- Article
- Article
Busting myths about turkey-baster babies
The popular idea of sex-free, turkey-baster-led conception has been around since the 1970s. Christine Ro goes beyond the utensils drawer to find out if it’s ever really happened.
- Article
- Article
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.
- Article
- Article
Between two summers
As Michael Malay tends his allotment, absorbing all the sensations of his surroundings, he finds the repetition of work calms the mind.
- Article
- Article
The empty bungalow
Grandma’s unsteady piles of stuff have been dismantled and dispersed. From an empty bungalow, Georgie Evans makes a plea for hoarding behaviour to be better understood.
- Article
- Article
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.
- Article
- Article
The blood notebooks
Novelist Rupert Thomson explores his unusual behaviour during a time of self-imposed isolation.
- Podcast
- Podcast
Joy
Bidisha explores joy, from the psychology of our earliest laughs to collective and solitary pleasures like comedy, food and performance.
- Article
- Article
Kathryn Mannix’s prescription for writing
The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘With the End in Mind’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.
- Article
- Article
Getting sexy with cinnamon
Add some flavour to your love life with this spice. It will warm up more than just your buns.
- Article
- Article
Is your job bad for your teeth?
Some surprising occupations pose hidden risks to dental health. Could your ivories be in particular peril?
- Article
- Article
The Key to Memory: Follow your nose
Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.
- Photo story
- Photo story
From chef’s whites to medical scrubs
Meet the machinists who have rapidly switched from making clothing for hospitality staff to uniforms for hospital workers.
- Article
- Article
Dancing for joy
Dancing is a mood enhancer, it increases social bonding and it improves creativity. Maybe you really can dance all your troubles away.
- Article
- Article
The Ladies of Llangollen
As we celebrate LGBT History Month, Sarah Bentley explores the relationship between the two 18th-century women known as the Ladies of Llangollen.
- Article
- Article
The amateur silversmith
It started as hobby and soon became a passion. Geraldine Holden tells us where the art and science of silver unite.
- Article
- Article
Healing hard-working hands
The names we use to describe different hand injuries tell us about history, gender and class. Occupational therapist María Cristina Jiménez explores those injuries, and the changing ways we talk about them.
- Article
- Article
Menstruation, magic and moon myths
Why do stories cloaking periods in magic and mystery persist? Pragya Agarwal argues against myth-making and for inclusive menstrual education, grounded in fact.
- Article
- Article
The healing power of the physic garden
Having experienced the healing power of plants and gardens, Iona Glen goes in search of present-day “physic gardens” and their origins in history.
- Article
- Article
Doris Day blows against
Dodie Bellamy remembers a heady summer watching Doris Day grimace and gust in vintage movies, her expressive exhalations changing her onscreen world with a puff.
- Article
- Article
The trouble with too many things
Hoarding is a slippery subject – difficult to define or diagnose. As she tries to explain the intensity of her grandma’s collecting, Georgie Evans finds the words and tools at her disposal aren’t all that helpful.
- Article
- Article
Coasting to catastrophe
In climate change, everything – and everyone – is connected. The watery process that will gradually cut off the Isle of Thanet from the British mainland has begun, and everyone in the UK needs to pay attention.
- Article
- Article
Drops of water
In the compulsory isolation of lockdown, Daisy Lafarge’s repeated visits – via a new microscope – to the miniature worlds contained by drops of pond water provided her with the company and escapism she craved.
- Article
- Article
When monarchs healed the sick
Our current Queen fortunately doesn’t have to spend hours laying hands on the sick to cure them. But it was a different story for monarchs of the early modern era, whose touch was a sought-after treatment for scrofula.
- Book extract
- Book extract
The give and take of caring
Kate Mosse argues that how we define ‘care’ matters, and explores the reciprocity of caring and being cared for.
- Article
- Article
Living in limbo when a loved one is missing
When someone goes missing, loved ones are thrown into a state akin to constant grieving; waiting for news, living in hope. Novelist Bev Thomas describes how they try to cope and carry on.