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Why is it that after listening to music, the last song you hear sometimes replays in your mind for several minutes after the music stops? —Dave VanArsdale, via e-mail Andrea Halpern, professor of psychology at Bucknell University, offers this explanation: TUNES THAT GET STUCK in the head, evocatively called “earworms,” are probably related to the more common experience of simply being able to call up from memory any familiar tune. For instance, try thinking of a song you know, such as “Happy Birthday....

Benhur Lee may have discovered a medical silver bullet—one that can disable HIV, the exotic Ebola virus, the common flu and possibly every kind of enveloped virus on the planet. Working from his laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, Lee came across this bullet after first creating a hybrid virus, one that combined the envelope (or outer surface) of the deadly Nipah virus and the core of the benign vesicular stomatitis virus....

A new effort to create tailor-made medicine for patients around the U.S. is getting a boost from a $215-million presidential initiative. It’s an ambitious undertaking fraught with concerns about patient privacy, funding and how such data would be stored. But because it’s such an innovative idea, there are few blueprints to work with. The broad federal effort, first announced during Pres. Barack Obama’s State of the Union address and then fleshed out with a few more details and a presidential East Room address last week, would create a personal health care information database of more than a million individuals....

From Nature magazine The results of China’s eight-year national marine survey paint a disturbing picture of its coastal environment. The survey, launched in 2004 by the Chinese State Oceanic Administration (SOA) and completed last month, is the country’s “most comprehensive marine survey so far,” says Gao Kunshan, a marine ecologist at Xiamen University, who was not involved in the project. It “provides a basis to protect and manage marine resources,” Liu Xigui, chief of the SOA, told China National Radio....

We live in an age obsessed with popularity. Adults spend more and more of their time thinking, and behaving, like high school students. In a new book—called, yes, Popular—psychologist Mitch Prinstein explores popularity with a scientist’s eye. Prinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that there are, in fact, two types of popularity and that we as a culture have settled on the more dysfunctional type....

After announcing that the herbal supplement kratom would be made as illegal as heroin, the Drug Enforcement Administration is now reconsidering its decision, a US official familiar with the process told STAT on Wednesday morning. In late August, the DEA announced that it would ban the substance for two or three years, a step that it could take unilaterally in a case it deems to be a “public health crisis.” Kratom is a plant from Southeast Asia often used to self-treat opioid withdrawal, chronic pain, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder....

The incoming Biden administration should press U.S. defense and intelligence agencies to do more about climate change, a panel of national security experts said yesterday. And one way to do it is through the power of their massive federal budgets. The talk, hosted by the Center for Climate and Security, was centered on the advocacy group’s Climate Security Plan for America, released in 2019. The plan calls on officials in the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and elsewhere to develop holistic strategies to meet the threat of climate change and mitigate the country’s contributions to its destabilizing effects....

When Rose Eitmiller found a new house on Sweet Pea Lane in Dewey-Humboldt, Ariz., population 3,613, she felt at home. She was still mourning the death of a daughter whom she always called “Sweetpea,” and the place seemed right to her. But that move in 2004 only brought more heartache for Eitmiller. Four years later, U.S. EPA dug up her front lawn in a successful search for arsenic, and Dewey-Humboldt soon became a Superfund site....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Long time math fans may remember our first foray into the world of percentages way back in the 12th and 13th episodes of the podcast. In those shows we learned what percentages are, how they’re related to fractions, how to use percentages to easily calculate tips at restaurants, and how to use percentages to easily calculate sales prices when shopping....

Passage of the Senate’s health care bill, as proposed, would risk eroding national health in one little-discussed way, according to medical experts: It would eliminate cash that pays for vaccines to protect the most vulnerable among us from diseases like mumps, measles or the flu. Former Pres. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) currently requires new health insurance plans to cover federally recommended vaccines for adults and children, without making patients share the costs through co-pays or deductibles—a “first dollar” coverage mandate meant to help Americans overcome the financial obstacle that had prevented some from obtaining important vaccinations....

