Most of us don’t have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives – in fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. And when we do try to think back to our earliest memories, it is often unclear whether they are the real thing or just recollections based on photos or stories told to us by others.

Most of us know eating fruit daily is a great way to try to stay healthy, with the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating encouraging us to eat two serves a day. This is because they are relatively low in energy content and rich in fibre, antioxidants and some phytochemicals that may have beneficial health effects.

If you’ve ever tasted a really hot chilli you’ll know just how potent the effects can be. The burning heat sensation on the lips, on the tongue – and if you are not careful, on other more sensitive areas, such as the eyes – can be severe and last for a painfully long time.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more women are affected by depression than men. This pattern is seen in countries around the world, including the United States.

Despite massive government, medical and individual efforts to win the war on obesity, 71 percent of Americans are overweight. The average adult is 24 pounds heavier today than in 1960. Our growing girth adds some US$200 billion per year to our health care expenditure, amounting to a severe health crisis.

Given how much they can actually do, computers have a surprisingly simple basis. Indeed, the logic they use has worked so well that we have even started to think of them as analogous to the human brain. Current computers basically use two basic values – 0 (false) and 1 (true) – and apply simple operations like “and”, “or” and “not” to compute with them. These operations can be combined and scaled up to represent virtually any computation.

Poets write about it, singers sing about it. We've all felt it at some time in our lives. There is even an entire industry that has been created around finding it, expressing it and maintaining it. But what is Love? What is really going on in our minds when we ''fall head over heels?'' Here's the science of it.

Regular participation in muscle strengthening activity such as weight or resistance training has many health benefits. However, this mode of exercise has been largely overlooked in Australian health promotion. Our recent research shows a large majority of Australians do not engage in muscle strengthening activity.

How does the ibuprofen pill turn off your headache? And what does the antidepressant do to help balance your brain chemistry? For something that seems so incredible, drug mechanics are wonderfully simple. It’s mostly about receptors and the molecules that activate them.

When you think of a broken heart, you probably picture something out of a romantic movie or a cartoon heart, cracked like a fragile piece of china. Indeed, so-called “broken heart syndrome” has a certified place in popular culture, and has been eloquently used in films such as The Notebook. But while we certainly feel “heartbreak” during periods of emotional upheaval, can you actually die of a broken heart?

Across forty years I’ve come to recognise many factoid-driven myths about smoking that just won’t die. If I asked for a dollar each time I had to refute these statements, I’d have accumulated a small fortune.

Do you think that the machine you are reading this story on, right now, has a feeling of “what it is like” to be in its state? What about a pet dog? Does it have a sense of what it’s like to be in its state? It may pine for attention, and appear to have a unique subjective experience, but what separates the two cases?

We devote around seven to eight hours to sleep each night in adulthood and ten to 12 hours in childhood. This amounts to around 200,000 hours in our first 60 years of life. Not getting enough sleep does a disservice to our brain and physical health. But how can we improve our chances of getting a good night’s rest?