If climate change sends us all back to the Stone Age, we wouldn't be the first culture. Or at least to the Bronze Age.

It used to be that changes in climate were simply history, now they are an indictment of everything we might hold dear, like electricity.

4,100 years ago, write scholars in Geology, an abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon affected northwest India and the resulting drought coincided with the beginning of the decline of the metropolis-building Indus civilization that spanned present-day Pakistan and India.

Canada has gotten a bizarre sort of entrepreneurial in the last decade. With Toronto mayor Rob Ford making headlines and a booming ecstasy industry, they have become a party destination. 

And that success has led to even newer designer highs which are flooding the drug market.

"The chemists who are making these drugs are coming up with about 10 new drugs per year; the legislation cannot keep up with the market," said University of Alberta pharmacologist Alan Hudson, who studies how ecstasy and other drugs affect brain neurochemistry. "The best way forward is to educate people that they're playing Russian roulette—the health risks from taking these drugs are high, and potentially lethal."

Numerous studies have concluded that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school.

Why would that be? Is it the mother-baby bonding time, something in breast milk or other attributes of families that have mothers who breastfeed their babies?

Sociologists from Brigham Young University think they have the answer and pinpoint two sources of this cognitive boost: Responding to children's emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those things, said lead author Ben Gibbs. 

Once a month, millions of women change their economic behavior and become more focused on their social standing relative to other women, says a paper written by scholars from The University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Minnesota.

Why are women such slaves to the moon? It's the ovulatory cycle, they assert, and it alters women's behavior by subconsciously motivating them to outdo other women. 

The Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope has providec the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula and what they found lends new insight into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars.

Stretching across almost 100 light-years of space, the Snake nebula is located about 11,700 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

In images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope it appears as a sinuous, dark tendril against the starry background, thus the name. It was targeted in the new study because it shows the potential to form many massive stars - stars that are 8 times heavier than our Sun.

Wind farms are not very good. Yes, politicians embrace them because the unions advocating them donate heavily to campaigns, and environmentalists advocate them because they always advocate something new until it becomes popular (natural gas the 1980s, ethanol in the 1990s, then wind - anything but nuclear) but aside from a lot of dead endangered birds, wind hasn't helped much.

But concern that wind farms would cause more global warming are overblown. They don't help, and they are unsightly and ridiculously expensive, but they sure don't hurt, even though they were previously implicated in more heat and rainfall in Europe.