James' World 2

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Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) data for the UK also reveals men under the age of 25 are four times more likely to be caught drug-driving – and twice as likely to be caught drink-driving.

Sammy’s older brother Jamie Morris, 25, told the BBC he feared the combination of young men and cars was “lethal”.

Jamie, from Llangynog, Wales, said he remembered “hyperventilating” when he learned of his brother’s death.

“It was just tears and crying,” he said. “You are just broken.”

Sammy and Lewis had been on a night out in Henley-on-Thames with another friend, John Yolland.

All three had a passion for cars, but Sammy could not yet drive.

John described himself and Lewis as “beemer (BMW) boys”, attracted by the “thrill of the speed” and “smoking tires”.

He said he had been meant to give Sammy a lift home on the night of the crash.

“But Lewis had a new BMW and Sammy had not been in it yet, so [he was] quite excited for that,” he said.

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(Left to right) Lewis Moghul, John Yolland, and Sammy Phillips

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Spring is on its way, so whilst you’re planning your spring cleaning schedule, you may be wondering how to wash pillows and bed sheets to get them smelling and feeling as fresh as possible. Over time, sweat and natural skin oils can soak through your pillows, mattress protector, and bed sheets, so you’ll need to give them a big deep clean to ensure they’re hygienic for sleeping on. Otherwise, you could be inviting in all sorts of nasties such as dust mites, mold, bacteria, and even bed bugs.

Bed bugs feast on your blood and can really irritate your skin, causing you to scratch all night long. The same goes for dust mites – they can trigger allergy-like symptoms such as a runny nose, sneezing, coughing, or sore throats. Washing your pillows on a regular basis helps stop the build-up of bacteria that can cause breakouts, skin inflammation, and itching. 

Here, we walk you through how to spring clean your pillows and bed sheets, including techniques and the products you need. If you’re looking to revamp your sleep space ready for spring and need a new bed, our guide to 2024’s best mattresses for all sleepers and budgets contains our top recommendations.

One of the things that puts people off washing their pillows is that they don’t think that they can be washed in the washing machine. Many of this year’s best pillows are made from microfiber, and the great thing about this pillow material is that it can be machine-washed.  

Microfiber pillows over time attract dirt, sweat, and allergens, so regular cleaning won’t only keep those at bay, but they’ll also prolong the life of your pillow. However, before you set about the process, do read the care label of your particular pillow to ensure that you can follow these steps when spring cleaning. This is the same advice we share when explaining how to clean a mattress.

1. Remove any pillow protectors

Pillow protectors are something that you should consider if you don’t already have them. Pillow protectors act as an extra shield against sweat, oils, and little pests like dust mites from getting into your pillow. You can also machine wash your pillow protectors on a more regular basis to really keep your bed fresh. 

2. Pre-treat stains and smells

Pillows attract stains, it’s normal and natural, so don’t worry if you see stains pop up. However, if you have stubborn or deep stains, it’s best to pre-treat these before you pop them in the washing machine.

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Illustration by Erik Carter

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In the spring of 2023, after her third case of COVID-19, Jennifer Robertson started to feel strange. Her heart raced all day long and she could barely sleep at night. She had dizzy spells. She felt pins and needles in her arm, she says, a “buzzing feeling” in her foot, and pain in her legs and lymph nodes. She broke out in a rash. She smelled “phantom” cigarette smoke, even when none was in the air.

Robertson, 48, had a feeling COVID-19 might have somehow been the trigger. She knew about Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection, because her 11-year-old son has it. But “he didn’t have anything like this,” she says. “His set of symptoms are totally different,” involving spiking fevers and vocal and motor tics. Her own experience was so different from her son’s, it was hard to believe the same condition could be to blame. “I just thought, ‘It’s really coincidental that I never got well, and now I’m getting worse,’” she says.

She saw a doctor in Cyprus, where her family was living at the time, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her husband was working. Neither visit yielded much. Then, after Robertson’s family moved to Scotland in the summer of 2023, a specialist there diagnosed with Long COVID. She is still sick—and a reinfection late last year set her back—but she has found some relief in treatments prescribed by her doctors, including heart medication and antihistamines.

Robertson’s story highlights the many challenges of detecting, diagnosing, and treating Long COVID. It affects people from all walks of life and produces a vast array of symptoms that can range in severity from mild to life-altering. And because there are so many forms Long COVID can take, it can be difficult for patients and doctors to know what’s going on.

That means many people aren’t getting diagnosed or treated, says Nisreen Alwan, a professor of public health at the U.K.’s University of Southampton who studies Long COVID (and has had the condition herself). Alwan’s research suggests there is “considerable self-doubt” among Long COVID patients, with many people questioning if they should get medical care or have the condition at all. That may be in part because media coverage tends to showcase a specific type of patient—someone who is very sick, potentially to the point of being bed-bound, and battling extreme fatigue and brain fog—so people with milder or more unusual symptoms aren’t sure whether their illness counts as Long COVID, Alwan says.

It’s hard to blame people for being confused. Long COVID is so broadly defined that virtually any unexplained health issue that comes after a case of COVID-19 and lasts at least a couple months could fit the bill. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to Long COVID—everything from insomnia and hallucinations to tremors and gastrointestinal issues—and they often look very different from those of an acute COVID-19 case. Further complicating matters, some people feel better for weeks or months after their initial infection before their health deteriorates.

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Everything you do—walking to your yoga class, making your favorite latte order, talking to your bestie, and just getting through the workday—happens thanks to your brain. Your brain is the control center for your entire body—it’s how you get shit done. So how can you take care of such a beautifully complex and integral part of your body and keep it in great shape for as long as possible?

