A fear of being buried alive was a Victorian fixation, but were people actually buried alive?

May’s molecule of the month is ether, the first general anesthetic.

Scientists have often looked to nature in the quest for new drugs to treat everything from cancer to infectious diseases. But archaeologist Patrick McGovern and an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are using a different approach: they’re looking to the past in search of new drugs.

A new study suggests that aspirin taken over an extended time period reduces the risk of death from a variety of solid tumor cancers.

In recent years the development of new antibiotics has dropped off dramatically even though new drugs are needed to fight drug-resistant bacterial infections.

During the 1930′s medicine was revolutionized by the discovery that Prontosil, an industrial red dye, could cure bacterial infections.