Health
What heat actually does inside the body — and why the salt matters as much as the water
Blood vessels open, blood pressure drops, the heart works harder. Sweating costs you fluid and salt, and it is the balance between them…
Tanmay Das
Health
Meningitis can kill within hours. The glass test is the last sign, not the first
Most people know to press a glass against a rash. Far fewer know that the rash is a late sign and may never appear at all. Here is what…
Health
Chasing the perfect night’s sleep is now a recognised way of ruining it
Sleep scores, magnesium, white noise machines. Doctors say patients are arriving with tracker data convinced they have a disorder they do…
Technology
Bezos on workplace stress: it comes from not acting, not from working hard — and the science mostly agrees
Jeff Bezos has said the same thing about stress for twenty-five years: it rarely comes from hard work, and usually from a problem within…
Technology
Before we bred them: what watermelons, bananas and corn looked like in the wild
The watermelon in a 17th-century Italian painting is mostly white rind and swirls; wild bananas were packed with hard seeds; the ancestor…
Technology
The first brain implant cleared for sale does not enter the brain — and China put it on national health insurance
NEO sits on the dura mater rather than piercing the cortex, in a procedure of about 90 minutes. The reimbursement decision may matter more…
Technology
Your tea bag may be shedding billions of plastic particles into the cup — what 19 studies found
A review of 19 scientific studies finds that many tea bags — including some sold as biodegradable — release micro- and nanoplastics into…
Technology
The Ig Nobel Prizes leave America: why science’s funniest ceremony is moving to Zurich
For 35 years winners of the Ig Nobel Prize flew to Massachusetts to be pelted with paper aeroplanes. This year the ceremony moves to…
Technology
Google says its quantum result can finally be checked. Read the word “verifiable” carefully — it means checked by another quantum computer
Quantum Echoes ran about 13,000 times faster than the best known classical simulation. The claim that matters is not the speed but that a…
Technology
Why your knuckles pop — the MRI that settled it, and the man who cracked one hand for 50 years to prove it does no harm
A 2015 real-time MRI study showed the sound is made when a gas cavity forms in the joint fluid, not when it collapses. No study has found…
Technology
The nuclear waste problem in one isotope: iodine-129 lasts 15.7 million years, and France pours 153 kg of it into the sea every year
Among the residues of a reactor, iodine-129 is the awkward one: nearly indestructible, mobile in soil and water, and drawn to the human…
Technology
NASA’s IMAP is off to map the bubble that keeps the galaxy out — and to give Earth a 30-minute warning before solar storms hit
The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe launched from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, bound for the L1 point 1.5 million km…