CRISPR – get to know this acronym. It’s good to know the name of something that could change your future.

Pronounced “crisper”, it is a biological system for altering DNA. Known as gene editing, this technology has the potential to change the lives of everyone and everything on the planet.

A bold statement but that is the considered view of many of the world’s leading geneticists and biochemists I’ve spoken to in recent months when working on my latest Panorama – Medicine’s Big Breakthrough: Editing Your Genes.

CRISPR was co-discovered in 2012 by molecular biologist Professor Jennifer Doudna whose team at Berkeley, University of California was studying how bacteria defend themselves against viral infection.

A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled “The Future of Geothermal Energy.” Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said this week that activist scientists, green lobbyists, and environmental organizations have distorted “surveys, maps and data” to intentionally mislead the “extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

A new report on the barrier reef’s health was released last week by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. It showed that only 22 percent of the reef was affected by the now-dissipated 2015-2016 El Niño, and that current conservation efforts over the last few years have taken the reef off of the World Heritage sites ‘watch’ list.

A couple of weeks back, New Scientist published an article trying to up the ante on climate sensitivity. 

One headline-making 2013 study had concluded that the immediate warming that would result froma doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would be around 1.3°C – significantly less than most previous estimates. But this was before global temperatures shot past 1°C above pre-industrial levels last year, as predicted by New Scientist in July 2015. If the 2013 study was repeated using that value, it would give an estimate for the immediate warming of 1.6°C, says Piers Forster…

In an essay published on Saturday May 7, 2016, Oregon Legislator Mike Nearman asked those who objected to his skepticism about Anthropogenic Global Warming to provide the evidence (data) that convinced them we are headed for a climate catastrophe. In response, he got the typical name-calling and other bad behavior we have come to expect from those thoroughly sold on the prevailing paradigm.

Most of us who actually are scientists realize that Nearman was precisely correct to request the robust empirical data that should back up all science, but in the case of Global Warming is substantially missing. Proponents like to confuse the issue by providing evidence of warming that could come from several natural sources and ignore the crucial question about a link to human activities. And when confronted with the ruse, some resort to calling opponents “absolute idiots.”

Of course, the only “absolute idiots,” are those who believe that science is too sacred to be questioned.

Scientists continually question prevailing wisdom to see if we can improve on it. When science first emerged out of the politics and religion of the seventeenth century with the formation of the British Royal Society, the founding members chose the motto “Nullius in verba” or “Take no one’s word for it.” That expressed their determination to avoid the domination of authority and to decide scientific matters by an appeal to data gathered by experiment. Once freed from the domination of politics and religion, science made amazing progress.

1988 was a barn-burner year for climate alarmists. Then-Sen. Al Gore’s steamy congressional hearing trumpeted a planet on fire, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to produce pseudo-scientific evidence blaming it on unfair capitalist industrial prosperity-spawned CO2 emissions.

Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart explained the real cause for urgency. She told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Stewart was wrong. Consequences of that phony science upon environmental and energy regulatory policies matter a great deal. So let’s consider some inconvenient facts.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and many universities are at a loss to explain recent conflicting temperature trends from Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. It can be boiled down to this: temperatures of the Earth’s three big fluid systems are each trending in different directions. The temperature of the Pacific Ocean is rising, the temperature of the atmosphere has remained constant, and the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is cooling.

That’s a problem.

These variances in temperature trends are not fitting previous climate model predictions and talking points released to the media. To counter this problem and almost, as predictably as rain in springtime, climate scientists favoring the theory of man-made global warming are flooding the media with new, and this time supposedly very reliable, explanations that are generated from their latest super-computer climate models. Their explanations, or better yet, their rationalizations for two of the three fluid temperature trends, Pacific Ocean warming and the atmospheric warming “pause”, have been discussed in previous CCD posts.

Climate experts have predicted an ice-free Arctic every summer for the last eight years.

This year is no exception.

Stanford researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were “stunned” by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients. While the research involved only 18 patients and was designed primarily to look at the safety of such a procedure and not its effectiveness, it is creating significant buzz in the neuroscience community because the results appear to contradict a core belief about brain damage — that it is permanent and irreversible.

