Almost 40 years ago, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died. Whether the Nobel prizewinner’s death was from prostate cancer (the official diagnosis) or poisoning has been a longstanding mystery. But earlier this week, Neruda's body was removed from its tomb, launching a forensic investigation that could establish once and for…

Some damn fine data visualization (interactive data visualization, at that!) by the folks at the Institue for Health Metrics and evaluation.

Do you ever long for the good ol' days? When a rickety school desk was enough to protect you from a nuclear blast, and chemistry sets contained real (read: deadly) chemicals?

Back in Victorian England, they knew how to inflict macabre, terrible death. Case in point: a single mishap led to the death of 25 people and the poisoning of nearly 200 individuals in one night, after they all consumed arsenic-laced peppermint treats.

Most dog owners go into a panic if their pet makes a lunge for the candy bowl — but is this worry really necessary?

The humpback whale is one of Earth's largest creatures, with an average weight of around 40 tons. But as it turns out, this gigantic creature is vulnerable to the toxins of a much smaller living thing: Aconitum delphinifolium, better known as Larkspur monkshood.

Where do your computer, iPhone, and television go when they die? Mostly they end up in dumps. Now, people in North America, India, and Europe are harvesting these trashed electronic parts to recover the precious metals within. Though gold is often what they seek, lead and copper are valuable in large quantities too.…

Scenes from Miyakejima can look downright post-apocalyptic. Each resident on the tiny Japanese island is required to carry a gas mask, just in case they need to quickly pull it on. But why?

Got a hankering for some rhinoceros horn? Practitioners of traditional Asian medicine believe that ground rhino horns, when ingested, can help cure diseases like cancer. Unfortunately for patients consuming rhino horns, they could just as well be chewing on their fingernails. Unfortunately for the rhinos, the increased …

In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is home to a lot of rocks…