Rank of “disappointed” among terms used by Americans in an October survey to describe their feelings about the government: 1 Soul Asylum – Misery

Percentage of Americans who say government programs don’t help their families: 54 Everything but the Girl – Wrong

Tons of marijuana the Mexican government burned in October following a major seizure: 148 Cheech & Chong – Let’s Make a Dope Deal

Percentage of developing nations whose economies have grown faster than the United States’ since 2001: 89 Billy Pilgrim – Uh-Oh

Average annual household income in Myanmar last year: $459 Meaghan Smith – Poor

Portion of Ukranian voters in an October survey who said they would be willing to sell their vote: 1/4 Billy Joel – Honesty

Percentage of bills proposed by the last Congress that became law: 3 Martin Sexton – Failure

Percentage of U.S. parents who rank bullying as their greatest fear for their children: 30 Indigo Girls – Kid Fears

Number of check-cashing shops currently operating in San Francisco: 141 The Call – Criminal

Number of countries with which the United States has a trade deficit: 77 Freeez – I.O.U. (12″ Mix)

Number of U.S. states that provide paid leave to parents: 2 Van Halen – Not Enough

Chance that an American teen suffers from a severe emotional or behavioral disorder: 1 in 5 Warren Zevon – Disorder in the House

Researchers suggested that homosexuality in men may be an evolutionary advantage if it is caused by a set of “feminizing” genes and if men who carry sub-critical numbers of those genes are rendered more sensitive and therefore less likely to kill their own offspring. Gays and lesbians were found to have the most masculine and feminine voices among men and women, respectively, and people with sexy voices were found to have more symmetrical, attractive features. Devo, “Jocko Homo”

Biologists dated the emergence of vocal sounds to 400 million years ago by studying the gruntings of male toadfish and midshipmanfish, both of which hum deeply to attract females and growl threateningly to ward off rivals. The Band, “We Can Talk”

Scientists discovered a sexually deceptive orchid so convincing that male wasps will mate with it to the point of ejaculation. Because unfertilized female wasps can produce sons but not daughters, the orchids on which the wasps waste their sperm will eventually create a larger population of male wasps to pollinate them. Joe Henry, “Mean Flower”

It was determined that male bees prefer sex with Ophrys orchids to sex with female bees, that straight men with attractive partners have more sex not because the partners are attractive but to discourage infidelity, and that men who are deceitful, narcissistic thrill-seekers also have more sex. Pat Benatar, “Sex As a Weapon”

Scientists discovered that watermelon rinds possess a Viagra-like chemical and were hoping to breed a race of aphrodisiac super-melons wherein the flesh, too, will possess the chemical. Brazilian researchers may have created human sperm cells by injecting pulp from the teeth of human babies into the testicles of mice, and sensory analysts created the perfect cheese sandwich. Computers are now better than people at air hockey. U2, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”

Light-carbon isotopes uncovered in Australia’s Jack Hills suggest that life may have existed on Earth in the Hadean eon, predating the Late Heavy Bombardment — after which life is commonly thought to have arisen — by several hundred million years. Underwater volcanism was blamed for the Late Cretaceous Anoxic Event that wiped out most marine life; a team of paleontologists found that there have been only three major mass extinctions in the past 540 million years, not five; and geologists correlated every mass extinction in that period with rising sea levels. Juliana Hatfield, “Dying Proof”

The world was about to run out of the elements gallium, hafnium, and indium. Zinc will not disappear until 2037. Boogie Down Productions, “Elementary”

Toxic clouds from Africa were threatening Caribbean coral reefs, the North Pole was forecast to have its first ice-free summer in recorded history, the Wilkins Ice Shelf was splitting off from Antarctica, and the world’s penguins were dying out. Scott Miller and the Commonwealth, “Goddamn the Sun” (live)

In space, the Earth’s shrieking could be heard; Mars’s soil, said chemists, will support asparagus. Yes, “Universal Garden”

Scientists discovered that eating blueberries and having friends are good for the memory and that pregnancy and smoking are bad for it. Nautiluses can remember useful things, but only for a day, whereas cuttlefish, which are much more sophisticated cephalopods, observe and form preferences for their future prey when they are still embryos. (Robert Plant, “Memory Song” [download])

Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies’ brains, and Canadian researchers said that straining to recall information on the tip of the tongue makes us learn our mistaken guesses rather than the correct answers we eventually remember. (Paul Carrack, “Tip of My Tongue” [download])

