Katherine Harmon Courage

At least two-thirds of U.S. families are struggling to find safe and affordable child care as the pandemic rages on. NPR asked infectious disease experts to help sort the health risks of each option.

With many Americans dying of COVID-19, it's important to document your wishes for your care should you get seriously ill. Doing so can ease the way for family in difficult moments.

Here's what the latest research says about pregnancy and the coronavirus — and what doctors and hospitals recommend to keep pregnant mothers and newborns safe.

Schizophrenia might be linked to a gene that tells the immune system to destroy too many connections in the brain, according to the results from a massive gene-focused research effort.

Scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute studied the genomes of 64,785 people around the world and found ...

We would all love a simple weight-loss plan. Beyond carbs and fats, some studies have hinted that a key group of gut microbes — from the phylum Firmicutes — might be more common among people who are overweight.

Thinner people, these studies suggest, might have more bacteria from the phylum ...

The rate of recent discoveries about the human microbiome has been dizzying. And Rob Knight wants to crank up the pace.

One of the top scientists in a field that's discovering possible bacterial influences on everything from diabetes to depression, Knight was also cofounder of a massive citizen science ...

A veritable jungle of organisms is helping keep each of us alive. But we've been rather negligent hosts. For starters, we don't even know who has shown up for the party.

When I signed myself, my husband, our dog and my mother up for the American Gut Project to ...

The gut microbiome may soon reveal important answers to questions about our health. But those answers aren't yet easy to spot or quick to obtain.

The week after I mailed off my family's microbial samples to be analyzed for the American Gut Project, I followed them down the road ...

On Sunday, my mother sent me an email: "OMG! Watch this unbelievable cooking show!"

It wasn't spam, and my mother, who's 65, does not use OMG lightly.

The fuss was over a 20-minute video about a 91-year-old grandmother who cooks Italian classics in marijuana-infused butter.

It's the first episode in ...

Understanding the human microbiome takes much more work than just identifying the organisms that live in a person's gut. A genetic census of these microbes is really only the start of figuring out what they have to do with health and disease.

To find helpful patterns in the microbe populations, ...

There's usually reason to be apprehensive when an artist spends years in the workshop on a single set of songs. But nearly 15 years after Voodoo, the R&B singer still makes tricky music sound easy.

The trillions of microbes that live in our guts and on our skin have the power to affect our health in big ways — from stomach disorders and autoimmune diseases to acne and mood. The secret life of what scientists call our microbiota has remained largely obscured, however, because many ...

The invisible world of the bathroom isn't pretty — unless you're a microbe. After scanning the microbial zoo of four public restrooms recently, a team of researchers found a diverse swarm of characters that persisted for months despite regular cleaning of the facilities.

The goal of the study, published ...