Do you really know?

If you use Tiktok, you may well have seen videos of people walking on a treadmill at a steep incline. Many of them claim to have lost weight and improved their fitness, all thanks to the 12-3-30 workout. If you’re thinking those are some oddly specific numbers, you’re right. The method involves walking on a treadmill that is inclined at 12%, for 30 minutes, at a speed of 3 mph. That's it. No runni...

Father’s Day is a holiday that honours fathers and celebrates their role in society. It’s celebrated in the United Kingdom on the third Sunday of June, but it wasn’t always a national holiday. In fact, it was imported from the United States, where it started in the early 20th century. The idea of Father’s Day was first proposed by Sonora Smart Dodd, a woman from Spokane, Washington, who wanted to...

It won’t have escaped your attention that the price of your weekly shopping basket at the supermarket has gone up significantly in the last year. Indeed, recent data from Kantar suggests that families are now spending an extra £16 per week on food shopping, due to inflation. More and more people are being plunged into food insecurity. But what can be done?  Well, in late May 2023, UK Chancellor Je...

We all know what it feels like to get pins and needles. It usually happens when we’ve been in the same position for too long, sleeping on one of our arms for example. Bad posture when seated can make this more likely to happen. It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling of numbness and tingling, as if someone was raking your skin repeatedly with small pointed objects. That’s where the name “pins and ne...

Retinol is a form of vitamin A, which is essential for healthy skin. It has many benefits such as smoothing wrinkles, exfoliating dead cells, clearing pores, and fading dark spots. Retinol works by stimulating the production of collagen, which is the protein that gives your skin strength and structure, and by speeding up the turnover of skin cells, which means it helps remove old cells from the su...

The musical film The Little Mermaid was released in cinemas on 24 May 2023. This movie highlights the importance of representations in the media. This effect has a name: the Scully Effect. The combination made for an unprecedented representation of women on TV at the time, with audiences far more accustomed to seeing scientists played by white men. The fields of Science, Technology, Engineering an...

YouGov data from 2019 showed that 49% of Brits shower once per day, while 20% do so 4 to 6 times per week. And 6% even shower more than once per day! That’s despite dermatologists saying that we don’t really need to shower every day. According to health professionals, both routines come with certain benefits. You might want to know the pros and cons of each option. For example, a morning shower ca...

What do chicken nuggets, margarine and instant noodles all have in common? Wel, they may look tasty, but they’re loaded with sugar, salt, fat and chemicals that strip away their nutritional value. That’s due to the heavy processing that goes into making them, which sees them completely transformed from the original raw ingredients.  And they’re increasingly ever present on our shelves and in our s...

The subject we’re talking about today is most associated with Japan, but is also relevant in many other parts of the world. The Japanese word “Karoshi” means "death by overwork". In a broad sense, it refers to workers who die suddenly from a bodily failure like a stroke or heart attack due to extreme stress and long working hours.  Let’s look into the causes and consequences of a phenomenon that a...

"Here’s my yoga instructor’s number”, "You must try this detox juice", "Download this diet app right now!". Have you ever heard people give this kind of ‘friendly advice’ to others in the past. Perhaps people have said things like that to you, with a little too much insistence for your liking. These days, there’s a certain demand for people to pursue physical and mental well-being, which has becom...

Ozempic is a brand name for a medication called semaglutide, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to treat type 2 diabetes. It works by mimicking a natural hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels and is taken through weekly injections.  Ozempic can also lower your risk of having serious heart problems, such as heart attack or stroke, if you have type 2 diabetes and h...

Today we're going to talk about a cognitive bias that causes people to believe, often mistakenly, that they are less likely to experience negative events and more likely to experience positive events than others. Estimates suggest that 80% of us display what’s known as the optimism bias. For example, we might think that we are less likely to get sick, lose our job, or have a car accident than the...

