SCHNIFFFRRPGHRRT. Ah, that’s better. Uh oh, unbecoming drip is rapidly re-forming on end of nose. Hunt frantically through pockets for bedraggled scraps of paper hanky. No joy… oh well, only one thing for it. Time to deploy the sleeve.
Admit it, you’ve been there. You are fabulously dressed to impress, on your way to the office festivities, ready to mingle, frolic, see and be seen. After a 20-minute walk in the freezing cold, you arrive triumphant. Then, as your body warms up and you begin an intelligent conversation with your boss, your nose begins to drip like a leaky faucet.
Cold may be the best-known trigger of annoyingly runny noses, but even if you are spending the holidays in warmer climes don’t feel too smug. The spicy chilli at the office barbecue is just as effective at making your nose betray you in your finest hour.
Why cold weather and spicy foods make your nose run is something of a mystery. But a few intrepid scientists have been unpicking its secrets. The good news is that, even though we know little about what causes a runny nose, there is an effective way to ward it off. And the bad news? We still have some pretty disgusting ways of dealing with a dripping nose.
Runny noses brought on by food or the chill have plagued humanity since the dawn of history. According to Dave De Witt, editor in chief of Fiery-Foods.com, the Aztecs even took advantage of this reaction to treat their colds. When suffering from stuffy noses, they ate large numbers of chillies to shift the troublesome mucus. In…
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
