Like many people, I spend much of my time at home fantasising about my next holiday. During the trip itself, most of my stresses seem to melt away, and I return feeling optimistic and energised.

Each time, I am determined to integrate those feelings into my day-to-day life, but I am almost invariably disappointed. Within a couple of weeks – sometimes less, depending on how much time I have to spend on the London Underground – I become the same irritable and frustrated person that I always was. And so, I start dreaming about my next escape.

As I planned a recent trip to Madrid, I wondered whether I was foolish to hope that my travels would offer anything more than temporary relief.

Delving into the psychological literature, though, I was relieved to see that the answer is a resounding no. Growing evidence explains the specific ways that our holidays can increase our wellbeing and, crucially, the types of activities that will offer the greatest restoration, based on the ancient Greek principle of eudaimonia: “human flourishing”.

“Instead of thinking only about where you are going to travel, you can think about what psychological experience you want the vacation to provide, and try to create that experience,” says Nanxi Yan, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

A serious consideration of holiday psychology has been a long time coming: until recently, psychologists studying wellbeing had mostly focused on the benefits of relaxation and leisure activities more generally. There have been plenty of studies on reading, for instance, while the research on vacations was patchy. As a result, they failed to capture the distinct opportunities for a mental reset that holidays can afford away from the daily grind. “From a psychological perspective, that separation is quite important,” says Yan.

Consider a recent review of the literature, published last year. Analysing the results of 32 different studies, Ryan Grant at the University of Georgia has shown that the average mood boost begins before we have even left home, as the anticipation of a trip builds. Those good feelings remain highly elevated for at least 21 days after we have returned home and may not return to the baseline for a further three weeks.

If you, like me, struggle to feel those longer-lasting benefits, it may be because you have been focusing on the “wrong” kind of happiness. Behavioural scientist Graeme McLean at the University of St Andrews Business School in the UK argues that we should distinguish between hedonic wellbeing, which concerns enjoyment and pleasure, and eudaimonic wellbeing, which concerns “personal growth, sense of purpose and meaning”.

“On holiday, hedonic wellbeing might come from lounging on a beach, enjoying nice food or staying in a lovely hotel,” he says. “Eudaimonic wellbeing might come from the sense of achievement in completing a challenging hike, learning about a new culture or forming connections with fellow travellers.”

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Studying 462 holiday-makers, McLean and his colleague Mohammed Aldossary at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia found that the boost in hedonic wellbeing faded pretty quickly, whereas the eudaimonic feelings lingered for at least eight weeks. For this reason, he recommends planning holidays that combine both elements – pure relaxation alongside the kinds of activities that feel more purposeful.

Yan agrees. “Travel can also expose people to novelty, different cultures, new activities and different versions of themselves,” she says – and it is here that the biggest benefits lie. “These experiences may help people not only feel rested, but also feel more alive, connected and reflective.”

So, what can we do to achieve it? Based on the available research on both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing, Yan and her colleagues distilled the key elements to think about (see below).

You don’t have to include every single element, but you may benefit from reflecting on the list and deciding which are most significant to you. “For example, if relatedness is very important, you might want to prioritise meaningful time with family, friends or a partner, rather than trying to do too many activities,” says Yan. To maximise autonomy, “it helps to build in freedom and flexibility”, she says. “A vacation that is too tightly scheduled can become another source of pressure.”

Mastery, meanwhile, might involve attending an art class or learning to scuba dive, and the need for novelty might encourage you to try to experience a whole new culture, rather than returning to a familiar destination.

That may take more serious attention than you currently pay to your travel plans. “Do not treat vacations only as time off. Think about what kind of psychological needs the vacation can satisfy,” says Yan. The hard work may pay off immediately. “Our research showed that merely anticipating an upcoming vacation can boost wellbeing, so the planning and looking-forward phase has value in itself,” says McLean. “It’s better to book early!”

If you are worried about protecting your purse strings, rest assured that you can glean many of these benefits from shorter trips – in fact, the greatest relief may come from just five or six days away. Nor do the activities have to be exceptionally luxurious: in Grant’s meta-analysis, physical exercise proved to be one of the best predictors of enhanced wellbeing, and that can be achieved through long walks or visits to outdoor gyms.

You may not even have to leave your home city, provided that you take those psychological needs seriously enough and don’t simply spend the time catching up on other responsibilities. When planned correctly, taking some time off at home can still be beneficial, says Yan. “For example, people can create boundaries around work, avoid routine chores during the holiday period, try new local activities, spend quality time with others, visit nearby nature or create small rituals that make the time feel different from ordinary life.”

Whether you are travelling abroad or staying at home, you should try to find ways to immerse yourself in the memories of the experiences after your break has ended. Along these lines, McLean also found that using virtual-reality headsets to return to the location of their holidays significantly prolonged the wellbeing benefits experienced by his study participants.

