What does sugar do to your body – and how can you avoid a slump?

We evolved to like energy-dense foods such as honey, but modern diets tend to include too much sugar. Here’s how to make sure you eat the right amount, at the right time

Sugar tastes great for good reason: we evolved to like it, back when honey was a hard-to-get, energy-dense treat and we spent half of our time running around after antelope. Now that it’s much easier to get and we don’t move as much, that sweet tooth is working against us: many of us are consuming far too much of it, and suffering from poor health as a result. But is there anything specifically bad about it beyond it providing too many calories and not enough nutrients?

“When we taste sugar, the body starts reacting the moment sweetness touches the tongue,” says Dawn Menning, a registered dietitian who works with health app Nutu. “The brain recognises it as a quick source of energy and activates the reward system, releasing the feelgood chemical dopamine that makes it so appealing.” Interestingly, not everyone tastes sugar in exactly the same way – in 2015, researchers compared different types of siblings’ perception of sugar and sweeteners, and found that identical twins were more similar to each other in their sweet taste perception than fraternal twins or non-twin siblings. They concluded that genetic factors account for about 30% of the variance in how sensitive people are to sweet tastes – but it’s unclear whether that actually affects how much we eat.

Published: January 12, 2026, 10:00 am

Is it true that … stretching before exercise prevents injury?

Loosening your muscles is beneficial, but choosing the right type of movement for your chosen exercise is key

It depends on what kind of stretching you’re doing, says Dr Alex Dinsdale, senior lecturer in sport and exercise biomechanics at Leeds Beckett University.

Injuries, he says, happen for all sorts of reasons, from poor footwear to fatigue. Two key factors are not having the range of motion required or not being strong enough to control that motion. “You might go for a run and lift your knees higher than your hamstrings can manage,” he says. Or you might lack the muscle strength needed to handle moving a limb at speed.

Published: January 12, 2026, 8:00 am

Amazon insists I return a phone it says ‘may be lost’

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Published: January 12, 2026, 7:00 am

UK media regulator investigating Elon Musk’s X after outcry over sexualised AI images

Liz Kendall describes content as vile and illegal and says Ofcom has the government’s backing to use its full powers

The UK media watchdog has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the use of the Grok AI tool to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes.

Ofcom has acted after a public and political outcry over a deluge of sexual images appearing on the platform, created by Musk’s Grok, which is integrated with X.

Failing to assess the risk of people seeing illegal content on the platform.

Not taking appropriate steps to prevent users from viewing illegal content such as intimate image abuse and CSAM.

Not taking down illegal material quickly.

Not protecting users from breaches of privacy law.

Failing to assess the risk X may pose to children.

Not using effective age checking for pornography.

Published: January 12, 2026, 5:25 pm

Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean ‘end of traffic era’

Media bosses expect web referrals to plunge and want journalists to emulate content creators, report finds

Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet.

An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom.

Published: January 12, 2026, 6:00 am

Amazon insists I return a phone it says ‘may be lost’

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Published: January 12, 2026, 7:00 am

Four months and 40 hours later: my epic battle with 2025’s most difficult video game

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

Published: January 12, 2026, 11:10 am

Primates’ same-sex sexual behaviour ‘may reinforce bonds amid environmental stress’

Behaviour among non-human species could help keep groups together in face of social challenges, says study

Same-sex sexual behaviour among non-human primates may arise as a way to reinforce bonds and keep societies together in the face of environmental or social challenges, researchers have suggested.

Prof Vincent Savolainen, a co-author of the paper from Imperial College London, added that while the work focused on our living evolutionary cousins, early human species probably experienced similar challenges, raising the likelihood they, too, showed such behaviour.

Published: January 12, 2026, 4:00 pm

The friendship secret: why socialising could help you live longer

Neuroscientist Ben Rein is on a mission to show that being around others not only feels good, but can even improve recovery from strokes, cancer and heart attacks. So why are so many of us isolated and glued to our phones?

‘I hate it.” I’ve asked the neuroscientist Ben Rein how he feels about the online sea of junk neuroscience we swim in – the “dopamine fasts”, “serotonin boosts” and people “regulating” their “nervous system” – and this is his kneejerk response. He was up early with his newborn daughter at his home in Buffalo, New York, but he’s fresh-faced and full of beans on a video call, swiftly qualifying that heartfelt statement. “Let me clarify my position: I don’t hate it when it’s accurate, but it’s rarely accurate.”

He draws my attention to a reel he saw recently on social media of a man explaining that reframing pain as “neurofeedback, not punishment” activates the anterior cingulate cortex (a part of the brain involved in registering pain). “That’s genuinely never been studied; you are just making this up,” he says. He posted a pithy response on Instagram, pleading with content creators to “leave neuroscience out of it”. “That’s why I think it’s especially important for real scientists to be on the internet,” he says. “We need to show the public what it looks like to speak responsibly and accurately about science.”

Published: January 12, 2026, 5:00 am

Starwatch: Behold Taurus, the Babylonian bull of heaven

Recorded in cave drawings as far back as 1000BC, this is one of the oldest zodiacal constellations to be recognised in its modern form

Taurus, the bull, is our focus this week. One of the oldest constellations to be recognised in its modern form, it was recorded as the bull of heaven in Babylonian records from about 1000BC, but cave drawings from Lascaux, France, suggest that humans may already have associated the stars with a bull approximately 14,000 years earlier.

Taurus sits on the ecliptic, the path that the Sun follows around the sky throughout the year, so it is known as a zodiacal constellation. The brightest star in the constellation is the red giant star Aldebaran. In Arabic, its name means “eye of the bull”.

Published: January 12, 2026, 6:00 am