Last updated March 7, 2018 at 2:55 pm
The Check-Up is a weekly feature highlighting some of the best, most fascinating, most important, or simply unmissable health, medical, and human stories from around the web.
Fountain of youth for sale
Kicking off this week with the ‘Surely This Is A Joke’ category, old people are paying to have young people’s blood injected into them. Which would be bonkers enough if there was some science to back it up, but of course there isn’t. You may as well have snake oil pumped into your veins. You would hope that their intended victims would be old and wise enough to see through the scam, but this is potentially a big business. Goes to show there’s no limit to the lengths that that sketchy people will take to make a buck.
Making sense of direction
When I went to stay with family in Seattle for a gap-six-months, my aunt would take the time during every car ride to point out landmarks like freeway overpasses, malls, lakes, whatever was around and explain how they related to each other. I appreciated her efforts, but I must admit that at the time I mainly just nodded along to be polite. Until one day I realised I knew where I was, and roughly where a bunch of other stuff was too. It was a surprisingly awesome feeling. Turns out she was totally onto something, and this article can give you heaps more tips about how to develop a better sense of direction, even (or maybe especially) if you feel like it’s an innate skill.
Toothbrush truths
The only thing I know for sure about oral hygiene is that you shouldn’t brush your teeth with bubblegum. Thanks Peter Combe. According to the experts, there are a lot of right ways to clean your teeth, and just about the only wrong way is to not do it at all. Also mouthwash kind of does nothing.
Wash your hands!
Good advice whether you’re on a cruise or not: wash your hands! But specifically for cruise ships, it turns out that simply washing your hands is the best and most effective way to stop the transmission of norovirus. Along with this handy hint, new research shows that it’s mostly crews that are to blame for spreading diseases on board, not passengers.
Nueroscience Q&A
And finally, every question about the brain you didn’t even know you had, answered by a real live neuroscientist.
