By Brian Clegg
From the flaws of the five-second rule to the reality approximately mobile masts and nuclear energy, saved updated with a web source, Science for Life is your advisor to surviving and thriving within the sleek world.
Science performs a primary position in daily lives—improving wellbeing and fitness, expanding existence expectancy, and embellishing lifestyles adventure. but it may be tough to get a deal with on what is good for you and your family.
Acclaimed technology author Brian Clegg provides the newest clinical suggestion, slicing throughout the vested pursuits and complicated contradictory statements that clutter the media and the web to offer a transparent photograph of what technological know-how is telling us straight away approximately altering our lives for the better.
Discover why the much-advertised antioxidants are usually not right for you, the reality approximately fats and sugar, and why one of many healthiest meals includes cancer agents and 21 E-numbers. discover what works and what does not in bettering brainpower—from the failure of enjoying Mozart to infants to the amazing talents of caffeine and nicotine. comprehend the instruments that advertisers use to cajole us and the way we will flip the mental strain again onto them.
Brian Clegg is a technology author who studied physics at Cambridge college and makes a speciality of making the strangest elements of the universe, from infinity to time shuttle and quantum thought, available to the overall reader. he's editor of popularscience.co.uk and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK).
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Additional resources for Science for Life: Using the Latest Science to Change our Lives for the Better
Sample text
What’s more, we are far safer now than our ancestors were, as we have greater protection against the misuse of chemicals. In the old days, people happily plastered toxic lead oxide on their skin to whiten it, and used wallpaper coloured green by deadly arsenic, which gave off poisonous fumes. Though things go wrong sometimes, the picture that ‘back to nature’ activists paint of a world where we are increasingly subject to dire chemicals gets reality back to front. Greenpeace comments on the ‘Chemicals out of control’ section of its international website: If someone came into your house, mixed you a cocktail of unknown chemicals – and offered you a drink – would you take it?
Another problem is that one trial is hardly ever enough. Even the best of scientists can make errors, and one of the checks and balances of science is that before a theory or treatment is considered worthwhile, the results have to be duplicated by other scientists and laboratories. All the best results are supported by a number of trials, and the best medical and dietary results typically come from a study that pulls together the results of many trials and combines them, giving more weighting to the best studies.
And that’s just what we know about. Coffee is a very complex mix of chemicals – around 1,000 in all. So far only 30 of these have had the kind of high dosage testing usually done on dangerous chemicals, and 21 proved carcinogenic. However, it ought to be stressed that the risks involved are still extremely low – in practice it takes over six cups a day to have any measurable risk, and even then it is small. ) For some people, coffee (caffeine in particular) is a problem when it comes to sleep, and a study in 2013 did show that caffeine could disrupt sleep for up to six hours after drinking it.