An organic compound called limonene provides the pleasant smell of cleaning products and air fresheners but some byproducts of these sweet-smelling compounds could be adding to the air while they remove germs and odors.

By cleaning your house, you could be adding smog and ozone to it. 

Aircraft propelled by beams of light rather than fuel? Laser-propulsion just got a step closer thanks to a new method for improving the thrust systems developed by physicists Yuri Rezunkov of the Institute of Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering and Alexander Schmidt of the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in Saint Petersburg. 

Currently, the maximum speed of a spacecraft is limited by the amount of solid or liquid fuel that it can carry. Achieving higher speeds means that more fuel must be burned—fuel that, inconveniently, has to be carried by the craft and hefted into space. These burdensome loads can be reduced, however, if a laser—one located at a remote location, and not actually on the spacecraft—were used to provide additional propulsive force.

By Sarah King, Genetic Literacy Project

Since the discovery in 2004 of Homo floresiensis, an ancient hominid nicknamed “Flo” and also “hobbit”, after the diminutive villagers from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, due to her small size relative to modern humans, much debate has been raised over the origins of the species.

You may not have realized it, but women's voices are a big topic. For women, at least. 

I suppose it may be true. If someone asks me to describe the characters in television comedy "The Big Bang Theory", my natural response would be 'the guy that matches the stereotype of how people think physicists are, the actual physicist, the engineer, the psychologist, the girl who looked a lot better with longer hair and the girl with the squeaky voice.'

See? 16% of my responses were related to female voice. She did better than the Indian guy, I forgot him completely, but whatever her science degree is was completely left out, the voice sticks out.

With private space missions just around the corner, we need to think about keeping important lunar sites safe. Cultsofhteshadow/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

By Beth O'Leary, New Mexico State University

Who will preserve the first lunar landing site at Tranquility Base for future generations?

How can the international community know it is election time in the United States? A whole raft of claims about science and why you should vote one way or the other will be produced. Some people have even claimed politics is hard-wired, which would mean that American Republicans and Democrats are distinct species, having branched off from the rest of the world in 1860.

While biologists laugh at the idea that voting preferences are biological, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists continue to match surveys to science and claim it might be true. What if only tall people voted Democrat and they only married other Democrats? Would that not shape evolution? Democrats would be tall and imposing and psychologists would say they will get their way more often.

The United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) is very popular with people who have no serious issues, because it is free - if they have to wait a few weeks, it is no big deal. For doctors, it isn't so great. The cost to attend medical school is not high, around $15,000 per year, but in their first year they will only earn about $30,000 annually. A specialist is almost 50% higher and that is part of the reason why the UK is losing General Practioners, at the bottom of the wage scale, faster than they can replace them.

By Robert Wager, Genetic Literacy Project

There is tremendous controversy about genetically modified (GM) crops and derived food. Even the definition of what is a GM crop can differ depending upon with whom you talk. From a strictly scientific perspective all food has been manipulated at the genetic level by human activity; therefore all foods are genetically modified.

A more scientifically precise term for what goes by the popular term GMOs is genetically engineered (GE). This definition involves the use of recombinant DNA technology in the crop breeding process.

Ebola is causing a lot of concern, a few instances in the United States were enough to lead to calls to overthrow the FDA vaccine approval process and the White House declared that the United States Department of Health and Human Services was unqualified to manage a handful of cases in America so they put a lawyer in charge as an Ebola czar. The National Institutes of Health said they could not fix the problem with the $330 billion they have gotten since 2001 but they are just exploiting an outbreak for personal gain also. In reality, the impact of disease outbreaks has been declining on a per capita basis for decades.

The far left in America loves government. Advocacy groups are always calling for new laws, new regulations, new bans and more layers of bureaucracy to put a stop to whatever they dislike. The right is increasingly suspicious of it, regarding every policy as a road to George Orwell's "1984".

That was not always the case. In the 1950s and '60s, it was the left who was on the right and the right was on the left. Government meant law and order and the right was opposed to anarchy and protests promoted by the left.