The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year. It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time. 

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK’s road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.

The Department for Transport had originally pledged to let self-driving cars be trialled on public roads by the end of 2013.

Business Secretary Vince Cable revealed the details of the new plan at a research facility belonging to Mira, an automotive engineering firm based in the Midlands.

“Today’s announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society,” he said.

UK engineers, including a group at the University of Oxford, have been experimenting with driverless cars. But, concerns about legal and insurance issues have so far restricted the machines to private roads.

Other countries have, however, been swifter to provide access to public routes.

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC9) in Las Vegas. If you ever doubted scepticism towards man-made global warming as a growing social movement, well, you couldn’t after attending that conference with hundreds of enthusiastic doubters in attendance and some 6,000 watching online. 

Death is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world’s oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens. 

Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.

Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.

What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body’s capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.

Two little cells

In van Andel-Schipper’s case, it seemed that in the twilight of her life, about two-thirds of the white blood cells remaining in her body at death originated from just two stem cells, implying that most or all of the blood stem cells she started life with had already burned out and died.

“Is there a limit to the number of stem cell divisions, and does that imply that there’s a limit to human life?” asks Henne Holstege of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who headed the research team. “Or can you get round that by replenishment with cells saved from earlier in your life?” she says.

Claims of rapid and effortless weight loss are swiftly making this little supplement popular. But does it actually work? Learn all the facts about raspberry ketone and if it will work for you. 

Chemistry debunks junk climate science in the ‘global warming causes ocean acidification’ debate. Established Chemistry proves that if temperatures were rising then, conversely, acidification would be falling, not increasing. Such is the woeful science ignorance (or intentional deceit) of climate alarmists. 

Indisputable facts

Discussion about those facts

Besides the above chemical and physical facts, it is well known that an increase in water temperature will reduce the solubility of CO2.

Leave any opened cold carbonated drink – from champagne to Coke – to warm up and see what happens to the fizz, which is CO2 in case you didn’t know. Your warmed champagne/Coke goes ‘flat’ because the carbon dioxide has escaped the liquid and entered the atmosphere.

It is therefore not rocket science to state with complete confidence that warm water naturally contains less CO2 than cold water.

The oceans are outgassing CO2 due to the slight warming trend since the end of the Mini Ice Age (c. 1850’s). The exact cause of this trend IS NOT known and remains the subject of much scientific debate! There is evidence that there is a gap of many centuries between planet-wide temperature swings and atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

As the so called pause in global warming continues, space scientists may be giving climate scientists some pause for thought. 

Global surface temperatures have remained statistically flat for over a decade following a rapid rise in the second half of the 20^th century despite the fact that the long-term increase in carbon dioxide associated with this rapid global warming has continued throughout the whole of the pause period.

Two pieces of research published this year suggest that the sun has played a bigger role in these events than is widely accepted by climate scientists and they imply, as a result, that the role of ‘greenhouse gases’ may be less significant than climate scientists currently believe.

The research shows that the sun is far more variable than we had previously thought and that variations in solar activity correlate very closely with changes in global surface temperature. This challenges the prevailing orthodoxy in climate science that our star plays no significant role in global warming.

The ebola virus that has killed almost 1,000 people in West Africa this year is fatal for “up to 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}” of those infected, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). But note the words “up to”… What is the normal fatality rate, asks James Fletcher? 

The WHO describes ebola as “one of the world’s most virulent diseases”. It is, according to the organisation’s website, “a severe, often fatal illness, with a case fatality rate of up to 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}“.

A case fatality rate – or CFR – is a relatively simple measurement. It’s the number of people diagnosed with an illness divided by the number of people who die because of it. But in the current outbreak, the proportion of infected people dying is far lower than 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}.

