone should take proper precautions to limit their exposure, people with lighter skin...