Tactics from foam rollers to compression tights to ice baths have become popular among all athletes, whether they be weekend warriors or elite competitors. Because of its popularity and perhaps simplicity, ice baths are among the most studied muscle recovery methods. In one study, researchers had a group of “recreationally active” men cycle for a short period, then had them undergo one of three recovery conditions: An ice bath, a warm bath (as a control), and a bath with a common skin cleanser that participants were told was a newly developed “recovery oil”. Prior to beginning the treatment, when asked, participants in the ice bath group and the “recovery oil” placebo group both believed, to a similar degree, in the integrity of the recovery methods they were about to receive. A study done that compares the two treatments—a traditional ice bath to whole body cryotherapy—found that a chilly soak reduces blood flow and tissue temperature better than the cryotherapy.

The oldest known periodic table in world has been discovered at the University of St Andrews. Dated back to 1885, the table was created only 16 years after Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev introduced the concept in 1869. According to Eric Scerri, an expert on the history of the periodic table based at the University of California, Los Angeles, the chart can be dated back to a time period between 1879 and 1886. “The discovery of the world’s oldest classroom periodic table at the University of St Andrews is remarkable,” says David O’Hagan, recent ex-head of chemistry at the University of St Andrews, in a press statement. “The table will be available for research and display at the University and we have a number of events planned in 2019, which has been designated international year of the periodic table by the United Nations, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the table’s creation by Dmitri Mendeleev.”

Böhme and her colleagues conducted a series of three tests on different groups of experiment participants to learn about what’s going on in the nervous system and the brain during self touch and touch from others. In the first test, they placed subjects in an MRI and found that fewer areas of the brain were activated, and at a lower intensity, during self touch than when experimenters touched the subjects. In the third test, experimenters placed an electrode on subjects’ thumbs and used it to track how quickly the brain processes information from self touch and touch by others. They found that the perception of self touch was lower priority for the brains of their test subjects than the perception of touch by other people. This study demonstrated that test subjects’ brains clearly understood the difference between self-touch and touch by others, and weighted those two experiences differently.

The growing popularity of such “digital detoxes” is encouraged by a slew of negative findings about the effects of technology use, alongside claims that such action can help reduce stress and help people become more “present” and compassionate. But frequent use of technology and social media isn’t a problem in itself. People have always been concerned about almost every mass-adopted technology invented, and social media and smartphones are no different. When it comes to digital detoxes, there is unlikely to be anything seriously wrong with stepping away from technology for the majority of people. In fact, seeing as there’s little evidence to suggest that technology is inherently bad, it might be that digital detoxes have no problem to solve in the first place.

This suggests surface ice is simply melting as global temperatures rise, causing gushing rivers of meltwater to flow into the ocean and push up sea levels. If all of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, 3km thick in places, was to melt, global sea levels would rise by seven meters, or more than 20ft, drowning most coastal settlements. The fate of Greenland’s huge glaciers in the south-east and north-west has long been viewed as a key factor in global sea level rise but the Ohio State-led research suggests the ice fields of the island’s south-west may prove an unexpectedly large source of meltwater. Arctic ice loss has tripled since the 1980s, with melting in places such as Greenland and Alaska providing the greatest instigator of sea level rise while destabilizing the very ground underneath 4 million people’s feet. The world’s largest expanse of ice is now losing about 219bn tonnes of ice a year, a trajectory that would contribute more than 25cm to total global sea level rise by 2070.

One early success consistent with this approach was to examine the mathematics of random sequences like coin tosses, but under the assumption that the observer has a limited memory capacity and could only ever see sequences of finite length. That’s why we think tails will come after three heads in a row when tossing a coin — demonstrating that humans do make sensible use of the information we observe. Others have shown that the availability bias, where we overestimate the probability of rare events such as plane crashes, results from a highly efficient way of processing the possible outcomes of a decision. The perception that we are irrational is one unfortunate side effect of the ever growing catalogue of human decision-making biases. But when we apply computational rationality, these biases aren’t seen as evidence of failures, but as windows on to how the brain is solving complex problems, often very efficiently.

Ramsey, young as he was, pulled against Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, who at the time were engaged in a quest for certainty and purity. In the summer of 1924, Ramsey went to Vienna for six months, to be psychoanalysed (he was paralysed about relations with women), and to spend more time with Wittgenstein. The Circle was happy to find the first part of their own answer in Wittgenstein’s idea that the truths of logic are tautologies. While the Circle was discussing ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’, Ramsey was writing a new paper, ‘Facts and Propositions’. But despite this ongoing contact, Schlick and the rest of the Circle seemed to be unaware that Ramsey was moving at speed away from their project, that he was developing a pragmatic outlook that clashed with their attempt to construct the world out of logic and observation.