Strong v swole: the surprising truth about building muscle

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way

Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become.

Published: January 26, 2026, 9:00 am

A new start after 60: I jumped in the sea for the first time, and finally began to heal

Despite living on an island, David Warr avoided the water for five decades – until a swimming teacher made the link between his fear and a childhood trauma

When David Warr was 11 he thought he was dying. At his school swimming lesson, he jumped in and swam – then realised with horror that his feet couldn’t feel the bottom. He recalls his teacher, standing on the side of the pool, shouting at him to “just swim” and his own immobilising fear. “I thought, ‘I can’t. I don’t know what to do.’ I started to panic hard. I thought, ‘She’s going to let me die.’”

Warr, 61, has blocked out how he reached safety, but for five decades he refused to go out of his depth again. He lives on the island of Jersey where water is a fact of life – but even when his sons were small, he would only wade a bit, and watch them swim with envy and pride. In contrast, he felt he was “battling the water”.

Published: January 26, 2026, 6:45 am

The spikiness secret: can acupressure mats help with pain, stress and insomnia?

Used in healing practices for centuries, modern versions of these spiky mats are increasingly popular, and many people find them invaluable. Here’s what the science says

Ever since Keith, 39, from Kansas, was in a car accident in 2023, he has lived with “pretty much constant mid-back and shoulder pain”. Over-the-counter treatments didn’t touch the sides and he didn’t want to resort to opiates. “Having exhausted everything there was solid science for with no satisfaction, I delved into acupressure,” he says. He bought an acupressure mat made of lightly padded fabric, studded all over with tiny plastic spikes, to lay his back on, and was surprised to find that it actually helped.

Acupressure mats, also known as Shakti mats, are inspired by the beds of nails that Indian gurus used for meditation and healing more than 1,000 years ago. While today’s mats have the nonthreatening sheen of a luxury wellbeing product, the spikes are no joke. In fact, the internet serves up a plethora of images of flaming, dented backs after their use – although you’re unlikely to seriously injure yourself using them. While the mats have been widely available for more than a decade, there has been a recent surge in mainstream interest. You may have seen them heavily advertised on your social media feed, the most prominent brand being Shakti Mat, made in India and costing up to £99 for the premium model. But Amazon is full of acupressure mats and pillows – Lidl recently stocked a mat and pillow combo for a tenner. Yet there is still no compelling evidence that they relieve stress, pain and sleep problems, or help with any other unmet health needs.

Published: January 25, 2026, 2:00 pm

‘We cut through the online ocean of advice’: the rise of adult sleep coaching

As sleep hygiene becomes received wisdom, growing numbers turning to one-to-one consultants for support

Before he sought out an adult sleep coach, Thorsten had spent countless hours trawling online advice about sleep.

“I devoured advice and implemented it all,” he said. “From the moment I got out of bed, virtually everything I did was tailored towards getting a good night’s sleep the following night.”

Published: January 25, 2026, 8:00 am

‘I was probably just as lost as my callers’: my six months as a telephone psychic

I sat there in my pyjamas, headset against my ear, and knew I was not doing the right thing

I’m not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am. Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.

When it started, I’d recently quit my job as an editor at a publishing company to write a novel while doing telemarketing shifts from my kitchen table. Instead of knocking off a bestseller, I found myself cold-calling strangers about energy bills while gripped by writer’s block and an inconvenient yearning to have a baby.

Published: January 25, 2026, 6:00 am

DVLA revoked my licence, so I couldn’t drive to my dying daughter

She had entered end-of-life care and I relied on my car to get to her, but it hadn’t returned the licence

Our daughter, who has cancer, entered end-of-life care on Christmas Eve. I am a carer for her and her two young children.

We both live in rural villages with no public transport options, so I need a car to get to her at short notice, but last summer, out of the blue, the DVLA told me I could not drive until December and revoked my licence.

Published: January 26, 2026, 7:00 am

Amsterdam prepares to ‘ban the fatbikes’ amid rise in serious accidents

Experts say souped-up e-bikes pose big risk for children aged from 12 to 15, who account for many A&E cases

On a busy lunchtime, thick-tyred electric bikes zoom through the leafy lanes of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. But after a marked rise in accidents – particularly involving children – these vehicles the Dutch call “fatbikes” are to be banned in some parts of the Netherlands.

