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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.

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.

Award winning wines tend to have high ethanol and sugar levels. according to a recent paper in the Journal of Wine Research that sought to know what characteristics were prevalent in the wines that won the top awards at an international wine competition.They crunched several years of data from the Mundus Vini Challenge, which is held twice a year in Germany, and found that large wine challenges tend to favor wines with high alcohol and sugar levels. Flavors often associated with sweetness, including exotic fruits in white wines and dried fruit and spiciness in reds, also increase the chances of winning top prizes.

Older people often talk about how they knew they had gone too far with their mothers. While a father might yell more a mother's tone would change into "that voice" and they knew they had gone over an invisible line.