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Astronomers have long known that dark matter makes up around 27% of the universe. But they still don’t know what it is. Now, nutritionists are beginning to realise that the same mystery swirls around your dinner plate. The truth is, we don’t really know what we are eating much of the time.
Our knowledge of nutrition generally centres around 150 chemicals – think fats, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins. But we now think there are more like 26,000 compounds in our diets that we haven’t identified. Mapping out these chemicals will be key to fully understanding how our food affects our health.
Earlier this week, Reform leader Nigel Farage pledged to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights should he be elected into government as part of his mass deportation plans. Farage complains that the convention is an obstacle that prevents the UK from removing people arriving in small boats and so would rather just do away with it. But the convention also protects the rest of us from mistreatment too. It helps children who have been abused, the victims of crimes – including the families bereaved in the Hillsborough disaster – and it, somewhat ironically given Farage’s proclaimed priorities, forms the basis for our freedom of speech
rights.
We’ve been examining the ways in which our phones add and detract from our lives in some depth this week. On the negative side, a new term was coined for a common phenomenon – when the person you are talking to picks up their phone, turns glassy eyed looking at the screen and is instantly lost to you. “Phubbing”, or phone snubbing can infuriate some people and trigger a toxic tit-for-tat that can damage relationships.
But on the positive side, a psychologist has been making the argument that phones can help us connect with nature rather than just keeping us inside scrolling. We tend to assume that technology is what stops us from “touching grass” but in fact, phones help us navigate outside, enable us to identify birds and plants, and generally give us resources that make the great outdoors more accessible.
And a sociological study of front and back gardens has revealed that people feel pressured to maintain a neat and tidy exterior on one side while letting their true selves run riot on the other. Find out which is which here.
Also this week, English resentment bubbles up, sun dogs shimmer and experts wrestle in the latest installment of our Jane Austen fight club series. This time, the gloves are really off as they clash over the biggest question of all: which is the author’s best novel?
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