NASA’s Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009 and stopped taking data last year after a mechanical failure. Yet in its relatively short lifetime, it has offered up a wealth of discovery. In February scientists announced a new harvest that brought Kepler’s tally of discovered planets to nearly 1,700. “This is the biggest haul ever,” says Jason Rowe of the nasa Ames Research Center, who co-led the research. The scientists studied more than 1,200 planetary systems and validated 715 planets....

Some half a million people worldwide with severe hearing loss use an electronic implant in the ears to be able to let them understand speech. Cochlear implants, as they are known, are one of the most successful technologies to have come out of neuroscience, but only provide partial correction for any hearing deficit. They are not a bionic device that lets people enjoy a Mozart symphony or make out a friend’s gossip in the din of an outing at a local club....

Predicting the future is usually a sucker’s bet. Conversely, making bets might be an unusually sound way of predicting the future. That prem­ise lies behind the plethora of futures markets that have sprung up in recent years, inspired by the success of commodities markets at determining the best time to go long on soybeans. Some political observers have begun to trust that if futures markets can anticipate the price of pork bellies, they should foresee the outcome of congressional races, too—possibly better than traditional polls can....

Millipedes are hard to tell apart. Different species of the many-legged creatures often share the same dull colors and tend to blend in with the gloom of the forest floor. But under ultraviolet light, some millipedes display a striking characteristic: their genitals glow brightly. Stephanie Ware, a research assistant at Chicago’s Field Museum, and her colleagues have used this strange fluorescence to help identify the leggy arthropods. Ware rigged up a camera with inexpensive UV flashlights to capture images of millipedes’ glimmering “gonopods,” specialized appendages used for copulation....

Shocking Science Shattered Nerves: How Science Is Solving Modern Medicine’s Most Perplexing Problem by Victor D. Chase. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 ($27.50) Almost from the time electricity was discovered, scientists suspected it was involved in human and animal motion. They used electricity to make frogs’ legs jump and, less successfully, to try to reanimate the dead. Today modern science can use a judicious jolt of electricity to restart a stopped heart under the right circumstances....

Governor Andrew Cuomo has warned that New York State is running out of time to get enough ventilators to treat the sickest coronavirus patients. Without them, vastly more New Yorkers could die. But the number of ventilators is not the only bottleneck: hospitals around the country are worried that a surge in COVID-19 patients will catch them short of the staff needed to run the lifesaving machines. In a typical hospital intensive care unit, one nurse takes care of one or two patients at a time, says Ali Raja, a physician and executive vice chair of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital....

When Martin Levy, an orthopedic surgeon and Border Collie enthusiast, began training his dogs to navigate agility courses nearly 20 years ago, he never expected to one day use the same techniques to train medical residents. “Over time, I started to realize that we had better tools for training our dogs than our residents,” says Levy, the residency program director for orthopedic surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Levy decided to use these tools to help new doctors learn the tricks of the trade....

Although racial disparities continue to plague the health care system there is one bright spot: the gap in kidney transplants appears to have closed. For the first time rates of such transplants among white and black patients are at equal levels, according to an analysis of almost 200,000 end-stage kidney disease patients. The change comes mostly as a result of deliberate policy changes made to help eliminate the racial gap rather than any particular medical improvement in transplantations....

On a Sunday morning in 1963 Theodore Millon woke up in a Pennsylvania hospital. He was in bed at a psychiatric ward shared by 30 patients. One of them thought he was Jesus Christ, another believed he was the pope, and a third claimed he was a corporate CEO who had been hospitalized by mistake. Millon began to fret. “I am wearing a hospital gown like all the other patients,” he thought....

German rocket physicist and astronautics engineer Wernher von Braun played a crucial role in developing the rocket technology, including the Saturn 5 , that put U.S. astronauts on the surface of the moon in 1969. Just 17 years earlier, when spaceflight was little more than a dream, von Braun worked for the U.S. Army building ballistic missiles. It was during this time that the future and first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala....