NASA began final testing for the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Tuesday, in an effort to finish testing before the telescope’s planned launch date in October.

After several years of secrecy, a company called Moon Express revealed the scope of its ambitions on Wednesday. And they are considerable. The privately held company released plans for a single, modular spacecraft that can be combined to form successfully larger and more capable vehicles. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon.

There’s been no word as yet, either from tour operators or polar bear researchers, that Western Hudson Bay polar bears have come ashore for the summer/fall season. Andrew Derocher reported at the end of June that the bears tagged by his team were still on the ice and as I write this, has not yet reported them ashore.

We have all heard about the record-breaking ice mass balance and cold temperature reading of -33°C recently set in Greenland — the Arctic island that is supposedly the canary in the climate coal mine.

June Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are now available, and we can see ocean temps dropping further after a short pause and resuming the downward trajectory from the previous 12 months.

The fossilized remains of a tiny bird that lived 62 million years ago suggest that birds burst out of the evolutionary gates once their dinosaur cousins were gone, rapidly diversifying into most of the lineages we see today.

Antarctic sea ice extent has been increasing since 1979 and reached a record high in 2014.

S_09_extent_anomaly_plot_v2.1.png (420×240)

Volcanic eruptions such as Mount St. Helens’ in 1980 show the explosiveness of magma moving through Earth’s crust. Now geologists are excited about what uplifted granite bodies such as Yosemite’s El Capitan say about magma that freezes before it can erupt on the surface.

A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded – has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July 2017, when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away.

Almost one-third of Europeans falsely believe that the polar ice caps have already melted, according to a poll published Tuesday.

NY Magazine Published Its Inconvenient Interview With One Of The World’s Most Famous Climate Scientists

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann was quick to criticize a New York Magazine article claiming that man-made global warming could make the Earth “uninhabitable” by the end of the century.

However, a transcript released Monday suggests a divergence between what Mann said publicly versus what he told the New York Magazine writer in an interview.

Scientists have discovered a new “anti-antiaphrodisiac” pheromone released by female insects. The pheromone lets males know when the female insects are ready to mate again.

The essence of the argument that an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide, an infrared-active or greenhouse gas, causes the Earth’s surface to become warmer lies in a radiation-dominant viewpoint in the transport of energy between the surface and the atmosphere.  This viewpoint is depicted in the NASA energy budget shown below:

It was just reported that Greenland set a new all-time July cold record, where the mercury plummeted to -33°C. Read details here.

A new model giving rise to young planetary systems offers a fresh solution to a puzzle that has vexed astronomers ever since new detection technologies and planet-hunting missions such as NASA’s Kepler space telescope have revealed thousands of planets orbiting other stars: While the majority of these exoplanets fall into a category called super-Earths—bodies with a mass somewhere between Earth and Neptune—most of the features observed in nascent planetary systems were thought to require much more massive planets, rivaling or dwarfing Jupiter, the gas giant in our solar system.

Stanford researchers have for the first time captured the freezing of water, molecule-by-molecule, into a strange, dense form called ice VII (“ice seven”), found naturally in otherworldly environments, such as when icy planetary bodies collide.