As we head towards another summer, isn’t it a relief to be able to shed the layers and wear lighter clothing when out and about? Well, if you’re a woman, you might have mixed feelings about that, due to the constant threat of unwanted attention from strangers when wearing summer clothes in public.  And a lot of the time, it goes further than just unwanted attention. A YouGov survey released in Jan...

Veganism is a lifestyle that excludes all animal products from one’s diet and other aspects of life. That means no meat, eggs or dairy but it can also include things like honey, leather, wool, silk, or anything else that comes from animals.  People choose this lifestyle for different reasons, some for ethical reasons, others for environmental reasons, and some do it for health reasons. Some studie...

I’m sure you can imagine a few scenarios in which you might have resisted the need to pee in the past. It may have been due to the toilets being unclean or closed. Sometimes, a little more privacy would be appreciated, especially at work, for example. There are a number of factors which influence the number of times we pee over the course of a day. These include age, bladder size, the weather, any...

We usually sneeze to protect ourselves from irritants such as pollen, dust, or chemicals. But there are some people who consistently sneeze when they look at the sun. In fact, this affects from 10 to 35% of us when we move from being in the shade to bright light, according to PBS.org. If it happens to you, perhaps you’ve been wondering if it’s an allergy to sunlight, but actually it isn’t. The rea...

After "quiet quitting" and "conscious quitting", here’s yet another new phenomenon related to the world of work that’s growing in popularity. “Acting your wage” involves putting in a certain amount of work, that’s in proportion to your salary. In other words, no going above and beyond; no extra hours and no unattainable goals. And no additional responsibilities outside of your job description, unl...

Many of us would like to be a couple of inches taller, given all the advantages that seem to come with being tall. We feel like we might have a better love life or be perceived as more powerful for example. But there’s not really anything we can do about our height. Or is there? Going back to the 1940s, Soviet doctor Gavril Ilizarov realised that following a fracture, bones like the femur tend to...

In late May 2023, Elon Musk’s neurotech startup Neuralink announced that it had received authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to carry out its first in-human clinical trials. Neuralink's brain chips have already allowed monkeys to play video games simply by following the screen with their eyes. The hope is that the technology will allow paralysed humans to communicate by moving...

Many of us have joked in the past about being allergic to work, or afraid of it, but did you know that there’s actually a real phobia of work? Have you ever felt anxious or stressed about going to work? Do you dread the thought of facing your boss, your colleagues, or your tasks? Do you avoid applying for jobs or quit them easily? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might have ergop...

Mother’s Day is celebrated in many countries around the world, but not always on the same date. For some it’s observed on the second Sunday of May, for others it  falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent but it can also be on the first Sunday of May; the last Sunday of May or even the first Sunday in June. Well, that’s because Mother’s Day has different origins and meanings in different cultures and reg...

If you’re like many people, you probably want to save more money but hate the idea of budgeting. Maybe you don’t like tracking every single expense or feeling restricted by spending categories. Maybe you just want a simple and flexible way to manage your money without too much hassle. That’s where the 80/20 method comes in. Also known as the anti-budget or the “pay yourself first” budget, it’s a s...

As of late May 2023, inflation in the UK finally dropped below double digits, from 10.1% to 8.7%, according to the Office for National Statistics. But the food consumer price index inflation rate is still over 19.1%.  Back in March, the Food Foundation think tank revealed that the number of children living in food poverty in the UK had doubled to 4m in just a year. How to save money easily at the...

The types of attachment were theorized by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s. They are widely used to help us understand how we react to situations in our relationships, whether it be with romantic partners, friends or family members.   Bowlby relied on research on the impact of early separations between infants and their mothers, and emphasized the importance of attachment relationship...

According to American neuroscientist Daniel Amen, a specialist in brain imaging, we produce 60,000 thoughts per day, and a staggering 80% of these thoughts are negative. That means we have 48,000 negative thoughts on a daily basis. Sometimes we just can’t seem to fight them off, but thankfully there are ways to cope with them. How can we counteract the tendency? How can we distance ourselves from...