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What should we do with old prescription medicines? The pharmacy won’t take them back, and most charities won’t take them either. Most people flush them down the toilet, not realizing that they end up in the water we drink, so that we’re “taking” lots of medicines that haven’t been prescribed for us.

Water treatment processes remove dangerous bacteria but aren’t able to remove dissolved medicines. Scientists say that the water in many cities is contaminated with estrogen from the urine of women on replacement hormones and birth control pills. But we’re not only drinking estrogen–The U.S. Geological Survey has found traces of painkillers, antidepressants, blood-pressure medicines and more in water samples from 30 different states.
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Scientists are studying the “Blond Eskimos” of Canada to find out if they’re related to early Viking explorers. Viking settlements mysteriously disappeared from Canada by the fifteenth century?did they go home, die off, of integrate into the local population?

“It’s an old story,” says researcher Gisli Palsson. “We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit?The Icelandic sagas, at several points, mention the Norse in Greenland meeting people who belong to other cultures.”
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People taste and smell things very differently, which is why one person loves broccoli and another person can’t stand it. This means it may be impossible to convince your child to eat foods he hates. And our taste buds also reveal whether or not we’re alcoholics.

Our senses of smell and taste are controlled by 1,000 genes, over half of which are completely inactive. 50 of these 500 inactive genes are switched on in some people, but not in others, which may be why tastes differ. Every human has a different pattern of active and inactive odor-detecting receptors, depending on which genes are switched on and how sensitive we are to them, and people from different ethnic groups taste and smell things differently.
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Ever wonder why churches have organs instead of pianos? The people who devised church services knew what they were doing, because organs emit infrasound, which is lower than 20 Hertz. Although it’s inaudible to the human ear, it creates religious feelings in people.

Jonathan Amos writes in BBC News that scientists conducted an experiment in a London concert hall and found they could instill feelings of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and shivers down people’s spines by sneaking infrasound into the music they were listening to.

Recent studies have shown that elephants communicate this way, and that volcanoes that are getting ready to erupt may also produce infrasound. Some people think that haunted houses may be associated with it.
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