The results, published in the journal Stroke, could have implications for our understanding of an array of disorders including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and Alzheimer’s if confirmed in larger-scale testing.

The work involved patients who had passed the critical six-month mark when recoveries generally plateau and there are rarely further improvements. This is the point at which therapies are typically stopped as brain circuits are thought to be dead and unable to be repaired. Each participant in the study had suffered a stroke beneath the brain’s outermost layer and had significant impairments in moving their arms and-or legs. Some participants in the study had had a stroke as long as three to five years before the experimental treatment.

Giordano Bruno has submitted to PSI a supplement to his article ‘Does the PNAS have an interest in selling windmills, solar panels and sea walls and collecting carbon taxes?https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/does-the-pnas-have-an-interest-in-selling-windmills-solar-panels-and-sea-walls-and-collecting-carbon-taxes/

Giordano writes:

Just a few remarks on my post: I wish to note how the authors of the extreme paper on the committed sea level rise of 9.9 meters that can only be approved and not criticized in PNAS are not exactly the academics that should write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America. Similarly to the authors that were permitted to comment the paper to approve the claim and allow the authors of the original extreme paper one more reply, they are all minus one partners of climate blogs, financial companies and other organizations having nothing to do with science or academy.

(NaturalNews) Think the Zika virus is responsible for all the cases of microcephaly in South America? Think again: There is no reliable scientific evidence linking the two. The developmental deformities are actually caused by exposure to toxic insecticide and larvicide chemicals, not Zika virus.

But because Zika virus fear fits a convenient funding narrative for chemical giants and vaccine manufacturers, it is being played up by the corrupt, criminally-run CDC and the Obama administration to funnel billions of dollars into the hands of vaccine corporations while ignoring the real causes of microcephaly.

Here are the top 10 reasons why the Zika virus fear mongering is a total scam:

An osprey was hit by a wind turbine blade in Scotland, and had to be euthanised. Normally, these accidents are not reported – see  Windfarms: bird mortality cover-up in the UK

What’s particularly interesting in this case is that we can read, in the media reporting the news, all the lame excuses being put-up by the wind company to hide the fact that this was perfectly previsible.

For instance: “The scheme’s operator Eneco is working with RSPB Scotland and a conservation expert to try to establish if there are site-specific factors that attracted the bird.” In other words: we goofed when we planned that wind farm; there was something particular about the site, and we didn’t see it. We´ll do better next time – end of story.

Scientists have discovered the specific mutation that famously turned moths black during the Industrial Revolution.

In an iconic evolutionary case study, a black form of the peppered moth rapidly took over in industrial parts of the UK during the 1800s, as soot blackened the tree trunks and walls of its habitat.

Now, researchers from the University of Liverpool have pinpointed the genetic change that caused this adaptation.

They have also calculated the most likely date for the mutation – 1819.

A smattering of water is buried deep inside the Moon and it arrived during the satellite’s very early history, a new study concludes, when asteroids plunged into churning oceans of magma.

How and when water got trapped in volcanic lunar rocks is a huge and open question for planetary scientists.

This international team has compared the chemistry of Apollo mission samples with various types of space rock.

They say that icy, early asteroids were the likely source of most of the water.

After such impacts the Moon’s developing crust could have trapped the water in the cooling magma.

Quoting from a post on vampires, “In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called ‘Bayesian priors’ or just ‘priors’), and then you ‘update’ them as you receive new evidence.”

This is the standard metaphor, and it’s not so much wrong as unhelpful, misleading, and restricting. The metaphor derives from Bayes’s rule (details which can be looked up anywhere) and which gives a formula which on the right-hand-side is supposed to be an element representing “prior beliefs.” The formula itself is correct, as most math is. But because math is correct does not mean that it means what you think it means.

(Incidentally, all (as in all) frequentist methods should be dumped forthwith: no hypothesis testing, no p-values, no parameters, no infinities. It is a false dichotomy to suppose that if not Bayes then frequentist, and vice versa.)