Lara V. Marcuse, MD, a board-certified neurologist and codirector of the Mount Sinai Epilepsy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shares the one thing she does every day (or almost every day, because life gets busy, folks!) to keep her brain healthy. As a bonus? It’s fun.

Pick up a difficult new skill, even if you suck at it.

“I started playing piano in my mid-40s,” Dr. Marcuse tells SELF. It all started by chance when her son began taking lessons: “I took his lesson book on the sly one night before bed, and I was totally enthralled by it,” she says, though she admits she found the songs themselves hard to get into at first. “I’m a 1980s New York City club kid. I grew up on a steady diet of house music, and I never liked classical.” It’s been seven years since she first gave playing a Chopin piece a shot, and she hasn’t looked back since. “[Playing piano] helps me get into [the] nooks and crannies of myself—and into my spirit,” she says.

Taking up a hobby that’s unfamiliar and even difficult forces your brain to exercise new or rarely used neural pathways, and that can help prevent cognitive decline and even protect your brain against Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia that leads to memory loss and an inability to complete daily tasks. Keeping your brain active makes neural pathways strong—and the opposite is true if you’re not finding ways to engage your mind.

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Elon Musk made some striking predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and income at the inaugural AI Safety Summit in the U.K. in November. 

The serial entrepreneur and CEO painted a utopian vision where AI renders traditional employment obsolete but provides an “age of abundance” through a system of “universal high income.”

“It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk told U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “You can have a job if you want to have a job or sort of personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.”

While admitting this prospect may not make “people comfortable,” Musk seemed optimistic about what he termed a “protopian” AI-driven future.

“I think everyone will have access to this magic genie, and you’re able to ask any question. It’ll be certainly bigger for education. It’ll be the best tutor,” he said. “And there will be no shortage of goods and services. It will be an age of abundance.”

Musk’s concept of “universal high income” appears to be an evolution of the universal basic income (UBI) idea supported by other tech leaders like Sam Altman. 

“We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have a universal high income,” Musk said, though he did not explicitly define the difference. “In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler, an equalizer.” It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time Musk addressed the topic. In 2018, he posted on X: “Universal income will be necessary over time if AI takes over most human jobs.”

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Don Lemon, the former television anchor, said Elon Musk’s X had “wooed” him to provide content on the social media platform. Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

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We’re closer than ever to mapping the entire brain to the microscopic level. Hundreds of neuroscientists across the world recently characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types as part of the National Institute of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, publishing almost two dozen papers in four Science journals today. This super-focused attention to detail could unlock many mysteries surrounding that complex organ, such as what happened in our brains to distinguish us from other primates. 

“This is the first large-scale, detailed description of all the different kinds of cells present in the human brain,” says Rebecca Hodge, an assistant investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle who co-authored multiple studies in the paper package. Her hope is that this brain atlas provides a community resource for scientists to explore how the wide variety of brain cells contribute to health and disease. This first suite of studies shows three main ways the brain map can be used for biology and medicine.

An evolving brain

A human brain atlas can teach us about our evolutionary history. One study published today in Science used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to measure the gene expression of individual brain cells in humans and five other primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas. In this method, scientists pull out individual cells from a piece of tissue, break them open to expose the genetic messengers inside, then use tags akin to tiny barcodes to identify that material. “This is the main technology used in some of these papers that are coming out, and it’s a technique that’s only been around for the past 10 years,” Hodge says. Getting this genetic profile allows researchers to group clusters of cells into specific types. 

Our cells’ composition and organization is similar to those of our close relatives. However, the biggest differences seemed to occur in a brain region called the middle temporal gyrus, which is involved in processing semantic memory and language. Humans had higher numbers of projecting neurons in this area compared to other species. What’s more, the researchers highlighted a difference in gene expression that promoted synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of neurons to strengthen brain connections. This feature is an important component for learning and memory, and it might explain how humans developed complex cognitive skills.

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Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a debilitating multisystem disorder from which adults rarely recover. Researchers have struggled to find changes in the body that underlie the illness, which often appears following an infection, partly because it may arise in different forms. Now, scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have completed perhaps the most comprehensive study of ME/CFS to date by examining a carefully selected group of participants. In the study, which was published today in Nature Communications, the researchers observed changes that reveal how the disease disrupts the immune and nervous systems.

In addition to having overwhelming fatigue, people with ME/CFS experience a range of other symptoms such as brain fog, hypersensitivity to light, and short-term memory loss. Medical professionals have historically dismissed the condition as a psychosomatic disorder by implying the disease lacks a physiological basis.

These dismissive views have held back ME/CFS research, and scientists have made little progress toward developing diagnostics and therapies and understanding the mechanism behind the condition. In recent years some progress has been made in accepting ME/CFS as a real physiological condition, in part because of the emergence of long COVID (a condition that, according to some studies, qualifies for an ME/CFS diagnosis about half of the time). But doubt over its legitimacy lingers. Alison Sbrana, a person with ME/CFS who was a participant in the new study, says that she would be shocked to meet someone with ME/CFS who hasn’t had their concerns brushed aside at some point.

Avindra Nath, a neurologist at NIH, set out to unravel the condition’s inner workings. First, his team had to carefully select a cohort of ME/CFS participants for the study because the condition has numerous forms that might not share the same physiological manifestations. The researchers focused on a subset of people with ME/CFS who had developed the condition following an infection (before the COVID pandemic). They homed in on this group by pursuing a rigorous selection process, and they only included participants whom a panel of five clinicians unanimously agreed met the criteria. Only 17 ME/CFS participants remained after the selection process, alongside 21 healthy volunteers. With its carefully selected cohort, Nath’s team employed a slew of tests to study several body systems.

.Credit:  Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images

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