The Conversation

Melatonin – a go-to sleep aid for kids and adults alike in many households in America – continues to create media buzz, with conflicting messages that leave people uncertain about its safety.

Images of families displaced by floods, prolonged droughts or extreme storms have become a distressingly regular feature of the daily news. As the impact of climate change intensifies, so does concern over its effects on human mobility.

Your child’s small, delicate, chalk-white baby teeth fall out. In their place grow yellowish-brown, fragile teeth – much to everyone’s surprise.

You might think of cancer as a mass of rogue cells that grow uncontrollably. But cancer is more organized and strategic than that. Rather, cancer is a tightly controlled cellular neighborhood that can keep the body’s defenses out or weaken them once they get in.

Soccer purists have long feared the “Americanization” of the game. But in one key respect, it is already happening: ownership.

Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”? For many people, this phrase is a useful way to name the physical toll stress and trauma can take when the body is in “fight or flight” mode.

Football fans everywhere are gearing up to celebrate the sport’s most skilled athletes as they prepare for the start of another Fifa World Cup. But few get to see how the next generation of Messis and Ronaldos are discovered.

For four decades, a controversial idea has shaped how autism is understood by researchers, healthcare professionals and the public: the claim that autistic people are “mind blind”. The phrase suggests an inability to grasp what others think or feel. It is simple, memorable – and wrong.The claim rests on a concept called “theory of mind”. In everyday terms, theory of mind is the ability to recognise that other people’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions may differ from your own. This idea explains why someone understands that a joke can fall flat, that a promise can be broken, or that a friend can be mistaken without lying. It is often presented as the key to how people make sense of one another.

The gut bacterium Bacteroides fragilis has long presented researchers with a paradox. It has been associated with colorectal cancer, yet it also lives quite happily in most healthy people. A new study from a Danish research team offers a possible clue. When they looked beyond the bacterium itself and into its genome, they found a previously unknown virus embedded within it – one that was significantly more common in cancer patients.

For many people living with psoriasis, the red, scaly skin patches are only part of the story. Another challenge is the uncertainty about whether there is anything they can do themselves to help manage their skin.Treatments have improved greatly in recent years. Creams, tablets and injectable medicines can all help control symptoms. Even so, many people still ask a straightforward question in clinic: is there anything I can do alongside my medication that might make a difference? Weight often comes up in that discussion. Psoriasis is more common in people who are overweight or living with obesity.

For the first time in 25 years of continuous crewed operations, an astronaut has been medically evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS). The Crew-11 mission ended when a SpaceX Dragon capsule brought the four astronauts of Crew 11 home following a medical incident in early January 2026.To protect the crewmember’s privacy, Nasa hasn’t yet disclosed details about what happened – and this article won’t speculate. But the evacuation raises a question worth exploring: how do astronauts stay healthy in space, and why is this early evacuation so unusual?

The concept of “hard work v privilege”, and what either one says about someone’s social status, is an important one. Politicians regularly draw dividing lines between “hardworking families” and those receiving “handouts”. Others distinguish between those whose wealth increases while they sleep, and small business owners who work hard for their incomes.