A UCLA-led research team reports that the moon is at least 4.51 billion years old, or 40 million to 140 million years older than scientists previously thought.

For decades, scientists have theorized that the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates is driven largely by negative buoyancy created as they cool. New research, however, shows plate dynamics are driven significantly by the additional force of heat drawn from the Earth’s core.

NASA’s asteroid-exploration mission OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has taken the left turn at Albuquerque on its way to a near-Earth space rock called Bennu.

The agency says the burn of 354 kg of fuel (780 pounds) boosted the craft’s velocity and put it on a trajectory for an Earth fly-by which will give OSIRIS-REx impart even more speed. That fly-by is set for September.

The most recent manoeuvre took place on December 28, 2016, and was the first big burn for the spacecraft (it’s designated Deep Space Manoeuvre 1, DSM-1). NASA says the Deep Space Network (DSN) collected tracking data showing it went well, and “subsequent downlink of high-rate telemetry from the spacecraft shows that all subsystems performed as expected”.

Scientists say satellite temperatures for the year 2016 show no statistical difference when compared to the year 1998. In other words, that’s 18 years of no global warming. However, several mainstream fake news outlets are telling readers 2016 has just become the world’s ‘hottest year.’

Skeptics are mocking the lame media claims – which revolve around a supposed ‘rise’ of 0.24 degrees – statistically well inside error margins. Since the 1980’s the UN’s IPCC has predicted a global ‘climate catastrophe’ if governments don’t restrict increases in human emissions of carbon dioxide, the supposed cause of ‘catastrophic’ climate change.

But with CO2 levels in the atmosphere now edging over 400 parts per million (350 ppm the official ‘safe’ limit) there seems to be something wrong with the cornerstone of the science –  the so-called greenhouse gas theory.

The rains have returned to California, and the six-year drought appears to be largely over. We have heard countless assertions from journalists and politicians, ignorant of the weather history of California and the other western states, that the drought was a result of global warming.

In the January edition of Scientific American, there is a well-told story “California Megaflood: Lessons from a Forgotten Catastrophe” by B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkley. She notes: “Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years.

Japanese scientists have spotted a gravity wave on Venus, and it could be the largest stationary one ever recorded in the solar system.

Researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science detected the large gravity wave using the Akatsuki spacecraft, according to Gizmodo. The wave is said to be 6,200 miles long and is surrounded by strong winds traveling 225 miles per hour.

The wave was first observed by JAXA’s Akatsuki orbiter in 2015. According to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the orbiter discovered “a stationary, bow-shaped structure in the upper Venusian atmosphere.”

JIUQUAN, China — On the edge of the Gobi Desert, the Jiuquan Wind Power Base stands as a symbol of China’s quest to dominate the world’s renewable energy market. With more than 7,000 turbines arranged in rows that stretch along the sandy horizon, it is one of the world’s largest wind farms, capable of generating enough electricity to power a small country.

But these days, the windmills loom like scarecrows, idle and inert. The wind howls outside, but many turbines in Jiuquan, a city of vast deserts and farms in the northwest province of Gansu, have been shut off because of weak demand. Workers while away the hours calculating how much power the turbines could have generated if there were more buyers, and wondering if and when they will ever make a profit.

This is the first baby to be born using a particular “3-parent-baby” technique to treat infertility.

The girl was born on 5 January in a fertility clinic in Kiev, Ukraine. “With the help of this method, a 34-year-old woman who had suffered from infertility for more than 15 years gave birth to a healthy baby that’s genetically her own,” said a statement from the Nadiya clinic.

The clinic’s director, Valery Zukin, and his team used a mitochondrial transfer technique that creates embryos that carry the chromosomes of two parents, but the mitochondrial DNA of a donor.

For the past decade legions of the gullible have been signalling their eco-virtue by candles’ glow, turning off the lights for 60 minutes as an offering to poor, overheated Gaia. It makes little sense, but promoters are delighted the faithful can still write cheques in the gloom.

World Wide Fund for Nature (Australia) is gearing up for its tenth idiotic Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday, March 25. Once again it will be urging people to turn off lights  (but not fridges, freezers, TVs, dishwashers, computers, aircons and smart-phones). If WWF is aware that satellite data shows no atmospheric warming for the past 18 years, that information figures nowhere in its literature.

Of course, any large-scale lights-off actually increases CO2 emissions because generators have to do inefficient ramping-up of power when the lights go on again. Such quibbles have never worried   WWF.

