Dr. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen's book, "Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything" (Workman Publishing), explores the history of charlatans and snake oil salesmen taking ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Does your tap water contain the radioactive element radium? You might be surprised to hear that ...

Gone are the days when the only way to make butter seem even healthier was to name it after a radioactive element. Beginning in the 1910s, the girls instructed to put radium in their mouths didn't bat ...

Hundreds of women and girls were exposed to a radioactive chemical at an Illinois factory in the 1920s. Years later, they helped change workplace safety standards. In the early 1900s, radium was all ...

Neighbors in a Douglas County community are worried about the safety of their drinking water. It's happening in Perry Park, an unincorporated community west of Larkspur, which is home to natural red ...

In our quest for health and longevity, we’re always looking for surefire shortcuts and miracle cures — whether through rigorously tested science or the fast-and-loose recommendations of an alternative ...

Amelia “Mollie” Maggia was the first to die. The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was lucrative — ...

Scientific discovery can be achingly slow, but it was moving swiftly in the 1890s. X-rays had been discovered in Germany just a few days before Christmas in 1895. Several months later, while ...

Mrs. Josie Bishop is a small, bright, sun-browned widow with four grown children. Twenty years ago she moved to California’s Mojave Desert from New Mexico, arriving with “a can of beans, a loaf of ...

As a little girl growing up in post-World War I Germany, Joe Dunthorne’s grandmother was among the many who brushed their teeth with irradiated toothpaste. Doramad, his grandmother’s family brand of ...