“Science” is not a set of facts but a process or method that sets out a way for us to discover information and which attempts to determine the level of confidence we might have in that information. In the method, a “claim” or “hypothesis” is stated such that rigorous tests might be employed to test the claim to determine its credibility.

I teach an introductory physics course to elementary education majors, but my lessons aren’t really about physics. At first glance, it might seem that they are, but it’s a trick. The course examines the nature of science. That’s what makes it so awesome.

When I talk about the nature of science, I don’t mean the list of steps outlined on that poster in your fourth grade classroom—that’s not how science works. Instead, think of the nature of science as both the process and the limitations of the scientific endeavor. Let me explain with an example from my class.

As wind projects continue to get planned throughout Germany, concerns over their effects on nature, wildlife and human health are growing more than ever.

The online Sächsische Zeitung (SZ – Saxony News) reports how one locality in Germany held a public forum on the subject of low-frequency infrasound earlier this year. Infrasound generated by wind turbines is low-frequency at a range that is not audible to the human ear (< 20 Hz), but the air pressure waves are in fact registered by the inner ear. For a fair amount of people these pulsing pressure changes can trigger a variety of physical discomforts, and over the long term to severe health risks, a growing body of literature shows.

Ynetnews reports: Israeli scientists from the Rehovot-based company Nucleix succeeded in developing a first of its kind blood test to diagnose lung cancer.

The new test is able to diagnose the disease long before it spreads in the body, thus increasing the chance of survival, as many patients usually die within a few months of the diagnosis.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have created artificial heart tissue with functioning vasculature by stripping a spinach leaf of its original cells and replacing them with human cells.

The spinach leaf was used to solve a problem faced by biological engineers when creating artificial tissues and organs. Methods such as 3D printing that generally make good copies do not have the ability to recreate the complicated vascular systems that are needed to ensure the success of any bioengineered tissue. If oxygen and nutrients cannot be transported to the cells, then that organ will fail and die.

If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously?

In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia. Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists.

Britain’s government seems to have specifically removed quantitative estimates of the costs of wind and solar power from an official report.

The report was  published roughly one year late and has seemingly had most of its cost estimates removed. The few stats that remain are entirely qualitative and do not include numerical approximations, like dollars per megawatt hour, which would normally be considered the principal output of such research.

(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch today announced it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to compel the U.S. Department of Commerce to turn over all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement (Judicial Watch v. Department of Commerce (No. 1:17-cv-00541)).

From the Daily Caller:

Six nonprofit groups that criticized President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts failed to mention the nearly $179 million in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants they’ve received since 2009, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group (The DCNF) analysis of federal spending data.

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.