The benefits of music education are widely reported. Playing an instrument has been shown to have significant cognitive benefits.

Creative thinking, social and emotional intelligence, coordination, memorization and auditory processing are all thought to improve in school-age children who learn music.

This makes it hard to argue with the fact that learning music is a good thing. But, when it comes to the type of music to teach, things get less agreeable.

If you have been purchasing Blue Buffalo pet food based on its rather suspicious claims about being "byproduct free", well, that is the power of marketing, no different than organic- and gluten-free manufacturers have created a similar health halo for their customers.

But competitor Purina didn't like marketing claims that its pet food was inferior. On May 6, 2014, Purina filed a lawsuit against Blue Buffalo for false advertising after testing revealed the presence of poultry by-product meal in Blue Buffalo's top selling pet foods. 

While secondhand exposure to cigarette smoking is linked with numerous health maladies, cannabis smoke is currently under a halo of no harm. Yet second-hand marijuana can cause an effect that cigarettes cannot - problems with memory and coordination, and in some cases testing positive for the drug in a urinalysis. At least in a very small study.

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world. The authors say the new research is the most comprehensive study of secondhand cannabis smoke and its effects since the 1980s, when researchers found the drug's active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and other cannabis byproducts could turn up in nonsmokers' bodies after an hour or more spent in extreme conditions with heavy smokers in an enclosed space. 

Currently, burning fossil fuels is the main source of energy here and around the world.  Those fuels emitting greenhouse gasses are considered by most associated scientific organizations in the world as contributing to a potential global catastrophe in the making.  With this, we are critically dependent on electricity for almost every necessity we have in our standard of living. 

The drive to improve performance means elite sport is inundated with data from wearable technologies such as GPS, computer vision and match statistics.

So professional clubs are constantly on the lookout for tools that can help turn these data into usable and meaningful information.

One such tool gaining popularity is machine learning. Put simply, machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence, whereby computers are able to learn without being explicitly programmed by a human operator.

By Sara Rennekamp, Inside Science -- Last week's deadly derailment that sent an Amtrak Northeast Regional train careening off its tracks has many people asking how such a tragedy could happen.

It's not a secret that organic farms trade modern science for inefficiency in production and higher profit margins - but that does not count the 'intangibles' that go into organic farming, argue Terry Anderson and Henry Miller, and those higher margins should be accounted for in a revenue-neutral way.

A new simulation modeled the effects of land use changes on the species diversity in rivers and streams and estimates that the loss of biodiversity will caused by changes in land use practices far more than by climate change.

Despite that, climate change gets all of the attention and changing land use practices, such as clear-cutting of forests for agricultural use, are frequently neglected in the development of conservation concepts.

A  psychological analysis of novice assassins has delved into how hitmen bury their feelings after a successful attack.

Hired killers don't deal with people, they are businessmen and they are doing a job, no different than a soldier in the military.

New natural gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has been the biggest reason American CO2 emissions have dropped but it is not without controversy. Environmentalists have taken to videos showing 'flaming tapwater' and seek to blame natural gas for it.

Thousands of years ago those same phenomena were similar religious belief - gas and oil seeps have been part of cultural practices for thousands of years. From the Oracle at Delphi to the Chimera fires, people from Indonesia and Iran to Italy and Azerbaijan have studied and been mystified by “eternal flames”.