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- Article
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Unravelling genetic origins from the potato to cinchona
Starting with the humble potato, Nataly Allasi Canales reveals how researchers unearth the genetic origins of modern plant varieties, and explains why their work is so important for biodiversity.
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- Long read
- Long read
Healthy scepticism
Healthcare sceptics – like those opposed to Covid-19 vaccinations – often have serious, nuanced reasons for doubting medical authorities.
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The enduring myth of the mad genius
There’s a fine line to tread between creativity and psychosis.
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Building a dream in the garden suburbs
In the late 19th century a ‘garden suburb’ promised a retreat from London’s dirt and crowds. See how this new concept was developed to appeal to the health concerns of the literary classes.
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Natural eating in Jamaica and the Caribbean
Riaz Phillips is passionate about the Jamaican food he grew up with and plant-based Caribbean food he came to later, like roti, baiganee and vegan stews and curries. Here he explores the origins and surging popularity of these natural ‘health foods’.
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Illuminated manuscripts, illuminating medicines
From rare bugs to exorbitantly priced plant parts, find out more about the artistic and medical uses of pigments from the past.
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How to cure the eco-anxious
Could community activism be the key to overcoming a fear of environmental collapse?
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Sharing Nature: Parks for people
Paula Broom’s photograph of Sydney’s Centennial Park shows the complexity and joy we find in urban greenery.
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Performance art, frozen in time
For over a year, live performance art with an audience present has been largely impossible. But still images continue to allow artists in this sphere to inspire audiences at home.
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Found items
Books leave their traces in our minds, but we leave traces of ourselves in books too, as these fascinating items found inside old works show.
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Is your job bad for your teeth?
Some surprising occupations pose hidden risks to dental health. Could your ivories be in particular peril?
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The island of unclaimed bodies
In New York, those who live and die on the extreme edges of society are buried on an isolated island, often forgotten and unmourned. But recent legal changes aim to reduce stigma and restore their dignity.
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Spanish flu and the depiction of disease
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed many millions more than World War I did. Find out why contemporary artistic depictions of its devastating impact are so rare.
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How do advertisers get inside our heads?
Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.
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Does mass media pave the way to fascism?
In the aftermath of World War II, psychoanalysts found the psychological roots of authoritarianism closer to home than was comfortable.
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Nymphomania and hypersexuality in women and men
The history of nymphomania is closely bound with society's views on women and their sexuality.
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What is air, and how do we know?
Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.
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Beating the bodysnatchers
When a rise in grave robbing called for strong measures, mortsafes became the unassailable solution. Allison C. Meier explores.
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The pain that punished feminists
In a society that viewed getting the vote, and pursuing an education and career, as unnatural goals for women, the pain of endometriosis was viewed as nature’s retribution.
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A brief history of tattoos
The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.
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The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War
In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.
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Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis
Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.
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How slums make people sick
A newly gentrified corner of Bermondsey leaves little clue to its less salubrious history. But a few intrepid writers recorded the details of existence in one of London’s most squalid slums.
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Born in the NHS
Despite underfunding, strikes and scandals, the first two decades of the 2000s has seen the British people’s love of and loyalty to the NHS soar.
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How nature is defending itself in court
The idea that nature has legal rights is increasingly being taken seriously, but who gets to speak for it? Isabella Kaminski asks how the non-human can be represented within a human-made system.