Shutterstock/dencg A senior doctor in charge of the NHS anti-disinformation campaign has said that language and cultural barriers could be causing people from ethnic minorities to reject the COVID-19 vaccine. Dr Harpreet Sood told the BBC it was “a big concern” and officials were working hard to reach different groupsContinue Reading
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Ten years ago, PayPal founder Peter Thiel condensed the growing sense of disappointment in new technologies down to just nine words. “We wanted flying cars,” he wrote, “instead we got 140 characters”. That these words still ring true a decade later shows just how far short of expectations newContinue Reading
Do atheists think differently? patrice6000/Shutterstock The cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what they’ve found, I will focus on three key snapshots. TheContinue Reading
Shutterstock/dencg A senior doctor in charge of the NHS anti-disinformation campaign has said that language and cultural barriers could be causing people from ethnic minorities to reject the COVID-19 vaccine. Dr Harpreet Sood told the BBC it was “a big concern” and officials were working hard to reach different groupsContinue Reading
Don/KnowYourMeme For most of us, memes are the harmless fodder of an “extremely online” internet culture, floating benignly between different social media platforms — and, on the whole, making us laugh. But in the shadier corners of the internet, like on the forum 4chan, memes can quickly mutate from jokesContinue Reading
Vampire bats, a commonly deltavirus-infected host, feed on the blood of other mammals. Belizar/Shutterstock Pandemics past and present have been caused when pathogens – germs that cause disease – move between animals and humans, as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) did when it made its way from bats toContinue Reading
rawf8/Shutterstock How many emails are in your inbox? If the answer is thousands, or if you often struggle to find a file on your computer among its cluttered hard drive, then you might be classed as a digital hoarder. In the physical world, hoarding disorder has been recognised as aContinue Reading
Coordinated brains. Jacob Lund/Shutterstock Many people across the world are still living under tough restrictions or lockdowns because of the pandemic, staying home as much as possible. This means that a lot of parents are spending more time than ever with their children. But how do you turn that timeContinue Reading
Earth from the ISS. NASA, CC BY Being forced into isolation and confinement creates a number of potentially stressful demands. However, we might be able to learn a thing or two about coping with these demands, from people who choose a life in such settings. Despite the glorified image ofContinue Reading
Lidiane Miotto/Shutterstock For years, conventional wisdom has held that roots don’t grow as deep in hard soil because it’s just too difficult for them to physically push through it. But our new research has unearthed another reason: their growth is controlled by a biological signal which can be “switched off”,Continue Reading
