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.