One of the best ever episodes of Only Fools and Horses has to be ‘Mother Nature’s Son’. Originally aired in 1992, the hilarious Christmas special sees Delboy convert his kitchen into a mineral water bottling factory after he successfully duped a wealthy entrepreneur into selling his brand of ‘Peckham Spring’ water. In true Del and Rodney fashion, his pricey bottled water turns out to be nothing more than tap water. It’s a ridiculous plotline, but sometimes the truth can be funnier than the fiction. Read more
Tag: Science
Why it’s time to forget about online dementia tests
You probably remember a time when nobody dared talk about dementia. Comedians would joke about ‘mad granddad’ but no-one seriously wanted to contemplate a life without memory. Thankfully, Alzheimer’s disease charities have started to wake us up to the reality of the 850,000 people who live with dementia in the UK.. Stigmatisation is waning but dementia is still greatly misunderstood and is feared more than cancer or even death. So when the headline “Test to STOP Alzheimer’s: Simple 20-minute quiz could be key to beating the disease” made the front cover of the Daily Express last week, it struck a chord with a great many of us. Promising to “halve the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease”, I decided to try it out to discover just how well it could ease fears of dementia. Read more
How to heal paralysis: modern day miracles
Without doubt, Geoffrey Raisman is in line for a Nobel Prize. The little-known British professor has been the brains behind a breakthrough that ‘cured’ a paraplegic man. Bulgarian Darek Fidyka was left paralysed after a knife attack four years ago; images of him now standing upright shot across the globe a few weeks ago. For the first time in history, surgeons had successfully fixed a severed spinal cord. In a bizarre act of surgical jiggery-pokery, surgeons removed nerve cells from Darek’s nose and then transplanted into his damaged spinal cord. Once there, the nose cells stimulated nerves to grow across the 8 mm gap in the spinal cord. And amazingly, this ultimately gave him feeling and movement back in his legs. Read more
Alcohol warning labels won’t make us cut down. (You won’t want to know what will.)
“Warning! Drinking this could seriously harm your health.” Now I don’t know about you, but if I saw that on a bottle then I would think twice before letting it anywhere near my lips. But if Conservative MP Tracey Crouch gets her way, then such health warnings could be appearing on cans and bottles of all alcoholic drinks. It’s not the sort of thing you want gracing your wine cellar – seeing a black and white danger sticker on a prized 2007 bottle of Rioja will somehow take the edge off it. Read more