An estimate finds that a northward shift of Earth's wind and rain belts could make a broad swath of regions drier, including the Middle East, American West and Amazonia, while making Monsoon Asia and equatorial Africa wetter.

A survey of gun dealers and pawnbrokers in 43 U.S. states found nearly unanimous support for denying gun purchases for criminals and mentally ill people who have a history of violence or alcohol or drug abuse; conditions that might have prevented Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis from legally purchasing a firearm.

Mild winters in Northern Europe are thanks to the Gulf Stream, which makes up part of those ocean currents spanning the globe that have always impacted the climate.

Yet our climate is also influenced by huge eddies, black holes of turbulence over 90 miles in diameter, that rotate and drift across the ocean. Their number is reportedly on the rise in the Southern Ocean, increasing the northward transport of warm and salty water. A good thing, because this could moderate the negative impact of melting sea ice in a warming climate. 

Proton therapy, an external beam radiotherapy in which protons deliver precision radiation doses to a tumor and therefore help spare healthy organs and tissues, is a cost-effective alternative to standard photon radiation therapy in treating medulloblastomas, fast-growing brain tumors that mainly affect children.

Hyperlink films, which use cinematic devices such as flashbacks, scenes out of chronological order, split screens and voiceovers to create an interacting network of storylines and characters across space and time, mirror contemporary globalized communities, it is said.

However, films in this genre like "Memento", "Love Actually" and "Crash" are not as new and innovative as believed - they still conform to conventional cinematic and social patterns, say scholars after an examination of twelve hyperlink films, ten female interest conventional films and examples from the real world and classical fiction.  

A recently published paper strongly suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women — for example, cheating on a partner or stealing a girl from another guy — because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control. At least when it comes to those of college age.

Previous papers have said that men are more likely than women to pursue romantic partners that are "off limits" but there has been no real theoretical explanation for this sex difference.

The solar system is crowded with small objects like asteroids and comets, and most have stable orbits which keep them out of harm’s way, but a small proportion of them are in orbits that risk collision with planets.

Smaller objects are more numerous and therefore result in more frequent collisions. The recent meteor seen over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013, was rare because the object was relatively large, around 17 meters across. However, the giant planet Jupiter is a much bigger target due to its tremendous gravitational attraction -- and it gets hit far more often than the Earth. The collisions are also much faster, happening at a minimum speed of 60 kilometers per second.

Working with cells in vitro and in mice, researchers have discovered that an antioxidant called ethoxyquin, a chemical commonly used as a dog food preservative, may prevent the kind of painful nerve damage found in the hands and feet of four out of five cancer patients taking the chemotherapy drug Taxol.

Ethoxyquin is a Food and Drug Administration-approved preservative and was shown in the new experiments to bind to certain cell proteins in a way that limits their exposure to the damaging effects of Taxol, the researchers say.