Many of the choices we make are informed by experiences we've had in the past but we know that sometimes it is better to throw all that out and take a risk on something new.

Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have shown that the brain can temporarily disconnect information about past experience from decision-making circuits, thereby triggering random behavior. 

Concrete is the world’s most-used construction material and thus a leading contributor to global warming, producing perhaps 10 percent of industry-generated greenhouse-gas emissions.

Industry is already reducing greenhouse emissions, such as by using more natural gas and less coal to generate cost-effective electricity, and a new suggests another low-impact way go green - reducing concrete emissions by more than half and getting a stronger, more durable material using science rather than rationing.

Mother Nature may be out to kill us but we shouldn't take it personally. She is out to kill everything. We just never noticed in the past. 

Today, thanks to long-term science projects, we can see how nature pits species off against each other. And biologists are studying streams to optimize how to prevent tallgrass prairies from turning into shrublands and forests.

People who practice yoga and meditation long term can learn to control a computer with their minds faster and better than people with little or no yoga or meditation experience, find biomedical engineers at the University of Minnesota writing in TECHNOLOGY.

The nice thing about telescopes is that we can look back in time - light that is reaching us now may have originated a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which means astronomers can view the universe as it was when it was much younger.

But sometimes we can be fooled by entire galaxies. DDO 68, otherwise known as UGC 5340, a ragged collection of stars and gas clouds, at first was thought to be a recently-formed galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood.

But it's not as young as it looks. 

For some people, their own standard is much more demanding that anything the outside world could expect. Perfectionism is a bigger risk factor in suicide than it is credited for, says York University Psychology Professor Gordon Flett, who is calling for closer attention to its potential destructiveness, adding that clinical guidelines should include perfectionism as a separate factor for suicide risk assessment and intervention.