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It is obvious that many of the young are looking forward to 25 hours a day in the foreseeable future owing to the fact that they are thirsty for more social communication wherever standing at in the world. In fact, the mobile phone almost every dweller owns in an urban area drastically squeezes their precious time when people should have spent with their beloved. To cogitate about managing time-spending on a smartphone is the crux of precluding everyone from isolation in soci

When the Bermondsey Public Baths opened in 1927, only one out of every 500 houses in this working-class London borough had a bathroom. What they lacked at home, including a lavatory of their own, local residents found in all but Roman splendour in a grand municipal building boasting two swimming pools and 126 private baths in cubicles along with Turkish and Russian baths, steam rooms and saunas. For centuries, in many parts of the world, this is how people without access to b

People with face blindness are missing a ‘hub’ in their brains. Do you find it difficult to spot a face in the crowd? Now we know why: people with face blindness seem to have a missing “hub” of brain connections. The discovery could be used to diagnose children with the condition, and teach them new ways to identify faces. People with prosopagnosia, which often runs in families, cannot easily tell faces apart. This can have a significant impact on people’s lives. People with

Even a single night of poor sleep can cause changes in the brain implicated in Alzheimer’s. Are you getting enough shut-eye? I DON’T mean to pry, but how much sleep did you get last night? What about over the past week? I ask because the answer could have serious consequences for your future mental health. More than 44 million people worldwide currently have Alzheimer’s disease, including members of my own family. The health, economic and personal impact is staggering. There

It's possible to have a diet that's both healthy and eco-friendly, but would you really want to eat it? Forget the fads, the answer is more straightforward than you think. LOW fat, low salt, wholegrain, heart healthy, vegan, organic, free-range, grass-fed, low carb, no added sugar. All these buzzwords, combined with shape-shifting guidelines, befuddling labels and fad diets wrapped up in pseudoscience, can make buying groceries these days fraught. That’s partly why anything t

The sabre-rattling between Pyongyang and Washington is masking a dangerous destabilisation in deterrence – making nuclear war by accident a real possibility. AS YOU read this, about a dozen submarines are lurking in the world’s oceans, equipped to launch nuclear missiles. Four are American; the rest might be British, French, Russian, Chinese, Indian or perhaps Israeli. Some of them are packing massive heat, equivalent to thousands of times the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima.

Besides Cassini, eight missions have passed the asteroid belt – and several are still broadcasting from the furthest solar system and beyond. Pioneer 10 Launched: 3 March 1972 Pioneer 10 was the first probe to cross the asteroid belt, traversing it between July 1972 and February 1973. Arriving at Jupiter in December 1973, it passed some 132,000 kilometres from its cloud tops, and obtained fuzzy images of the four large “Galilean” moons, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io. Now

Willpower is not the limited resource we once thought it was. A simple attitude-hack is all that stands between you and endless motivation. By Christian Jarrett IT HAS been a long day. You’ve been squinting at spreadsheets since 9 am, but your boss keeps interrupting to ask how you’re getting on and colleagues insist on offloading their own problems. By 6 pm you’re exhausted. It’s a miracle that you even make it home before hitting the wine and chocolate. Psychologists used t

Zero and infinity cast long shadows in mathematics, making and breaking equations. But these strange beasts can also explain what numbers really are Zero The number that’s not a number YOU could be forgiven for thinking that zero is not a proper number. After all, numbers are the things we use to count, and you can’t count nothing. We have evidence for counting going back five millennia, but the history of zero only began with the Babylonians in about 1800 BC. Even then, it w

Miracle materials that would supercharge clean energy are on the cards now we can play with individual atoms. We just need to work out how to arrange them By James Mitchell Crow “WHY cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?” When the fabled physicist Richard Feynman posed the question during a famous speech in December 1959, he was not looking for an easy-to-carry version of the illustrated reference guide. He was drawing att

