Deborah Franklin

Long before cooking was common, early humans needed extra energy to fuel bigger bodies and brains. Scientists say simple stone cutting tools likely allowed small-toothed meat eaters to thrive.

When actress and writer Laury Sacks started losing words fast, her best friends, who happened to be filmmakers, captured her experience. Looks Like Laury, Sounds Like Laury shows how they reached her.

A pediatrician who specializes in fixing broken bones in kids and teens says about 90 percent of the fractures he treats have been splinted improperly in a community ER or urgent care center first.

If the weather on your campout turns ugly, you may be tempted to fire up the stove inside the tent to cook or get warm. Don't, say emergency room toxicologists, or risk a potentially lethal buildup of poisonous carbon monoxide.

Getting and using health insurance shouldn't be so hard, say doctors and health literacy specialists who volunteered to come up with a consumer guide that even a seventh grader can understand. It's available just as many people are sizing up new options.

By precisely measuring footfalls, scientists discovered that healthy human feet bend and flatten much like the feet of tree-dwelling apes. And the flex in one person's foot can vary a lot from one step to the next.

There's a difference between knowing your breast cancer risk and believing it. When psychologists asked several hundred women to plug personal health data into an online tool that then calculated their breast cancer risk, nearly 20 percent rejected their scores as wrong.

Many sudden deaths among high school athletes are preventable with the right precautions.

People famous to one generation may be unknown to another. Getting an accurate diagnosis of dementia for younger patients may require a test that includes the faces of younger celebrities, researchers say.

The bacteria that cause many cases of ear infection in kids and pneumonia in the elderly are usually harmless until activated by distress signals from their human host. When the flu or another virus gives you a fever, for example, mild-mannered pneumococcus can turn nasty.