We can’t all afford this technology, of course, but he suggests some lo-fi alternatives. “Deeply engaging with holiday memories – perhaps through journaling about the experience in vivid detail, creating a rich photo or video montage that you actively revisit, or even planning a return trip to the same destination – might tap into similar psychological pathways, though this would need further research to be confirmed.”

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“The underlying factor is about re-engaging psychologically with the vacation experience in a rich, immersive way,” says McLean. You are unlikely to get this from passively scrolling through your photos; it needs your full attention.

Attempting to put all this into practice on my trip to Madrid, I made a greater effort to chat to locals in Spanish, maximising my sense of autonomy and mastery; attended a concert by one of my favourite singers, an experience that was imbued with meaning; and visited the city’s botanical gardens, which helped me connect to nature.

It has now been six weeks since I returned, and the warm glow remains. My sunnier mood may be slowly fading, but it hasn’t yet been extinguished. Now, I’m dreaming of my next trip.

Hunter-gatherers transported brown trout into the mountains of Norway at least 7000 years ago so they could be harvested during summer foraging trips into the highlands.

That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes that had been covered by a kilometres-thick ice sheet for tens of thousands of years, says Axel Mjærum at the University of Oslo, Norway.

“This is the oldest documented example of human-mediated translocation of fish in the world,” says Mjærum.

Until around 8400 years ago, Lake Tesse, at an elevation of around 850 metres, was covered by the Fennoscandian ice sheet, leaving an ecological blank canvas once it retreated.

Yet before it was transformed for hydropower storage in the 1940s, Lake Tesse was regarded as one of the richest brown trout waterways in Norway, yielding 9 tonnes of the fish annually.

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While it has long been suspected that humans had a hand in establishing the brown trout population in Lake Tesse, we had no idea how long ago this happened.

Alternative ideas have included transportation by birds or natural migration of fish and eggs upstream. But most Norwegian mountain lakes, including Lake Tesse, only had brown trout until recently, and geographical features such as large waterfalls make natural dispersal upstream impossible.

Mjærum and his colleagues studied the partially buried remains of elaborate wooden fish traps, discovered in 2022 when the lake level was lowered.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the oldest trap dated from around 4950 BC. By correlating the recovered wood with the pine tree ring chronology available for the central Scandinavian mountains, the team was also able to precisely date some of the posts that were part of the younger traps.

One came from a tree felled between spring 2669 BC and winter 2669-2668 BC, and another 12 years later during the winter of 2657-2656 BC, demonstrating that the traps must have been maintained to keep them in good working order.

“Therefore, it is possible that this form of trap fishing was ongoing in Tesse during much of the period between 5000 and 2650 BC,” says Mjærum.

The transport of fish into the lakes is an early example of people managing the environment to provide food, centuries before the advent of farming in Scandinavia. There is evidence that fish farming began even earlier in other parts of the world, including channels and traps for catching eels built in Australia 8600 years ago.

How people transported the fish is unknown, but they may have used waterskins. People probably stayed in the mountains for part of the summer season, hunting reindeer and fishing, but spent the winters in the valleys or along the coast where the climate was milder, says Mjærum.

“A good and predictable food supply also made longer stays possible, not only for hunters aiming for big game, but for whole family groups,” he says.

Western Europe’s first total solar eclipse since 1999 will happen on 12 August and see eclipse chasers travel to eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain for totality, when the moon covers the sun’s disc and the usually hidden solar corona bursts into view. Solar and atmospheric scientists will be among them – and above them.

It is tempting to think total solar eclipses have been made obsolete for scientists by spacecraft. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown through the sun’s corona, while the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory study the sun from space. ESA’s Proba-3 mission can even create artificial eclipses in orbit. So why do scientists still need to chase the moon’s shadow across Earth?

The answer is simple: total eclipses offer cheap and accessible opportunities to study both the sun and Earth. “Research groups that have novel ideas can go to an eclipse and take observations without having to bid for tens of millions of pounds’ worth of grants from NASA or the European Space Agency – the barrier to entry is much lower,” says Ryan French, a solar physicist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado.

One example is the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, which will send teams from several US universities to Spain and Iceland to study atmospheric responses to the eclipse. Balloons released in Spain will reach an altitude of 27 to 37 kilometres, carrying 360-degree cameras, ozone instruments and radio experiments. Icelandic teams will launch balloons carrying radiosondes, devices that can monitor pressure, temperature, humidity and other atmospheric parameters. The idea is to measure the effects the eclipse has on the planetary boundary layer, the atmosphere’s lowest region where its behaviour is most heavily influenced by warm air rising from the ground.

NASA’s WB-57 high-altitude aircraft can measure polarised coronal light and will fly for the 2026 eclipse. Flying high avoids the problem of cloud cover obscuring the view, while also minimising atmospheric interference. “At high altitude, you can observe infrared light that you can’t observe from the ground,” says French.

