Written by Freeman Dyson
Sometime in the next few hundred years, biotechnology will have advanced to the point where we can design and breed entire ecologies of living creatures adapted to survive in remote places away from Earth. I give the name Noah’s Ark culture to this style of space operation.
Written by Paul Homewood
Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate.
Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years.
Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987.
Written by PSI staff
Below is another in the series of articles about the extraordinary science writer Edsel Chromie. Now in retirement this American innovator is candid about the failures of Establishment science to take up his novel ideas about electromagnetism on other planets and impacts on earth’s weather.
Now his inspired ideas are gradually being accepted by leading institutions such as NASA. Here readers can be appalled and enthralled by Chromie’s reminiscences and be mindful of these sage words: “Scientific orthodoxy kills truth.” – Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel Prize in physics
Written by Tony Heller
The blog post below about the Congo shows another example of how NOAA has erased the warmth of the 1940s. In 1974, the National Center For Atmospheric Research showed a large global warming spike to the 1940’s, followed by very rapid cooling back to below 1870’s levels.
Written by Jonathan Amos
Image copyrightNASAFurther evidence has been obtained to show that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa throws jets of water out into space. Scientists first reported the behaviour in 2013 using the Hubble telescope, but have now made a follow-up sighting. It is significant because Europa, with its huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, is one of the most likely places to find microbial life beyond Earth. Flying through the jets with an instrumented spacecraft would be an easy way to test the possibility.
One could even attempt to capture a sample of ejected material and bring it back to Earth for more detailed biological analysis. The alternative – of trying to land on the moon and drill through perhaps tens of kilometres of ice to examine the ocean’s water – would be immensely challenging.
Written by Andrew Follett
Government funding of scientific research has a corrupting influence that could cause more unethical behavior among researchers, according to a new study by scientists at Virginia Tech.
Researchers found federal funding is encouraging scientists to falsify data and publish bad research. The study found that universities are making the problem worse by mostly hiring young scientists as adjuncts, not tenure-track positions, which increases the financial pressures causing them to distort science.
Written by Tony Heller
After the shortest melt season on record, and the earliest end to the melt season record, September ice growth has been the fastest on record.
Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut
Earlier this month, Mark Serreze from NSIDC advised the Ship of Fools that could sail to the North Pole.
After unusual Arctic storms, sea ice coverage in region is plummeting
Good thing they weren’t foolish enough to listen to Serreze, like Lewis Pugh did in 2008.
North Pole could be ice-free this summer, scientists say – CNN.com
In 2008 Lewis Pugh kayaked about 20 miles out of Svalbard before he got blocked by ice, and then spun his total failure as proof of global warming.
Written by William M Briggs
John Allen Paulos wrote of innumeracy, the mild malady of being unable to work with numbers. “I’m not primarily concerned with esoteric mathematics here, only with some feel for numbers and probabilities, some ability to estimate answers to the ubiquitous questions… people should have a visceral reaction to the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion.”
So it is true. And undisputed.
The opposite of innumeracy isn’t numeracy or even mathematical ability. High-level mathematics will always be closed off to all but the few, not only because it requires innate abilities most don’t have in the same way most can’t be centers on professional football teams, but because it requires years of dedication and few have the time or inclination.
Written by Robert, iceagenow.info
After quantifying the magnitude and frequency of extreme floods in the UK, scientists found that flooding has been the most extreme in more than 600 years.
Flooding in northwest England was reconstructed from the coarse grained units preserved in lake sediments at Bassenthwaite Lake. The record includes the floods of December 2015 (Storm Desmond) and November 2009.
The UK scientists found five flood rich periods (CE 1460-1500, 1580-1680, 1780-1820, 1850-1925, 1970-present) and then (of course) found a way to tie the floods to global warming.
However, reader J. H. Walker comes to a different conclusion.
Written by Dr Klaus L E Kaiser
That futuristic phrase from the science fiction television series Star Trek, with actor James Doohan as Scotty, was the command to instantly beam your physical being to another place in the universe like from one star to another or, for all other earthlings that want to stay close to the surface, like traveling from LA to the Big Apple in a fraction of a second. 
