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.

“Every day workers take time to shower, style their hair, select clothes and get dressed. Others spend additional time to shave, trim nails, apply makeup, polish shoes and iron clothes.”

Should they bother?

For, until recently, it was “…unclear whether such time-consuming activities are valuable in the labor market.” – explains Steve DeLoach, PhD., professor of economics at the The Love School of Business, Elon University, who has investigated the subject, and has published a paper entitled : ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall: The effect of time spent grooming on earnings’ (in the Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 26-34.)

Acupuncture to improve fertility rates? 

The University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine says that acupuncture, when used as a complementary or adjuvant therapy for in vitro fertilization, may be beneficial  - depending on the baseline pregnancy rates of a fertility clinic. If the baseline success was not very high, it went up a little. For clinics with more success, acupuncture had no effect.

In vitro fertilization is a process that involves fertilizing a woman's egg with sperm outside the womb and then implanting the embryo in the woman's uterus. According to the researchers, acupuncture is the most commonly used adjuvant, complementary therapy among couples seeking treatment at fertility clinics in the United States.

There is a heated national debate about gun control.

Two mathematicians have designed parameters they say can help best prevent both one-on-one killings and mass shootings in the United States. Their findings, that properly-enforced gun laws will help, are not new. Like hockey, 'enforce the rules we already have' would seem to apply to guns. Instead, the cultural focus is on 'assault weapons', a tiny fraction of gun homicides, while ignoring the psychiatric common denominator and that the overwhelming number of gun deaths are suicides - not mass shootings.  Shooting sprees happen just as often in European countries where guns are banned as they happen in the US. 

X chromosomes are special, even for genetic material. They differ in number between men and women and to achieve equality between sexes, one out of two X chromosomes in women is silenced.

In Drosophila, the opposite happens: in male flies, the only available X chromosome is highly activated, to compensate for the absence of the second X-chromosome.

A "structure-based" approach to drug design has led to identification of compounds with the potential to delay or treat Alzheimer's disease, and possibly Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's disease and other degenerative disorders.

Structure-based drug design, in which the physical structure of a targeted protein is used to help identify compounds that will interact with it, has already been used to generate therapeutic agents for a number of infectious and metabolic diseases. 

A new projection estimates that by the middle of this century there could be an average 56 percent drop in the amount of water stored in peak snowpack in the McKenzie River watershed of the Oregon Cascade Range -   if there is a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase.

Similar impacts may be found on low-elevation maritime snow packs around the world.

40 years ago, a technique now used for detecting tiny quantities of molecules, in situations from crime scene forensic analysis, to drug detection, to establishing the origins of works of art, was discovered.

But despite there being a dozen CSI shows that use this on American television, you probably never heard of it. 

In the early 1970s, researchers discovered that by roughening the metal surface upon which the molecules they were examining had been placed, they could increase the signal by which they could detect these molecules - by a million times. It became arguably the most sensitive method of analysis on surfaces that anyone has ever come up with.

False memories implanted in mice show how easily it is to manipulate recall of events.

Natural killer cells (NK cells) are part of our innate immune system. As they first line of defense, researchers agree that the body needs as many active NK cells as possible.

But, as is often the case, there can be too much of a good thing and researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have shown how.