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Go to about any public square, and you see pigeons pecking at the ground, always in search of crumbs dropped by a passerby. While the pigeons' scavenging may seem random, new research by psychologists at the University of Iowa suggest the birds are capable of making highly intelligent choices, sometimes with problem-solving skills to match.

The study by Edward Wasserman and colleagues centered on the "string task," a longstanding, standard test of intelligence that involves attaching a treat to one of two strings and seeing if the participant (human or animal) can reel in that treat by pulling the correct string.

Cassava has huge potential and could turn from "a poor people's food into a 21st century crop" if grown according to a new environmentally-friendly farming model, the UN food agency said on Tuesday.

The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report that global cassava output has increased by 60 percent since 2000 and that yields could be boosted by up to 400 percent.

Cassava has "huge potential", the FAO said.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to a researcher from the University of Waterloo in a controversial new study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now suggests that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the researcher argues.

Scientists now have definitive proof that many of the landscapes seen on Mars were indeed cut by flowing water.

The valleys, channels and deltas viewed from orbit have long been thought to be the work of water erosion, but it is Nasa's latest rover, Curiosity, that has provided the "ground truth".

Researchers report its observations of rounded pebbles on the floor of the Red planet's 150km-wide Gale Crater.

Their smooth appearance is identical to gravels found in rivers on Earth.

Astronauts travelling to Mars on any of the current space-flight vehicles would receive a dose of radiation higher than NASA standards permit, according to a study of the radiation environment inside the craft that carried the Curiosity rover to the planet.

The study, reported in Science1, is the first to use radiation data recorded by a robotic craft en route to Mars. It is also the first to rely on measurements from a radiation detector in space that has shielding similar to what might be used on missions carrying humans, says physicist Sheila Thibeault of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, who was not involved in the study.

10) A Volcanic Elephant

Ever since Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described his discovery of canals on Mars in 1877 and American astronomer Percival Lowell started to map them, we humans have been fascinated with the Red Planet. Although the canals were nothing more than a case of mistaken identity and our technology has come a long way since Schiaparelli and Lowell's telescopes, Mars continues to serve up its fair share of illusions, hoaxes and misunderstandings.

What a spring clean. Vials of moon dust collected by the first men to walk on the moon have been discovered in storage in California after being missing for more than 40 years.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, NASA sent 68 grams of lunar dust to Melvin Calvin at the University of California, Berkeley, who had won the 1961 Nobel prize in chemistry.

If you've had to fight though plastic packaging to get to your food you won't be surprised to hear it can raise your blood pressure – but it's the phthalate chemicals used in the packaging rather than the effort involved, that's to blame. These chemicals are generally used to make plastic soft, for example in credit cards or plastic shower curtains. A study of nearly 3,000 children in the Journal of Pediatrics found that children between the ages of six and 19 who had been exposed to phthalates (measured by levels of breakdown products of the chemicals in their urine) had higher levels of blood pressure than those who didn't.

Related: Study shows dangers of BPA chemical used in plastic packaging

Algae are an interesting natural resource because they proliferate quickly. They are not impinging on food production. And they need nothing but sunlight and a bit of waste water to grow on. Scientists working for theSPLASH research project, funded by the EU, are now addressing the challenge of making high-quality, affordable plastics from algae. They need to demonstrate that this new type of bioplastic —namely used to produce polyesters and polyolefins— can be of the same quality as traditional plastic. And they need to show whether it can be produced in an economically viable way.

We urgently need to know how far and how fast the sea will rise, but the latest attempt to put figures on it is dangerously misleading

IMAGINE your job is to protect London from surging seas. In one way it is easy: unlike most coastal cities, London has a formidable flood defence system in the form of the Thames Barrier, capable of protecting it from all but the highest storm surges.

But as the seas rise, the risk of the barrier being breached will increase steadily.

The brain's perception of the body may seem set in stone, but a new study shows the mind can be tricked into taking an entire virtual body for its own.

In 1998, neuroscientists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen performed an experiment where they showed people a rubber hand being stroked with a paintbrush, while applying the same strokes to each person's own, hidden hand. This gave people the feeling that the dummy hand was their own.

The internet might be a historic boon for kitten-fanciers and steaming-eared trolls, but it's not all good news. Online writing, you see, is destroying the purity of English as we know it and threatening to dumb us all down into a herd of screen-jabbing illiterates. Or so runs one regular technophobic complaint, the latest version of which has been offered by Robert McCrum. He is worried about what he describes as "the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails)" and what he perceives as "the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications".

Most people who grew up in the 70s, 80s and the 90s – and even those who took drugs during that time – have no idea what is going on in today's drugs market. Forget the acid flare and dope fug of the 70s, the twitchy glamour of coke, the grim arrival of crack and the cheap smack era of the 80s – even the benign ecstatic burst of acid house: today's ever-changing drug culture is different: digital and massively distributed.

For 20 years Joan* quietly suffered from an unrelenting desire to commit suicide. She held down a job as a special-education teacher and helped care for her family in the northeastern U.S. Yet day after day she struggled through a crushing depression and felt neither joy nor pleasure. Except for the stream of psychiatrists recommending different antidepression treatments—all of which failed to provide relief—Joan kept her condition private. She says it was the fear of hurting her students or abandoning her father that kept her alive. “I really don't know how I survived,” she says.