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The experiences of cancer patients have long been told through a narrow, often sanitized lens — framed as battles to be fought and wrapped in neatly packaged survival stories. But today, a new generation of patients is rewriting that script. As cancer rates rise among adolescents and adults under 50 — even as overall rates decline — many are making sure their experiences are seen, heard and understood in all their complicated, unfiltered realities. (Cornejo, Sitz, Monroe and Conrad, 8/31)

As social media and wellness podcasters bombard young women with messages about the pill, many are questioning what they’ve long been told. (Goldberg, 9/2)

When Marya Zlatnik meets with women in the early stages of pregnancy, she gives them the standard advice: take prenatal vitamins; avoid alcohol, smoking and eating raw fish. But for certain patients, the maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, adds another warning: Avoid plastic. (Osaka, Hulley-Jones and Ducroquet, 9/4)

Every time her middle school classmates streamed outside for monthly fire drills, Kira Tiller had to stay behind, worrying about what would happen to her in a real emergency. Flashing bright lights can trigger seizures for Ms. Tiller, who has epilepsy. So her teachers in Gainesville, Va., would send her to a windowless office during drills to avoid the alarm strobes. When her family requested a real emergency plan, administrators just said they would figure it out. She remembers thinking, “I could literally be left behind to die.” (Rao, 8/25)

Earlier this summer, Glen Kenny spent three days confined to a special chamber inside his University of Ottawa lab where the daytime temperature was set at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The purpose was to see how the researcher’s 61-year-old body held up in brutal indoor temperatures observed during a 2021 heat wave that killed hundreds of Canadians. (Hirji and Clark, 8/29)

The nonprofit APOPO has worked in Morogoro, Tanzania, for more than two decades to train African giant pouched rats for lifesaving missions. (Denton, 9/4)