Mary Carmichael

It was a news story certain to stoke public fears. Last week the FDA announced that antidepressants, the very drugs that were supposed to lift patients out of emotional danger, might cause some of them to worsen and even turn suicidal in the first few weeks of therapy.

It's been almost two decades since a series of lawsuits drew wide attention to the problem of asbestos. Compared with toxic mold, the cancer-causing fibers may not even be the scariest household hazard anymore.

When scientists try to describe what makes Earth special, they usually note that it's the "wet planet." Now they'll have to come up with some other distinction.

It was a truism, conventional wisdom, a nasty fact of life. For years, doctors insisted that after the initial six-month recovery period, stroke victims could not improve substantially.

Dr. Neal Barnard may come from a family of cattle ranchers, but he's got a beef against meat. For 19 years, the founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has preached the virtues of veganism, accusing parents of "child abuse" if they feed their kids so much as a slice of bacon and calling the Atkins-diet logo, a red A, "the scarlet letter." PCRM is a sort of anti-Atkins foundation, with attention-grabbing press conferences and a list of patients who blame the meaty diet for...

By the time RHDV had cut its swath through China, 140 million had died. In Italy, the disease killed 64 million, then spread as far as Czechoslovakia, Spain and Germany.

Even without the time travel, it's a stretch to say that "Back to the Future Part II" was even a little realistic. Case in point: shouldn't we have flying cars by now?

For years Rukmini Devi helped Indian couples in the impoverished state of Bihar choose the sex of their children. But in her decades of work, she never once used PGD.

Remember "repressed memory"? In the 1990s it dominated headlines so much that you may well have wanted to repress the whole phenomenon yourself. Courts became clogged with cases based on memories of abuse the plaintiffs had suddenly "recovered," and even Lucy from "Peanuts," in doctor mode, made a diagnosis: "The fact that you can't remember being abducted by aliens and satanically abused," she told Charlie Brown, "is proof that it really happened."Scientists scoffed, of course.

If you had resolved to quit smoking this year, you've probably already given up. But a new Cornell study of almost 2,500 smokers ought to encourage you to keep trying, especially if you're female.

For healthy eaters, the choice between beef and fish can seem like a no-brainer--one is linked to heart disease, and the other is linked to its prevention.

All the flu going around in the past few months has eclipsed that usual winter complaint: the common cold. But sniffles and coughing have one problem the flu doesn't.

For healthy eaters, the choice between beef and fish can seem like a no-brainer--one is linked to heart disease, and the other is linked to its prevention.

With its talk of space-time and cosmic microwave backgrounds, astrophysics has a tendency to sound like sci-fi. But 2003 made it clear that the truth was stranger than even that kind of fiction.

When Elizabeth Schuler got pregnant last July, she didn't turn to the FDA for nutrition advice. Instead, she asked a real group of experts--the women at her Chicago hair salon.

It sounded bad: Chiron and Aventis Pasteur, makers of the flu shot, announced last Friday that they had run through their entire stock of the vaccine. With a vicious Colorado strain having killed at least five kids--and infected 6,300 more people--the Centers for Disease Control seemed caught by surprise, and anxiety spread through the 200 million Americans who hadn't yet been immunized.

It may sound like a bad B-movie sequel--"Attack of the Killer Scallions!"--but there's no better way to describe America's newest food hysteria. Mexican scallions have killed three people and infected hundreds more with hepatitis A in the Pittsburgh area, joining Guatemalan raspberries (which can carry Cyclospora germs) and Mexican cantaloupes (salmonella) in the ranks of potentially toxic raw produce.

RUSSIAThe Putin StrategyThe big question in this Sunday's parliamentary elections is not whether supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin will dominate their opponents, but what Putin will do with the victory.

One of the great virtues of "The Trans Fat Solution," a new cookbook/health primer, is that you can read the entire thing in less time than it takes to make the Walnut-Cardamom Coffee Cake on page 41.

Most patients who take statins to lower their cholesterol probably don't know why they're on one brand instead of another. Truth be told, neither do their doctors.

If anyone ever needed science to throw her a bone, it's the woman in this photo. She's tired, she's overworked, she's got a screaming toddler who won't be mollified.

Try as she did with traditional healthy eating, Adele Gubic just couldn't seem to lose weight after her third pregnancy. So when she heard about the Atkins diet two years ago, it seemed like a godsend.

It's hard to say which facet of osteoporosis is worse--the symptoms, or the fact that they show up only when it's too late to fully cure them. Women aren't likely to think much about a disabling disease of old age when they're too young to suffer from it; by the time they're old enough to realize it's in their near future, calcium tablets can only help so much.

It's hard to say which facet of osteoporosis is worse--the symptoms, or the fact that they show up only when it's too late to fully cure them. Women aren't likely to think much about a disabling disease of old age when they're too young to suffer from it; by the time they're old enough to realize it's in their near future, calcium tablets can only help so much.

It's a quandary that goes back to the ancient Greeks: what makes Homo sapiens unique? Plato famously thought he had the answer, arguing that humans were the world's only hairless and featherless creatures to walk on two feet.

Why does scratching stop an itch? --Wilbur Seymour, Sandia Park, N.M.Like many questions Ask Tip Sheet receives, this one's been puzzling scientists for years.

It's been more than four decades since doctors introduced a vaccine for whooping cough, a disease so archaic it even sounds old. So why is it suddenly on the rise nationwide?

Like many students, Kimberly Fenn has pulled more than a few all-nighters, cramming facts into her head for the next day's exam, fighting exhaustion and gravity to keep her eyelids from closing.

There are corners of the ocean that Navy Capt. Alfred McLaren has never seen, but to hear him recount his life story, it's hard to believe they'll stay hidden from him for long.

Iceland's deCODE Genetics has attracted controversy since its July 2000 IPO, when bioethicists came out swinging, accusing the firm of invading people's privacy.