The Orwellian Nature of the “March for Science”

Written by Alan Carlin

Despite Saturday’s so-called “March for Science,” the almost simultaneous release of a Second Edition of a Research Report showing the exact opposite of what some of the marchers claim to be the conclusions of climate science has brought home the Orwellian reality that the marchers have gotten their claims concerning what the science says exactly backwards. The Climate March website says their forces of “The Resistance” won’t tolerate institutions that try to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.” If the marchers really support science, they should be supporting climate skeptics, not the climate alarmists. How Orwellian can you get? The science is clear.

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Eight ways intelligent machines are already in your life

Written by Dr Sabine Hauert

Woman holding a phoneImage copyright: GETTY IMAGES
Image caption: Voice recognition allows virtual personal assistants to carry out commands

Many people are unsure about exactly what machine learning is. But the reality is that it is already part of everyday life. A form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to learn from examples rather than having to follow step-by-step instructions.

The Royal Society believes it will have an increasing impact on people’s lives and is calling for more research, to ensure the UK makes the most of opportunities. Machine learning is already powering systems from the seemingly mundane to the life-changing. Here are just a few examples.

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Plastic-eating caterpillar could munch waste, scientists say

Written by Helen Briggs

Wax worm caterpillars in petri dishImage copyright: CÉSAR HERNÁNDEZ/CSIC
Image caption: Wax worm caterpillars in a petri dish

A caterpillar that munches on plastic bags could hold the key to tackling plastic pollution, scientists say. Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the larvae of the moth, which eats wax in bee hives, can also degrade plastic.

Experiments show the insect can break down the chemical bonds of plastic in a similar way to digesting beeswax. Each year, about 80 million tonnes of the plastic polyethylene are produced around the world.

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Animals that can survive being eaten

Written by Sandrine Ceurstemont

It was probably the trip of a lifetime. In 2012, biologists on an expedition to East Timor in southeast Asia spotted a brahminy blind snake wriggling out of somewhere quite unexpected: the rear end of a common Asian toad.

Mark O’Shea from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK and his colleagues witnessed the unusual event by chance after finding the pair under a rock. It is the first account of prey surviving digestion by a toad and of an animal as big as a blind snake emerging from a digestive tract alive.

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Scientists Wrong On Danger of Butter – But Right On Global Warming?

Written by Joseph Curl

The world is in the grip of global warming. Everything will keep getting hotter and hotter. Then we’ll all die. That’s the consensus from the scientific “community.” That’s the “settled science” always talked about.

But getting to the point that any science is actually “settled” – as in 100 percent accurate – is very difficult. There may be strong evidence to point to one conclusion, but it may turn out that we didn’t have all the information needed to arrive at the correct finding, or, data may change over time, leading us down a different path.

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Top NASA Climate Modeler Admits Predictions are ‘Mathematically Impossible’

Written by Dr. Duane Thresher, Climatologist

Top American Climatologist, an expert in climate modeling, exposes the fallacy that current climate models provide a realistic or reliable prediction of future climate change. In a 1-2-3 step guide to disposing of the global warming debate Dr. Duane Thresher says successful modeling with modern computers is “mathematically impossible.”

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Pro-Trump Scientist Berates Ivanka’s ‘Madness’

Written by Thomas D Williams PhD

In an open letter to Donald Trump, climate expert Dr. Duane Thresher has urged the President not to give in to his daughter Ivanka’s misguided views on global warming and her insistence that the U.S. remain in the Paris climate agreement ratified by Barack Obama last August.

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Dear ‘Marchers for Science’….

Written by Stephen J Crothers

Science is now controlled by money-driven nitwits bereft of scientific acumen, brainwashing the populous at large by the application of the methods of the advertising executive and the marketing manager, as they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, with their evil eye and greedy, their stunted forms and weedy.

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The Crisis of the American Sciences

Written by Natalie Smolenski

Winifred Knights, The Deluge (1920)

In medicine, a crisis signals the turning point of a disease: a moment of inflection in which the course of the illness turns either for better or worse. Yet a crisis can also be developmental; it can signal the transition from one state of being to another. Sometimes this is referred to as a “maturational crisis.” In this piece, I argue that the United States is facing precisely such a maturational crisis. Moving through it to a better future requires nothing less than a re-founding of the republic on terms different from the theological inheritance that characterized our Enlightenment-era establishment.

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Hexagon considerations on Saturn

Written by Jane Cobbald

Image courtesy http://ciclops.org/view_media/42032/Saturn-Approaching-Northern-Summer?js=1

“We are leaving the Era of the Sun as planetary lord (1980–2016) and entering a new era where Saturn will be Lord of the new planetary cycle (2017–2053.)” I read this in a posting by an astrologer I follow. I don’t know how he came to this assessment, but it caught my interest. So I started looking at Saturn.

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Manipulated IPCC Science supported by Manipulated Appeals to Authority

Written by Dr Tim Ball

The story of how Maurice Strong (pictured) and the Club of Rome set up the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to direct political and scientific focus on CO2 to ‘prove’ it was causing global warming is well documented.

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New genetics paper not about whether climate change causes polar bear hybrids

Written by Susan J Crockford

A new paper on the evolutionary history of bears (Bears breed across species borders: Kumar et al. 2017) has concluded that hybridization is common and natural among all species of ursids. And while some media outlets (e.g. DailyMail) have framed this as surprisingly convincing proof that experts were wrong to claim that climate change is the cause of recent polar bear X grizzly hybrids, definitive evidence against that interpretation has been available for years to anyone who bothered to look: see my recent “Five facts that challenge hybridization nonsense.”

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Artist Edvard Munch inspired by ‘screaming clouds’

Written by Jonathan Amos

The ScreamImage copyright: GETTY IMAGES
Image caption: Edvard Munch’s The Scream: One of the world’s most famous works of art

Norwegian scientists have put forward a new theory to explain the inspiration behind one of the most famous works of art ever produced. The Scream (1892), by Edvard Munch, depicts a figure holding its face, which is making an agonised expression. But look above this individual and the sky is full of colourful wavy lines.

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Global Greening in the New York Times (CO2 benefits contradict SCC)

Written by Robert Bradley Jr.

… Dr. [J. Elliott] Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that  in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said.

– Carl Simmer, A Global Greening, New York Times, April 5, 2017.

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Congress Should Investigate the Claim of Scientific Consensus

Written by co2islife

The claim of “consensus” is one of the pillars of sand that is supporting the climate change political movement. The problem is, the way this conclusion was reached, it isn’t defensible. Searching published articles for certain words doesn’t prove a “consensus.” No one went or record supporting the claims of “consensus,” it all came from research of articles.

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Driverless cars trial set for British motorways in 2019

Written by bbc.co.uk

traffic on roadsImage copyright: GETTY IMAGES

A consortium of British companies has unveiled a plan to test driverless cars on UK roads and motorways in 2019. The Driven group also plans to try out a fleet of autonomous vehicles between London and Oxford. The cars will communicate with each other about any hazards and should operate with almost full autonomy – but will have a human on board as well.

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