On:

Is your grandmother constantly playing Bingo? Do your friends take every vacation in Las Vegas, even though they can’t afford to lose? When relatives come to visit, do they always make a detour to a nearby Indian reservation in order to gamble? You can have a gambling problem the same way you can be addicted to alcohol or drugs?it’s the same personality profile. And just like alcoholics and drug addicts, gamblers need the help of a twelve-step program.
read more

On:

“Ear worms” are not parasites invading our ears, they are tunes you can’t get out of your head. Scientists want to learn what makes a tune so catchy, it “hooks” your brain so you can’t forget it. Advertisers and jingle writers would like to know this secret too.
read more

On:

It’s official: the weather bureau has announced that this is the hottest summer ever in the US. At least 40 people have died from the heat in Phoenix, but places that are usually much cooler in the summer, such as upstate New York, are experiencing an incredible heat wave as well. As those of you familiar with global warming know, the world doesn’t just get hotter, weather patterns get more extreme. This accounts for the incredibly unusual phenomenon of a tornado in the UK.
read more

On:

It took a hacker’s threat to get scientists to reveal the existence of the 10th planet that has recently been discovered in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. Why the information was being kept secret is unknown.

Alicia Chang writes in the (UK) Independent that a conference announcing the discovery of the newest planet in our solar system was quickly set up by Michael Brown, of the California Institute of Technology, after a the website that originally announced the discovery had been hacked and the hacker threatened to release the information.
read more