Sometimes, it all starts with symptoms that seem to inhabit different quarters of the same body. The headaches that come knocking every month. The intestine that goes haywire on menstruation days. The bloating, the nausea, the pain that moves from room to room.
For more than four decades, the ocean along Panama's Pacific coast followed a precise and reliable rhythm. Between January and April, cold, nutrient-rich water masses rose from the depths, feeding the marine food chain and protecting coral reefs and local fisheries. In 2025, however, this mechanism came to a sudden halt. The Panama upwelling didn't take place, leaving scientists without historical references and questioning the stability of tropical ocean systems.
In recent years, microplastics have gone from being just an environmental problem to a very real presence inside the human body.
There's one thing almost everyone takes for granted when talking about mental stress: that it's a singular feeling, more or less intense, more or less manageable. A vague burden, hard to describe, that brings with it some anxiety, some insomnia and moments of irritability. However, that assumption might be incorrect, or at least quite incomplete.
We see them on the ground, on sidewalks, at the edge of gutters. Then the rain comes, cars go by, seasons change, and after a while they're gone. Or rather: we no longer see them. Because in the meantime, they've simply changed shape.
A titanium ring, a few sensors and an app to manage everything: at first glance, it's not exactly the heart of a health revolution.
There are objects that enter our lives with the promise of making our lives easier, but disappear just as quickly. Disposable e-cigarettes are one of the clearest examples of this contemporary paradox: a few days of use, a perfectly working lithium battery, followed by a noiseless journey to the trash can.
Sewage doesn't lie. At the Nosedo wastewater treatment plant, on the southeastern outskirts of Milan, a faithful portrait of citizens' consumption habits (including food, tobacco and drugs) is drawn every year.
EFSA has published the conclusions of its re-evaluation of sucralose, the sweetener E 955 used in many light and sugar-free products.
Two hundred million people worldwide live above two thousand meters. Science has barely cared about this for decades - the focus was mainly on the extreme altitudes of four- and five-thousand meters - leaving this huge group of people in a blind spot of medical research. This is precisely why Eurac Research, the private research center headquartered in Bolzano, wants to fill that gap - and to do so it needs people willing to spend a month in a mountain hut.