People eat more with friends and family than when dining alone and evolutionary psychologists have defied Occam's razor and come up with an unne

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.

A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.

The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males.  

The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.

Google News was awash in suggestive headlines last week following the publication of a new paper purporting to show a link between occupational pesticide exposure and increased cardiovascular disease risk.

The organic food industry, even large players like Whole Foods, created a disturbing trend; lying to customers about whether or not organic food uses pesticides or chemicals.

In reality, organic food is covered in pesticides. If they were not, instead of only being an average of 13 percent more expensive than regular food (thanks to Amazon squeezing efficiency, it was 20 percent and higher when Whole Foods was a separate company) it would be 80 percent. Pests and other natural blights would devastate their crops.

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.

Placebo controls are a gold standard against which new treatments are often measured. If a new treatment consistently proves to be better than a placebo and safe, it can be marketed, sold and prescribed. Otherwise, it can’t – or at least shouldn’t. The problem is that, as our latest study reveals, researchers don’t report what placebos contain. Different placebos have different effects, and the choice of what’s in a placebo can lead to mistaken inferences about a new treatment’s benefits or harms.