Very Interesting - November/December 2020

Everything You Need to Know About Intrusive Thoughts

Occasionally, you're minding your own business when a weird - and sometimes disturbing or upsetting - thought pops into your head. Why does your brain do this, and does it mean that you're a bad person?

A lab to live by

CERN continues to be a hotspot for scientific discovery

HOW TO BUILD THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

At the Polarization Lab in North Carolina, multidisciplinary researchers – including social scientists, statisticians and computer scientists – are breaking apart the social media status quo to rebuild it, one peer-reviewed brick at a time

W BOSON: IS IT ABOUT TO BREAK PHYSICS?

The mass of the W boson, a subatomic particle, appears to be wrong. What could this mean for the Standard Model of particle physics?

HOW OUR BRAINS DECLINE AS WE AGE

The charts could one day be used as a clinical tool to help track patients’ brain development and diagnose neurodevelopmental disorders

LAB GROWN MEAT

Everything you need to know about a future where you can have your steak and eat it…

An Immune System for the Planet

Can we build a global pathogen defence system – a planetary equivalent of the immune system – to protect us when the next pandemic arrives?

STIMULATION AND SIGNALLING

Using magnets to influence the brain could lead to revolutionary new depression treatment. The method, tested in rats, targets star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes. Neuroscientists Dr Yichao Yu and Prof Mark Lythgoe at University College London tell us more…

THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: WHY IS IT BEING RETIRED AND WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO IT?

The last decade of the ageing space station’s life will feature private occupants, movies and an eventual watery grave

THE PERILS OF FOLKLORE

Seemingly innocuous folk cures and old wives’ tales can have a darker side