How two Italian teenagers hacked the Soviet space program and may have heard the dying breaths of a lost cosmonaut.

Why Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is wrong and “gayness is a necessary side effect of getting along.”

When it comes to representing pharmaceutical companies, a doctor’s medical record is far less important than his or her ability to sell.

The story of how Washington blew its best shot to do something on climate change.

For most people who participate in clinical trials, being a guinea pig is just a way to make a quick buck. For others, it’s a career.

On the golden anniversary of her first trip to study chimps, an ode to Jane Goodall.

A writer struggles to understand, among other things, why humans do more for whooping cranes than for themselves.

A writer struggles to defend his arbor vitae trees from a pack of hungry deer—“an episode of great vexation and buffoonery.”

A trip to the Russian baths helps author start to see the good in his terrible eyesight.

How misdirected incentives in the bewildering medical supply industry keep innovative, life-saving equipment from reaching hospitals.

The cozy relationship between “the internet newspaper” and bogus medicine.

Thirty years ago, few people had ever heard of ADD. ‘Early onset depression’ might become a common diagnosis long before 2040.

Tony Judt on his own amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the experience of being “left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

Fifteen years ago, William Dranginis saw Bigfoot. He’s still trying to prove it.

The mother of a child born with a deformed brain responds, heartbreakingly, to an academic study claiming that people are happier without kids.

An emerging school of therapy says that scripting your dreams while awake could eliminate the worst ones. Not everyone thinks that’s healthy.

Should modern medicine shift its end-of-life priorities, focusing less on staving off death and more on improving a patient’s last days?

Is there really such a thing as brain death?

The battle to contain the Asian tiger mosquito–one suburban, above-ground pool at a time.

The complex, highly evolved world of Moscow’s subway-riding stray dogs.

In the 1950s, L.S.D. became a Beverly Hills’ therapy fad, and it profoundly changed idols like Cary Grant.

A first-person account. “If you’re the sort of person who has only ever had to deal with colds and cuts, food poisoning and the odd virus…what strikes you most is the glacial pace of recuperation.”

Through a series of interviews and historical inquiries, Errol Morris dissects Anosognosia, “a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.”

Anesthesiologists, in hugely disproportionate numbers compared to other doctors, are getting high.

75 years after its founding, it’s still hard to explain exactly why Alcoholics Anonymous works.