Pure Science

Science Focus

Every year, the US sees around 1,200 tornadoes tear across its landscape – but lately, things have felt different. Tornadoes are striking earlier, appearing in unusual places and clustering together with alarming intensity. Now, in early...

Science Focus

It is a charming scene in The Sound of Music when Maria and the Von Trapp children sing about a lonely goatherd yodelling in the Austrian Alps (lay-ee-odl-lay-ee-odl-lay-hee-hoo). But little did these characters know, their yodelling would...

Science Focus

Smokers are increasingly unconvinced of the benefits of switching to e-cigarettes, or ‘vaping’ – using an electronic device to heat a liquid that contains nicotine and inhaling the vapour (as opposed to breathing in the smoke from burning...

Science Focus

Endometriosis is a common condition where cells similar to those in the lining of the womb grow in other parts of the body. It affects around 10 per cent of women, and up to 50 per cent of women who are infertile, and can have a...

Science Focus

Today, the Sahara Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on our planet. But it wasn’t always this way.  Roll the clock back 7,000 years, and the Sahara was a lush, green savannah, teeming with wildlife, dotted with lakes –...

Science Focus

If you have lower levels of a type of cholesterol nicknamed ‘bad’ cholesterol in your blood, you may be less likely to develop dementia – and vice versa. That’s according to a recent Korean study published in the Journal of Neurology,...

Science Focus

Deep-sea anglerfish have a very weird way of mating. Tiny males bite onto the much bigger females and in some species, his body tissues fuse with hers. The male effectively turns into a sack of sperm hanging onto the female, ready for her...

Science Focus

The use of antibiotics in livestock farming has transformed the industry over recent decades, fuelling productivity gains as agriculture races to keep up with a growing global population and rising demand for animal-source foods. These...

Science Focus

Dieting can be tedious over the long term. Sure, counting calories over a week or two might be feasible, but forcing yourself to do it every day for months? Excruciating. If this struggle feels familiar, a new year-long trial may offer...

Science Focus

Should I be putting silicone tape on my wrinkles? With the caveat that you look wonderful just as you are, silicone tape does seem to reduce the appearance of wrinkles and help reduce scarring. There are plenty more caveats around products...

Science Focus

High above Earth at an altitude of around 480km (300 miles), roughly over Brazil, is something strange. A spot where satellites go haywire, where the Hubble Space Telescope can’t collect data and where even the astronauts on the...

Science Focus

Never cut a worm in half lengthways. It’ll most definitely not regenerate or, indeed, survive. Should a worm accidentally be sliced widthways, however, perpendicular to the length of its body, it might well live to wriggle another day....

Science Focus

It’s believed that e-cigarettes have helped millions of people quit smoking in the UK alone, but that doesn’t mean they’re good for you. Vapes may contain less nicotine, tar and other harmful substances compared to combustible cigarettes,...

Science Focus

It takes more than a year for the postpartum body to settle to its new normal after giving birth – much longer than a three-month 'fourth trimester'. That’s according to a recent study by biologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and...

Science Focus

The urge to become invisible goes back a long way. Hunters and soldiers have been finding ways to camouflage themselves for centuries, but scientists are edging closer to truly making things invisible. Modern stealth tech can not only...

Science Focus

A rare partial solar eclipse will rise over parts of North America and Europe on Saturday 29 March 2025, offering early risers a dramatic display – including a 'double sunrise'. “From wherever you see the eclipse, it will be a wonderful...

Science Focus

Sometimes evolution produces an organism so weird and wonderfully different to anything that we know of that scientists are stumped. Enter the Tully monster, a soft-bodied sea creature that swam in the muddy estuaries of what’s now...

Science Focus

The age of the Universe can be derived by measuring its current rate of expansion and then extrapolating backwards. In practice, however, we also have to know how that expansion rate may have changed through time, and this is dictated by...

Science Focus

Feeling stressed? That’s not surprising. The modern world, with its relentlessly breaking bad news and always-on communication, is more or less set up to keep us on edge.  But there’s a problem: our bodies are built for fight or...

Science Focus

Lots of strange things happened in 2023. But one thing (arguably the most notable thing to happen that year) went largely unnoticed. For the first time since the 1980s, the number of people with obesity in the US decreased. According to...

Science Focus

“You lose most of the heat from your head,” the saying goes. But is this actually accurate? This myth likely stems from a US Army Field Manual that stated 40–45 per cent of heat loss occurs through the head.  Scientists explained that...

Science Focus

Where you live has a huge impact on your health. From the air you breathe to how much you earn, a myriad of factors shape your long-term wellbeing – and now, scientists say they may also influence your risk of developing dementia. A new...

Science Focus

For more than 70 years, so-called ‘forever chemicals’ have been used to make products all around us, from non-stick cookware to fabrics, food packaging and more. But they’ve also been linked to serious health consequences, including...

Science Focus

It’s easy to assume that people with obesity enjoy food more than people in smaller bodies – but it’s not true. Instead, people seem to gradually get less pleasure from eating as they put on weight. Now, scientists have discovered why that...

