All of us have lurking in our DNA a most remarkable gene, which has a crucial job - it protects us from cancer. Known simply as p53, this gene constantly scans our cells to ensure that they grow and divide without mishap, as part of the routine maintenance of our bodies. If a cell makes a mistake in copying its DNA during the process of division, p53 stops it in its tracks, summoning a repair team before allowing the cell to carry on dividing. If...

Nuestra comprensión del cáncer está pasando lentamente por una revolución, lo que permite el desarrollo de tratamientos más efectivos. Por primera vez en la historia, la tasa de mortalidad por cáncer muestra una disminución constante, pero la 'Guerra contra el cáncer' apenas se ha ganado. Fung explica qué es el cáncer, cómo se manifiesta y por qué es tan difícil de tratar. Él identifica muchos errores de la comunidad médica en la investigación...

Upbeat cancer survivor Lydia Goetz and her sister, Margaret, start a "Knit to Quit" group in their Blossom Street yarn store in Seattle, bringing in an assortment of customers for weekly self-help sessions. It's for people who want to quit something -- or someone! and start a new phase of their lives. The group includes a local baker who wants a baby as much as Lydia does, a chocolate magnate who needs a way to deal with the stresses of running his...

This work presents the results of a monumental study of diet and death rates from cancer in more than 6,500 adults across China and Taiwan and explains the study's significance and what it reveals about the implications of poor nutrition. While revealing that proper nutrition can have a dramatic effect on reducing and reversing these ailments as well as obesity, this text calls into question the practices of many of the current dietary programs, such...

Practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites readers to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a hospital cancer ward. In her skilled hands, as both a dedicated nurse and an insightful chronicler of events, we are given an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in this country, and by the end of the shift, we have...

Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity--the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing--its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer.

When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O'Neil, and...

"The New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter delivers her first ever collection of essays--funny, poignant, deeply personal and sharply observed pieces, drawn from three decades of writing, which trace girls' and women's progress (or lack thereof) in what Orenstein once called a "half-changed world." Named one of the "40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years" by Columbia Journalism Review,...

"Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She...