Elon Musk’s audacious plans are usually met with acclaim, and sometimes even awe – but not this time. Fresh details of The Boring Company’s urban transport plans have been lambasted on social media.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder (pictured above) gushed about “1000s of small stations the size of a single parking space that take you very close to your destination & blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city, rather than a small number of big stations like a subway”.

The energy market is undoubtedly in a state of flux. The current power play between the U.S., OPEC and Russia is symptomatic of the changing geopolitical and economic dynamics of the entire market, U.S. tight oil seems set to completely upset the apple cart, and rapid technological advances are putting hitherto unattainable reserves within our reach.

A cycle has two extremes and two middles.  The motion of a pendulum has two high points and one low point, which it passes through twice.  The phases of the moon are a new moon, a full moon, and two quarter moons.

 Newton’s great feat, which maybe is not commonly acknowledged, is he explained how there were two diurnal ocean tidal cycles each day which were obviously influenced by the moon’s cycle as it revolved (orbited) about the earth once about every 25 hours as the earth rotated about its axis with a period of 24 hours.  Clearly these cycles have a period of time associated with them.

It is worth returning to that letter in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, criticising Booker’s global warming groupthink article:

SIR – I agree with Christopher Booker that people tend to adopt the views of their “group” without checking facts or using critical thinking.

Nevertheless, his article contains inaccuracies. A big one: that climate change theory was immediately hailed as a scientific consensus.

The alarms are sounding about lack of ice extent in the Bering Sea, studiously ignoring what else is happening in the Arctic.

For instance, the above image shows the last 10 days on the European side, with the Barents Sea on the right growing steadily to a new maximum. On the left, Gulf of St. Lawrence ice is retreating as usual while the Baffin Bay holds steady.

A group of U.S. scientists has had to be rescued by helicopter from Antarctica after being trapped by encroaching ice.

Good Morning America reports:

A group of American scientists was rescued from an island off Antarctica’s coast after ice prevented a U.S. Antarctic Program research vessel from reaching them.

A huge solar storm is heading for Earth, and it’s likely to hit tomorrow. Nasa spotted the solar flare releasing a coronal mass ejection earlier this week. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a ‘G1’ storm watch. It coincides with the formation of ‘equinox cracks’ in the sun, which form around the equinoxes on March 20 and September 23 and weaken the magnetic field.

What would happen if it were proven that “fossil fuels” weren’t the result of decaying plant and animal matter, were actually created within the Earth due to simple chemistry and you could not be scared into believing that we were “running out” of oil and natural gas?

Learning can result in the increase of how much information our brains can hold, researchers have found.

Researchers at UT-Austin, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Otago in New Zealand discovered that the capacity of a synapse, the junctions between brain cells, expand in response to learning.

“Our most recent finding found that the range of a synapse is not fixed,” said Kristen Harris, a UT neuroscience professor. “On the other hand, if you buy a flash drive, the factory determined how much info you could store; it’s at a fixed level. Our brains are not like that.”

Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth’s crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet.

The finding, published Thursday in Science, represents the first detection of naturally occurring ice-VII ever found on Earth. And as sometimes happens in the scientific process, it was discovered entirely by accident.

Editor’s Note: This is part II; part I can be found here.

Professor Brian Wansink is head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. The lab has had problems, some described in an article called “Spoiled Science” in the Chronicle of Higher Education early in 2017:

Four papers on which he is a co-author were found to contain statistical discrepancies. Not one or two, but roughly 150. That revelation led to further scrutiny of Wansink’s work and to the discovery of other eyebrow-raising results, questionable research practices, and apparent recycling of data in at least a dozen other papers. All of which has put the usually ebullient researcher and his influential lab on the defensive.

A new study shows that the Antarctic Ice Shelf has been thickening – in times of global warming. Logic: Global warming cannot be the driving factor for Antarctic ice shelf mass, let alone CO2.