Science Focus

From Sheldon Cooper to Sherlock Holmes, autism-coded characters on screen have long been defined by their wacky social skills, constantly misunderstanding jokes and saying things that others find rude. When it comes to diagnosing real...

Science Focus

The way young people have been worshipping at the church of protein recently, you’d have thought its priest was Andrew Scott. For instance, two in five parents of American 13- to 17-year-olds said their kids had eaten protein supplements...

Science Focus

Skywatchers across the northeastern United States, eastern Canada and parts of Europe are in for a rare astronomical treat this spring. On the morning of Saturday 29 March 2025, a partial solar eclipse will grace the skies – and for some...

Science Focus

Scientists have discovered that an imbalance of certain chemicals in the brain could help explain why teenage girls are at greater risk of depression than boys. Specifically, researchers claimed to have identified the role of a chemical...

Science Focus

Earlier this month, in the dead of night, a mysterious spacecraft touched down at Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Barbara, California. The craft in question was the eerily-named X-37B – an experimental and highly secretive US...

Science Focus

A new 30-year study of eight popular diets has identified the one most likely to keep you healthiest into your 70s and beyond. The Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI) diet was found to offer slightly greater health benefits than the...

Science Focus

A powerful combination of two cholesterol-lowering drugs could prevent thousands of deaths each year from heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, according to the largest analysis of its kind. Published in the journal...

Science Focus

Predicting the future is considered a fool’s game. Yet we can't help but wonder what ideas we’ll be talking about in the decades to come… presumably while sitting in a bar on the Moon, sipping anti-ageing, dark matter martinis. Hundreds of...

Science Focus

Is it possible to navigate your way to better brain health? That was the tantalising question raised by a recent study in the British Medical Journal, which found that being a taxi or ambulance driver may offer protection against dementia....

Science Focus

How can you burn more calories as you walk? Walk farther, walk faster or walk harder. Those are basically your options, right? But let’s take the scenic route on this answer because walking is fast becoming a hot research topic among...

Science Focus

People of all ages can benefit from eating resistant starch from various sources. Resistant starch gives a host of benefits, including improved blood sugar control and better gut health.  Starch, a carbohydrate, consists of polymers...

Science Focus

For centuries, scientists believed that only the elite were buried in pyramids. But a surprising recent discovery of ancient skeletons has thrown that idea into question.  In a new study, researchers analysed the remains of people...

Science Focus

Cats are many things; enigmatic, aloof, contrary and yes, they are also liquid. Pour a liquid into a container. It changes its shape to fill all the available space, before spilling over the top. Pour a cat into a container and it does the...

Science Focus

British Summer Time (BST) is back, which means the clocks are about to spring forward by one hour. But when exactly does the change happen in the UK in 2025 – and what’s the point of shifting the time around twice a year? When do the...

Science Focus

The most popular idea for what causes depression in the brain is some kind of chemical imbalance. Many pharmaceutical companies have claimed in their advertising that their antidepressant drugs work by correcting this imbalance. The notion...

Science Focus

When French scientists Laurence Gaume and Marion Desquilbet first heard the news about a new international insect decline database, they felt something was off. It suggested that some insect species were actually on the rise – a claim that...

Science Focus

None of us remember being babies. In fact, most adults’ earliest memories come from the age of about four years old – and scientists don’t really know why.  Researchers have long believed this phenomenon – called 'infantile amnesia' –...

Science Focus

Picture the scene. Camden’s Electric Ballroom, circa 1976. The Sex Pistols are on stage, belting out ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to a pogoing mosh pit full of spiky-haired punks. The floor is sticky with lager, the air weighs heavy with attitude....

Science Focus

Good news for fans of the humble pecan: these tasty nuts might be even healthier than we thought, and swapping your usual snacks for them could be a smart move for your health. That’s because a recent study has found that swapping daily...

Science Focus

The early bird catches the worm, while the night owl is more at risk of developing depression. That’s according to a new study that suggests people who prefer waking up and staying up late are more likely to experience depressive symptoms,...

Science Focus

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid mission has released its first major batch of survey data, offering a stunning glimpse into the vast cosmos.  The newly unveiled images, covering a 63-square-degree patch of the sky – more than...

Science Focus

The addictiveness of nicotine pouches and other oral products may depend on their flavourings, according to a new rat study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Nicotine pouches – small sachets placed...

Science Focus

The quantum universe Quantum physics is confusing. Fortunately, scientists have been exploring it for years and we are, finally, beginning to make some sense of it all. Here's our guide to quantum mechanics made easy: a whistlestop tour in...

Science Focus

Science Focus

We share about 98.8 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Yet, despite this near-identical genetic blueprint, chimps have not built civilisations, waged wars or mastered the art of the TikTok dance...

Science Focus

The UK needs more houses. Demand is outstripping supply and it’s driving up prices, making affordable housing harder to come by. That’s just one of the reasons behind the government’s intention to build 1.5 million new homes over the next...