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It’s the latest fad in Silicon Valley. By reducing the brain’s feel-good chemical known as dopamine – cutting back on things like food, sex, alcohol, social media and technology – followers believe that they can “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate simple things more easily. Some even go so far as avoiding all social activities, and even eye contact. The exercise, dubbed “dopamine fasting” by San Francisco psychologist Dr Cameron Sepah , is now getting increasing international attention. But what exactly is it? And does it work? As someone who studies the brain’s reward system, I’d like to share my knowledge with you. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger produced in the brain . It is sent around the brain conveying signals related to functions such as motor control, memory, arousal and reward processing. For example, too little dopamine can result in disorders like Parkinson’s Disease , involving symptoms of muscle rigidity, tremors and changes in ...

For many of us, a visit to the doctor’s office can be wrought with anxiety. A persistent cough that won’t go away or an ailment we hope is nothing serious can make GP visits emotionally difficult. Now imagine that you can’t phone the doctor to make an appointment, you don’t understand what your doctor just said, or you don’t know what the medication you’ve been prescribed is for. These are all situations that many Deaf people face when accessing healthcare services. We use Deaf (with a capital “D”) here to talk about culturally Deaf people, who were typically born deaf, and use a signed language, such as British Sign Language (BSL) , as their first or preferred language. In contrast, deaf (lowercase “d”) refers to the audiological condition of deafness. For our study , we talked to Deaf patients in Wales who communicate using BSL to learn about their experiences with healthcare services. Their experiences illustrated the challenges they face, and showed us that patients have unique ...

Just like we’ve done for smartphone main cameras, we’ve had another look at all the smartphone front cameras we tested in 2019 and have picked our favorites in several categories for you (note we will still test a number of smartphone front cameras before the end of the year and update this list accordingly if necessary). We launched DXOMARK Selfie back in January and have since used the new protocol to test the front cameras of 25 smartphones, from entry-level to flagship devices. As it is for the main camera, the overall Selfie score is a great indicator for the all-round performance of a front camera. However, it also makes sense to dive deeper and have a closer look at the sub-scores as well in order to make sure you find the right device for your specific requirements. We’ve done some of that work for you and picked our favorites for a range of front camera use cases. So without further ado, here are our favorite smartphone front cameras for 2019: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+...

If your dog has been alive and kicking its paws about for a decade, the widely held belief is that it has aged as much as a human would have done by the grand old age of 70. This conversion factor – each year of a dog’s life accounting for seven human years – comes from dividing human life expectancy of around 77 by the canine life expectancy of around 11. The underlying assumption is that each calendar year a dog lives though is equivalent to seven human years at any stage of a dog’s life. But new research suggests that things aren’t so simple. And if we look at some basic developmental milestones, it’s clear why. For example, most dog breeds reach sexual maturity between the ages of six and 12 months – the upper end of that range corresponding, by the traditional conversion, to a human age of seven. And at the other end of the spectrum, although unusual, some dogs have been known to live for over 20 years. Under the “factor-of-seven” conversion rule, this would equate to an unfat...

With 2019 slowly but surely coming to an end and all major smartphone launches of the year behind us, now seems like a good time to recap and have another close look at the many smartphone camera reviews we have published this year, and pick our favorite smartphones for you (note we will still test a number of smartphone cameras before the end of the year and update this list accordingly if necessary). As of this writing, we’ve tested 31 smartphone main cameras this year, covering everything from very affordable budget devices to the flagship models from all major brands. At device launches over the past twelve months, we’ve seen important innovations in terms of hardware, with some models boasting as many as five individual cameras (for example, the Nokia 9 PureView and the Xiaomi Mi 9 CC Pro Premium Edition), as well as new and improved computational methods on the software side of things. As one would expect, these technological developments have resulted in notable performance im...

In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it. Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered – and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years. The first concerns the fundamentals of our existence. Physics predicts that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of the matter you are made of and something called antimatter . Most particles of matter have an antimatter twin, identical but with the opposite electric charge. When the two meet, they annihilate each other, with all their energy converted into light. Read more: Explainer: wh...

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world wide web and now he’s calling on us to save it. The British engineer and computer scientist recently released a Contract for the Web – a list of commitments for governments, businesses and individuals to make in order to tackle fake news and privacy violations online. According to a new report by Amnesty International, the internet is threatened as never before by the dominance of companies such as Facebook and Google ), which stand accused of “enabling human rights harm at a population scale”. Tech companies allow us to keep up to date with the world and keep in touch with friends and family no matter where they live. We use them to find job opportunities or to create new communities online. But every time you use search engines or social media, your personal data can be hoarded and sold on to other businesses. No doubt these platforms would argue that our data is the cost of using their services for free, but there’s plenty in ...

Football has long been considered a man’s world in the UK – but this is changing. Not only did the semi-final match of the 2019 Women’s World Cup attract more than 11.7 million viewers , 2018 also saw the establishment of the first top-tier professional women’s football league ever. And, for the first time since the Women’s Super League (WSL) was founded in 2010, women coaches actually outnumbered men by two to one in the 2019-2020 season. While this progress is certainly something to celebrate, the industry remains dominated by men. Even in women’s football leagues, men still hold 91% of all coaching jobs at all levels. In the semi-professional league, Arlesey Town’s head coach, Natasha Orchard-Smith , is currently the league’s only female head coach. The gender balance of coaches in the WSL is a welcome sign of industry progress – but my colleagues and I still wanted to know why women continue to be kept out of coaching roles at all levels of football. Male dominance in footba...

Endurance running is in. Fitness enthusiasts and elite runners alike spend their weekends pounding the pavements and bounding through the countryside. They are training for and competing in ultra marathons, triathlons and obstacle races. Runners often claim that they run to escape from the demands of everyday life, to experience freedom , and say that they find running a good way to meditate . But in my recently published PhD thesis , I investigate what really motivates people to torture themselves by running hundreds of painful kilometres in their spare time, no matter the weather. And it paints a rather different picture. My research shows that running has become a way to gain social status by creating an image or personal brand . Even though most runners claim only to compete with themselves, they often use their personal brands to compete with others. This doesn’t just apply to running, but also to the competition for jobs, education and even dates in our competitive and individu...