Rae Ellen Bichell

An ideal pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. And it looks like there's also an ideal time between pregnancies.

The length of time between giving birth to one baby and getting pregnant with the next should be 18 months or more. Women who get pregnant sooner than that are more likely to ...

Of the 5 million Americans with failing hearts, about half of them will die within five years of getting diagnosed. Given the odds, it seems that people with heart failure should start thinking about how they want to die.

But doctors don't routinely talk to those patients about ...

Ralph Metcalfe and Jim Ryun sprinted. Bob Mathias ran, tossed, and jumped. Bill Bradley dribbled. Wendell Anderson defended. Ben Nighthorse Campbell judo chopped.

They competed in different Olympic sports and in different eras, but they had one thing in common: they all ran for Congress and won.

Some of them ...

Diamonds are supposed to be a girl's best friend. Now, they might also be her mother, father or grandmother.

Swiss company Algordanza takes cremated human remains and — under high heat and pressure that mimic conditions deep within the Earth — compresses them into diamonds.

Rinaldo Willy, the ...

Antarctica is one of the best places on Earth to spot these fallen stars.

Each winter — which is summer in down south — a team of geologists camps out on an Antarctic glacier in the middle of nowhere, often where no human has ever tread. It's kind of ...

An invention to help with obstructed labor has turned some heads — and not just because the idea came from a party trick on YouTube.

The Odon Device, created by Argentine car mechanic Jorge Odon, guides a folded plastic sleeve around the baby's head. A little bit of ...

Hair. On a head, it can dazzle. In a drain, it can revile — its repulsive potential right up there next to slime, bugs and vomit.

Anthropologists and writers have noted hair as a status symbol in some cultures, and addressed the special variety of ...

Last month, I got hit by a drone. No, it was not a giant surveillance robot, or a sinister armed device. It was a cute little quadcopter about the size of a coconut, operated by a professor who built it for fun.

The hobby of building and flying drones has ...

Fruits and vegetables are unquestionably essential to a healthful diet.

But there's another side to some of these plants that, thankfully, most people never see: the tiny amounts of toxins within them. The minute amounts of poison found in many seeds, leaves and roots are the result of the protracted ...