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3 weeks ago | 
english.elpais.com | Daniel Mediavilla |Enrique Alpañés
In a city like Madrid, men live, on average, three years longer in the Chamartín neighborhood, with greater purchasing power, than in Puente de Vallecas, a working-class area. The trend is similar worldwide, because economic capacity correlates with health and life expectancy. However, according to a recent publication in The New England Journal of Medicine, this dynamic changes when comparing the rich and poor in the U.S. and Europe.
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3 weeks ago | 
english.elpais.com | Enrique Alpañés |Daniel Mediavilla
It’s not just how much you eat that matters, but when you eat it. This is what social media started saying some time ago, and some scientific studies are beginning to confirm it. The idea is crystallizing in a new dietary approach: intermittent fasting. There is some controversy and conflicting opinions about this new technique within the scientific community. The information available is interesting, but insufficient.
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1 month ago | 
english.elpais.com | Enrique Alpañés |Daniel Mediavilla
Less than 10% of the 100,000 Americans in the study reached the age of 70 in good healthMadrid - We tend to use the phrase “you are what you eat” in the present tense, but science suggests we should think of it in the future tense. The diet we follow in middle age largely determines the quality of our old age. While many studies have pointed to this idea, few have had as extensive a database as the one published on Monday in Nature Medicine.
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1 month ago | 
english.elpais.com | Marita Alonso |Enrique Alpañés |Manuel Ansede
The following sentence is not from the script of an adult film nor a crude John Waters comedy: “Nighttime erection data from my 19-year-old son and me. His duration is two minutes longer than mine. Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright.” It was posted to the X profile of 47-year-old tech magnate Bryan Johnson, best known for his unending fight to achieve immortality.
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1 month ago | 
english.elpais.com | Jessica Mouzo |Enrique Alpañés
Each gender inequality that women face slowly chips away at their wellbeing, gradually undermining various aspects of their lives. They earn less, are more likely to experience unemployment, spend more time on housework and caregiving, are underrepresented in politics and leadership roles, and are at a greater risk of sexual harassment. The list of structural disadvantages is long, and its repercussions are far-reaching.
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1 month ago | 
english.elpais.com | Daniel Mediavilla |Enrique Alpañés
Around 5% of the global population has had a near-death experience. People who have survived accidents, cardiac arrest or complicated surgeries often remember moments when they walked towards a light, saw their body from the outside, or heard people calling them from beyond the grave. Very often, the experience changes their way of seeing life and reduces their anxiety about death.
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2 months ago | 
english.elpais.com | Marla Broadfoot |Enrique Alpañés |Adrián Cordellat
Everyone has heard that it’s vital to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, a recommendation repeated so often it has become gospel. Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term — memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened immune system. But in recent years, scientists have discovered a rare breed who consistently get little shut-eye and are no worse for wear.
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2 months ago | 
english.elpais.com | Javier Yanes |Enrique Alpañés |Daniel Mediavilla
When Spain-based immunologist Irene Salinas, from the University of New Mexico in the United States, began searching for bacteria in the brains of healthy fish, it might have seemed like a futile task: every biology student knows that a strict filter keeps the brain free of microbes, and that breaking that sterility only leads to a potentially fatal infection. But Salinas found what she was looking for: her 2024 study supports the existence of a brain microbiome in fish.
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2 months ago | 
english.elpais.com | Miguel Ángel Criado |Enrique Alpañés
Every July 6, at 10 a.m., Pamplona’s municipal police open the town hall square to crowds that move freely until around half an hour before the chupinazo, the rocket signaling the start of Spain’s world-famous San Fermín festival, also known as the Running of the Bulls. At that moment, the crowd seems chaotic, but a new study published in Nature reveals that it actually follows fluid dynamics, with circular movements formed by increasingly larger subgroups orbiting in 18-second cycles.
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2 months ago | 
english.elpais.com | Enrique Alpañés |Miguel Ángel Criado |Laura Soler |Jose Alvarez |José Álvarez
The more plastic we produce, the more we find inside us. Years ago we began to ingest microplastics and nanoplastics hidden in our food. These passed into our digestive system, and from there they entered the bloodstream, which ended up distributing them throughout our insides. One study found them in our lungs, then in our intestines.
