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Subscribe freeYou spend roughly a third of your life in bed, and your sheets collect sweat, skin, oils and dust mites every night. How often to wash them, at what temperature, and how often the pillows, duvet and mattress need attention too.
Making friends after school and university feels harder because the conditions that created friendships disappear. Research on proximity, repeated contact, the "liking gap" and the hours it takes to turn a stranger into a close friend shows what to do instead.
The trolley problem made self-driving cars a favourite topic for philosophers. But the moral weight of autonomous driving lies in everyday settings: how fast, how close, how cautious. Here is where the real choices are made.
Lower the eggs into boiling water, set a timer and cool them in cold water: that is most of the secret. Exact times for every kind of boiled egg, and the fixes for cracked shells, grey yolks and eggs that will not peel.
Strong local ties make people healthier, safer and happier, yet many of us barely know the people next door. Here is what research says about neighbourliness, and the simple habits that rebuild it.
In July 1518, an outbreak of uncontrollable dancing swept through Strasbourg. Here is what the records say, why the city made it worse, the theories that don't hold up, and the one that does.
Television spent two decades teaching us to cheer for people we would cross the street to avoid. Media psychologists have a good idea how it works, and what it says about us.
Roughly two dozen countries have compulsory voting on the books. Australia has enforced it for a century. Here is what it changes, what it doesn't, and why the argument never goes away.
Give one monkey a grape and her neighbour a cucumber for the same work, and the cucumber may come flying back. What animal experiments reveal about where our sense of fairness comes from, and why scientists still argue about it.
Economists predicted that wallets stuffed with cash would be returned less often. The opposite happened. Here is how the lost wallet experiment worked, what it found, and what it tells us about why people are honest.
A good apology can repair trust; a bad one can make things worse. A study of 755 people identified six elements of an effective apology and ranked them. The two that matter most are the two people find hardest to say.
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