Category: Science

  • Mystery symptoms? Get your lead levels checked

    It’s every gardener’s nightmare. Digging deep into the earth, you strike something hard and, with a metallic thud, a geyser of water fountains up into your face. One of our neighbours recently experienced such a shovelling disaster while erecting a new fence when an old lead pipe supplying her mains water was punctured by a misplaced…

  • Astronaut Tim Peake interview: boldly going where no body has gone before

    For Tim Peake it’s T minus 600 hours until launch. Come 15th December, the 43 year old father of two will be strapped atop 150 tonnes of rocket fuel looking skyward. He will be spending six months aboard the International Space Station, during which time he will be floating around, admiring the view, and playing…

  • It’s official: you’re only as old as you feel (and look)

    “You are only as old as you feel,” or so the saying goes. This adage is great for cheering yourself up when the grey hairs start to take root, but science has recently revealed that the time-honoured expression is alive and kicking – the younger you feel, the younger you actually are. Ground-breaking new research…

  • Gardener beware! 4 deadly plants that could be in your backyard

    Vegetable growers will know that there is little to beat eating the fruit of efforts. A bowl of garden-grown lettuce leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers, sprinkled with freshly cut basil leaves puts any shop-bought salad to shame. The mysterious death of gardener Nathan Greenway, however, highlights the dangers of unwittingly harvesting the wrong kind of plant.…

  • Test yourself: Could you spot a skin cancer? Never miss a melanoma.

    If you ever doubted humankind’s ability to do great things for our planet, just look at the sky. Or rather, look toward the ozone layer high in the stratosphere. If you cast your mind back, you will remember that there was a lot of talk of the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ brought on by…

  • A chocolate a day (may possibly) keep the doctor away

    The Easter eggs don’t last long in our house. It wouldn’t have always been that way though: as I child, I would diligently squirrel away Easter chocolate, treating myself only on special occasions. I now have no such willpower and, by the looks of it, neither do the rest of you. A recent survey has…

  • ‘Google to rank pages by accuracy’ shown to be inaccurate

    As a science writer who writes a lot about health, I spend more time than most scouring the internet for medicine-related information. Unfortunately, the advice that ‘Dr Google’ prescribes is all-too-often a bit dodgy. Search ‘how to treat my headache’, for example, and in alongside the sensible suggestions are some rather more dubious and laughable…

  • Three parent babies: it’s not what you think

    Most of us came into this world through a moment of passion between our father and mother. Not so for everyone. In the world today there are 200,000 people who were not conceived in the conventional way – but in a Petri dish. For the past 35 years, IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation) and similar ‘test…

  • The health benefits of generosity – it really is better to give than receive

    Christmas is a time for giving. This week, we will give more to charity than at any other time of the year. For, all the fundraising carol singers, shopping-bag-packing Brownies, and charity tin-shakers make it hard for even the stingiest of scrooges to keep their wallets buckled shut. But a couple of weeks ago, I…