If you want to find the gay neighborhood in a new town, look for the tanning salons, according to a new analysis. Neighborhoods with high proportions of gay and bisexual men are twice as likely to have an indoor tanning salon than other neighborhoods.

Some will try to argue that the tanning industry is targeting gay and bisexual men ("just like Big Tobacco" is the cliché) but they are already six times more likely than heterosexual men to tan indoors so the stores are going up where the customers are. Due to high usage, gay and bisexual men are about twice as likely to suffer from skin cancer as heterosexual men but all people should stop using tanning beds.

A decade ago there was concern about a mass die-off of bees, and while they rebounded nicely, it shone a light on a problem that has occurred since recordkeeping of bees first began over a thousand years ago. Mass die-offs are common.

While it was once believed to be just random bad luck, and modern environmentalists tried to claim it was pesticides in their war against agricultural scientists, the recent problems have instead been varroa mites. 

These parasites are just a couple of millimeters in size but they infiltrate colonies and infect bees with viruses and do it will. Yet until their plague on bees got attention in corporate media, so-called Colony Collapse Disorder, there had been little study of the mite's biology.

The imagery of the ideal housewife was just what it reads like, a convention fabricated by male-dominated urban advertising executives to sell stuff.

Because it was an ideal, some women adopted it, and some men wanted it, and therefore it grew, but it largely faded away as culture wised up to claims about organic food and alternative medicine in the early 2000s.

Though prebiotics are a fad outside the chemotherapy sector, there is little evidence they do anything positive or negative in humans. Except in horses, where they seem to do something negative.

Before they can reach the intestines, commercially available supplements partially break down in the animals' stomachs, which can lead to inflammation of the stomach lining. So if you really feel the need to give a horse prebiotics, preparing  food supplements so that they don't take effect until they reach the large intestine. 

Political events can take a serious toll on mental health - at least in one case. A man with a brief episode of acute psychosis convinced a doctor it was triggered by the 2016 Referendum on Brexit--the process of the UK leaving the European Union (EU), which it joined in 1993.

The doctor describes the case of a middle aged man, brought to hospital by paramedics in an acute psychotic state, three weeks after the June 2016 Referendum result on the UK's departure from the EU.  The patient was confused and very agitated, with disordered thoughts and speech. He heard voices and was delusional. And he was paranoid, believing people were spying on him and planning to kill him, and that radio/TV discussions were targeted at him.

In 2006, a tiny brown pebble, equivalent to a raisin, sold at auction for $25,000. This inconsequential artifact was, in fact, William Shatner’s kidney stone. The US actor had persuaded doctors to return the grisly relic to him following surgery, so he could auction it for charity. It was bought by an online casino that added it to its collection of oddities, which include a grilled cheese sandwich graced with an image of the Virgin Mary. Stranger still, this extraordinary interest in curiosa is not an uncommon occurrence, neither today nor throughout history.