Environomics

Are Power Grids & Mobile Phones Raising Diabetes Risk?

By Magda Havas, BSc, PhD, Contributing Writer

The enormous networks of electricity and wireless radiation surrounding our modern lives may be quietly rewiring the way our cells make energy. In doing so, they could be contributing to the surging incidence of type 2 diabetes. That’s the main conclusion of a new scientific analysis by McGill University biophysicist, Paul Héroux, PhD.  Published as […]

Pharma Pushes Back on State PFAS Regulations

By Claudia López Lloreda

In January 2025, Minnesota’s law regulating PFAS, a class of synthetic chemicals used to make products resistant to heat, grease, oil, and water, came into effect. The statute, one of the strongest of its kind in the United States, banned the chemicals across 11 categories, from cookware to textile furnishings. Beginning in July 2026, the […]

Can Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Affect Gender Identity?

By Charles Schmidt

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was running for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination when he sat for an interview with Jordan B. Peterson, a controversial Canadian psychologist, during his eponymous podcast. About an hour into the conversation, which published in June 2023, Kennedy pivoted from answering a question about climate change to bringing up a very […]

Is Male Infertility Contributing to Falling Birth Rates?

By Joshua Cohen

(This article was originally published on Dec. 3, 2025 on Undark.) For decades, U.S. marriage rates have been on the decline while the average age at which Americans have children has risen. Alongside this, birth rates have dropped — a phenomenon the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called a “national […]

Noise: Not Just a Nuisance, It’s a Public Health Risk

By Erik Goldman

Back at the turn of the 20th Century, physician-bacteriologist Robert Koch predicted that, “One day, man will have to fight noise as fiercely as cholera and the plague.” That day is definitely upon us. The detrimental impact of noise goes far beyond the obvious problem of hearing loss. Over the last decades, researchers have shown, […]

Uncovering the Exposome: An Emerging Field Casts a Wide Net

By Emma Foehringer Merchant

(This feature was originally published on June 16, 2025, on www.undark.org) The lab buildings of Long Island’s renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have hosted researchers responsible for some of the most consequential scientific leaps in human genetics and disease. In the last 60 years, eight of the lab’s scientists have earned Nobel Prizes, including for […]

Are Nitrogen Fertilizers Exacerbating Pollen Allergies?

By Janet Gulland, Contributing Writer

Nitrogen fertilizers, widely used in agriculture, not only boost the quantity of pollen produced by grasses, they also raise the allergenicity of the pollen. That’s bad news for allergy sufferers. Researchers at Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, compared pollen production from fertilizer-treated versus untreated Belgian grasslands and found a six-fold increase in pollen loads from the […]

The Uncertain Multigenerational Implications of PFAS

By Nicole Williams

(This article was originally published on January 27, 2025 by www.undark.org) My son was born in late 2019. A few months later, early one morning, I found myself looking into his eyes as he nursed and I wondered if I was doing the right thing. Trying to ignore my nagging worry, I continued nursing him, […]

Trump 2.0: Implications for Holistic Medicine

By Erik Goldman

Healthcare was not a high-priority campaign issue for either candidate in 2024. But Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, to head the Department of Health & Human Services, and Mehmet Oz, MD, to run Medicare and Medicaid, as well as his promises to tame drug costs, eliminate Medicare fraud, and “make America healthy […]

The Leapfrog Effect: New Tech Moves Tests, Treatments Out of the Clinic

By Erik Goldman

For a lot of people these days, medical clinics are no longer the center of the healthcare equation like they were in the past: their smartphones are now the point of focus. An astonishing number of medical tests, treatments, and services have jumped out of the clinic and into peoples’ daily lives via their computers, […]