The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is designing a space probe to intercept a 40-million-ton asteroid that will pass extremely close to Earth twelve years from now.

Ocean currents and winds form an endless feedback loop: winds blow over the ocean’s surface, creating currents there. At the same time, the hot or cold water in these currents influences the wind’s speed.

In 2009, 22-year-old student Nicholas George was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when Transportation Security Administration agents pulled him aside. A search of his luggage turned up flashcards with English and Arabic words. George was handcuffed, detained for hours, and questioned by the FBI.

Billionaire Paul G. Allen’s Stratolaunch, a massive aircraft designed to launch rockets into space from high altitude, has been rolled out of its hangar for the first time in preparation for testing.

Here are things to know about the program that has been underway since 2011:

Researchers at Penn State University have developed a new, cheaper and more efficient way to split water molecule and produce pure hydrogen fuel.

President Donald Trump said a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement is “in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.”

As President Trump leads the war against the ‘hoax’ of man-made global warming, yet another independent study comes to his aid. This time fakery is exposed around a simple and well-publicized university experiment long claimed to prove the ‘settled science’ of alarmist climate academics.

Artificial intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The promise is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.

The Financial Times highlighted one dimension of science journalism’s ceaseless churn by reporting in April that RELX, formerly Reed Elsevier, had sold the magazine New Scientist to “investment vehicle” Kingston Acquisitions. The half-century-old publication claims a weekly global audience above 3 million.

The area and duration of heatwaves in the US during June used to be much higher prior to 60 years ago. One hundred degree days during June were more than twice as common during the 1930’s as they are now, with 1933, 1936, 1934, 1954, 1911 and 1916 being the hottest years.

Word is coming out of Washington that President Trump has finally made the decision to exit the Paris Agreement. There have already been various stories about the apocalypse waiting around the corner if that happens, not least from so-called scientists who should know better, eg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-30/climate-danger-zone-seen-if-trump-pulls-u-s-out-of-paris-deal

But just what difference will it make to global emissions?

The melt rate of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is an important concern because this glacier alone is currently responsible for about 1 percent of global sea level rise. A new NASA study finds that Thwaites’ ice loss will continue, but not quite as rapidly as previous studies have estimated.

The first ever genetic analysis of mummies found that ancient Egyptian kings were more closely related to West Asians than Africans, according to a study published Tuesday by scientists at the Max Planck Institute.

Since the 1970s the northern polar region has warmed faster than global averages by a factor or two or more, in a process of ‘Arctic amplification’ which is linked to a drastic reduction in sea ice.

Paleontologists at the University of Manchester have definitively proven there will never be a Jurassic Park after re-analysing collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone discovered more than a decade ago.

Measured temperatures in Iceland show a cyclical pattern, with the late 1930s warmer than the present. The measured data doesn’t fit NASA’s theory about CO2 driving climate, so they cool past temperatures to create the appearance of a warming trend.

Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

Temperatures around 1940 are cooled more than two degrees centigrade.