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Homesick for planet Earth
Find out how homesick astronauts spend their free time, and how recreating home cooking from freeze-dried ingredients can cheer them all up.
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Celebrating our soft toys
After cuddling a teddy bear cured her insomnia, Elspeth Wilson was inspired to speak to four other autistic and disabled adults, who praise the roles soft toys play in their lives.
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Why are women more willing donors than men?
Why is there a gender imbalance when it comes to the donation of organs, blood and tissue, and what can be done about it?
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Theriac: An ancient brand?
The name theriac survived for around for two millennia as a pharmaceutical term. But a ‘brand’ name is not always a guarantee of quality.
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How music opens the doors of memory and the mind
People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?
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Sharing Nature: Alone
Being alone in nature can be a contradictory experience of fear and freedom.
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Sigrid Rausing’s prescription for writing
The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘Stay With Me’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.
- In pictures
- In pictures
The evolution of war-zone medicine
The need to deal with battlefield injuries has led to inventive designs for extreme situations. Find out how camel-drawn ambulances and flat-pack hospitals have helped casualties survive.
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Womb milk and the puzzle of the placenta
A human baby needs milk to survive – and this holds true even before it’s born. Joanna Wolfarth explores “womb milk”, as well as ancient and modern ideas about the placenta.
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To write in golden photographs
When Rachel Genn’s brother disappeared, a newspaper article led the family to his bedside. But the accident he’d barely survived was not to be the last tragedy in his life.
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Seeds for the future
Indigenous groups have a key role as guardians of biodiversity, and their knowledge could help us all preserve our world. To survive, we all need to collaborate, reject prejudice, and share what we know.
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Intertwined with air
Siwakorn Odochao details his people’s way of perceiving trees and humans as intimately connected, and draws on the air as the element that weaves between them. Through the co-dependency of humans and trees to prepare the air for each other, he elaborates on the relationship between air, health and environment.
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Divining the world through an artist’s almanac
Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.
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Shame’s long shadow
What is shame and why is it so powerful? A violent sexual assault left Lucia Osborne-Crowley suffocated with shame, but she’s now determined to understand how this overwhelming emotion works.
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Native Americans and the dehumanising force of the photograph
In the second part of Native Americans through the 19th-century lens, we delve deeper into the ambivalent messages within the images.
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The current that kills
In the 19th century, electricity held life in the balance, with the power to execute – or reanimate.
- In pictures
- In pictures
Pepys and the plague
Through its long history, London has survived some enormous epidemics. During the 1665 Great Plague of London, the city burned, shops closed, the streets emptied and bodies piled up. Read Samuel Pepys’s account of how the city pulled through.
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Mixed feelings and milk siblings
A friend in need has a profound effect on Alev’s feelings about women sharing their milk in this final instalment of ‘The Breastmilk Market’.
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A freezer full of breastmilk
When new mum Alev Scott began pumping her milk between feeds, she soon found she was freezing more breastmilk than her baby would ever need. So Alev began to investigate ways to share her oversupply.
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The poetic language of health
When his doctors could only offer phone consultations, James Morland turned to poetry to make sense of the medical terms describing his symptoms and test results.
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Losing touch
In these pandemic times, when touch has become taboo, Agnese Reginaldo explores the importance of physical contact to our wellbeing.
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Drawing the human animal
We might try to deny our animal instincts, but this series of extraordinary 17th-century drawings suggests they are only too apparent.
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Wonder years
The confusion and secrecy surrounding his condition seriously affected Chris’s mental health, blighting his teenage years. But somehow he began to hope and plan for the future.
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Parasites and pests from the medieval to the modern
Humans have been reluctant hosts to a plethora of unpleasant parasites for centuries. And medieval evidence shows our modern distaste for these little irritations is just as ancient.
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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.