Guess what? A kind of “teleportation,” described as ”long-distance ‘disembodied‘ transfer” is now claimed to have been achieved. The wonders of modern science keep getting weirder by the day. I can already see airline executives shaking in their boots, not to mention the Hyperloop and “Uber”outfits—already so yesteryear …
Written by John O'Sullivan
Key UK global warming spin machine The Guardian newspaper is at it again touting a new paper by discredited “soft” science experts. The “Big Story” here is the newly-published paper ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism’ (September 19, 2016) which takes long- discredited strawman alarmist talking points and runs them up a flag pole for treehuggers to salute.
The Guardian asserts the new paper debunks skeptics who use “contradictory arguments” as follows:
“A new research paper published in the journal Synthese has looked at several of these contradictory arguments that get thrown around the blogosphere, the Australian Senate and the opinion pages of the (mostly) conservative media.
The paper comes with the fun and enticing title: “The Alice in Wonderland mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”
Why Alice? Because, as the White Queen admitted: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Written by Pallab Ghosh
Image copyright: SIGRID GOMBERT/CULTURA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYThe UK government is to outline its plans to strengthen collaborative research between Britain and China. The Science Minister, Jo Johnson, will give details while opening a joint UK-Chinese plant research centre just outside Shanghai.
Scientists at the centre will investigate new ways of growing crops to feed an expanding global population. The centre is the latest effort by the UK to tap into the rapid growth in scientific investment by China.
Chinese research has grown rapidly in the past 20 years. Spending on R&D is now over 40 times what it was in 1995, amounting to £150bn in 2015 – just over 2% of the country’s economic production (GDP).
That compares with the UK government’s spending on R&D of £8.4bn, which is just under 0.5% of Britain’s GDP.
Written by David Keene
Some years ago, my West Virginia hunting and fishing buddy was invited to appear on a local television station high in the mountains with an animal rights activist, a young vegan mother who brought her one-year-old daughter with her.
In the midst of the discussion after the young lady argued that we humans ought to stop treating animals as our inferiors, my friend turned to her and asked a simple question. “After the show, you will have to drive back down the mountain with your daughter and I’m wondering what you would do if, as you round a curve, you see a raccoon or rabbit in the road and you have a choice: You can hit and probably kill it or you can swerve and possibly lose control of your car endangering you and your child. What would you do?”
Written by Andrew Follett
Scientists at Australia’s main medical research agency say that fluoride in drinking water is safe after analyzing 60 years of research and 3,000 scientific studies.
Researchers found that fluoride in water has no adverse health effects at the levels used in Australia, and that the substance is not linked to low IQ, cancer, or cognitive problems. The only result was reduction of the effects of tooth decay by 26 to 44 percent in children. 
“It shows that community water fluoridation as it’s used in Australia today is effective at reducing tooth decay and is not associated with any general negative health effects,” Anne Kelso, CEO of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, told reporters.
Written by Steve Milloy
This is the ultimate fact sheet for debunking what has become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most potent regulatory weapon — the claim that fine particulate matter (soot and dust called PM2.5) in outdoor air kills people. This sheet will be updated regularly as needed. This will be Version 1 (September 22, 2016). Please let me know if you have comments/suggestions.
The Claim. Since the 1996, EPA has claimed that fine particulate matter in outdoor air (PM2.5) causes death.
The EPA’s position is that:
EPA claims that natural and manmade PM2.5 causes as many as 500,000 deaths annually. [1]
Written by Paul E. Smaldino, Richard McElreath
Abstract: Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science.
This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing—no deliberate cheating nor loafing—by scientists, only that publication is a principal factor for career advancement. Some normative methods of analysis have almost certainly been selected to further publication instead of discovery.
In order to improve the culture of science, a shift must be made away from correcting misunderstandings and towards rewarding understanding. We support this argument with empirical evidence and computational modelling. We first present a 60-year meta-analysis of statistical power in the behavioural sciences and show that power has not improved despite repeated demonstrations of the necessity of increasing power.
To demonstrate the logical consequences of structural incentives, we then present a dynamic model of scientific communities in which competing laboratories investigate novel or previously published hypotheses using culturally transmitted research methods. As in the real world, successful labs produce more ‘progeny,’ such that their methods are more often copied and their students are more likely to start labs of their own. Selection for high output leads to poorer methods and increasingly high false discovery rates. We additionally show that replication slows but does not stop the process of methodological deterioration. Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level.