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Health

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Health

The Oldest Drug Habit on Record Is Betel Nut, Sucked by Foragers in Sulawesi Up to 25,000 Years Ago

Grooves in fossil teeth that nobody could explain, arecoline in the residue, and a frog-egg assay to prove the dose reached the brain. The Griffith University paper in Science Advances pushes human drug use back by more than ten thousand years.

Sep 17, 2026/3 min read

A woman preparing areca nut and betel leaf for chewing at a stall in Myanmar in 2014; the Sulawesi foragers sucked the nut rather than chewing a quid

Health

Pennsylvania's Fourth Measles Death Is an 18-Year-Old in Mifflin County. America Last Lost Four in a Year in 1992

Nearly 700 cases in 38 counties, 133 in hospital, a hundred new infections in a week, and four unvaccinated dead in a month: two infants, a woman of forty and now a teenager with brain inflammation. The CDC has yet to count any of them.

Sep 17, 2026/3 min read

A vial and pre-filled syringe of Priorix, a measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, in its blister pack

Health

An AI-Designed Lung Drug Made Six Ageing Clocks Run Backwards in a Small Trial. That Is Not the Same as Reversing Ageing

Rentosertib was built to treat pulmonary fibrosis. In 42 patients, blood proteins read by six independent clocks came out three to four years younger after a month. Independent doctors say a younger score is not a younger person.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

A chest X-ray showing the scarring pattern of pulmonary fibrosis, the disease rentosertib was designed to treat

Health

A Brain Implant Let Paralysed People Speak and Wave at the Same Time, Through an Avatar, for the First Time

Edward Chang's team at UCSF decoded attempted speech and upper-body movement from the same electrodes on the motor cortex, so a patient could say hello and wave, or nod while saying yes. Two of three participants controlled the avatar.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

Health

A Bedroom That Is Not Quite Dark Is Linked to a Thicker, Stiffer Heart, in the First Study to Measure Both

Eleven thousand people wore a light sensor for a week. Three years later, those who slept in more than three lux, a very dim room, had thicker left ventricles and muscle that flexed less. The differences are small. Cardiologists still care.

Sep 12, 2026/4 min read

A dark bedroom at night with a street light shining through the window onto the bed, the kind of low light the study measured

Health

Slow Breathing Made People Take More Risks, Not Fewer, in a Berlin Brain-Scan Study

Forty-one volunteers who breathed with a long exhale accepted riskier bets for money in an MRI scanner, and those whose heart rhythm responded most showed the strongest reward activity in the brain. A neat result, a small sample, a lesson about calm.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

A magnetic resonance imaging scanner in a hospital room, the kind of machine the volunteers lay in while making their choices

Health

Intermittent Fasting Works About as Well as Eating Less, Because in the Trials That Is What It Turned Out to Be

Three randomised trials put time-restricted eating against ordinary calorie control or against nothing. The eating window on its own did little. Combined with eating less, it did what eating less does. What that means for anyone considering it.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

A breakfast table laid with a boiled egg, orange juice and coffee. Early eating windows front-load the day's food to the morning

Health

Nobody Ever Found the Study Behind Eight Glasses of Water a Day, Because There Is Not One

A physiologist went looking for the origin of the rule in 2002 and came back empty. What the reference intakes actually say, why food and coffee count, how much the number varies between people, and when in a Gulf summer it genuinely matters.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

Water being poured from a bottle into a drinking glass held in the hand, at a kitchen worktop by a window

Health

Cold Showers and Ice Baths: A Dutch Trial Found Fewer Sick Days, a New Review Found Inflammation. Both Are Right

Three thousand Dutch adults who ended their showers cold took fewer sick days. A 2025 review of eleven trials found stress fell twelve hours after a plunge and inflammation rose. What is known, what is marketing, and why the first minute can kill.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

Winter swimmers in swimsuits on a wooden pier beside a hole cut in the sea ice at Turku, Finland, in low afternoon sun

Health

The Finnish Sauna Study Everyone Quotes Is Real, and It Is Weaker Than the Wellness Industry Wants It to Be

Men who used a sauna four to seven times a week had far fewer sudden cardiac deaths over twenty years than men who went once. That finding launched an industry. What the study can and cannot support, and who should be careful.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

The public smoke sauna at Kuusijärvi in Vantaa, Finland, its timber walls lit at night with snow on the ground and the forest behind

Health

Ten Thousand Steps Was a Marketing Number. The Evidence Says the Benefit Flattens Around Seven Thousand

Two large pooled analyses now agree: the drop in mortality with more walking is steep up to about seven thousand steps a day and shallow after that. What the studies found, what they could not show, and what to do with a phone that counts.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

People walking along a lit seafront promenade at dusk, slightly blurred by the long exposure, with the beach to the left