The iPhone 5 is on sale today — on track to being Apple’s biggest iPhone hit ever, with people lining up around the world and two million pre-orders.

European leaders converged on Rome today for a series of meetings. Things have been relatively calm since the European Central Bank announced a rescue plan, but chaos often seems just below the surface. Italy and Greece together put out a statement meant to reassure you, me, and everybody that they do not ever, ever, ever want to leave the Euro.
 
EU regulators have cleared the way for one giant music company to buy another: Universal wants to purchase EMI. But the Europeans, as is often the case, have a few conditions — so as to assure the new entity doesn’t have too much market power. The merged company would have to sell the labels of some of its biggest artists, including Coldplay, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie. The Beatles, however, get to stay.

In the ’90s, a federal program called “Moving to Opportunity” gave housing vouchers to very poor families in five of America’s biggest cities. The idea was to move out of their present neighborhood, and presumably to somewhere better. A new report in the ournal Science tells us a few important things about how those families fared — some of it’s encouraging; some of it, not so much.

If you’re looking for bright spots in this economy, you can get a buzz from the craft brewing industry. Sales are up, and local beers are springing up all over. Now many of those brewers want to make it easier for customers to bring home their beer —
and the key is a refillable container called a “growler.”

Benetton is an Italian clothing company that’s been known to court controversy with its ads over the years. And a new campaign is making waves. But this time it’s for a different reason: critics say it’s…  Kinda boring. 

Every year a group called the Annals of Improbable Research hands out the IG Nobel Prizes. Let’s have a look at some of this year’s winners, shall we?

• A physicist at Stanford used mathematics to explain the shape of the human ponytail.

• Researchers at the University of California looked at why people spill their coffee.

• Three Dutch psychologists discovered that people estimating the height of the Eiffell Tower give lower estimates when they are leaning to the left.

• And a neuroscientist at U.C. Santa Barbara showed various pictures to a dead salmon, and measured the emotional reactions in its brain.