Society for Science & the Public, which publishes Science News, uses cookies to personalize your experience and improve our services. For more information on how we use cookies on our websites, visit our Cookie Policy.

Brian Vastag

All Stories by Brian Vastag

  1. Health & Medicine

    Smoking ups risk for type 2 diabetes

    Smoking increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 61 percent.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Addiction Alleviator? Hallucinogen’s popularity grows

    The unsanctioned use of an obscure hallucinogen, ibogaine, to treat addiction has exploded recently.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Not Yet: CDC panel questions antidepressant gene test

    A genetic test designed to tailor drug treatment for depression offers little clinical value, says a CDC panel.

  4. Anthropology

    Ancient Ailment? Early human may have carried tuberculosis

    A 500,000-year-old Homo erectus skull from Turkey may show telltale signs of tuberculosis, by far the earliest such evidence of the disease.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Big kids at risk for heart disease

    Overweight children grow up to have an elevated risk for blocked coronary arteries as adults, a long-term Danish study finds.

  6. Health & Medicine

    The Long Road to Beta Cells

    In their quest to cure type 1 diabetes, scientists are finding that turning stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells is a lot harder than it first appeared.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Sickle Save: Skin cells fix anemia in mice

    Using a new technique to turn skin cells into stem cells, scientists have corrected sickle cell anemia in mice.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Malaria’s new guises

    Scientists have observed Plasmodium falciparum enjoying three distinct lifestyles—two of which have never been seen before—in the blood of infected children.

  9. Anthropology

    Northwest Passage: Americas populated via Alaska, genetics show

    A single population of prehistoric Siberians crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and fanned out to North and South America, a new genetic analysis of living Native Americans suggests.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Wrong Way: HIV vaccine hinders immunity in mice

    An HIV vaccine hurts, not helps, the immune systems of mice, say scientists.

  11. Health & Medicine

    9/11 reflux

    Up to 20 percent of 9/11 workers in New York City experience symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease, also called acid reflux.

  12. Flawed Stem Cells Yield Fragile X Clues: Researchers study genetic disorder via discarded embryos

    The most common inherited cause of mental retardation arises when a mutated gene is shut down early in embryonic development.