Borneo is the world's third largest island, after Greenland and New Guinea. Slice Borneo in half and chances are you'll see the equator bisecting this island twice the size of Germany. There is no better or worse time to visit Borneo; equatorial climates mean year-round rain which rarely lasts long. Our family arrived in Borneo this week, after our daughter's examination.

We first stopped at Selingan Island in Sandakan Archipelago, where sea turtle conservation has been underway for many years. Watching gravid turtle

Curated with modern elements like text messages and emails, Sally Rooney's novel Intermezzo is a masterpiece.

In this moving story of two heartbroken brothers after their father's death, we are told how one of them regretted about not giving the eulogy at the funeral, and how another one struggled with the divorce of parents.

As we follow the journey of Ivan and Peter, we recognise the sentimental way Sally Rooney depicts the two brothers' navigating the grief.

Ivan is withdrawn. So much so that he "locks

There are no shortcuts in grief. After a loss, every day hurt. Then each month. And then every special days of the year.

The opposite is true of bringing up a child. Every day comes with surprise. Then every week ends with a Sunday when the parents find something new. And it is really, really, really funny. When I read the book of parenthood by Fredrik Backman, I can't stop laughing.

If you've read his novel Beartown , you might have remembered the

Not many writers are chefs.

Charles Dickens had gone into such details of Christmas dinner. Amy Tan previously told a story of cooking crabs in The Joy Luck Club . Nigella Lawson's book How to Eat does not have a single photograph of food, and yet presents us with the best recipe of mayonnaise.

Asako Yuzuki's novel, Butter , turns out to be the best reading experience of mine recently. The secrets of butter and gourmet cooking could have been a reason for getting the 2025 British

I learned about Pablo Picasso's weird friendship with an owl in one of the first major exhibition of his in Hong Kong. In 1946, Picasso adopted a little injured animal, bandaged up its broken claw, and kept the owl until it healed, then decided to take the owl with him back to Paris.

The famous self portrait of Picasso as an owl, his ceramics, etchings and drawings of owls, seem to depict the artist's personal relationship with owls. When it comes to the

"The secret to happiness is either to have had a happy childhood or a poor memory." So says the psychiatrist Benji Waterhouse, whose mother was surprised to hear his speaking about childhood to his therapist. Can a mother remember her son's childhood? That's where things often get murky.

Here's why laughter matters: If you're wondering the way to fend off sickness or stress, go and read Benji Waterhouse's book. He wrote the comic medical memoir as a NHS doctor,

Every death is a tragedy, whether in Ghana, Punjab, or Gaza. You get hurt over the loss. I do, too. Everybody does. We all have suffered the tragedy with the death of a loved family member or close friend. But Jessica George's novel is one of the most heartbreaking stories, in which a London-born Ghanaian daughter lost her father with Parkinson's disease.

Maddie Wright, with a nickname Maame meaing "woman" in Twi dialect, has been the main caregiver of

Social psychologists like to describe our brain comparison machines as a "sociometer". That's a gauge hidden inside our brain, running from 0 to 100 to denote where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment.

Think about the electricity bill you receive once every month, after which you will know your electricity consumption. If you're meticulous, you can view your meter in real time. Most of us won't bother to do that. Now we do. We check the

Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific proof.

Much of what we now believe is the result of experiments in which people are randomly assigned, like lottery, to receive a treatment and other people are randomly allocated to be in the control group. Researchers then look at the outcomes of intervention. Unlike the observational studies, this tool can get rid of selection bias, when groups being studied are already significantly different after they are "selected" to receive treatment.

Observational studies often fall prey to "reverse causality"

Getting our DNA upgraded would be really exciting. We get excited just writing the phrase "upgraded."

To finally get a genetic upgrade that ramps up our performance would be a huge milestone for humanity. After reading Thomas Cech's book about RNA and CRISPR, I picked up a sci-fi novel Upgrade .

I am not sure if genetic upgrade is a real thing or fiction fantasy. The story of Logan Ramsay in Upgrade lets us get a better picture. Logan literally got a mind-blowing transformation in his