23 articles from SATURDAY 30.10.2021

‘It’s mind-boggling’: the complex, and growing, use of medicinal cannabis in Australia

Tens of thousands of people are turning to the drug to treat a range of conditions – but the evidence is patchy and costs can be highWhen Helen was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her early 40s, her doctor prescribed her a range of opioids. She tried morphine, meperidine and a few others, but none helped ease the constant pain her chronic condition caused.Long before medicinal cannabis was legal...

Burn, baby, burn: the new science of metabolism

Losing weight may be tough, but keeping it off, research tells us, is tougher – just not for the reasons you might thinkAs the director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University, Massachusetts, Susan Roberts has spent much of the past two decades studying ways to fight the obesity epidemic that continues to plague much of the western world.But time and again, Roberts and other...

Being an only child made me fascinated by siblings – and means I’ve had to learn to share my life

My debut novel is full of the brothers and sisters who were absent though my childhoodPeople often ask me about my brothers and sisters. They have read my debut novel, Girl A, and they expect to find my own family, encrypted in the fiction. There are seven siblings in the Gracie family in my book and between them there is caustic rage, begrudging respect, tenderness and cruelty. Too much love and...

Prof Peter Stott: ‘Denialists question the cost of climate action … doing nothing costs far more’

The veteran scientist on Trump’s limited impact, Russia’s ruthless climate stance and on the urgency of COP26 in GlasgowProf Peter Stott is a forensic climate detective who examines the human fingerprint on extreme weather. A specialist in mathematics, he leads the climate monitoring and attribution team of the Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services at the Met Office in Exeter and was...