Cocaine users display worse memory performance, concentration difficulties, and attentional deficits. They have difficulties understanding the perspective of others, show less emotional empathy, find it more difficult to recognize emotions from voices, behave in a less prosocial manner in social interactions and report fewer social contacts.

So why is it the second most popular drug in Europe, after marijuana? 

Scholars at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich say the worse emotional empathy was correlated with a smaller social network and the social cognitive deficits contribute to the development and perpetuation of cocaine addiction.

Do you understand the complexities of the brain's working memory? No one really does. Yet everyone knows how much RAM is in their phone or tablet or PC.

Using the RAM analogy, researchers say that working memory - a temporary memory system that keeps information readily accessible for a few minutes - in the brains of primates is a lot like a computer. But it's also in simpler mammals like rodents. RAM does not work like the brain, the brain works like RAM. Ray Kurzweil's singularity just came a little closer after you read that sentence.

Relic moss samples exposed by modern Arctic warming have been found to date as far back as 44,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating. 

How bad is pollution in China? So bad you can see it from space.

Wait, can't you do that in the US? Anyone who has flown into Los Angeles in the morning surely sees pollution. 

This is different. And worse. Plumes of several anthropogenic pollutants, especially particulate matter and carbon monoxide, at ground level over China can now be detected from space - something that was only possible higher up previously. The team used measurements by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer on board the MetOp satellite and the findings represent a crucial step towards improved monitoring of regional pollution and forecasting of local pollution episodes, especially in China.

Conservationists and animal activists have created a mythology that poaching is mostly illegal hunting for trophies or something like ivory for decoration.

It's not the case at all, and that confusion is why anti-poaching efforts are about as effective as the 'War on Drugs' in America. 

A new battery that runs on sugar has an "unmatched energy density", according to the team behind it.

Other sugar batteries have been developed but energy density has always been the problem. There is a reason gasoline is still popular after 150 years and that reason isn't big oil marketing, it is that the energy density of gasoline is terrific.

The energy density of this new battery is order of magnitude higher than others, allowing it to run longer before needing to be refueled, said Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech. They believe the technology could progress enough that it could be running in some devices starting in three years. And they could be cheaper, refillable and biodegradable.