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Researchers recently monitored the behavior of thousands of people as they sang along to more than a thousand tunes and say they have uncovered the common traits in songs that are most 'catchy'.That's right. If you like to song along to some songs more than others, there is a sort-of science reason why; it helps to be a man, though ironically with a higher-pitched voice.The four core elements that trigger people's inclination to sing, according to musicologist Dr. Alisun Pawley and psychologist Dr. Daniel Mullensiefen are:

In claims about math performance among females, and the sociological implication that unknown  cultural pressure in schools made the mentally malleable fairer sex believe they couldn't do math even if they could, there was always one inconvenient truth  - in America, over 70% of teachers are women, so if there was sexism women were doing it.A study at the University of the Basque Country finds a more pervasive link between the sexist attitudes of mothers and that of children - and gender and the family's socio-economic and cultural level to sexism. Mothers teach more gender than discrimination than fathers.

Nothing says science like a beetle humping a beer bottle - and it earned Professors Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz a coveted Ig Nobel prize.If you have been living under the science equivalent of a rock, you may not know the Ig Nobel prizes are parodies of the Nobel kind and are presented annually by the Annals of Improbable Research.

A recent study fed rats homobrassinolide, found in the mustard plant, which produced an anabolic effect, and increased appetite and muscle mass, as well as the number and size of muscle fibers.  So maybe you can get ripped by gardening a little more. Homobrassinolide, a type of brassinosteroid found in plants, given orally to rats triggered a response similar to anabolic steroids, with minimal side effects. In addition, the research found that the stimulatory effect of homobrassinolide on protein synthesis in muscle cells led to increases in lean body mass, muscle mass and physical performance.

Efforts have long been underway to make the Système Internationale d'unités (SI Units) more accurate. If you know your science history, SI units were devised during the French Revolution as an alternative to the British System.   And so the French Academy of Sciences was tasked with the new system and promptly got the whole thing wrong.But SI units caught on and so efforts have been ongoing to make them more accurate.  Scientists like the idea to relate all of the unit definitions to fundamental constants of nature, making them stable and universal and giving them closer links to each other and the quantities they measure. 

Where would we be without relativity? Observations in astronomy are based on light emitted from stars and galaxies and the light will be affected by gravity, according to the General Theory of Relativity, which is actually quite special, despite its name. Observations are one thing, but interpretations in astronomy are based on the correctness of the theory of relatively, yet it has never been possible to test Einstein's theory of gravity on scales larger than the solar system. Astrophysicists at the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute say they have managed to get much bigger - 'grotesquely' bigger in their terms - and measure how the light is affected by gravity on its way out of galaxy clusters.  

The first video of tool use by a fish has been published in the journal Coral Reefs by Giacomo Bernardi, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the video, an orange-dotted tuskfish digs a clam out of the sand, carries it over to a rock, and repeatedly throws the clam against the rock to crush it. Tool use was once considered an exclusively human trait, but Jane Goodall's reports of tool use in chimpanzees in the 1960s changed that. Since then, many other animals have been observed using tools, including various primates, several kinds of birds, dolphins, elephants, and other animals.

Ice cream is big business in America.  Sales of ice cream and frozen desserts top $20 billion annually, according to the International Dairy Food Association, which is about 1.6 billion gallons per year or 23 quarts per person per year. It's consumed by nearly 90 percent of households (vegans - bah).  According to the National Ice Cream Retailers Association, ice cream consumption grew nearly 25 percent from a year ago and nearly 10 percent of American milk goes into frozen treats.It's too late for this summer, but some time soon you could be enjoying an experimental ice cream that starts as one flavor then shifts to another before being swallowed.It's not vanilla and chocolate mixed, it's vanilla transformed.

Women who increase consumption of caffeinated coffee have lower risk of depression, according to a report in Archives of Internal Medicine.

If health care is free, more people will go to the doctor and that means longer waiting for people who truly need it. An overburdened health care system would then have to hire less-qualified people to meet the needs, and that is bad.  If the president suddenly says every family will get a three star-chef, for example, they won't actually get a three-star chef, they'll get a McDonald's fry cook dressed like a chef.Yet we spend a lot for great care.  Some contend Americans get too much health care under the current system, meaning rationing under a nationalized system would not really hurt anyone.  Who is making that claim?  Economists in favor of government health care, mostly.

Are students inspired to go into physics because of a television show like "The Big Bang Theory"?  Probably not, or else 60% of America would be cops and lawyers.But chemistry has a bad reputation, argues a recent editorial in Nature Chemistry, and "Breaking Bad" gets some of the blame for keeping its reputation bad.   It's a cable show on AMC, so not exactly on the minds of all that many people, but it chronicles the transformation of Walter White from suburban high school chemistry teacher to crystal meth dealer and criminal mastermind who uses his chemistry expertise (poisons, noxious gases, and acid) to eliminate rival meth dealers. 

Researchers have created a protein 'switch' that instructs cancer cells to produce their own anti-cancer medication and lab tests showed it can activate a powerful cell-killing drug when the device detects a marker linked to cancer. The goal in cancer treatment is to some day cause cancer cells to self-destruct  and spare healthy tissue, damage to all tissue being the downside to current treatments like chemotherapy.