People living around the Pacific Ring of Fire are facing a terrifying New Year of earthquakes and volcanoes after experts predicted a period of unprecedented seismic activity.

Santa really was good this year. Rather than handing out expensive kitchen gadgets to clutter up the shrinking counter space, he had some swell presents in his bag. My Dearest was the clear winner — she got a new snow shovel!

When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.

Albert Einstein contributed greatly to modern physics, but was he wrong in his definition of gravity lensing? If you are less impressed with clever manipulation of mathematical equations and prefer empirical science, that which is based on verifiable observation of natural events, then the work of Edsel Chromie will interest you.

What follows are 6 recent studies presented by Lüning and Vahrenholt, which dump cold water on the claim storms will get more frequent and intense.

Paper Reviewed: Pingale, B.N., Singh, S.D. and Yadav, A. 2017. Potential impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on yield and plant growth of rice (Oryza sativa) and maize (Zea mays) crops. Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences 87: 1041-1044.

Image copyright: TANUSREE CHAUDHURI

Tanusree Chaudhuri, 34, was pregnant with her first child when her supervisor told her she would have to give up her dreams. She was doing a doctorate in computational biology and aspired to improve people’s health.

Image copyright: JAMES GALLAGHER

It has been a remarkable year of promise in medical science. Incurable diseases from sickle cell to haemophilia now look as though they can be treated. Here are the highlights.

In recent decades, select groups of scientists and politicians have blamed carbon dioxide (CO2) — a “greenhouse gas” — for increasing global temperatures to dangerous levels.

Image copyright: ROBERT PARK

Scientists say they have made a step forward in the fight against a wheat disease that threatens food security. Wheat is a staple food crop, making up a fifth of the calories on our plates.

But in many parts of the world, the crop is being attacked by stem rust (black rust), a fungus that can ravage a farmer’s fields. Researchers from the UK, US and Australia identified genetic clues that give insights into whether a crop will succumb to stem rust.

Nasa is to fund a helicopter mission to hunt for alien life on Saturn’s largest moon – the ocean world of Titan. The US space agency announced this week that the project, dubbed Dragonfly, has been selected as a finalist for a new expedition which will launch in the 2020s.

President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.

He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Apple has confirmed the suspicions of many iPhone owners by revealing it does deliberately slow down some models of the iPhone as they age. Many customers have long suspected that Apple slows down older iPhones to encourage people to upgrade.

Paper Reviewed: Verhage, F.Y.F., Anten, N.P.R. and Sentelhas, P.C. 2017. Carbon dioxide fertilization offsets negative impacts of climate change on Arabica coffee yield in Brazil. Climatic Change 144: 671-685.

“Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, “transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?

On Dec. 11, 2017, a day before the Macron Paris climate change summit, in a story entitled“Exxon to provide details on climate-change impact to its business,” Reuters incorrectly reported that world temperatures might rise by 35.6°F because Reuters used a Celsius-Fahrenheit conversion, instead of stating the temperature change equivalencies of 2°C – which turn out to be only 3.6°F, says Friends of Science.