There are good reasons to believe that enjoying yourself is beneficial for your health. Unhappiness has some severe downsides. Being depressed or stressed makes a wide range of medical conditions worse. The exact reasons for all this haven’t been teased out in the kind of detail that chemistry anoraks like me enjoy, but it seems [...]
With stories in the last couple of weeks including scares about lead, cadmium, arsenic and today cobalt, I have decided to set up a bingo card comprising the Periodic Table. The rules are simple. When there is a scare story you just cross off the element involved. Fabulous prizes for a full group or a [...]
Despite frequent scare stories, lipstick will not do you any harm even if you eat large quantities of it.
Everyone knows that astronomy grew out of astrology. Both can trace their origins back to the same place, even though they don’t have much to do with one another nowadays. It is often thought, even by some chemists, that chemistry has a similar relationship with alchemy. It sounds plausible, but in fact modern chemistry developed [...]
Anyone can develop an allergy to anything anytime. Allergic reactions vary in severity, but in rare cases some can kill you. So when you make it to your bed tonight you can thank providence for sparing you for one more day. But lets get things in perspective. Although in theory anything can be an allergen [...]
The UK television series QI delights in exposing facts you have always believed as being untrue. And very entertaining it is. If they are reading this, here is another one for them. Which country first used gas in the First World War? I was absolutely convinced it was the Germans. But it turns out that [...]
It is often said that 60% of what we apply to our skin is absorbed. The true figure is far lower.
Happi reported last week that the Personal Care Products Council spent $170,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter, a 21% increase from the same period a year ago. Is that all? That barely covers the cost of an office and a couple of staff. I know its easy to spend other people’s money, [...]
I was very heartened by the common sense responses of the commentators on this story from the Daily Mail, sent to me by my sister. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2009890/Is-shampoo-making-fat-The-chemical-calories-common-beauty-products-affecting-weight.html Some stories are so obviously bogus you need no specialist knowledge whatever to see that they are nonsense . The only question is why the editors at the Mail [...]
Non-UK readers, and maybe even a few UK readers may not have heard of the long running British radio series Desert Island Discs. It is a simple but brilliant format. Guests to the show are asked to say which 8 records they would take with them to a desert island, and they are also allowed [...]