In the 1990s, under the guise of wage protectionism, the Clinton administration got legislation passed that made it far more difficult for immigrants to get a work visa.  The concern was that a foreign worker would work in the US for less.  Result overall: Jobs instead went overseas.

Impact in science; we now spend $5 billion a year on STEM programs, trying to convince American children who are inclined to be doctors that they should instead be scientists, while foreign science students educated in the US are forced to go back home where they become competitors to the US.

Researchers recently monitored the behavior of thousands of people as they sang along to more than a thousand tunes and say they have uncovered the common traits in songs that are most 'catchy'.

That's right. If you like to song along to some songs more than others, there is a sort-of science reason why; it helps to be a man, though ironically with a higher-pitched voice.

The four core elements that trigger people's inclination to sing, according to musicologist Dr. Alisun Pawley and psychologist Dr. Daniel Mullensiefen are:

In claims about math performance among females, and the sociological implication that unknown  cultural pressure in schools made the mentally malleable fairer sex believe they couldn't do math even if they could, there was always one inconvenient truth  - in America, over 70% of teachers are women, so if there was sexism women were doing it.

A study at the University of the Basque Country finds a more pervasive link between the sexist attitudes of mothers and that of children - and gender and the family's socio-economic and cultural level to sexism. Mothers teach more gender than discrimination than fathers.

Nothing says science like a beetle humping a beer bottle - and it earned Professors Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz a coveted Ig Nobel prize.

If you have been living under the science equivalent of a rock, you may not know the Ig Nobel prizes are parodies of the Nobel kind and are presented annually by the Annals of Improbable Research.

A recent study fed rats homobrassinolide, found in the mustard plant, which produced an anabolic effect, and increased appetite and muscle mass, as well as the number and size of muscle fibers.  

So maybe you can get ripped by gardening a little more. Homobrassinolide, a type of brassinosteroid found in plants, given orally to rats triggered a response similar to anabolic steroids, with minimal side effects. In addition, the research found that the stimulatory effect of homobrassinolide on protein synthesis in muscle cells led to increases in lean body mass, muscle mass and physical performance.

Efforts have long been underway to make the Système Internationale d'unités (SI Units) more accurate. If you know your science history, SI units were devised during the French Revolution as an alternative to the British System.   And so the French Academy of Sciences was tasked with the new system and promptly got the whole thing wrong.

But SI units caught on and so efforts have been ongoing to make them more accurate.  Scientists like the idea to relate all of the unit definitions to fundamental constants of nature, making them stable and universal and giving them closer links to each other and the quantities they measure.