“That 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} figure actually comes from one outbreak of ebola which took place in the Congo between 2002 and 2003. It’s the highest rate we have ever seen,” says Maimuna Majumder, a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Accused of being “flat Earth deniers of settled science” requires placing the Ptolemaic Model in perspective. Discussed for two centuries by the Greeks, Aristotle in 400 BC gave a solution involving approximately 50 transparent concentric spheres which rotated to provide the movements of planets and stars observed on a fixed, flat Earth.

 

NASA has tested an “impossible” electric space drive that uses no propellant – and found it works even when it is designed not to. This has sparked immediate skepticism of the technology. 

New independent climate analysis reveals what may be the greatest flaw in modern climate science- a simplistic over-reliance on the assumption of steady state atmospheric conditions. New research from France employs a two-way formulation for heat evacuation by radiation from the planet rather than the standard one-dimensional ‘greenhouse gas theory.’ 

 It reveals that convection plays a more dominant role than radiation in our climate and that number fudging by so-called climate “experts” may be the only truly discernible extent of “man-made” global warming.

In a new paper, ‘Diurnal Variations of Heat Evacuation from a Rotating Planet,’ submitted to open peer review at Principia Scientific International (PSI), Joseph Reynen, a retired Dutch scientist living in France, puts standard climate science calculations under the microscope and reveals that for too long the “experts” used an outdated guesstimating process relied on before the modern era of accurate computing.

Reynen’s study is yet further validation to what an increasing number of independent scientists are saying is a major error by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC gave an uncritical free pass to an assumed physical interpretation from a pre-computer era approximation which put a great emphasis on a fixed artificial energy absorption rate instead of actual absorption for the real energy flux coming from our sun.

As Reynen delves into the technicalities he explains, “In the beginning of the 1900’s computers were not available and by splitting-up the radiation in up-ward and down-ward components, and introducing a co-ordinate transformation with the so-called optical thickness concept, analytical solutions were possible, although in the form of integrals. Quadrature techniques were available at that time to evaluate numerically those integrals, with no need for computers.”

But that assumption of fixed solar energy flux has been blown apart by the latest physical measurements by satellite and by rigorous ground-based analysis from experts from the “hard” sciences. Indeed, the scope of Reynen’s paper is not to give detailed results for diurnal variations of the sun power, but rather to demonstrate that one-dimensional steady state models based on the one-way heat flow concept of Swedish professor, Claes Johnson is an accurate tool to show the very small influence of infrared-sensitive gases for the global and annual mean heat budget of the planet.

It’s a thirsty world out there. But with much of the globe’s drinking supply unimproved by treatment systems that can remove animal waste, bacteria, viruses, and chemicals, a clean sip of water is too often a luxury. 

Many researchers and inventors are looking for cheaper and faster ways to get clean drinking water to people who lack it. On the industrial scale, people are refining filtration membranes by using advanced materials like graphene to make more efficient potable water supplies. Others are using architecture to make rain-harvesting buildings. For individuals, one designer has made a solar power distiller to turn saltwater fresh. These are just a few examples of a lot of brainpower going in to help around 780 million people who have limited access to clean water.

Now a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) team says they have developed a novel personal filtration tool that will contribute to the solution. Using a three-stage system that includes an advanced polymer membrane, they say the device, called DrinkPure, works so quickly that it can filter up to a liter of water a minute.

“What makes our DrinkPure filter unique is that you can screw it on to virtually any plastic bottle. It doesn’t require a pump or a reservoir, so it’s very easy to use,” said Jeremy Nussbaumer, a 23-year-old former ETHZ mechanical engineering student. “You simply screw the filter onto a bottle containing polluted water, then you can put it straight in your mouth and take a drink.” 

Water coming into the system first passes a large screen that filters sand and organic matter. Then it moves through an activated charcoal layer that removes chemicals, metals and odors. Finally, it goes through the polymer layer, which is impregnated with nanoscopic pores that are all exactly the same size. This removes bacteria, viruses and other microbes. 

Henrik Møller, Denmark’s leading academic expert on noise research, has been fired by his university after exposing a far-reaching cover up by the Danish government of the health risks caused by wind turbine noise pollution. 

