Category: Health

Creatine supplements can be particularly beneficial for building strength. Chay_Tee/ Shutterstock Creatine is one of the most popular sports supplements out there. It’s shown to help build muscle and improve strength, boost speed and power in athletes and benefit sports performance all round. Research also suggests this superstar nutrient may have other health benefits, including […]

Still Life by Edward Hartley Mooney (1918). Manchester Art Gallery, CC BY A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallised. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals […]

The earliest signs of dementia are rarely dramatic. They do not arrive as forgotten names or misplaced keys, but as changes so subtle they are almost impossible to notice: a slightly narrower vocabulary, less variation in description, a gentle flattening of language. New research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that these changes may be […]

The year is 1926. Queen Elizabeth II is christened. Wage cuts and increased working hours for coal miners precipitate a general strike of workers. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. The League of Nations accepts Germany as the sixth permanent member on the council deeming it a “peace-loving country”. It is also the year that Virginia Woolf […]

Okrasiuk/Shutterstock New data has revealed something the UK has never seen before: clear evidence that sexual minority people die earlier, and at higher rates, than their straight or heterosexual peers. For the first time, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published overall mortality rates by sexual orientation in England and Wales. The findings come […]

Video_Stock _Production/Shutterstock The human body, it turns out, is surprisingly good at making stone. Give it enough time and the right conditions and it will go about crystallising minerals, hardening secretions and, in rare cases, turning tragedy into rock. Gallstones. Kidney stones. Tonsil stones. Salivary stones. And, in one of the strangest and saddest corners […]

Master1305/Shutterstock For much of the 20th century, scientists believed that the adult human brain was largely fixed. According to this view, the brain developed during childhood, settled into a stable form in early adulthood, and then resisted meaningful change for the rest of life. Today, the concept of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change its […]

Toa55/Shutterstock.com You’re relaxing on the sofa when suddenly your eyelid starts twitching. Or perhaps it’s a muscle in your arm, your leg, or your foot that begins to spasm – sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for hours or even days. It’s an unsettling sensation that affects about 70% of people at some point in […]

Miridda/Shutterstock For some women, pregnancy is a time of profound loss. Not all pregnancies progress as expected. One serious complication is ectopic pregnancy, a condition in which a fertilised egg implants somewhere other than the uterus. The uterus is the only organ designed to stretch, supply blood and safely support a developing pregnancy. When implantation […]

Cleansing is an important part of any skincare routine. leungchopan/ Shutterstock Cleansing has long been an important part of hygiene rituals across cultures. Nowadays, cleansing remains an essential part of daily skincare routines, helping to remove sweat, makeup and old skin cells. But with skincare routines becoming more and more extensive (and expensive), it can […]