Polystyrene, one of the world's most common plastics (one popular product is Styrofoam), degrades in decades when exposed to sunlight, rather than thousands of years as previously claimed. 

Polystyrene has been routinely detected in the world's oceans since the 1970s., though at nowhere near levels it should be. In fact, only 1 percent of the plastic that should be found is detectable. Chemistry may be why.

"Le Roman de la Rose" (The Romance of the Rose) was started in 1230 and completed around 1280. It is a medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision and some parts that were later removed are quite steamy.

Its 22,000 lines describe the attempts of a courtier to woo his beloved. It was a medieval blockbuster, at least among the wealthy who could afford books, and a century later Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, adopted and translated it for a new audience.

Now the oldest surviving pages, used as a folder or binding for other documents, have been revealed. Parchment was durable but expensive so it was common for it to be reused. 

Global warming did once kill off a once-common species, but it was the transition from the last Ice Age to the current warming period, starting 15,000 years ago.

That well-known species was the woolly mammoth but it managed to hang on until 2,000 B.C. Its last known habitat was Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean. Ice ages happen in cycles, in recent geological history about 90,000 of every 100,000 years the planet has seen the planet covered in far more ice, and during the last one, mammoths were widespread, from Spain to Alaska.

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.