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In order to learn how modern societies can adapt to the changes caused by global warming, scientists are working in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes.Their findings will tell governments, scientists and NGOs how relationships between human beings and their environments may change in decades to come as a result of global warming.

Some studies suggest that video gaming can improve vision and enhance information processing abilities. But that may be total nonsense, according to a study that examined the short-term effects of video-game ownership on academic development in young boys.

Adolescents who watch R-Rated movies are more likely to try alcohol at a young age, according to a study based on phone surveys of 6,255 10-14 year-old children.Published in Prevention Science, the study examined the relationship between watching R-rated movies and the probability of alcohol use across different levels of "sensation seeking," which is a tendency to seek out risky experiences. Sensation seeking was based on how individual subjects identified with statements like: "I like to do scary things, I like to do dangerous things, I often think there is nothing to do, and I like to listen to loud music."

The quality of entries in the world's largest open-access online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, depends on how authors collaborate, a study by University of Arizona researchers has found. The research, they say, is the first to explain why some articles on the site are of much better quality than others. Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. The team randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level and applied a data provenance model they developed in an earlier paper.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, approximately 20 percent of Americans believed that then-Senator Barack Obama was a Muslim despite news stories that attempted to debunk the rumor, according to a study in The Journal of Media and Religion. The study analyzed data from a survey of more than 2,400 people taken at three points during the campaign to see if exposure to news media helped correct misperceptions about Obama's faith.The findings are consistent with psychological studies on selective memory that show that people tend to discount facts that are inconsistent with their preexisting beliefs. People are also less likely to remember information that conflicts with their beliefs.

Scientists writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society say they have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in SMM J1237+6203, a galaxy in the early Universe.The researchers observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.According to their findings, the galaxy exploded in a series of blasts trillions of times more powerful than any caused by an atomic bomb. The blasts happened every second for millions of years, the scientists said.

A new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that people in good health are almost twice as likely to be interested in sex compared to those in poor health. Sexual activity has health benefits and is linked to living longer, but the new study investigated how general health impacts the quality of sex.The study also estimate how many remaining sexually active years healthy men and women have left.The results revealed that at the age of 30, men have a sexually active life expectancy of nearly 35 years and for women it's almost 31 years. At 55, this figure changes to almost 15 remaining years for men and 10 years for women. This gender difference diminishes for people with a spouse or intimate partner.

Researchers from Kuwait University predict that world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014 — almost a decade earlier than some other predictions. The team explains that scientists have developed several models to forecast the point at which oil production reaches a maximum and then declines, and some put the date at 2020 or later. One of the most famous forecast models, called the Hubbert model, accurately predicted that oil production would peak in the United States in 1970.

University of California, San Francisco researchers have uncovered a crucial mechanism that encourages alcohol consumption after extended abstinence.Previous work has suggested that people, places, and objects associated with alcohol use are potent triggers for eliciting relapse and that cravings for both alcohol and drugs can increase across protracted abstinence. However, the specific molecular mechanisms that underlie pathological alcohol seeking are not well defined.

Some chickens appear to be male on one side of the body and female on the other, and researchers writing in Nature this week say they know why. It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones.The authors of the new study, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell autonomous sex identity (CASI).The findings may also be relevant to why males and females differ in behavior and in susceptibility to disease.

An analysis in Nature of more than 70,000 galaxies by a team of physicists suggests that the universe – at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth – plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. But that's not all. They also conclude that the existence of ill-defined 'dark matter' is the most likely explanation for the observation that galaxies and galaxy clusters move as if under the influence of some unseen mass, in addition to the stars astronomers observe.

The 'war on cancer' has led to a reduction in the rate of cancer deaths whether measured against baseline rates in 1970 or in 1990, reports a new study by the American Cancer Society. According to the study, the downturn in cancer deaths since 1990 is due mostly to reductions in tobacco use, increased screening allowing early detection of several cancers, and modest to large improvements in treatment for specific cancers. The study was published today in PLoS One.Researchers used nationwide cancer mortality data for the years 1970 through 2006 from the SEER*Stat database, which defines major cancer sites consistently over time in order to facilitate reporting of long term mortality trends.