NPR News

Russia and Ukraine are holding large military exercises along their shared border as the Ukrainian military claims to be closing in on rebel strongholds in Donetsk and Luhansk, NPR's Karoun Demirjian reports from Moscow.

Government troops and separatists have been fighting for months for control of eastern Ukraine, Karoun says, and Ukrainian leaders say Russia has been supplying the separatists with weapons and strategic assistance — a charge Moscow denies.

Newly hired employees who don't sign up for health insurance on the job could have it done for them under a health law provision that may take effect as early as next year.

Sometimes nature comes up with elegant solutions to difficult problems, like how to gain weight and not get diabetes.

Take, for instance, the grizzly bear. How does this 750-pound mammal survive long, lean winters? Well, it just gets really fat beforehand and then sleeps the hungry season away.

Grizzly bears can easily double their body fat in the months leading up to hibernation. For us humans, this kind of weight gain could result in some pretty serious health consequences — one of the most common being Type 2 diabetes.

Back in 2008, doctors in Cambodia made a worrisome discovery. They were having a hard time curing some people of malaria.

Even the most powerful drug wasn't clearing out the parasite from patients' blood as quickly as it should. Malaria had evolved resistance to the last medicine we have against it, a drug called artemisinin.

Tim West's grandfather invented Doritos chips and was an executive at the global snack food giant Frito-Lay.

The younger West ate plenty of junk food growing up. But lately, he's been much more interested in kale, quinoa and tree-ripened fruit.

And the 30-year-old Bay Area food entrepreneur now wants to completely reinvent what we eat and how it's produced.

If you show up at a hospital emergency department with a high fever and you just happen to have been traveling in Africa, don't be surprised if you get a lot of attention.

Hospitals are on the lookout for people with symptoms such as a high fever, vomiting and diarrhea who had been traveling in parts of West Africa affected by Ebola, following instructions from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Monday, New York's Mount Sinai Hospital announced that it was evaluating a patient who had recently been in West Africa.