Pine Island Glacier is one of the biggest routes for ice to flow from Antarctica into the sea and the floating ice shelf at the glacier's tip has been melting and thinning for the past four decades, causing the glacier to speed up and discharge more ice.

It's been a key factor in estimates for sea level rise in a warming world but it turns out that the ice shelf melting depends on the local wind direction, which is tied to tropical changes associated with El Nino.

With the rush to legalize marijuana in the interests of a libertarian society or, more suspect, for medical reasons, addiction is about to come back to the forefront.

Over 20 million people around the world are already addicted to marijuana. In the last few years, cannabis addiction has become one of the main reasons for seeking treatment in addiction clinics. Cannabis consumption is particularly high in individuals between 16 to 24 years old, a population that is especially susceptible to the harmful effects of the drug. 

Methane hydrates are ice-like solid fuel composed of water and methane. And they are fragile.  In some areas, such as in the North Atlantic off the coast of Svalbard, scientists have detected gas flares regularly and the reasons for their occurrence were unclear. They seem to only be stable at high pressure and low temperature. 

If so, global warming might cause the dissolution of gas hydrates, according to an analysis led by scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel who say that it is very likely that methane hydrate gas flares are caused by natural processes. 

An interdisciplinary group has called on scholars, government granting agencies, journal editors and reviewers to adopt stringent and transparent standards in order to give social science research credibility, substance and impact. 

The authors note that vague methodologies and suspect conclusions has contributed to a distorted body of research that tends to exaggerate the effectiveness of programs that deal with important issues affecting millions of people including health, agriculture, education and environmental policy.

Learning about ancient civilizations used to mean hand-drawn maps and clunky tomes; now anyone can do it, using Google Earth and some idea of where to look and what to look for.

And Google Earth has helped create a map of an ancient Syrian trade route that shows how one city's political sway extended farther than believed. It still takes old-fashioned digging by others to have found the artifacts in the first place, but for visualization and understanding, the future is here.

You've seen advertisements on television for websites like Lumosity and claims that games that will 'train' your brain to be better.

Well, they sort of work, it's not total snake oil, though they work mostly at teaching your brain to solve the puzzles in those websites and games, which is not really improving anything. Elliot T. Berkman, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon and lead author on a new paper, says that training for a particular task does heighten performance, but that advantage doesn't necessarily carry over to other things. So if solving puzzles in apps is going to be your career, great. Otherwise, save your money.