During the 2024 total solar eclipse, Citizen CATE – an experiment funded by the US National Science Foundation and NASA – used telescopes spread along the path of totality to create a 1-hour timelapse of the corona. This will be repeated during the 2026 eclipse, ahead of a plan to produce a timelapse of the corona with the larger North African Telescope Eclipse experiment during the longer eclipse that will happen in August 2027. Totality in 2027 will last much longer because the new moon will be closer to Earth, and the path of totality is close to the equator, where Earth effectively bulges out towards the moon.

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“Most of the scientific instruments at an eclipse are not just taking photographs, but collecting measurements of spectra,” says French. Spectroscopy can reveal the speed, temperature and density of plasma in the corona. “When you observe specific spectra, this can give you information on the speed of plasma moving in the sun, and can tell you about the temperature and the density of plasma sloshing around the sun,” he says.

Other eclipse scientists ask a fundamental question: what is the radius of the sun? Because the sun has no solid surface, its visible edge is difficult to define. Yet tiny differences can shift the predicted edge of the path of totality. The Besselian Elements Team, a group of researchers scattered across the world, records flash spectra at the path’s edge to refine eclipse maps and calculate the sun’s actual radius.

The eclipse may also offer a rare chance to test whether aurora can be detected during totality. NASA scientist Liz MacDonald, founder of citizen science project Aurorasaurus, will use all-sky cameras to search for faint auroral glow. It is a long shot, but Iceland lies beneath the auroral oval, a region surrounding the geomagnetic North Pole within which the aurora can regularly be seen. Even a non-detection could help constrain whether eclipse darkness can reveal aurora.

Total solar eclipses are brief, vulnerable to clouds and geographically specific, but they open a rare observing window onto the sun’s inner corona – and let scientists try bold ideas without first building a spacecraft.

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Ancient Egyptian princesses were probably trained in using bows and daggers and put themselves at risk of serious injury. Rediscovering mummies from about 3800 years ago has revealed that some of these women had enlarged bones in their arms and bowing of the bones in their palms, which suggests they were active users of the weapons they were often buried with.

“They carried their bows and daggers into the afterlife not just as ornaments, but as testaments to the active, resilient and powerful lives they led,” says Zeinab Hashesh at Beni-Suef University in Egypt.

Weapons have been found buried with women from many cultures throughout history. But there has been much debate about whether this was symbolic or meant the women used them.

Now, Hashesh and her colleagues have studied six royal mummies – five female – found at the Dahshur complex of pyramids and tombs from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom between about 1850 and 1700 BC. The mummies, some of which were found with bows and arrows alongside them, were excavated in the 1890s, and were rediscovered in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during a curation project in 2020.  

The team has analysed the bones to learn about the lives of these royal individuals, four of whom are thought to be daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II.

A key finding was that Princess Ita – who had an elaborate gold and lapis lazuli dagger in her burial assemblage and was aged between 28 and 34 when she died – would have had very strong connections between the bones in her forearm and strong hand muscles. This implies the habitual gripping of weapons like daggers or maces, says Hashesh.

Princesses Noub-Hotep (aged between 40 and 44) and Itaweret (aged 20 to 34) both showed enlargement of the radius bone in the forearm, which could be an adaptation to the repetitive stress of drawing a bow. The former princess, who was buried alongside arrows, also had bowing of the second right metacarpal bone in the palm and strengthened attachments of finger muscles. These hint at the sustained mechanical load required to hold a bow and are indicative of “archer’s grip”.

“I imagine the lives of princesses like Noub-Hotep and Ita were far from the sedentary, purely decorative existence we often associate with ancient royalty,” says Hashesh. “To develop the archer’s grip and the structural bowing of the hand bones observed in Noub-Hotep, they must have begun training in archery and martial arts from a young age.”

Michelle Langley at Griffith University in Australia says this study gives us real insight into these princesses’ lives. “Royal women were not simply sitting around a palace or following their menfolk around, but living active and skilled lives. They were trained in very practical martial and hunting arts, just as we imagine their fathers and brothers were,” she says.

The bones also revealed that injuries were common. For example, Princess Itaweret survived broken ribs and foot fractures, which Hashesh says were probably caused by accidents or hard blows.

“This tells us that they were out in the world, perhaps engaged in high-impact activities where falls and blows were a real danger,” she says. When injured, their status gave them access to surgeons capable of setting bones so well that they healed without infection or misalignment, she says.

But Sonia Zakrzewski at the University of Southampton, UK, says that other activities could result in similar alterations to arm and hand bones, such as frequent juggling or using a scythe. “If we were to find a tennis player buried with a club, we cannot simply argue that this [similar] bony change was a result of clubbing people,” she says.