In this latest of a series of articles about retired science writer, Edsel Chromie, we feature a further example where Chromie demonstrates that natural phenomena can be neatly explained by strong magnetic field current flow, as proven in 1900’s laboratory experiments overlooked today: Electromagnetism on Saturn.
From those same laboratory experiments Chromie has identified how Saturn’s rings and “geysers” of Enceladus also exhibit strong magnetic field current flow that is consistent and reproducible.
In 1980 when the dark fingers within the rings of Saturn were first discovered, Dr. Bradford Smith said: “We just don’t know what to make of them, except they look dark. And that would suggest that it’s a diminution of material”
A generation ago, few people had tattoos and those were mostly hidden beneath clothes. More recently, tattoos (both having and showing them) appear to have become common accoutrements of parts of modern society. Just walk down any street in summer temperature and you’ll see all kinds of personal embellishments “engraved” on skins of various ages and colors.
Some of these ancient designs are going to be replaced (??) soon by more modern designs, like those also functioning as electronic signaling devices for your hand-held phone, tabloid, or whatever. Their big feature is supposed to be your ability to control your fridge, home lights, or other electric home gadgets – just by touching your shiny gold-leaf-tattoo as in the pics below.
(Life Issues Institute) — All along I’ve felt somewhat suspect that the Zika virus is linked to microcephaly. The US Centers for Disease Control and the New England Journal of Medicine both concluded the link is there. Both are heavy hitters in the realm of research, however, they admit there’s no studied verification.
Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry were quick to jump on the abortion bandwagon for pregnant women with confirmed or suspected cases of the Zika virus.
But a recent, expansive study has cast legitimate doubt on the Zika/microcephaly connection.
The world will soon face an energy crisis of monumental proportions which many ignore. By 2050 we must significantly increase total energy production or face a need for worldwide redistribution of wealth and energy allocation coupled with population reduction. The only realistic solution to the production of much higher amounts of energy is the development and commercialization of fusion energy from which both electricity and synthetic liquid and gaseous fuels may be produced.
This has been known for many years but contrary to public and political body’s misconceptions, comparatively little investment and effort has been made in the field since the mid to late 1970s. Government sponsored fusion programs have followed two “mainline” approaches; civilian controlled magnetic confinement and NNSA managed weapons based inertial confinement.
Whereas the United States was the world leader in fusion in the 1975-80 time frame, the U.S. gave up its lead and most of its fusion programs in 1985 based on the agreement between President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in support of the Soviet Union’s suggestion of an international cooperative fusion effort which took 20 years to take shape as ITER in Southern France.
In the mid-1990s Drs. Irv Lindemuth, Richard Siemon and Kurt Schoenberg proposed a new way forward to much quicker and lower cost fusion development along with Dr. Francis Thio of NASA’s Marshal Space Labs. Today several private enterprise companies in the U.S. and Canada are pursuing this approach and other non-mainline approaches with financial funding from venture capital companies and a few national governments.
Given the time required to successfully demonstrate a sustained controlled fusion reaction producing net energy gain followed by the commercialization of “utility ready” regulator approved product, a new collaborative approach is needed. Funding must be significantly increased for all these private companies. This author is calling for the formation of a fusion consortium to be funded by the public and the utility industry. A comprehensive plan has been set forth to accomplish this and make the exploration of “inner-space” and fusion energy development America’s 21st Century moonshot project. The need and justifications are summarized in the concluding “Fusion Energy Elevator Pitch.”
THREE years ago Thomas Herndon, a young graduate student from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, made a splash among economists. Given an assignment to replicate the analysis behind a published academic paper, he pored over the data used for an influential study on government debt written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, both professors at Harvard. Much to the authors’ embarrassment, Mr Herndon found the most elementary of mistakes: they had accidentally omitted five rows of their spreadsheet when calculating an average. When included, the missing figures weakened the paper’s conclusion substantially.
Its core collapsed within seconds, fused heavy metals, and hurled them into outer space in a cataclysmic blast. A supergiant — reduced to a cloud of dust and gas.
The crime went unreported for eons. Then, about 2.6 million years ago, evidence began to land on Earth. Heavy atoms ejected from the supernova broke through the planet’s atmosphere and settled on its surface as isotopes.
Now, scientists say they’ve uncovered clues to the crime. But something seems suspicious. Soon after the aftermath arrived on Earth, our planet fell into a major ice age — leading many investigators to see the supernova as both victim and accomplice.