From microbes to marsupials, life abounds on Earth. But even if you stripped the planet of all its inhabitants, Earth would still “live”.

Its molten core churns, generating a magnetic field that envelops the planet. Erupting volcanoes spew gases and pave new lands with fresh lava. Earth’s surface is a jigsaw puzzle of continent-sized rocky plates that push, rub, and clash against one another – powerful processes that build mountains and reshape landscapes.

Earth is not just a vessel for life; the planet itself is alive. But its geological metabolism – and especially the dynamism of its tectonic plates – is also responsible for making it a habitable world. If the planet were a cold, dead, and inert space rock, life as we know it probably could not exist. At least on today’s Earth, geology and biology go hand in hand.

Financial ties between researchers and companies that make the drugs they are studying are independently associated with positive trial results, suggesting bias in the evidence base, concludes a study published this week by The BMJ (January 17, 2017).

Relationships with industry are common among investigators of randomised clinical trials (RCTs) – raising concerns about the effect that financial ties may have on the evidence base. But studies investigating these relationships have been conflicting.

So a team of US based researchers set out to investigate the association between financial ties of principal investigators and study outcomes in a random sample of 195 drug trials published in 2013.

Paper Reviewed: Uthicke, S., Ebert, T., Liddy, M., Johansson, C., Fabricius, K.E. and Lamare, M. 2016. Echinometra sea urchins acclimatized to elevated pCO2 at volcanic vents outperform those under present-day pCO2 conditions. Global Change Biology 22: 2451-2461

So how did Uthicke et al. (2016) learn what is implied by the title of their paper? As they go on to describe it, they studied “an Echinometra species on natural volcanic CO2 vents in Papua New Guinea, where they are CO2-acclimated and also subjected to secondary ecological changes from elevated CO2,” and where they additionally experienced “large daily variations in pH (>1 unit) and pCO2 (>2000 ppm) and average pH values (pHT 7.73),” which values, they make a point of noting, are “much below those expected under the most pessimistic future emission scenarios.”

Paper Reviewed: Liu, Z., Chen, W., He, X., Fu, S. and Lu, T. 2016. Regulatory effects of elevated carbon dioxide on growth and biochemical responses to ozone stress in Chinese pine (Pinus taulaeformis Carr.). Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 97: 793-797.

In an attempt to downplay the many benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on plant growth and development, climate alarmists frequently contend that the positive responses induced by rising levels of CO2 will be negated by the negative impacts of rising levels of ozone (O3) pollution. However, as evidenced by the many studies we have previously reviewed on this topic (see, for example, those reviews posted under the various subheadings of Ozone: Effects on Plants, listed here), elevated CO2 reduces, and nearly always completely overrides, the negative effects of O3 pollution on plant photosynthesis, growth and yield.

IMAGE: A 2009 IMAGE OF RHESUS MONKEYS IN A LANDMARK STUDY OF THE BENEFITS OF CALORIC RESTRICTION. THE THEN 27-YEAR-OLD MONKEY ON THE LEFT WAS GIVEN A DIET WITH FEWER CALORIES.

Of course, people are not caged rhesus monkeys — our genetics, lifespans, lifestyles, environments, stresses etc. are infinitely different. The media release is below.

Calorie restriction lets monkeys live long and prosper
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

MADISON, Wis. — Settling a persistent scientific controversy, a long-awaited report shows that restricting calories does indeed help rhesus monkeys live longer, healthier lives.

A remarkable collaboration between two competing research teams — one from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one from the National Institute on Aging — is the first time the groups worked together to resolve one of the most controversial stories in aging research.

 

 

Duh… I wrote about the phenomenon of asthma overdiagnosis 14 years ago… and what are the implications for EPA air pollution junk science? The media release is below.

My 2002 FOXNews.com article is below that. As to the implications, suffice it to say that this reality further debunks EPA’s junk science-powered weak statistical associations on asthma and air quality.

Also read: Ozone Triggers Lying Not Asthma.

Australian Physical Chemist uses standard science to test whether ‘greenhouse gases’ –  key to the theory behind man-made global warming – really can have any greenhouse effect on other planets.

Dr Peter J Carson (University of Adelaide) shows that careful comparison of the different concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) on Earth, Venus and Mars determines that any supposed ‘greenhouse gas effect’ has no relation to the amount of atmospheric CO2.

Dr Carson’s analysis, set out below and linked here, is a compelling debunk of the claims that adding more CO2 into the atmosphere will alter the temperature of a planet’s surface. In effect, Carson shows that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is false.