Holly Spanner

Psychology is rife with myths: you only use 10 per cent of your brain; you’re either left-brained or right-brained; your brain has a ‘learning style’. Culture is littered with ideas that would have any decent psychologist rolling their eyes. At 146 years old, psychology is no spring chicken, but compared to something like astronomy, it’s a toddler. Since the subject is still in its infancy, a lot of the early ideas about human thought and behaviour linger, giving rise to misconceptions about how our brains work. While erroneous conclusions about the ‘left/right brain’ idea is relatively harmless, others can get us into trouble. TV in the 90s taught us that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was something only kids had – the unruly, fidgety kind that couldn’t sit still long enough to do their homework. The trouble is, psychology and the early narrative around the condition oversimplified what was happening. As we learn more about the disorder, those assumptions are crashing into real people’s lives and a forgotten generation of undiagnosed people are emerging, having struggled their whole lives. This issue, we investigate why millions are waking up to the new reality of ADHD.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 425 of BBC Science Focus magazine

Your mindset matters. As I write this, I’m conscious it sounds like the title of an obnoxious self-help book or a soundbite clipped from a questionable podcast, but it’s true. There’s a growing body of evidence that your attitude – the way you approach the world – makes a big difference to your health. In fact, the effect is so strong that people with a rosier view of the future tend to live longer than those who are pessimistic, 7.5 years longer on average. There’s a more dramatic example that comes to mind if you still need some convincing that your brain can cure your body: sham surgeries. Under lab conditions, there are procedures for which the placebo surgery – an operation with all the elements of real surgery, from receiving anaesthesia, getting an incision and going through recovery – has the same recovery rate as the real surgery. The placebo is as effective as treatment. In fact, placebo painkillers can be effective too when it comes to chronic pain. It’s a take on medicine that’s well explored by the late Dr Michael Mosley in his film on placebos, which you can find on iPlayer (bit.ly/MosleyPlacebo). So it begs the question: if a positive mindset can lead to being healthier, can it also help slow the effects of ageing? Is there something to growing old ungracefully? Instead of expecting and resigning ourselves to aching joints and weary muscles, what if we adopted a more positive attitude, one that presumes the best years of our lives are still ahead? In this issue, David Robson examines what he calls the 'Expectation Effect.'

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 424 of BBC Science Focus magazine

Who doesn’t love a good mystery? There’s nothing better than uncovering the clues to crack a case. A missing button here, a crooked rug there, and does that painting look fake to you? But when it comes to solving the mysteries of the Universe, things are even more complicated. We may now have the James Webb Space Telescope at our disposal, but the more it shows us, the deeper these mysteries become. It’s shown us a surprising number of gigantic galaxies lurking in the oldest corners of the Universe. The trouble is, to reach the sizes we’re seeing, they must have formed earlier than we think is possible. As far as our understanding of cosmology is concerned, finding these galaxies is like finding someone murdered inside a locked room. Luckily, there's a team of astro-sleuths on the case, and they’re using all their deductive skills to explain why we’re finding so many of these very big, very old galaxies – and if they’re really as weird as they appear to be.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 423 of BBC Science Focus magazine

Recall is a bit like that game at the fun fair, the one where little yellow ducks bob around in the water and you have to fish them out with a flimsy rod. Our current understanding of memory and forgetfulness is that, to a degree, you don’t actually lose your memories: it just gets harder to fish them out. Once you encode something to your brain, it pretty much remains there, you just need the right hook – psychologists call them cues – to extract the memory. It could be a smell, a song, even a word that can tug the memory and haul it directly into the present. Which is all to say that remembering everything is getting harder as we get older. But there are ways we can tend to our memory to keep it working well, which is where Christian Jarrett, our psychology expert, steps in for this issue.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 422 of BBC Science Focus magazine

The last 10 years on Earth have been the hottest since records began. To make matters worse, 2024 was the first calendar year that was, on average, 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial era. This will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the news. Summer is now synonymous with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. But the numbers were confirmed at the start of the year in a report published by the World Meteorological Organization – a ringing alarm for those who can influence society’s carbon emissions. There were smidgens of hope in the report. One of the factors at play was El Niño, an enormous weather pattern that was particularly active over the last two years, functioning like bellows to a scorching planet. Plus, CO2 emissions, despite reaching a record level in 2024, have plateaued over the last decade. Though that modest achievement, most analysts would agree, won’t be enough. The carbon needle needs to move the other way, and fast. Trail-blazing climate action is needed, but exactly what form that action could take is one of the questions being asked by ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In this issue, we explore the ambitious projects aiming to cool the planet.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 421 of BBC Science Focus magazine

Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? If you look at the deep-field images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, it’s easy to believe there might be something. Those images capture a portion of the sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and yet, in them, you can see thousands of galaxies. Within each of the galaxies are billions of stars. In the face of those odds, it just feels implausible to think our little rock is the only one where life found a way. The more we study other-worldly materials, like meteorites from Mars and dust collected from asteroids, the more we find the type of ingredients needed for biological processes. The most compelling discovery of this kind came in January, when scientists declared they’d found 14 of the 20 amino acids that make up human proteins inside a sample returned from the asteroid Bennu. In fact, they found all five of the nucleotide bases that make up our DNA (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil). So, what does it all mean? Could life be quite common in the cosmos? Did life on Earth come from another world? Jonathan O’Callaghan picks up the story in this issue.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 420 of BBC Science Focus magazine

For decades, Hollywood has mined hypnotism as a cinematic trope, often portraying it through a lens of mystery, manipulation and mind control that reinforces enduring stereotypes far removed from its real-world practice. But scientists, too, have been looking into hypnotism for over a century now, and the more we learn about it, the more we’re finding it has potential for pain relief, both mental and physical. The thing is, that potential depends largely upon your ability to be hypnotised. In this issue, award-winning science writer David Robson sees if he can fall under hypnotism’s spell and, if so, how it could make doing his work a little easier.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 419 of BBC Science Focus magazine

Iceland sits upon two continental plates – the Eurasian plate and the North American plate. These huge chunks of Earth’s surface are yawning apart at a pace of 2cm (just shy of 1in) every year. This movement creates fissures in Earth’s surface, like cracks in its shell. In Iceland, the Silfra fissure sits over an aquifer, where glacial meltwater gathers underground, and so this crack became a lake. It's the only body of water in the world that you can dive into and find yourself swimming between two tectonic plates. You can, almost, reach out and touch the Eurasian plate with one hand and the North American plate with the other. I couldn’t tell you why that appeals to me as an idea, as something to see before I die, but it does. While the fissure is around 60m (200ft) deep underwater, in my imagination, swimming through those waters would feel like Earth was opening up beneath me. The idea that there’s another world beneath us has a special kind of hold on humanity, one that’s almost as alluring as the idea that there’s life beyond Earth. The thing is, seismology is now in a place where it’s able to give us a detailed picture of what’s really going on deep inside the planet. And every time it does, our understanding of what it’s like down there changes. In this issue, we share what we've discovered.

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 418 of BBC Science Focus magazine

The textbook version of a heart can look flat and motionless, which doesn't really equip us with a proper understanding of how it works. It looks different on an ultrasound scan (also known as an echocardiogram). It's easy to be struck by how tireless it is: contracting and relaxing in a precise rhythm without change. It's hypnotic. But of course, the heart does tire – it just takes a few billion beats for it to happen. And for some of us, years of neglect means that it’s likely to happen a little bit sooner. So, how can we add some extra beats or, at the very least, make life a bit easier on the old ticker? Alongside all the usual advice (get some exercise, eat less bacon and so on) researchers are discovering that some surprising small changes can also significantly lower your risk of heart disease. And the good news is that they add up. In this issue, we share what we’ve uncovered.

Many of us liken dementia to a loss of memory, but the condition comes from a much more fundamental erosion of the very structures our brains depend on. Dementia has multiple causes, and the collective symptoms typically sneak up on us. Our grey matter will have been diminishing for years before we, or those around us, notice a difference in our behaviour. As a result, we’re only able to spot most cases of dementia very late. But mercifully, that could be about to change. In this issue, we look at the breakthrough science on the cusp of developing a biological test to spot dementia early.

Stories of spooky goings on pique our interest like nothing else, so there’s always a slight tinge of disappointment when science debunks them as fiction rather than fact. Case in point: the many yarns spun about the ‘Bermuda Triangle’. But truth is stranger than fiction. And although we’ve struck off one mysterious Bermuda Triangle, another – perhaps even stranger – one has risen to take its place: the South Atlantic Anomaly, or the so-called ‘Bermuda Triangle of Space’. Satellites and spacecraft risk being scrambled and pass through it at their peril, while astronauts avoid going on spacewalks when they’re anywhere near it. But what makes this orbital no-go zone so weird, is that it doesn’t stay put. It's been shifting from one place to another, and back again, over a very long time. So, what's behind this mysterious sinkhole that we have no control over?

Here is the solution to the crossword from issue 415 of BBC Science Focus magazine.

Fog occurs when air saturated with water vapour is cooled suddenly, and there are several different ways this can happen.

On the eve of a quarter century, it seems like a good time to pause and take a look back (and forwards) at the science that matters. Of course, it’s all important, but it’s fun to wind the clock back and argue about the breakthroughs that have really blown our minds since the year 2000. We asked some of the world’s leading scientists and science commentators for their take on the biggest breakthroughs of the 21st century (so far), including the Higgs boson particle, the Mars Curiosity rover, psychedelic therapy, HPV and HIV vaccines, programmable chemical robots, the James Webb Space Telescope... and more.