Though we have access to a seemingly limitless amount of new music each day, we keep coming back to songs or albums, mostly stuff we liked at college age.

It's common to prefer the familiar - even by college students who may self-identify as preferring new music. People pick familiar with even when they believe they would prefer less familiar music. It's one of the reasons why the Pandora algorithm is regarded so highly. Yet we often hear the complaint that radio stations are playing the same songs over and over - and even Pandora plays the same 50 or 100.

The Canadian boreal forest,  stretching from the Yukon in the west to Newfoundland and Labrador in the east, remains one of the world's great natural treasures.

The ecologically diverse region contains the largest blocks of intact forest and wetlands left on Earth and scientists have found 1 billion to 3 billion nesting birds from 300 species there. Its abundant wildlife and freshwater have sustained Aboriginal communities for millennia.

Hemp (Cannabis sp.) has been a fundamental plant for the development of human societies. Its fibers have long been used for textiles and rope making, which requires prior stem retting.

This process is essential for extracting fibers from the stem of the plant but can adversely affect the quality of surface waters. The history of human activities related to hemp - its domestication, spread, and processing - is frequently reconstructed from seeds and pollen detected in archaeological sites or in sedimentary archives, but this method does not always make it possible to ascertain whether retting took place.

The Muon g-2 team has completed transport of a 50-foot-wide electromagnet from Long Island to the Chicago suburbs in one piece. The move began on June 22nd at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and concluded this week at Fermilab, a 3,200 mile journey - at least the way they did it.

Why such a torturous route? They couldn't flex it. Or twist it. And it doesn't exactly travel well on highways. 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory indoor air researchers have found hazardous levels of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in a surprisingly large percentage of California home kitchens.

And the most common device for mitigating this indoor air problem — range hoods — vary widely in performance.

In a study ( submitted to Environmental Health Perspectives) of southern California homes which was submitted to Environmental Health Perspectives, Brett Singer group found that a significant portion of residences exceed outdoor air quality standards for several pollutants on a weekly basis as a result of cooking with gas burners. 

Salmonella bacteria is most frequently spread to humans by infected food and as they develop a resistance to one group of antibiotics they are also less susceptible to killing by other, unrelated antibiotics and a biocide used in common household items. 

Researchers have discovered that a common mutation in Salmonella, which makes it resistant to fluoroquinolones, an important class of antibiotics, also allows survival of bacteria in the presence of other antibiotics or the biocide, triclosan. Triclosan is an antibacterial and antifungal agent found in toothpastes, deodorants and soaps. 

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.