Frank Swain

Susan Greenfield: The online world is changing our brains

We need to talk about how digital technologies might be affecting our minds says the neuroscientist

Glowing trees could light up city streets

Synthetic bacteria that glow brighter and longer than anything in nature make great night lights

Want a new you in 2017? Here's how

Swain talks about new years resolutions with mixed results. Some, like his oath to visit the gym 100 times over the course of the year, were successful. Others, such as keeping on top of his taxes, were not. In fact only 10 per cent of resolutions made in January will survive until December

Death to nature

Swain reviews Making Nature: How we see animals, an exhibition of the works of several artists, including Carl Linnaeus, Herman de Vries, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, at the Wellcome Collection in London.

Under 18s sexting ban? No thanks, Mr Hunt

UK Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has called on social media giants to do more to tackle sexting among the nations teens, which he blames for rising cases of mental illness. Yet his proposals for smart locks that stop teenagers sharing sexually explicit images are just the latest example of government demanding magical fixes for complex soc[etal problems. Giving evidence as part of a House of Commons inquiry into suicide prevention, Hunt singled out social media as a key platform for abuse.

Why does everything seem so terrible

Its hard not to feel that July brought an unusual dump of bad headlines. Recent weeks have seen the televised deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of the US authorities, police being killed in Dallas and Baton Rouge, terror attacks in Istanbul, Baghdad, Nice and Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, and other acts of violence in Germany and Japan. He watched these incidents unfold against a backdrop of heightened tension around the world, with deep divisions exposed by the UKs EU referendum, an attempted military coup in Turkey, and the US presidential election. Here, Swain talks about the perception of people on violence around the wor

Fresh air and sunshine: the forgotten antibiotics

Florence Nightingale knew about them. Your grandparents might have known about them. So why have doctors turned their backs on these two potent germ killers?

Sports shoe guru: How to choose the best running shoe

Cheap sports shoes can be as good as expensive ones, says Benno Nigg, the sports scientist who helped design David Beckhams Predator boot