“It’s nonsense!” said Henk Hendrik Wolthers, 69, from the saddle of his wide-tyred, electric Mate bike. “I drive a car, I ride a motorbike, I’ve had a moped and now I ride a fatbike. This is the quickest means of transport in the city and you should be able to use it.”

Published: January 25, 2026, 4:29 pm

Life after Molly: Ian Russell on big tech, his daughter’s death – and why a social media ban won’t work

Molly Russell was just 14 when she took her own life in 2017, and an inquest later found negative online content was a significant factor. With many people now pushing for teenagers to be kept off tech platforms, her father explains why he backs a different approach

Ian Russell describes his life as being split into two parts: before and after 20 November 2017, the day his youngest daughter, Molly, took her own life as a result of depression and negative social media content. “Our life before Molly’s death was very ordinary. Unremarkable,” he says. He was a television producer and director, married with three daughters. “We lived in an ordinary London suburb, in an ordinary semi-detached house, the children went to ordinary schools.” The weekend before Molly’s death, they had a celebration for all three girls’ birthdays, which are in November. One was turning 21, another 18 and Molly was soon to be 15. “And I remember being in the kitchen of a house full of friends and family and thinking, ‘This is so good. I’ve never been so happy,’” he says. “That was on a Saturday night and the following Tuesday morning, everything was different.”

The second part of Russell’s life has been not only grief and trauma, but also a commitment to discovering and exposing the truth about the online content that contributed to Molly’s death, and campaigning to prevent others falling prey to the same harms. Both elements lasted far longer than he anticipated. It took nearly five years to get enough information out of social media companies for an inquest to conclude that Molly died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content”. As for the campaigning, the Molly Rose Foundation provides support, conducts research and raises awareness of online harms, and Russell has been an omnipresent spokesperson on these issues.

Published: January 26, 2026, 5:00 am

AI is hitting UK harder than other big economies, study finds

Britain is losing more jobs than it creates owing to artificial intelligence, Morgan Stanley research suggests

• More than a quarter of Britons fear losing job to AI in next five years

• Business live – latest updates

The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of artificial intelligence and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests.

British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Published: January 26, 2026, 8:41 am

More than a quarter of Britons say they fear losing jobs to AI in next five years

Survey reveals ‘mismatched AI expectations’ between views of employers and staff over impact on careers

• AI is hitting UK harder than other big economies, study finds

More than a quarter (27%) of UK workers are worried their jobs could disappear in the next five years as a result of AI, according to a survey of thousands of employees.

Two-thirds (66%) of UK employers reported having invested in AI in the past 12 months, according to the international recruitment company Randstad’s annual review of the world of work, while more than half (56%) of workers said more companies were encouraging the use of AI tools in the workplace.

Published: January 25, 2026, 3:00 pm

EU launches inquiry into X over sexually explicit images made by Grok AI

Investigation comes after Elon Musk’s firm sparked outrage by allowing users to ‘strip’ photos of women and children

• Europe live – latest updates

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the production of sexually explicit images and the spreading of possible child sexual abuse material by the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok.

The formal inquiry, launched on Monday, also extends an investigation into X’s recommender systems, algorithms that help users discover new content.

Published: January 26, 2026, 2:27 pm

Schools in England should be phone-free all day, education secretary says

Bridget Phillipson says pupils should not use mobiles at any point, as Ofsted prepares to inspect compliance

• UK politics live – latest updates

Schools should be phone-free throughout the entire day, the education secretary has told headteachers in England, stressing that pupils should not use the devices even as calculators or for research.

Bridget Phillipson wrote to schools to underline updated guidance issued by the government last week, according to the BBC. “Schools should make sure those policies are applied consistently across classes, and at all times and we want parents to back these policies too,” Phillipson said.

Published: January 26, 2026, 8:20 am

UK maker of AI avatars nearly doubles valuation to $4bn after funding round

Synthesia makes digital presenters for clients to use in corporate videos and counts 70% of FTSE 100 as customers

A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (£3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector.

Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city’s mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary.

Published: January 26, 2026, 9:00 am

Meet ‘Amelia’: the AI-generated British schoolgirl who is a far-right social media star

The avatar, created to deter young people from extremism, has been subverted and is breaking out of niche online silos

In certain corners of the internet, on niche news feeds and algorithms, an AI-generated British schoolgirl has emerged as something of a phenomenon.

