Michaeleen Doucleff

Every time I spend New Year's Eve with my mom, she tells me the same thing: "Be careful with that Champagne, honey. The bubbles go straight to the head. And it won't be pretty tomorrow."

Thanks, Mom. Glad you're looking after me after all these years.

But is she right?

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How do you know you're in love? Angry? Or sad? Emotions start off in the brain, then ripple through the whole body. Now scientists have charted where we consciously feel specific emot...

When it comes to the rising prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, there are many factors to blame.

Diet and exercise sit somewhere at the top of the list. But the genes that some of us inherit from Mom and Dad also help determine whether we develop the disease, and how ...

If you're lucky enough to be heading down to the Caribbean this winter for snorkeling, daiquiris and a kick of vitamin D, you should probably think about packing long-sleeve shirts and bug repellent — especially if you'll be spending time on the island of St. Martin.

Last week the World ...

Well, look what showed up on our doorstep.

The Western Hemisphere has an unwelcome visitor: a painful tropical illness called chikungunya fever.

And it doesn't look like the hard-to-say illness is leaving anytime soon. (You can hear how to pronounce it here.)

After being a problem in Africa and ...

Looks like Harvard University scientists have given us another reason to walk past the cheese platter at holiday parties and reach for the carrot sticks instead: Your gut bacteria will thank you.

Switching to a diet packed with meat and cheese — and very few carbohydrates — alters the trillions ...

Eat candy and fight tooth decay. What a sweet concept, right?

Well, microbiologists in Berlin are trying to make that dream a reality.

They've created a sugarless mint that's aimed at washing out cavity-causing bacteria from your mouth. And the candy works in a curious way: It's spiked with dead ...

When it comes to making food yummy and pleasurable, humans clearly outshine their fellow animals on Earth. After all, you don't see rabbits caramelizing carrots or polar bears slow-roasting seal.

But in terms of the global food chain, Homo sapiens are definitely not the head honchos.

Instead, we sit somewhere ...

Baking cookies is almost magical. You put little balls of wet, white dough into the oven and out pop brown, crispy, tasty biscuits.

"In a time-lapse video, it looks like a monster coming alive," says the team from TEDEd in a new animation that — just in time for ...

Making your own cheese and yogurt is all the rage these days. Now a scientist has taken the DIY craze to an entirely new level. She and an artist have made cheeses using the microcrit...

When you hear the term "next-generation condom," beef tendon probably isn't the first thing that pops into your mind.

But a condom made from the cow part is one of 11 ideas to win $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in its reinvent-the-condom competition.

Another winning proposal ...

About 150 years ago, a prestigious surgeon in Paris found a new body part while dissecting cadavers. He described the structure as a pearly, "fibrous band" on the outside of the bones in the knee.

That sure sounds like a ligament. But nobody really gave it much thought. And poof! ...

Children who were conceived with in vitro fertilization have the same overall chance of developing childhood cancers as those conceived naturally, scientists reported Wednesday.

"It's a reassuring finding," says pediatrician Alastair Sutcliffe of University College London, who led the study. "It's a bellwether to the future health of these ...

A ham and cheese sandwich floats in midair. A Weber grill is sliced in half to expose a burger sizzling inside. The Photography of Modern Cuisine is both a visual feast and a practica...

When Mike Napoli got up to bat in Game 6 of the World Series, my first thought was, "Oh my goodness, that beard is awful." But after the Red Sox's first baseman laid off a few bad pitches, I started liking the hair on his chin.

All that got me ...

We reported Wednesday that the polio outbreak in Somalia had spread to South Sudan. But health officials say that they were mistaken. There have been no polio cases in the country since 2009.

The World Health Organization said previously that it had confirmed three cases of polio in South ...

The world has eradicated just one human disease: smallpox. But another illness is getting tantalizingly close to elimination.

No, we're not talking about polio; that virus also has its back against a wall. But a report Thursday puts a parasitic worm ahead of polio in the race to extinction.

The ...

With a tiny clump of cells from a man's scalp, scientists have grown new human hair in the laboratory.

But don't get too excited. A magic cure for baldness isn't around the corner. The experimental approach is quite limited and years from reaching the clinic — for many reasons.

The ...

In the ranks of English nobility, the Montague family may have just been earls. But in the kitchen, they were kings.

A historian has stumbled upon the first English recipe for a frozen chocolate dessert — think chocolate sorbet crossed with a Slurpee. Even in 17th century speak, it ...

Ten years ago rye whiskey was on the brink of extinction.

Despite its venerable history as the whiskey made by George Washington, only a handful of distillers were bottling this quintessentially American spirit. And you definitely couldn't order a rye Manhattan at your local cocktail lounge.

My, how times ...