Sharon Begley

Want to be smarter in work, love, and life? Scientific advances offer proven ways to enhance your gray matter.

Scientists say vaccines could hold the key not just to a cure, but to wiping out cancer forever.

New science unveils how your brain is hard-wired when it comes to spending—and how you can reboot it.

His doctor said it helped Michael Jackson sleep, but propofol is far more powerful.

New research shows how some common tests and procedures aren't just expensive, but can do more harm than good.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. Why we're unprepared for the harrowing future.

Stem cells from embryos may finally cure patients—reviving a bitter debate.

After the disaster trifecta in Japan--quake, tsunami, nuclear crisis--Californians are asking if they might be next. The state's two reactors sit near seismic faults, tsunamis are a risk, and evacuation plans are iffy. Did someone say 'prepared'?

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

Getting a good night's sleep has long been known to cement the day's memories, moving them from short-term storage into long-term holding, but new research shows that it's not automatic.

It sounded like a panacea for climate change: "geo-engineering" the atmosphere to block some sunlight and counter global warming. Now scientists scrutinizing the approach say it could produce dangerous cascade effects, severely disrupting weather and agriculture—and might fail to block the worst of the greenhouse effects anyway.

The popular dietary components may not do any good, and may actually harm.

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn't. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn't (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.

Many of the concepts that could make us smarter are well established and not particularly abstruse, but not widely known even among the educated.

There are countless unanswered questions about why Jared Loughner allegedly went on a shooting rampage, but of this we can be sure: across America there are thousands of parents of older adolescents and young adults who are terrified that their child's strange behavior, paranoid rants, drinking, drug abuse, conspiracy fantasies, and other red flags of mental illness will lead to violence.

According to forensic psychiatrists, the answer is "not easily." But in an ironic twist, Arizona makes it easier than any other state to do so.

It's probably not going out on a limb to say that John Boehner's waterworks—the man cries when his party wins control of the House, when he thinks about kids, when he walks down the House aisle to take the Speaker's gavel—are not meant to reduce sexual arousal in women.

To any woman having surgery for breast cancer, the words she most wants to hear in the recovery room are, "We got it all." But if she wants to find the surgeons who have the best track record on the most important measures, she might as well throw darts at a printout of oncologists.

Blueberries and crossword puzzles aren't going to do it. But as neuroscientists discover the mechanisms of intelligence, they are identifying what really works.

His empire includes airlines, mobile phones, digital publishing, and space travel. Why the billionaire high-school dropout has added climate change to his agenda.

Even before their midterm debacle, Democrats couldn't pass an energy-climate bill worth the name. Prospects for legislation to free the country from dependence on petro-dictators—and put it on a path to a renewable energy-based economy—would seem, therefore, about as likely as John Boehner introducing a $700 billion stimulus bill. So why are renewable-energy advocates smiling?

In terms of being the director of NIH, I don't think anybody who's worked with me would be able to identify a circumstance where my personal beliefs about faith have in any way interfered with my role as a scientific leader.

Obese animals hold lessons for us.

Claims of a new life form get whacked.

To those who are convinced that the science of global warming is sound, as well as to those on the fence, the refusal of climate scientists to attribute any single episode of extreme weather to greenhouse-induced climate change has been either exasperating … or suspicious.

Why family medical history is key.

The life experiences of grandparents and even great-grandparents alter their eggs and sperm so indelibly that the change is passed on to their children, grandchildren, and beyond.

This column is about science education, but teachers and curriculum designers should click away now rather than risk apoplexy.

For Democrats hoping to pull off the electoral equivalent of an interception at the goal line with one second left in the game, the primaries were a rude awakening—not because of who won, but because of who voted.

The Copenhagen climate talks failed, the U.S. Senate punted--but all is not lost when it comes to greenhouse reductions.