What we’re really thinking… (http://askinyourface.com/)

“Male brain,” “female brain,” “Don’t blame me, blame my brain“… Folk neuroscience is prevalent, but misguided (The Guardian).

Also misguided? These popular anti-heliocentrist videos (1 and 2) suggesting a sun-led “vortex” trailing planets around the galaxy, according to Slate’s Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait.

A case of HIV has been cured in a Mississippi infant. The WSJ breaks down the story with some useful Q-and-A’s.

IKEA is now implicated in the ever-widening European horse meat scandal (summarized in this infographic). The furniture retailer/low-cost cafeteria removed ground meat items from their menus in Europe and some parts of Asia. These include stuffed cabbage, veal burgers, wiener sausages, and their famous meatballs. The scandal has prompted calls to shorten food supply chains, as well as raised the question, why don’t more people knowingly eat horse meat?

Fish labeling has also come under recent scrutiny: last week’s study by Oceana, a conservation group, revealed that a third of 1,215 samples of fish purchased throughout the United States were mislabeled (see map). Sushi bars and vendors of snapper and tuna were among the worst offenders. Oceana’s study confirms results from 2004, as well as a  2008 high-school student project.

The Harper government’s rebuttal of last September’s report ranking Canada 55th in freedom of information (behind Mongolia) took 150 days to be released by the Treasury Board under the Access to Information Act. The same act is the focus of a new investigation over whether the muzzling of Canadian federal scientists is illegal; Rick Mercer feels pretty strongly about the issue.

A massive meteor entered the atmosphere last Friday and exploded over Chelyabinsk in central Russia, injuring over a thousand people and causing damage to thousands of buildings thanks to glass-shattering shockwaves.

With a diameter of 55 feet and weighing ten thousand tons, it’s the largest such object to collide with Earth in over a century.

Collectively, the multiple eyewitness videos, many from dashboard cameras, broke viral video records for rate of viewer growth over the weekend.

According to NASA, this fireball was not related to the predicted asteroid flyby on the same day (which you can observe in this time-lapse video). Google removed its Doodle for the asteroid out of respect for those injured by the meteor.

The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion has prompted “vindicated” scientists to argue for greater asteroid detection programs, a Russian politician to claim a cover-up of US weapons testing, and meteorite hunters to scour the Urals for valuable fragments (some of which may be for sale on eBay).