When I was still in school, the rule-of-thumb for the human microbiome — the sum total of microbes that live in and on our bodies — was that bacteria outnumbered human cells 10 to 1. Specifically, it was believed that the average person has 10 trillion human cells and carries 100 trillion bacteria.
Not so, say the authors of a new PLoS Biology paper, who re-crunched the numbers. According to their estimate, the human body actually consists of 30 trillion cells, and our bacterial allies only number 38 trillion. The ratio, therefore, is much closer to 1 to 1. The authors explain that the original estimates were little more than “back-of-the-envelope” calculations. As such, they served as useful reference points, but more accurate data is now available.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to allow the public to understand better, and reap benefits from, Einstein’s 1905 discovery that rest mass (m) is energy (E) and to explain the chain of events in 1905-1945 that obscured knowledge of a power offering these benefits to all humanity:
1. Abundant energy to sustain human life and to advance human civilization;
2. A better understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, the chemical elements, the solar system, and life on Earth; and
3. Empirical confirmation – in rest masses of ordinary atoms -of many earlier spiritual and scientific insights, including Aston’s 1922 promise of “powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction,” Max Planck’s 1944 assertion that the force creating atomic matter was guided by “a conscious and intelligent Mind” (commonly attributed to God), and Kuroda’s 1945 insight into the “beginning of the world” from Hiroshima’s destruction.
Written by Josef Kowatsch and Sebastian Lüning (Translated/edited by P Gosselin)
According to the German DWD national weather service August 2016 recorded a mean temperature of 17.7°C. The start of the month was really cool, but the last part of the month the temperature climbed to peak summer levels, and thus compensated for the otherwise sub-par summer. No record temperature was set, with the month’s high some degrees below the record of over 40°C set for a few minutes in 2015.
During the last ice age almost all of Canada, along with parts of Europe and Asia, were buried beneath one to two miles of ice. At the same time, sea levels stood 350 to 400 feet lower than today.
Sea levels were so low that the entire continental shelf, at least in eastern North America, was above water. Many states on the eastern seaboard were twice as big as today. New Jersey’s shoreline, for example, stood 60 to 100 miles east of its present location.
Same in the west.
The land between Alaska and Asia rose out of the sea like a bridge (or rather, the sea dropped away from the land), and the Bering Strait, which today is only 18 stories deep at its deepest point, was above water. Our ancestors could have walked to Siberia. (The word bridge is misleading, because the land connection between Alaska and Siberia was almost as wide as Alaska itself.)
PARIS: A toothy, dolphin-like predator which prowled the oceans in the Jurassic era, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, has been uncovered in a Scottish museum where it lay buried for 50 years, scientists said Monday.
First discovered in 1966, the fossil has at last been freed from its prehistoric sarcophagus to reveal a chunky, four-metre-long (13 feet) deep-sea killer — its pointed mouth bristling with hundreds of cone-shaped teeth.
“It is spectacular,” said palaeontologist Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences, who helped expose the 170 million-year-old remains.
Climate alarmists claim increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause oceans to become more acidic which, when combined with ocean warming, will decimate coral reefs unable to adapt to climate change. Time and again this fear has been shown to be misplaced. Most recently, The New York Times reported the Coral Castles reef between Hawaii and Fiji, which had been declared dead in 2003, is now teaming with life.
On a Friday in March 2013, a researcher working in the lab of a prominent pulmonary scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was arrested on charges of embezzlement. The researcher, biologist Erin Potts-Kant, later pled guilty to siphoning more than $25,000 from the Duke University Health System, buying merchandise from Amazon, Walmart, and Target—even faking receipts to legitimize her purchases. A state judge ultimately levied a fine, and sentenced her to probation and community service.
Then Potts-Kant’s troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn’t like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing “unreliable” data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant.
It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
The Duke case “should scare all [academic] institutions around the country,” says attorney Joel Androphy of Berg & Androphy in Houston, Texas, who specializes in false claims litigation. It appears to be one of the largest FCA suits ever to focus on research misconduct in academia, he says, and, if successful, could “open the floodgates” to other whistleblowing cases.
False claims lawsuits, also known as qui tam suits, are a growing part of the U.S. legal landscape. Under an 1863 law, citizen whistleblowers can go to court on behalf of the government to try to recoup federal funds that were fraudulently obtained. Winners can earn big payoffs, getting up to 30% of any award, with the rest going to the government. Whistleblowers filed a record 754 FCA cases in 2013, and last year alone won nearly $600 million. The U.S. government, meanwhile, has recouped more than $3.5 billion annually from FCA cases in recent years.
