Overdose deaths in the United States declined slightly last year, the first decrease in five years, according to preliminary federal data released Wednesday. The rare good news in the decades-old addiction crisis was attributable mostly to a drop in deaths from synthetic opioids, chiefly fentanyl, said researchers at the National…
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Google Unveils AI for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules
Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation. It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease. On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled…
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‘Failure to Thrive,’ or a Failure to Look?
Geriatrics is a field of sleuthing. To solve medical enigmas, doctors must become detectives, teasing out the effects of overlapping causes that include chronic conditions, acute injuries, social factors and the normal process of aging. It is a challenge that tests the patience of many doctors; the number of certified…
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Family Members at One Another’s Throats? Call In the Mediator.
The four adult children were in agreement. Their father, William Curry, a retired electrical engineer and business executive, was sinking deeper into dementia. They had found a memory care facility about a mile from their parents’ house in Chelmsford, Mass., where they thought Mr. Curry would do better. But their…
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Hilary Cass Says U.S. Doctors Are ‘Out of Date’ on Youth Gender Medicine
After 30 years as one of England’s top pediatricians, Dr. Hilary Cass was hoping to begin her retirement by learning to play the saxophone. Instead, she took on a project that would throw her into an international fire: reviewing England’s treatment guidelines for the rapidly rising number of children with…
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Can Parrots Converse? Polly Says That’s the Wrong Question.
Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to converse with apes and trained parrots to deploy growing English vocabularies. The work quickly attracted media attention — and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics…
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Patient Dies Weeks After Kidney Transplant From Genetically Modified Pig
Richard “Rick” Slayman, who made history at age 62 as the first person to receive a kidney from a genetically modified pig, has died about two months after the procedure. Massachusetts General Hospital, where Mr. Slayman had the operation, said in a statement on Saturday that its transplant team was…
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Biden Administration to Pay Dairy Farmers for Bird Flu Protective Measures
The Biden administration said on Friday that it would compensate dairy farmers for cooperating with its efforts to limit the spread of the bird flu virus, part of a series of expansive measures aimed at containing an outbreak. The payment system amounted to one of the most forceful actions taken…
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The Ages When You Feel Most Lonely and How to Reconnect
When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went on a nationwide college tour last fall, he started to hear the same kind of question time and again: How are we supposed to connect with one another when nobody talks anymore? In an age when participation in community organizations, clubs and religious groups…
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Nancy Neveloff Dubler, Mediator for Life’s Final Moments, Dies at 82
Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a medical ethicist who pioneered using mediation at hospital bedsides to navigate the complex dynamics among headstrong doctors, anguished family members and patients in their last days, died on April 14 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 82. The cause was…