There are bones hidden away in almost every cupboard in many of the rooms of New York University’s primatology department, and James Higham is keen to explain to me what they can tell us about an important part of our evolution: why we have such big, heavy brains.

Yours truly has a preference for spuds over rice as the dietary “carb.” So, you may forgive me for being interested in news about this tuber-kind being potentially feeding the future colonists on planet Mars.Surely now, our venerable Canadian Broadcasting Service (CBC) would not lie!

As the report says:

The [potato growing] experiment was conducted in soil in the Atacama Desert in Peru, which is most similar to what is found on Mars.

The “Extreme Weather” meme has earned its place in climate change history as the fundamental driver of climate scaremongering, used deceptively and effectively to promote the catastrophic man-made climate change theory by instilling fear, doom and gloom directly into the human psyche through simple imagery and repetitive correlation rhetoric.

Cells are basically tiny computers: They send and receive inputs and output accordingly. If you chug a Frappuccino, your blood sugar spikes, and your pancreatic cells get the message. Output: more insulin.

But cellular computing is more than just a convenient metaphor. In the last couple of decades, biologists have been working to hack the cells’ algorithm in an effort to control their processes. They’ve upended nature’s role as life’s software engineer, incrementally editing a cell’s algorithm—its DNA—over generations.

Image copyright: SPL

The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015.

However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. There are growing concerns around the world over research integrity.

Image copyright: ANU

Have you ever thought about discovering a planet? It may not be as fanciful as you think. Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU) want help in searching for a ninth planet thought to be orbiting our Solar System.

With a working title of Planet Nine, it is speculated to exist beyond Pluto. Amateur stargazers have been promised input on naming the planet if they spot it on a website showing digital images of space.

In 2001, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the earth to warm and developed computer models to predict how much the earth would warm in the future.

Does any empirical scientific evidence exist to support this premise of the IPCC? The answer is no, in fact it is just the opposite, CO2 has a cooling effect. The major components in the atmosphere that cause the earth to be cooler than it would be otherwise are the so-called greenhouse gases.

In the period from 2000-2015, the hole in the ozone layer shrank by more than 4 million square kilometers—nearly a billion acres—according to a new report in the journal Science.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, news of a massive hole in the ozone layer caused worldwide panic, stoked by everything from rumors of sheep being blinded by increased atmospheric radiation to the fear of a skin cancer pandemic and even comparisons to “AIDS from the sky.”

Environmentalists truly believed and predicted during the first Earth Day in 1970 that the planet was doomed unless drastic actions were taken.

Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily Caller News Foundation takes a look at predictions made by environmentalists around the original Earth Day in 1970 to see how they’ve held up.

A new scientific paper authored by seven scientists affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences was just published in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Physics.

The scientists dismiss both “greenhouse gases” and variations in the Sun’s irradiance as significant climate drivers, and instead embrace cloud cover variations — modulated by cosmic ray flux — as a dominant contributor to climate change.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html

According to the Met Office, last month much milder than average, although it only ranked 34th warmest since 1772. The warmest February was actually way back in 1779.

Looking at the figures for England as a whole, average temperatures for February do seem to have been on the rise since the 1980s.

Past the ridiculous claim that average global temperature going from, say, 58F to 59.8F will increase the incidence of diabetes, the bulk of this lame study occurred during the pause. What warming happened then? Any actual increase in diabetes incidence could easily be attributed to changes in detection and diagnoses.

According to Nasa, there have been no sunspots on the surface of our star in two weeks, leading to predictions the solar minimum has begun early. The sun follows cycles of roughly 11 years where it reaches a solar maximum and then a solar minimum.

During the former, the Sun gives off more heat, and less in the latter. By observing the sun through Nasa’s powerful Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, experts have noticed there has been very little activity.