You need a biopsy, or some other kind of minimally invasive treatment, and you are feeling anxious. Nothing is likely to go wrong, but you're still worried. 

Would pre-procedure hypnosis help? Maybe. Soft music? Possibly. But a small study presented Monday at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 39th annual meeting, suggests that donning a pair of video glasses that displays a movie or television show only you can see is likely to help you the most. 

"Whether they were watching a children's movie or nature show, patients wearing video glasses were successful at tuning out their...

Between vaccine refusal, drug resistant strains of bacteria, and the growing ranks of the immuno-compromised, it sometimes seems that we humans are losing our brief moment of superiority in the unending arms race against pathogens. But a new technique has shown remarkable promise in mice infected with deadly forms of meningitis and pneumonia, and may point the way to regaining the upper hand against a wide range of infections.

A genetically reengineered version of an immune system protein called properdin appears to activate a robust immune response against invading pathogens, according to a...

What does Thor's hammer weigh? Ten quadrillion pounds? 42.3 pounds? Less?

Among scientific laws is this one: Nerds will be nerds. So YouTube brainiacs Vsauce3 played "what if." What if Thor's hammer were made from a dying star instead of forged in a dying star (because we all know that's how it was made).

It would be inconceivably dense and heavy. Mayhem would ensue. It would attract human bodies faster than the speed of sound, ripping them apart with its pull. If the god of thunder were to set it down (say, to give his impressive muscles a rest), it would sink to the center of the Earth!  

Mj...

A fair amount of conversation about e-cigarettes has involved their use in purportedly helping people to quit smoking. Researchers on Monday said the evidence for that has been “unconvincing,” and they suggest that regulations should forbid such claims until there’s supporting research.

In a letter Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Internal Medicine, researchers from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and the Department of Medicine at UC San Francisco noted that e-cigarettes are “aggressively promoted as smoking cessation aids.&...

Stressed out women have more difficulty getting pregnant than women with less stress, according to a new study this week in the journal Human Reproduction.

Although the relationship between stress and trouble getting pregnant has been hinted at before, it had never been scientifically proven before now. This new research marks the first time that scientists have found a direct link between stress and infertility.

"Women should not look at these findings and feel guilty," said Courtney Denning-Johnson Lynch, director of reproductive epidemiology at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical...

There’s more bad news about the effects of oil spills on warm-water predators, including Atlantic bluefin tuna, already one of the most threatened fish in the seas.

Oil spills such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may cause serious heart defects in developing fish embryos, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The release of more than 4 million barrels of oil between April and July 2010 coincided with the spawning window for...

Our bones are remarkable feats of engineering; strong and yet light, shot through with holes and yet able to bear incredible loads. This super-strong natural material is built as cells incorporate hard minerals like calcium into living tissue. Now, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are borrowing this idea from nature: They’ve created living cells that incorporate inorganic matter like gold and quantum dots.

These bacterial factories, described in the journalNature Materials, could one day help create fully functional hybrid "living materials" that could be...

Now that spring is here, maybe it's time to grab your surfboard and head to some far-off coastline -- perhaps as far as the outer solar system. Scientists using NASA's Cassini spacecraft have found hints of waves sloshing on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon – the first time waves like those in Earth's oceans have ever been found on another world.

Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system, after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and it’s sometimes called a planet-like moon: It’s the only other world in our neighborhood to feature stable bodies of liquid on its...

When a major extinction takes place, apex predators — those giant beasts sitting at the top of the food web — are often the first to suffer. But it turns out that in the worst extinction event in Earth’s history, they might have actually branched out a little, according to a new study in PLoS ONE that looked at ancient armored amphibians and giant swimming reptiles.

While the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago was a violent and dramatic end, this end-Cretaceous event wasn't the worst extinction in Earth’s history. That dubious honor goes to...

Why do our eyes open wide when we feel fear or narrow to slits when we express disgust? According to new research, it has to do with survival.

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Psychological Science, researchers concluded that expressions of fear and disgust altered the way human eyes gather and focus light.

They argued that these changes were the result of evolutionary development and were intended to help humans survive, or at least detect, very different threats.

To test their hypothesis, study authors examined two dozen volunteer undergraduate students with standard eye-exam...