It’s a known fact that exercise is addictive. But CrossFitters – those who take part in CrossFit’s brutal workouts and stringent diet – are infamous for their fanatical devotion to their fitness philosophy. They can be found doing pull-ups and heavily weighted squats, flipping tires or hitting them with a sledgehammer, climbing ropes, tossing medicine balls, and “going Paleo<.”

India's sterilization program focuses on women. EPA/STR

By Sabu S Padmadas, University of Southampton

Is there such a thing as a Facebook murder? Is it different than any other murder? Legally, it can be. From a common sense point of view, there is no 'hate crime' status that should make a murder worse if a white person kills a latino person or a Catholic instead of a white person or a Protestant, but legally such crimes can be considered more heinous and get a special label of hate crime.

But social media is ubiquitous and criminal justice academics are always on the prowl for new categories to create and write about so a 'Facebook Murder', representing crimes that may somehow involve social networking sites and thus be a distinct category for sentencing, has been postulated. 

In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then the concept of 'embedded' emissions has been used by anti-meat proponents.

"It takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" is easy to remember. It is elegant. It is also completely wrong. Regardless, the virtual environmental cost of meat became a craze and it was soon followed by virtual water. The virtual water in the grain in just one part of Egypt is more than all of the water in the Nile so the concept falls apart rather quickly when it comes to the real world but scholars are still broadening the concept out to new areas.

Some people have great memories - almost like they are looking at a photograph. What is the secret? Will it be possible to change the amount of information the brain can store?

Maybe. Researchers have identified a molecule that puts the brakes on brain processing. When the brake is removed, brain function and memory recall is improved.  

Credit:McGill

FXR1P: a controller of certain forms of memory

There may be disagreement about whether or not telling teenagers to not have sex works but that could be due to puberty. In younger kids, cookie abstinence works just fine. Even the Cookie Monster can get kids to eat fewer cookies, and cookies are kind of his thing.

Deborah Linebarger, an associate professor in Teacher and Learning at the University of Iowa, studied a group of preschoolers who repeatedly watched videos of Cookie Monster practicing ways to control his desire to eat a bowl of chocolate chip cookies.

"Me want it," Cookie Monster sings in a video, "but me wait."

The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan was released in June of 2014 and is seeking public comments until December 1st so if you want to yell about liberals or Big Oil, you are running out of time.

The plan is like most government policies, they picked a number out of thin air and will tell businesses to meet the standards or close up shop. The government lost a gigantic amount of money subsidizing legacy solar power technology and have realized that the only way solar can be viable without funding actual basic research is to make everything else expensive, so existing power plants have to reduce emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

When Ebola was the latest rage in mainstream media (that would be last month - poor people in Africa are so October of 2014) National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins was quick to capitalize on it - they could have had a vaccine by now, he claimed, if only funding had not been flat since 2004.

Science blogging was, naturally, quick to blame Republicans and The Sequester and whatever else would get Democrats to the polls in the run-up to elections. 

Here's a diet tip that is certain to work: Eat nothing and drink nothing except water from 6 PM until you wake up the next day. With no dieting at all, you are certain to lose weight unless you go out of your way to eat three Big Macs at dinner.

The reason is because your other organs and your brain start communicating - and many of them get a break from constantly processing food. 

Studies have found that mice who accumulated the most glycogen in the liver did not gain weight in spite of having access to an appetizing diet. In addition to observing that those animals ate less, researchers have found that the brains of the animals showed scarce appetite-stimulating molecules but rather many appetite-suppressing ones.

In America, it is no surprise to see obese people. They know they are obese, they just don't care. In Britain, you see just as many obese people, but they don't care because they don't think they are obese. They don't even think they are 'very overweight'. 

Fewer than 10 percent of clinical obese Brits think they have a weight problem.

In results from a 2012 survey of around 2000 adults published in
BMJ Open, only 11 percent of obese women acknowledged they were "obese", with most describing themselves as "very overweight" or "just right".  At least they know those positive body image campaigns are working.