Let’s suppose your child wants to take a martial arts class. Being a conscientious parent, you check out the local dojos and find two good places. Both are suitable and well equipped. Both practice fighting with contact – but there’s one major difference. One dojo insists on a full range of protective padding – hands, feet, chest protectors, shin guards – the whole works. The other takes a much lighter approach – hands and feet, and sometimes not even those.
To the conscientious parent, the first place is going to look much safer, right? But when you look at the injury rates of the two dojos, you notice something odd: They’re about the same. The kids covered in foam padding are getting just as many bruises, scrapes, and sprains as the kids wearing almost none. What could be going on here?
What’s happening is a process known as risk compensation. It’s a tendency in humans to increase risky behavior proportionately as safeguards are introduced, and it’s very common. So common, in fact, as to render predictions of how well any given piece of safety equipment will work almost useless.
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When the human ear encounters music, a number of brain systems are engaged by the incoming sound. The music signal is first directed to the thalamus, which relays the information to the primary auditory cortex. Once activated, this part of the brain is thought to identify the fundamental elements of the music, such as pitch and loudness. The secondary auditory cortex then processes the harmony, melody and rhythmic patterns, and the tertiary auditory cortex seems to integrate everything into the overall experience of music. Such is the process to the best of modern science’s understanding, but the complex mental digestion of music is not yet fully understood. 
Deep beneath the plains of central Texas lies a catacomb of tunnels once meant to house the most expensive physics experiment ever devised. That experiment, the Superconducting Supercollider, would have revolutionized our understanding of the physical world by giving us our first glimpse of the “God Particle.” And, proposed during the Cold War, it would have been a monument to the technological and scientific prowess of the Western world.
At a length of 5,522 miles (8,891 kilometers), Canada and the United States share the longest non-militarized border in the world. Today we think of the two nations as the friendliest of neighbors, but at one time both nations had somewhat detailed plans for attacking one another… just in case. 
The Nazi Blitzkrieg was a revolution in warfare that forced the rest of the world into a wild scramble to figure out how to dam the onslaught. The German tanks were fast and powerful, and very difficult for the conventional weapons of 1939 to repel. They rolled over Poland with nary a problem, and soon overran most all of Europe.
Many people have started to cut their use of fossil fuels. Some because of the onerous price of gasoline, some to curtail global warming, and some because they want to embrace the up-and-coming technologies of alternative energy. Most of the outcomes of this movement have been positive things, but in 2003 the state of Oregon started worrying about what would happen if normal people began getting too good at not needing oil, and bought less gasoline—therefore paid less gasoline tax.
Amnesia is a fascinating condition, and as such it comes up commonly in popular culture. It’s such a wonderful (and by wonderful, I mean wonderfully over-used) plot device – after an unfortunate whack on the head by a large blunt object, characters can be caught in precarious positions as they struggle to recall one key piece of information, acting as a detective of their own minds. Sometimes the amnesia is temporary, lasting long enough for one 22-minute television program; in others, their amnesia is a lifelong problem.