Her name is Amelia, a purple-haired “goth girl” who proudly carries a mini union flag and appears to have a penchant for racism.

Published: January 25, 2026, 9:00 am

Blurry rats and coyotes with mange: the oddly thrilling subreddit dedicated to identifying wildlife

The most popular posts on r/animalid are exotic lizards and rare birds – but it’s the haziest trail cam screenshots that feel the most dangerous, the most spectacular

• Read more in the Internet wormhole series

I spent the first decade of my life in Vancouver Island, Canada, in an area rich with parks, lakes and forests. Deer would occasionally wander into our neighbourhood and nibble on the blossoms in our front yard. In that neck of the (literal) woods, mountains and deer also mean cougars.

My sister and I would play at a local park, then walk home along a track parallel to a dense forest. My older sister, being three and a half years ahead of me in life and therefore lightyears ahead of me in wisdom, would helpfully declare that if we encountered a cougar it would attack me, not her, as I’m the smaller prey.

Published: January 25, 2026, 2:00 pm

Sam Altman’s make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?

Altman’s campaigning for his company coincides with its use of enormous present resources to serve an imagined future

Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls “universal extreme wealth”.

In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world’s most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations. OpenAI is pushing an aggressive expansion – encroaching on industries like e-commerce, healthcare and entertainment – while increasingly integrating its products into government, universities, and the US military and making a play to turn ChatGPT into the new default homepage for millions.

Published: January 25, 2026, 1:00 pm

AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed | Heather Stewart

Tech could lose its social acceptance unless it makes people’s lives better – and trade unions want an urgent conversation

“Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch over your kids?” Elon Musk asked Davos delegates last week, as he looked forward with enthusiasm to a world with “more robots than people”.

Not me, thanks: children need the human connection – the love – that gives life meaning.

Published: January 25, 2026, 11:24 am

Why I’m launching a feminist video games website in 2026

I’ve been a games journalist since 2007, but still there isn’t much video games coverage that feels like it’s specifically for people like me. So I’m creating a home for it: Mothership

Whether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble bursting or about the video game industry’s mass layoffs and cancelled projects, 2026 does not feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s more, games journalists – as well as all other kinds of journalists – have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is using video game memes as ICE recruitment tools, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the wider world’s slide to the right.

The manosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist websites such as Teen Vogue; bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of “woke”. Put it all together and we have a dismal stew of doom for someone like me, a queer woman and a feminist who’s been a games journalist and critic since 2007.

Published: January 26, 2026, 11:00 am

Spider monkeys found to share ‘insider knowledge’ to help locate best food

Researchers observed the primates switching social groups and passing information on where to find the ripest fruit

Spider monkeys share tips about where to find food by changing their social groups in a “clever system for sharing insider knowledge”, research has shown.

They were observed to frequently switch subgroups of three or more individuals in a way that enabled them to share information about the location of fruit trees and timing of when they would ripen.

Published: January 26, 2026, 5:00 am

Starwatch: Moon occultation will ‘wink out’ Pleiades star cluster

Seven sisters constellation’s brightest members will be hidden from view for about an hour

On the night of 27 January, the moon passes in front of the Pleiades star cluster, temporarily hiding (occulting) some of its brightest members from view.

The Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters, lie about 440 light years away in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. They are one of the most recognisable structures in the winter sky. The stars were all born from the same giant cloud of molecular gas. Although in time they will be dispersed through the galaxy, at only 100m years old, they remain a relatively tight-knit community of stellar siblings.

Published: January 26, 2026, 6:00 am

Barbara Hurman obituary

My mother, Barbara Hurman, who has died aged 100, was an archaeologist specialising in the identification and illustration of finds – the items disinterred during the course of excavations.

She worked on a number of sites for the Bucks Museum, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the Milton Keynes Archaeological Unit, the Department of the Environment and the Museum of London, and in her late 70s completed four summer seasons as the finds supervisor and ceramic analyst on Nottingham University’s excavation of the Roman site at Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Published: January 26, 2026, 11:51 am

Strong v swole: the surprising truth about building muscle

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way

Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become.

Published: January 26, 2026, 9:00 am