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Named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, aphrodisiacs are said to increase libido, potency, and sexual pleasure.

Throughout history, couples have gone to extraordinary lengths to choose the sex of their child. In the middle ages, women believed they could swing the odds of having a son by asking their husbands to turn their faces eastwards during sex.

BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read. So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape.

What makes babies laugh? It sounds like one of the most fun questions a researcher could investigate, but there's a serious scientific reason why Caspar Addyman wants to find out. He’s not the first to ask this question.

In fact, Nasa’s third Moon landing had completely failed to capture the public imagination. “People were getting bored,” Lovell (now 89 but sounding 20 years younger) tells BBC Future. “The publicity for Apollo 13 you could find on the weather page of the newspaper, that was it.”

This article is part of a BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said.

This story originally published in April 2018 as part of our series What If, which uses imaginary scenarios to help us better understand the real world. On 24 March 2018, more than two million people took to the streets in the US to protest gun violence.

An eight-year-old juvenile chimpanzee named Kakama trudged along a path among the forest trees, following his pregnant mother. A scientist sat silently at a distance, watching Kakama pick up a log and carry it with him for hours.

It’s often said that food brings people together. But it can also split families apart. Cookbook author Nandita Godbole has experienced this first-hand. Her affluent Indian family, who generally had hired cooks in their homes, disapproved of her choice of profession.

An apparent police ban on all mahjong parlours in a Chinese city led to panic among aficionados of China's national pastime. Police in Yushan in southeast China first announced the ban at the weekend, saying it was to curb illegal gambling and "purify social conduct".

To get the best out of your daily blood pressure medication, take it just before you go to bed, say researchers. It's a simple tip that could save lives, they say in the European Heart Journal.

You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart they will become more intelligent. A quick internet search reveals plenty of products to assist you in the task.

You’re out to lunch with someone you’ve known for a few years. Together you’ve held parties, celebrated birthdays, visited parks and bonded over your mutual love of ice cream. You’ve even been on holiday together. In all, they’ve spent quite a lot of money on you – roughly £63,224.

A painting of the Mona Lisa hangs above a fireplace in a London flat in the 1960s. Is this picture not only by Leonardo da Vinci, but also an earlier version of the world famous portrait that hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris?

The UK will not meet its climate change targets without a revolution in home heating, a think tank says. But a poll conducted among MPs suggests that most do not consider pollution from home heating to be a priority.

Anthony Mancinelli sits in a salon chair in New Windsor, New York, waiting for his next customer. Aged 107, Mancinelli is used to the routine: he has been cutting hair for 96 years.

The boarding school where I was a pupil in the 1990s provided the perfect microcosm for anyone interested in how “survival of the fittest” plays out among humans.

When RubySam Youngz was singled out by a bully at the age of 10 in her last year of primary school, she felt isolated and confused. She’d just moved with her family from England to Wales and the bully honed in on her accent. They then started mocking her appearance.

Can you be too beautiful? It is hardly a problem that most of us have to contemplate – as much as we might like to dream that it were the case.  Yet the blessings and curses of beauty have been a long-standing interest in psychology.

It’s commonplace to say that we’re all deluged by more information than we can possibly handle.

Some people have a gift for predicting the future. Not a vague, ambiguous prediction, but reasoned, cautious and thoughtful foresight. These people can see the likelihood of a companies’ commercial success or the outcome of elections better than anyone else.

Bob Petrella can recall any moment from his past. Called highly superior autobiographical memory, there are around 60 known cases around the world. “It’s almost like having a time machine, where I can go back to a certain day or a certain period in my life and almost feel like I’m back there.

Your personality has been sculpted by many hands. Your genes, your friends, the schools you attended, plus many other factors, will all have played a part in making you the person you are today.

In 2014, Nasa awarded $1.1M to the Center for Theological Inquiry, an ecumenical research institute in New Jersey, to study “the societal implications of astrobiology”. Some were enraged.