All Stories by Ben Harder
- Health & Medicine
Comb over Chemicals: Tool may rid heads of pesticideproof lice
Used systematically, special combs may be more effective than insecticidal shampoos at ridding a child's scalp of head lice.
- Earth
Inhaling salt raises blood pressure
People who work in environments where large amounts of salt particles hang in the air may literally breathe their way to high blood pressure.
- Health & Medicine
Potent Medicine
Drugs now used to treat erectile dysfunction might soon assume multiple roles in managing heart disease and other conditions, including some that affect women and infants.
- Health & Medicine
Can Chocolate Fight Diabetes, Too?
Consuming flavonoid-rich dark chocolate could not only lower blood pressure and cholesterol but also improve the body's processing of sugar.
- Health & Medicine
After terror, moms’ stress affects kids
Infants born to women who developed posttraumatic stress disorder during pregnancy have unusually low concentrations of the hormone cortisol.
- Health & Medicine
Siccing Fungi on Malaria
Two independent research teams have found that fungi can kill mosquitoes or reduce the efficiency with which they transmit the malaria parasite.
- Health & Medicine
From Famine, Schizophrenia: Starvation gives birth to personality disorder
Women who go severely hungry during early pregnancy face twice the normal risk of having a child who develops schizophrenia in adulthood.
- Earth
What’s Gotten into Everybody? Survey of bodily contaminants finds encouraging declines and new exposures
The U.S. population's exposure to lead, secondhand smoke, and certain other harmful chemicals has trended downward, but some newly measured contaminants are present in a sizable fraction of the nation's residents, according to an updated report.
- Earth
Weighty evidence on testicular cancer
New evidence supports a theory that men who were exposed to excess estrogenic hormones at an early stage of fetal development may face an elevated risk of testicular cancer.
- Humans
Pushing Drugs
Pharmaceutical marketing toward both patients and physicians appears to influence which medicines get prescribed.
- Health & Medicine
Tumors in Touch: Cancer cells spur vessel formation through contact
Some tumor cells use a newfound mechanism to prompt neighboring cells into forming blood vessels that then nourish the cancer.
- Health & Medicine
A problem at hand for catchers
A young professional baseball catcher, who may receive more than 100 pitches per game thrown at more than 90 miles per hour, may be virtually certain to develop circulatory abnormalities in his catching hand.