Chemotherapy will be obsolete within 20 years, scientists have predicted after launching a landmark project to map 100,000 genomes to find the genes responsible for cancer and rare diseases. 

By the time children born today reach adulthood, invasive drugs and their devastating side-effects, will have been replaced by sophisticated medicines that can fix individual faulty genes, according to those behind the project.

Britain is the first country in the world to embark on a program to map the genomes of thousands of people in the hope of finding which genes are responsible.

In a joint £300 million project, universities across Britain are coming together, alongside the Department of Health, the Wellcome Trust, Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Medical Research Council.

David Cameron, the prime minister, said the venture would ‘unlock the power of DNA’ to deliver ‘better tests, better drugs and better care for patients.’

“As our plan becomes a reality, I believe we will be able to transform how devastating diseases are diagnosed and treated in the NHS and across the world,” he said.

The first few hundred pilot participants in London, Cambridge and Newcastle have already donated DNA samples and the project is expected to be completed 2018.

The impact of carbon dioxide on climate change may have been overstated, with solar activity giving a better explanation of changes in the Earth’s temperature, according to Chinese scientists. 

A new paper published in the Chinese Science Bulletin has found a “high correlation between solar activity and the Earth’s averaged surface temperature over centuries,” suggesting that climate change is intimately linked with solar cycles rather than human activity.

The paper, written in Chinese, says that there is also a “significant correlation” between solar activity over the past century and an increase in Earth’s surface temperatures over the same period. The correlation between solar activity and water temperature is even higher than the correlation between solar activity and land temperature.

The paper, by Dr Zhao Xinhua and Dr Feng Xueshang, adds that a peer-reviewer said the results “provide a possible explanation for the global warming”.

In a press release, posted on the Hockey Schtick blog, The researchers say:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed that the release of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases contributed to 90 percent or even higher of the observed increase in the global average temperature in the past 50 years.

However, the new paper casts doubt on the IPCC’s assertion:

Research shows that the current warming does not exceed the natural fluctuations of climate. The climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities. Solar activity is an important ingredient of natural driving forces of climate. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate the influence of solar variability on the Earth’s climate change on long time scales.

  According to many government climatologists ‘greenhouse gases’ – especially carbon dioxide, keep our planet 33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. However, an increasing number of experts from the “hard” sciences say the generalists of the infant science of climatology have overlooked the huge role of clouds in climate. 

  Physicists say it is the dominance of clouds, not carbon dioxide that really holds the key. In this article we take a closer look at just how important clouds really are.

  Let us begin by addressing two key sets of numbers that appear to be in contradiction:

1. Contemporary climate theory uses the following statement as a base:
   “Right now, the warming influence is literally a matter of life and death. It keeps the average surface temperature of the planet at 288 degrees kelvin (15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit). Without this greenhouse effect, the average surface temperature would be 255 degrees kelvin (-18 degrees Celsius or 0 degrees Fahrenheit); a temperature so low that all water on Earth would freeze, the oceans would turn into ice and life, as we know it, would not exist. ” http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_chapter.asp?id=21&page=1
2. But in stark contradiction to this planetary physics calculates the average temperature of the Earth without greenhouse gases or an atmosphere to be far higher at 6 C.  http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/library/notes/plantemp.htm

Deviations of actual planetary surface temperatures from these computed temperatures are due to:

    As there is dispute on the amount of temperature variation caused by the “greenhouse gas effect” (GHE) or the “atmospheric effect” it is the scientific approach to apply scepticism and judge for yourself. To imagine what the Earth would be like without greenhouse gases is to image a world without clouds – with other “greenhouse gases” being invisible. Here I will lay out a logical scenario of what the Earth’s climate would be like without them.

NASA’s next Mars rover will, we’re told, convert the Red Planet’s atmosphere into oxygen, collect rocks to return to Earth, peer to the depth of half a kilometre under the surface – and use stereo cameras to send back unprecedented snaps of the bleak planet.