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Yeming Shen called 911 on Feb. 10. He was alone in his Troy, N.Y., apartment, dying of the flu. But the garbled call was unintelligible to the operators, and police couldn’t pinpoint the phone’s location. For 45 minutes after Shen called 911, five police officers, three firefighters and a police dog searched in vain for the student. All they had was a general area encompassing two apartment buildings. They eventually gave up without finding Shen. Six hours later, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student’s roommate discovered his body, the Times Union first reported. (Kornfield, 2/22)

One night in 2009, Madelaine Sattlefield lifted an 80-pound tray of letters carefully sorted by Missouri ZIP code. She had done this task thousands of times in nine years, but on this night, her arm seared with pain and went limp by her side. The tray crashed and sent envelopes cascading around her. She could barely move but immediately worried about what an injury might mean for her job. “Anxiety had kicked in. I was like, what are they going to say, what are they going to do?” Sattlefield said. (Jameel, 2/24)

ADNA microscope. A gene therapy for “bubble boy” disease.  The restoration of cellular activity in pig brains four hours after death. Nano-robots that might clean teeth better than flossing. These are just some of the 64 important discoveries and inventions included in this year’s STAT Madness, a bracket-style competition to honor the best biomedical research published in 2019. (2/24)

Nationwide, most people picked up by police for a misdemeanor while in a psychiatric crisis are taken directly to a hospital emergency department, where they typically are held for hours or days, often involuntarily confined, according to emergency department surveys. Many are charged and held in jail with no mental health professional to talk to and no access to psychiatric medicines. The same goes for people with drug addiction. In the past five years, that’s become a rarity in Arizona. As in other parts of the country, Arizona’s crisis centers are open 24 hours, seven days a week, and everyone is accepted, regardless of whether they have health insurance. (Vestal, 2/24)

We’ve long been schooled on the lifesaving value of early detection of a potentially deadly cancer. So when a simple blood test was introduced in 1994 that could detect the possible presence of prostate cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths among American men, it’s not hard to understand why it quickly became hugely popular. (Brody, 2/24)

If she hadn’t tripped over her neighbor’s dog, causing her to miss the step down into a sunken living room where she landed squarely on her left hip, Lynda Holland still might not know what was wrong. Holland scrambled to her feet, shaken and grateful she hadn’t been injured: Her puffy down coat had cushioned her fall onto the hardwood floor. Then she realized the pain that had dominated her life for the previous six years had suddenly diminished. (Boodman, 2/22)

Nicole Dodds first noticed her son, Rowan, was having trouble using the right side of his body when he was about 6 months old. Babies typically use both hands to pick up toys and lift their chest off the floor at that age, but Rowan was mostly using his left arm and hand, keeping his right hand balled in a fist. That started a string of doctor visits. Around Rowan’s first birthday, doctors did an MRI and diagnosed his one-sided weakness as hemiplegia, probably caused by a stroke he sustained in utero. This surprised Dodds, since as far as she knew she’d had a totally normal pregnancy and birth. (Witman, 2/22)

For women who haven’t gone into labor by 42 weeks, just about every medical and birth professional recommends induction — a jump-start to labor from medicines that ripen the cervix or contract the uterus. But Judith, an artist and freethinker who believes in “all that hippy jazz,” had a different kind of birth plan — one that dismissed medical recommendations and relied on nature and intuition, that rejected a sterile hospital for a warm pool in her own home and that avoided doctors and midwives. Instead, Judith wanted to be with only her husband and her closest friend, a plan known as freebirth, or unassisted birth, by the tiny subculture of women who practice it. (Zadrozny, 2/21)

It was about five years ago when Dallas-Fort Worth photographer Elaine Baca photographed her first birth. Until then, she had been primarily working weddings... According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of pregnancy-related deaths for black women is 3 to 4 times higher than those of white women. "It's important for people to see and understand that black women and babies who are dying in childbirth are not just statistics put out by the CDC," Baca told "GMA." (Brown, 2/24)

Medicine is serious business. But for a growing number of patients, a trip to the hospital may include a laugh with a clown. Medical clowns — health-care workers who dress up and act like clowns to help make medical procedures and hospital stays less stressful — can be found around the world. The growing field relies on the age-old performance art of clowning to help lift the strain that can pervade the treatment of all-too-serious health concerns. (Blakemore, 2/22)

Though chocolate is typically divided into three categories: dark, milk and white, the latter two really should just be called “highly-processed interpretations of chocolate,” because that’s basically what they are. And it’s the processed sugars, salts and fats that make these varieties so tasty — which is also what makes them so addictive. (Spector, 2/23)

Older adults may have better success at losing weight if they do it with the help of intensive behavioral therapy from dietitians, a new study suggests. Intensive behavioral therapy for obesity, or IBTO, is a customized treatment that helps people change their eating and exercise behaviors through a series of one-on-one counseling sessions. (Rogers, 2/21)

Lydia Denworth wants you to make more time for your friends. We don't fully appreciate our friendships, says the science writer and author of the new book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond. If we did, we'd take cultivating those intimate bonds as seriously as working out or eating well. Because, she writes, a new field of science is revealing that social connections play a vital role in our health. (Renken, 2/22)

Faith Trznadel was born without a tibia bone, and when she was 10 months old, doctors had to amputate her lower leg. “The hardest part is the staring, the snickering,” said Faith’s mother, Sheila Trznadel, about how other people treated her daughter. “One message to get across to people is it’s okay to ask questions. . . . It’s better to ask questions than just stare. [It’s] getting rid of that stigma.” (Furby, 2/23)

Is there such a thing as a healthful beverage? In truth, there’s not much of a health case to drink any beverage other than water after the age of 2 — despite the marketing and advertising you might have seen on the benefits of things like dairy milk, plant-based milks, juices and more. (Carroll, 2/24)