For planetary scientists, it was the boldest claim in a generation: an unseen extra planet, as much as 10 times the mass of Earth, lurking on the Solar System’s frontier, beyond Neptune. But the claim looks increasingly shaky, after a team of astronomers reported last week that the orbits of a handful of distant lumps of rock are not bunched together by the gravity of Planet Nine, as its proponents believe, but only seem clustered because that’s where telescopes happened to be looking.

With the CDC still scrambling to find any pretext to extend draconian lockdown measures and the new CDC director explicitly urging states not to relax restrictions, on Tuesday Texas Governor Greg Abbott defied the organization whose politicization has become a stamp of humiliation, and announced that the second-largest US state will lift the mask mandate and all other anti-pandemic restrictions amid declining hospitalizations and infection rates.

Astounding new figures out of France suggest what is no doubt a broader global trend of hesitancy and skepticism when it comes to the current big push to ‘vaccinate all’.

Reuters in covering the country’s vaccine rollout finds that merely around “half of health workers in French care homes do not want to be vaccinated” — even after many of these routinely witness the ravages of COVID-19 on the elderly and infirm.

This is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary stories of the entire ‘global pandemic’ which has turned the world upside down over the twelve months.

In an article published by Lockdown Skeptics by Derek Winton entitled, The Imperial Model and its Role in the UK’s Pandemic Response, the author rightly calls into questions to relevant scientific experience of who is arguably the UK government’s most consequential science advisor of the COVID crisis – the notorious Neil Ferguson from Imperial College.

 

Note: This article, published on 5 February 2010, originally appeared in Forbes. It was removed sometime in mid October 2020 with no explanation.

The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying “The sky is falling!” like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. “The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible,” the agency claims on its Web site. A WHO spokesman declined to specify who or what gave this “description,” but the primary accuser is hard to ignore.

While all eyes have been on Mars this week, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is studying the structure and surface of the Sun, as well as gathering data on solar winds, used a close approach to the planet Venus to beam back some stunning photos, which were actually imaged last year.

According to the archaeological powerhouse behind the ongoing Pompeii excavations, an elaborately adorned ceremonial chariot—a sick sled experts dubbed “the Lamborghini of chariots”—was recently unearthed from the ash-covered ruins.

Historians are sure to pore over this ‘unprecedented’ period for centuries to come. It is my belief that in the fullness of time, they will come to regard our response to the Sars-CoV-2 virus as monumental folly. In particular they will be bewildered by the role of deeply flawed computer modelling in triggering a chain of events that fundamentally, and perhaps catastrophically, damaged western society.

This crucial new paper from the US National Library of Medicine destroys the common myth that face masks work against COVID19. The conclusion from the study, which appears in the Elsevier Public Health Emergency Collection is “both medical and non-medical facemasks are ineffective to block human-to-human transmission.”

Last week, an organization called Climate Feedback attempted what it claimed was a fact check of an article James Delingpole had written about a report we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) had published a few days earlier.

A prominent Canadian zoologist says that Facebook’s polar bear claims are gravely out of date and 2020 was another good year for polar bears.

In the State of the Polar Bear Report 2020, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) to coincide with International Polar Bear Day (27 February), zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that while the climate narrative insists that polar bear populations are declining due to reduced sea ice, the population surveys and the scientific literature don’t support such a conclusion.

NASA Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) measurements from satellite data don’t support global warming claims.

Analyst blogger and Principia Scientific contributor, Zoe Phin downloaded and analyzed 10 gigabytes of NASA instrumental data on the earth’s radiation budget (ERB) fully covering the years 2003 to 2019 [site] [data].

The idea is to see the effect of clouds at the surface, especially the so-called Upwelling Longwave Radiation (LW_UP).

Frozen wind turbines became a symbol of last month’s Arctic blast that left millions of Texans without power, but as far as green energy proponents are concerned, the solution is not less wind but more.

Human guinea pigs for Big Pharma and rotten states. The sickening experiments fuelling vaccine scepticism among people of colour.

There’s much talk in the news of a low take-up in Covid vaccinations among people of colour in the US, UK, Africa and beyond. But it’s a scepticism born of horrific and shameful acts by governments and Big Pharma.

New research in Brazil highlights how distinctive the “living skin” of the planet can be. A few decades ago, a team of scientists reported in Nature that life on land is possibly over a billion years older than previously demonstrated.

Below is a brief clip from of David Cohen, a professor and Associate Dean for Research and Development of at the Luskin School of Social Work, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on psychoactive drugs (prescribed, licit, and illicit) and their desirable and undesirable effects as socio-cultural phenomena “constructed” through language, policy, attitudes, and social interactions.