Relatively few of these cases have targeted research universities (see box, below); many allege fraud in health care or military programs. But that’s changing. The FCA “is increasingly being used to target alleged fraud in a diverse array of industries, including research and academia,” says attorney Suzanne Jaffe Bloom of Winston & Strawn LLP in New York City. Although recent court rulings suggest public universities may have some protection from qui tam suits because they are government entities, private institutions do not. Eleven private universities, including Duke, are among the top 25 recipients of federal funding for academic science over the past decade.
Retraction Watch
The Duke case centers on allegations made by biologist Joseph Thomas, who, according to court documents, joined Duke’s cell biology department in 2008. In 2012 Thomas moved to the pulmonary division, where Potts-Kant worked under William Michael Foster investigating how pollutants affect the body’s airways. After Potts-Kant was placed on leave in 2013, the pulmonary division conducted an investigation of the data produced by Foster’s lab, according to the lawsuit. (Duke has not released the results of the investigation.) Investigators analyzed raw data, recalculated results, and reran experiments, according to the suit. Thomas, who says he participated in the review, claims that other reviewers and pulmonary division staff told him that Potts-Kant doctored nearly every experiment or project in which she participated. Sometimes, the suit alleges, she hadn’t exposed mice to the right experimental conditions or run the experiments at all. Other times, Thomas alleges, Potts-Kant had run the experiments but altered the data, tweaking them to match the hypothesis or boost their statistical significance.
Thomas, who no longer works at Duke, alleges that Foster and others at Duke were aware of concerns raised about Potts-Kant’s work even before the investigation began. There were obvious red flags, he contends. For example, she spent far less time completing a research task than required by an equally experienced researcher. And at least one outsider had raised questions about her data at a scientific meeting. But the university withheld the scope of what it knew from federal funding agencies as it filed reports on existing grants and applied for new ones, the lawsuit alleges.
Specifically, Thomas alleges that since 2006 Duke received at least 49 grants worth $82.8 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Environmental Protection Agency, and other agencies “that were directly premised on and/or arose from the research misconduct and fraud of Potts-Kant and/or the Foster lab.” And he alleges that the doctored data helped other institutions win 15 additional grants, worth $120.9 million, from NIH. (Those grants involved using the Duke lab for some research tasks.)
Foster did not respond to requests for comment on the case. Thomas—who is represented by his brother John Thomas of Gentry Locke LLP in Roanoke, Virginia—would not comment, and Potts-Kant could not be reached. In a statement, Duke spokesperson Michael Schoenfeld says that officials learned of the “discrepancies” in Potts-Kant’s data only after her embezzlement was discovered in 2013. “Even though the full scope of Ms. Potts-Kant’s actions were not known at the time, Duke notified several government agencies in June 2013 about the matter and immediately launched a formal scientific misconduct investigation, as required by federal law,” he stated. “Since then, Duke has provided extensive information to the government regarding the grants in question, and we will continue to cooperate with their investigation.” (The government has not joined the case, but could later.)
An attorney not associated with the case says it may face obstacles. Although the high number of retractions suggests that Thomas can meet the FCA’s requirement that “falsity” exists, it may be more difficult to show that the inclusion of fraudulent data was key to winning the grants, another essential aspect of an FCA case, says Torrey Young of Foley & Lardner LLP in Boston. “An important concept,” she says, is that “you can have research misconduct without having a false claim.”
Alison McCook is an editor at Retraction Watch based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This story was produced under a collaboration between Science and Retraction Watch.
I finished high school in 1995. It was the year the top quark was discovered, a prediction dating back to 1973. As I read the articles in the news, I was fascinated by the mathematics that allowed physicists to reconstruct the structure of elementary matter. It wouldn’t have been difficult to predict in 1995 that I’d go on to make a PhD in theoretical high energy physics.
Little did I realize that for more than 20 years the so provisional looking standard model would remain undefeated world-champion of accuracy, irritatingly successful in its arbitrariness and yet impossible to surpass. We added neutrino masses in the late 1990s, but this idea dates back to the 1950s. The prediction of the Higgs, discovered 2012, originated in the early 1960s. And while the poor standard model has been discounted as “ugly” by everyone from Stephen Hawking to Michio Kaku to Paul Davies, it’s still the best we can do.
The two closest active tide gauges to those locations show that sea level is rising at exactly the same rate is was a century ago. There is not the slightest indication that humans have had any impact on sea level.