Strokes were found to generate depolarization waves that spread outward from the affected area and damage other parts of the brain. Geologists reported that large earthquakes often trigger other seismic events in distant parts of the world; a Franco-Turkish team of seismologists found that the hypersonic energy pulses unleashed by supershear earthquakes may awaken dormant faults nearby; and massive-slow-motion ice-quakes were shaking the West Antarctic Ice Sheet twice a day. (The Grateful Dead, “Ripple” [download])

Neuroscientists found that sloths sleep around nine and a half hours a day. Previous research had studied only captive sloths, who sleep on average sixteen hours a day, possibly because they are bored and depressed. (Mose Allison, “So Tired” [download])

Children exposed to lead are more likely to commit violent crimes as adults, children born to mothers who use cell phones while pregnant are 54 percent more likely to have behavioral problems, and children born to fathers older than forty-five are twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood. (Reverend Horton Heat, “‘D’ for Dangerous” [download])

An increase in pet-owl abandonment in Wales was blamed on Harry Potter. (The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Night Owl Blues” [download])

Widespread toxoplasmosis among marine mammals was attributed to anchovies’ consumption of cat feces, paleontologists unearthed a 380-million-year-old fossil of a fish giving live birth, and a Welsh geobiologist discovered immense populations of prokaryotic cells, which may individually be more than 100 million years old, living a mile beneath the ocean floor. The buried cells are possibly equal in biomass to all plant life on the Earth’s surface. (David Wilcox, “Mighty Ocean” [download])

Astronomers reported that Jupiter’s Little Red Spot is now as big as its Great Red Spot and that a third Red Spot has appeared. Cosmologists concluded that the universe is small. There is evidence of time before the Big Bang. (Deodato, “Also Sprach Zarathustra” [download])

A selection of “Findings” from the back page of Harper’s Magazine, June 2008.

A genetic variation affecting two thirds of East Asian men might allow them to take performance-enhancing testosterone undetected, a study found. As yet there exists only anecdotal evidence that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean athletes are more successful at cheating. (Randy Newman, “Yellow Man” [download])

Biologists warned that woody plants were poised to invade China, and phytologists in Europe confirmed that invasive Chinese black truffles threaten Perigord black truffles with extinction through interbreeding. (Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land” [download])

Scientists found that the DNA of platypuses comprises bird, mammal, and reptile genes, and that the Amazon molly fish has been reproducing asexually for 70,000 years but has avoided the rapid genetic deterioration associated with asexual vertebrates by stealing the DNA of its sister species. (Tears for Fears, “God’s Mistake” [download])

Australian biologists discovered that subordinate gobie fish restrict their eating so as not to grow large enough to threaten dominant fish, and primatologists found that subordinate female macaques, stressed from constant harassment by dominant females, tend to eat too much calorie-rich food. An overweight English hedgehog was reported to have lost weight on the Atkins diet. (The Staple Singers, “The Weight” [download])

Women who consume bananas before conception are more likely to bear boys. (Sparks, “Dick Around” [download])

Economists established that the 63 percent drop in Brazil’s birth rate between 1960 and 2000 was due in part to soap operas. (Ornette Coleman, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” [download])

Researchers were building robot nanoworms, designed to seek out and kill cancer cells, and swarms of robot dragonflies for the U.S. military. (Robyn, “Robotboy” [download])

The Earl of Cranbrook put forth that Borneo’s iconic pygmy elephants are actually an alien species introduced to the island centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu. (Freddie Stevenson, “If An Alien Astronomer Could See Us from Afar” [download])

Thai doctors were unable to verify whether nang bong caterpillars, which favor the leaves of the golden-shower tree, are an effective aphrodisiac, and Chinese zoologists found that exposure to cat urine makes male mice more aggressive and makes their urine more likely to attract females. South African scientists observed an Antarctic fur seal attempting to rape a king penguin. (R. Kelly, “You Remind Me of Something” [download])

Norway once had parrots. (Aztec Camera, “Birds” [download])

Ornithologists said that great tits can cope well with global warming, though British tits were found to be better adjusted than Dutch tits, and neuroscientists studying zebra finches found that baby birds babble before they become capable of adult birdsong. (Joe Walsh, “I.L.B.T.’s” [download])

Urban food deserts were growing in size and number throughout Canada, undersea deserts were expanding, the reduction of air pollution in North America was thought to be causing droughts in the Amazon, chemists warned that aquatic ecosystems could be destroyed by nanoparticle silver washing out of odor-fighting socks, and British meteorologists noted a foul “Euro-whiff” emanating from the Continent. (Freedy Johnston, “Gone Like the Water” [download])

Cosmologists postulated that the universe began not with a bang but with a splat, and suggested that the solar system may be situated within a billion-light-year-wide bubble of low density surrounded by a shell of high density, which would create, for observers on the Earth, the illusion that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. (Sonny Landreth and Eric Johnson, “The Milky Way Home” [download])

Geologists remained uncertain about why the Earth hums. (The Finn Brothers, “Gentle Hum” [download])

A selection of “Findings” from the back page of Harper’s Magazine, June 2008.

