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Rethinking the placebo effect

The placebo effect has long been harnessed for both legitimate and fraudulent use, but we’re only just discovering how and why our bodies respond positively to dummy drugs, as Anjuli Sharma reveals.

Finding a cure for homesickness

While technology can mitigate some aspects of homesickness, other components of home are harder to replicate. Find out how 21st-century studies are helping homesickness sufferers find silver linings in their new situation.

Dying to be in nature

The modern funeral business is one that uses up precious resources and pollutes the planet. But you can make sure it’s only your memory that leaves its mark with these new and natural ways to leave this earth.

Ayurveda: Knowledge for long life

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex. Aarathi Prasad investigates how it came to be this way.

Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

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.

Can isolation lead to manipulation?

Military-funded researchers wanted to know if isolation techniques could facilitate brainwashing. One neuroscientist suggested that it might improve our own control over our minds.

How the magician’s assistant creates the illusion

Without breaking the spell, performer Naomi Paxton reveals the subtle ways the magician’s assistant helps the audience to keep believing.

Parks and politics in Brixton’s past and present

Gentrification is creeping along Railton Road, but racial inequality still lingers in memories of the 1980s, and in the continuing lack of green-space access.

Defying deafness through music

Did you know that Beethoven’s profession meant he was ashamed to admit to being deaf? Find out how similar prejudices persist today and how our writer is helping to break them down.

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.

Dyslexia and its misconceptions

Overcoming common myths about dyslexia only adds to the challenges of growing up with the condition. Madeleine Morley, who was diagnosed with dyslexia aged eight, goes into myth-busting mode and shares her personal experiences.

This is a MOOD

Adults might sometimes dismiss teenagers’ ‘moodiness’, but adolescence is a time of complex shifts in brain and body, which are intricately bound up with fluctuating feelings.

Mask, ritual and fertility

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

The Key to Memory: Follow your nose

Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.

Why the NHS is worth saving

In this extract from his latest book, ‘Free For All’, Dr Gavin Francis poses challenging questions to be addressed if a health service that’s free for all at the point of use is to remain possible.

Inside the Cold War mind

Martin Sixsmith explores the competing national psyches of Russia and America, and a world divided between their irreconcilable visions of human nature.

Pain, politics and the power of photography

Art historian Giulia Smith explains what she most admires in the work of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, and how their approach makes illness political.

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.

Religion and mental health

At a time of extreme distress, Jamila Pereira found that the faith she had relied on was failing her. Here she describes how she found other ways to begin healing and finding happiness.

Your gut’s instincts

Cultural historian Elsa Richardson explores the stomach’s influence over our emotions, and why trusting your gut is often good advice.

Finding solidarity in arachnophobia

Arachnophobia is very different from just disliking spiders. Izzie Price shares the reality of having the phobia, and explores its likely origins.

Winter blues and the story of SAD

In ‘Chasing the Sun‘ Linda Geddes reveals why for some people, winter is literally depressing, showing how we first came to recognise seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Why we need to decolonise the skies

Astronomer Dr Tana Joseph explores how rethinking way we look at the stars could improve our relationship with our own planet and make it a healthier place to live.