In 2014, drugs and alcohol are used primarily for pleasure and not to commune with nature or contact the spirit world.

In ancient times, opium poppies and hallucinogenic mushrooms were for gifted elites and their use went hand-in-hand with shamanistic belief systems and the sacred burial rituals of pre-industrial societies, according to a recent paper. 

Multiple lines of evidence incorporating 40 years of observations that six massive glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector "have passed the point of no return", a worrisome sign for melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Those glaciers already contribute to sea level rise, releasing as much ice into the ocean each year as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet does. They contain enough ice to boost the global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said the findings will require that current predictions of sea level rise be revised upward.

Is it The Day After Tomorrow imagery that environmentalists and a lot of journalists like to create?

For more than two decades, members of the United Nations have sought to forge an agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but international climate negotiations have had limited success.

What percentage of plants in the world are woody?

There is an optimum size for electrical networks if you want to avoid blackouts - and that does not mean making things better and more redundant. 

Being the right size is a common topic in fields like biology. In 1928, geneticist John Haldane wrote the essay "On being the right size" in which he stated that "For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form".
This became known as Haldane's Principle.

It applies to power networks also, according to the results of a study done by researchers at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Iowa State University.

Gamergates look like ordinary workers but inside things are changing: their brains shrink by 25 percent, their ovaries expand to fill their abdomens and their life expectancy jumps from months to years.

Why? Researchers wanted to find out.

So they took some workers from a colony and separated them from their gamergates. These workers effectively formed their own colony and began fighting to establish dominance.

When some of the workers in the new colony (Colony B) began to get the upper hand, they were removed. They found that these dominant ants had begun to produce elevated levels of dopamine – more than other workers, though less than full-fledged gamergates.

The astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli first described them as 'canali' in the 19th century. A conspicuous net-like system of deep gorges known as the Noctis Labyrinthus is clearly visible on Mars' equatorial region.

The gorge system, in turn, leads into another massive canyon, the Valles Marineris, which is 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and 7 km deep. Both of these together would span the US completely from east to west.

These gorges resemble terrestrial canyons formed by water so most researchers assumed that immense flows of water must have carved the Noctis Labyrinthus and the Valles Marineris into the surface of Mars. Or perhaps tectonic activity had created the largest rift valley on a planet in our solar system.

A genetic mutation
that causes albinism
 in Doberman pinschers has been identified. And the researchers discovered that type of albinism has certain characteristics that are evident in humans too. 

Paige Winkler, a doctoral student in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University, and Joshua Bartoe, an assistant professor in the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, led the effort to discover the mutated gene that is associated with a form of albinism in humans. 

A new robot is capable of reacting quickly and catching objects with complex shapes, like bottles and tennis rackets, in less than 5/100ths of a second.

The robot arm measures about 1.5 meters long, has three joints and a hand with four fingers. It was programmed at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
 (LASA) and designed to test robotic solutions for capturing moving objects.