The IceCube laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. Photograph: www.icecube.wisc.edu

We’ve all heard of CERN and the strange mysterious things happening at the site of the largest machine in human history. But most folks don’t realize that the ice sheet in Antarctica is also being used as a large particle detector.

A private company in the United Kingdom says it has successfully tested its prototype nuclear fusion reactor at temperatures that are hotter than the Sun. The company hopes to use the nuclear fusion reactor to start supplying energy in 2030.

As ever-more peer-reviewed studies prove carbon dioxide is not our climate’s control knob a stubborn clique of ‘lukewarmers’ persist in defending the discredited greenhouse gas theory. Why?

Nobel Laureate, Ivar Giaever: In 2008 I participated on a panel at the Lindau meeting discussing “Global Warming” and to prepare, I looked into the subject using the internet. I found that the general belief is that the average surface temperature over the whole earth for a whole year has increased from ~288 oK to 288.8 oK in roughly 150 years, i.e. 0.3{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and that it is due to increased CO2. If this is true, it means to me that the temperature has been amazingly stable.

One of the most difficult concepts for people to understand is that science doesn’t prove theories, science is the process that disproves theories.

SPOTLIGHT: Yesterday, I was supposed to feel guilty about my carbon footprint. Today it’s my plastic footprint.

In Grimm brothers’  world-famous mythical story about “Hänsel and Gretel” in the forest, their answer to the witch’s question about the strange sound she heard, was “Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind” (the wind, the wind, the heavenly child).

Environment: It has become an article of faith in the U.S. that recycling is a good thing. But evidence is piling up that recycling is a waste of time and money, and a bit of a fraud.

Antarctica is being pulled apart by an ancient rift system deep in Earth’s continental crust.

(left) A healthy ocean snail has a transparent shell with smoothly contoured ridges. (right) A shell exposed to more acidic, corrosive waters is cloudy, ragged, and pockmarked with ‘kinks’ and weak spots. Photos courtesy Nina Bednarsek, NOAA PMEL.

Outright bans on plastics have an overall negative effect on the environment, and recycling initiatives make for better solutions, according to an Independent Institute report.

At the Wall Street Journal, Steven F. Hayward penned a great summary of the current state of the climate movement, telling us the CO2 climate change issue is quickly running out of oxygen.

The debate on the nature of light in the early twentieth century, whether light was a particle or a wave, led to Einstein’s solution with the creation of the photon where waves could become particle like, having no mass but containing energy.