Scottish scientists found that women are instinctively attracted to the faces of men who want long-term relationships, whereas men are instinctively attracted to the faces of women who want one-night stands; French bio-statisticians declared Caucasian women to be more attractive than Caucasian men; a computer learned to identify beauty in Caucasian women; and a team of European sexologists reported that 40 percent of Italian couples were not having sex, due in part to Italian men’s declining sex drive and growing predilection for prostitutes and cybersex. (The Bar-Kays, “Sexomatic [12" Mix]” [download])

Students exposed to subliminal Apple logos were found to answer questions more creatively than subjects exposed to subliminal IBM logos.

Marine biologists revealed that male Abdopus aculeatus octopuses may strangle to death rivals in defending the females whom they have seduced by swimming in a feminine manner, and paleontologists discovered that sexual reproduction first appeared about 600 million years ago among tube-shaped creatures living in spats on the seafloor. The gonorrhea bacterium was determined to be the strongest organism in existence. (Yeasayer, “Germs” [download])

It was suggested that a pack of black squirrels in Russia had killed and eaten a dog because of a shortage of pine cones. Israeli researchers claimed to have identified a ruthlessness gene.

A California neurologist suggested that transgender men are born with neural structures that result in their experiencing a phantom penis, much as penile amputees sometimes experience phantom erections and phantom orgasms. (The Shins, “Phantom Limb” [download])

A 2,000-year-old ghost forest on the coast of Oregon was uncovered by rough seas. Eight-thousand-year-old Norwegian spruces in Sweden were growing rapidly due to a warming climate, scientists warned that melting ice sheets may trigger massive earthquakes (as seems to have happened at the end of the last ice age in Scandinavia), and geologists detected an unusual swarm of undersea earthquakes that could not be blamed on a tectonic fault.

Astronomers recorded footage of a tsunami traveling across the surface of the sun at a million miles an hour and deduced that the Saturnian moon Titan harbors an underground ocean of water and ammonia. (Guster, “The New Underground” [download])

As much as one-quarter of Earth’s beach sand is now made of plastic.

Goldfish were found to have reasonably good memories. (Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Melody for a Memory” [download])

Biologists found that those English soccer teams with red uniforms tend to win more often and score more goals than other teams, and a British psychologist found that soccer players are successful in direct proportion to the lengths of their ring fingers.

John Gorka, “Arms Length” (download)

Half of all women are estimated to have no G-spot.

An Australian study reported that college students make up 40 percent of Melbourne’s prostitutes.

Dan Bern, “Hooker” (download)

The tip of the nose was determined to be the place where harsh and unpleasant smells are sensed.

Russian officials discovered a boy who was raised among birds and speaks only in chirps.

Mac & Katie Kissoon, “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” (download)

King penguins were threatened by global warming, blue penguins were threatened by cars, Florida vultures were attacking cars, and male starlings exposed to estrogen-mimicking pollutants were observed to sing long, complex songs that make them attractive to females.

Prozac was revealed not to work, researchers demonstrated that placebos are more effective if the drugs for which they stand in are said to be more expensive, and a Scottish study determined that roughly half of a person’s happiness is due to genetics.

Joe Satriani, “Rubina’s Blue Sky Happiness” (download)

Physicists stored and retrieved a nothing.

Astronomers found that soot floating in interstellar space — rather than dark energy — may be responsible for the dimness of faraway galaxies, and suggested that the early universe was populated by large stars composed of dark matter.

Bill Frisell, “Pretty Stars Were Made to Shine” (download)

Paleontologists unearthed the 55-million-year-old fossil of a mouse-sized primate in Mississippi and the 70-million-year-old fossil of a beach ball-size Beelzebufo (“devil frog”) in Madagascar.

Butterflies and moths remember their lives as caterpillars.

Mason Jennings, “Butterfly” (download)

Honeybees can recognize individual human faces.

Goldfish have reasonably good memories.

Van Morrison, “Goldfish Bowl” (download)