“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” Hsin Hsin Ming

Almost every person who walks through my practice doorway is anxious in some way. And so they should be. While their anxiety might be blasting messages at an overly high volume, the messages themselves are worth paying attention to: abusive relationships, significant losses and workplaces that have squeezed their personal, physical and spiritual lives into a corner too small for a hamster to burrow in.

Last week there was another very public case of a journal article being retracted as a result of academic misconduct. This time it was in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), with the lead author – Dr Anna Ahimastos, working at Melbourne’s Baker IDI – reportedly admitting she fabricated data.

Gayle Newland, 25, has been convicted of three counts of sexual assault against a woman who had believed she was in a sexual relationship with a man. Newland’s case has thrown up some very thorny questions about gender and sexual consent – and about what, exactly, we are required by law to reveal to our sexual partners.

In Australian homes, reliable hot water supplies for taking showers or bathing the kids are taken for granted. But this has a significant cost – conventional hot water heaters can account for up to 30% of household energy use and can be significant carbon emitters.

One alternative is solar hot water, which can supply more than 90% of household hot water and reduce energy bills by 50-85%, as well as lowering carbon emissions.

There are countless parenting questions that science can’t answer: “is it gross to eat food my child spat out?”, “why do my kids hate wearing pants?” and, of course, “when they grow up, will my kids remember how much I loved them, or just that I made them wear pants?”.

Fortunately, there are some important parenting issues science can address. Here are five simple tips for raising healthy children based on scientific studies from the last 12 months,.

1. Dads can – and should – help with breastfeeding

This spring, the world learned of a newly discovered missing link between microbes and humans called Lokiarchaeota. The actual story is that the microbe Lokiarchaeota, discovered on the deep sea floor by a hydrothermal vent called Loki’s Castle, shares features with both bacteria and us. The spin is that this makes it a missing link between the two.