You know what happens to women when they watch Katherine Heigl movies or episodes of "The Bachelor"? 

Well, it happens to men also - when they think there might be beer nearby.

Really, it is almost Pavlovian, except the saliva is mental too. A PET scan study found that even when no alcohol was involved, the flavor of beer caused striatal dopamine release in men.(1) 

The striatum in men (and women - and all primates - but this particular study is about men, so, let's stay on message) consists of the caudate nucleus and the putamen and it gets input from the cerebral cortex and structures like the amygdala and hippocampus.

When most people think 'green' in America, they think of liberal Democrats. It's a carefully crafted image. Conservatives who deny global warming conserve energy just as much as liberals who accept it but that gets little attention. Sociologists in a new paper instead found that the idea of the 'green' Christian is the environmental trope they need to spend their time debunking.

Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future.  They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).

My vague libertarian leanings want me to stay out of the marijuana issue, just like I don't interfere in vaginas and just like I think the government should stop micromanaging gold fish and Big Gulps and telling restaurants whether or not to allow a cigar after a great steak.

But marijuana has become a political issue and it has fallen along predictable political lines; if you think cigarettes should be banned and marijuana legalized, I know how you vote. And therefore the people suddenly presenting nonsense statistics, dubious medical claims and sociological woo are seemingly doing it because they want to stick it to right wing people who are against pot.  That's not science, people.