Helen Jaques

Hosting an international sporting event like the Olympic Games or the Commonwealth Games is an expensive business. The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, for example, will cost a total of £9.35bn, equivalent to £150 for every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom. Such costs are generally justified in terms of collateral benefits [...]

A new study has found that giving children up to one year old a sweet solution before jabs reduces the pain of the immunisation, providing a scientific basis for Mary Poppins’ maxim that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The meta-analysis looked at fourteen randomised controlled trials that assessed the effects of [...]

Young people who smoke tobacco through a water pipe – also known as a hookah, shisha, or goza – are more likely to use illicit drugs than their non-smoking contemporaries, according to a study of young Canadians. Most notably, hookah smokers were much more likely to smoke marijuana: 74% of water-pipe users reported marijuana use, [...]

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill, first approved by the FDA in 1960 and now the choice of contraception for more than 100 million women worldwide. By uncoupling sex from pregnancy, oral hormonal contraceptives finally allowed women to become agents of their own bodies. Life isn’t all rosy on the pill [...]

Since first coming on the market in 1998, the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra has improved the sex lives of countless men. Now new research has suggested that phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5) inhibitors like Viagra could also help women – but not how you think. Researchers in California have shown that sildenafil (Viagra) and a similar drug [...]