Each year, many of the nation’s leading sleep clinicians and researchers gather to share recent progress made in addressing sleep apnea, insomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, and other issues plaguing society today. This year’s meeting, SLEEP 2017, gathered such experts in Boston for poster and speaker sessions on the latest ongoing research in sleep and circadian science.

Though alcohol has become an integral part of many social functions, especially holidays, few people truly understand the damage that too many drinks can do to your body and your brain. In fact, years of chronic alcohol use can actually contribute to a person developing a serious brain disorder that affects cognition, movement, and memory.

Nurses in neonatal intensive care units spend close to 13,000 hours every year “bartending” – monitoring, labeling, printing, and logging – breast milk for the nearly 500,000 babies across the U.S. that require special care. And for moms of these fragile patients, keeping a full inventory can add stress to an already trying time. Enter Keriton, a new breast milk management system designed for nurses and new moms, by nurses and new moms.

Prevention is still our best weapon against HIV. One prevention method that has gained a lot of public attention in recent years is pre-exposure prophylaxis, also known as PrEP. Daily PrEP use can lower the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90 percent and from injection drug use by more than 70 percent—but the challenge with PrEP, like many other daily medications, is adherence. That’s where Penn Medicine's Helen Koenig and recent Perelman School of Medicine graduate Giffin Daughtridge come in.

Ever since Apple rolled out its ResearchKit framework two years ago, valuable data collected from the iPhones of patients who opt-in has poured into medical centers investigating better ways to study and treat diseases. The latest foray into mobile research technologies comes from researchers in Penn Dermatology, who recently launched a ResearchKit app focused on sarcoidosis.

One of the newest entities with the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics, the Health Language Processing Lab combines social media content with other sources of health information in a unique way aimed at understanding how people use language to communicate health needs.

There’s no grey area when it comes to the eruption of pimple-popping videos floating around the internet. People either “pore” over them, or burst out in horror just seeing the links. I happen to like them. They’re incredibly grotesque, I admit, but also inexplicably gratifying to me – and many others. That’s why they’re all over YouTube, bubbling up on Facebook feeds, and popping up in news stories.

Today’s uncertain health care climate is a source of confusion and anxiety for many—and while there was an uptick in Millennials who cited health care as a key concern during the 2016 Presidential campaign, many young adults might be more at risk for gaps in coverage than they realize.

What women experience when working as surgeons is different from what male surgeons experience — not necessarily in the specific acts of wielding a scalpel and other instruments, but in virtually every other area of their working lives. Over the past year, female surgeons across the country and world have reinvigorated a push toward visibility and toward changes to empower equitable success for women in a persistently male-dominated field.

Surgeon, professor, novelist: It’s a lofty trio of career choices, each particularly demanding in its own way. Certain pairings among the three do fit together rather well — plenty of professors have written a novel or two, and certainly plenty of surgeons are also professors — but it’s a rare individual that looks at those three choices and says, “Yeah, sure, I’ll take ‘em all.”