Biological age can diverge from the number of years we celebrate on our birthdays - and it sheds light on the time we have left By Helen Thomson AGE is a peculiar concept. We tend to think of it as the number of birthdays we have celebrated – our chronological age. But this is just one indicator of the passage of time. We also have a biological age, a measure of how quickly the cells in our body are deteriorating compared with the general population. And these two figures don

If you can't restart a stopped heart within 5 minutes, brain damage starts. But using the lungs as a heat exchanger to chill the blood may buy us more time. By Michael Brooks HERE’S a fact that might chill the cockles of your heart: if your ticker stops, you have less than 5 minutes to get it going again before your brain experiences irreversible damage. But there could soon be a way to open that window much wider, thanks to a technique that rapidly cools the body to exploit

Addresses aren't just a convenient label to mark where you live, they're a vital technology – and one that needs an upgrade. By Joshua Howgego KWANDENGEZI is a beguiling neighbourhood on the outskirts of Durban. Its ramshackle dwellings are spread over rolling green hills, with dirt roads winding in between. Nothing much to put it on the map. Until last year, that is, when weird signs started sprouting, nailed to doors, stapled to fences or staked in front of houses. Each con

By Andy Coghlan Whatever became of the Canaanites? Famously, they appeared on the losing side in one of the best known biblical conflicts – over the city of Jericho. They lived on further north, but because their territory was invaded many times in antiquity their ultimate fate has been a mystery – until now. Their DNA has now been found in the population of modern-day Lebanon. Many archaeologists have been fascinated by the Canaanites. They lived on the Mediterranean’s easte

Awe is so powerful it alters your sense of self, connects you with humanity and boosts your mind and body. And there's a surprising way to get more of it. By Jo Marchant HAVE you ever been stopped in your tracks by a stunning view, or gobsmacked by the vastness of the night sky? Have you been transported by soaring music, a grand scientific theory or a charismatic person? If so, you will understand US novelist John Steinbeck’s response to California’s giant redwood trees, whi

With echoes of the gluten-free craze, lectins are being wrongly vilified with a glut of questionable health claims, says Anthony Warner By Anthony Warner Just in case there was not enough fear and misinformation about food, the latest restrictive fad sent to cure us of all ills is the lectin-free diet. Lectins, a family of proteins found in many foods, have been described as “the new gluten”, and if that refers to them being wrongly demonised, it might not be far from the tru

By Matt Reynolds Does Siri have trouble with your accent? A project is turning to crowdsourced voice donations to overcome this problem, and iron out some of the other inherent problems with voice recognition. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa are trained on huge databases of recorded speech. But if those don’t contain enough samples of a particular accent or dialect, the voice assistants will struggle to understand people who speak that way. So Mozilla ­­– the foundation

By Andy Coghlan A comparison of health systems in 11 wealthy nations has found the US falling short by multiple measures, while the UK’s National Health Service leads in several categories. “We measured performance quality across five domains, and the USA fell short in all five,” says Eric Schneider of the Commonwealth Fund think tank in Washington DC. The domains were ease of access to healthcare, how equal access is to people of different incomes, administrative efficiency,

We take it for granted that recycling is the best way to dispose of waste. But is that just greenwash? New Scientist sorts through the trash so that you can make up your mind. By Bob Holmes Which materials are worth recycling? From the most basic environmental point of view, all materials are worth recycling, because this reduces the need for energy-intensive mining and smelting of virgin materials. That makes a huge difference for some things – notably aluminium – but even r

English study is by no means pertinent to the practice of exam-questions! Delicious, juicy and jewel-like, pomegranate seeds are packed with vitamins, minerals and fibre. Discover what else makes this ruby fruit so healthy... Pomegranates are round fruits with hard, shiny red-yellow skins. Split one open to reveal the jewel-like inner seeds, known as arils, which can be eaten raw or juiced. When choosing a pomegranate, look for those with unblemished, shiny skins and which fe