News reports that most cases of cancer are the result of bad luck dominated the headlines at the start of the year. But there has since been a lot of criticism of the reporting, and some of the science itself. So what should the reports have said? 

Headline-writers and news bulletin editors around the world just couldn’t get enough of a new study of cancer published on 2 January. “Two thirds of cancers are due to bad luck” reported one typical news story – and most other media outlets had similar headlines.

But there’s been criticism of the way this statistic was reported, some of it directed at journalists, and some at the researchers themselves.

To understand the study, published in the journal Science, it helps to understand the scientific basics of cancer.

The disease occurs when cells in a specific part of the body begin to mutate and reproduce uncontrollably. The cancerous cells can invade and destroy surrounding tissues.

The researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the US reported they had found a correlation between the number of cell divisions that take place in a given tissue and the likelihood that it would become cancerous. They looked at 31 tissue types (two common cancers, prostate and breast cancer, were not considered).

“Some tissues are fairly stable, so, for instance, muscle and brain tissue does not divide once it’s done developing,” explains P Z Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, in the US.

“So those tissues have a very low likelihood of coming down with cancer, whereas things like the lining of your intestine is constantly being regenerated and sloughed off and so those cells have a high proliferative output and they’re much more likely to become cancerous.”

A new type of antibiotic developed from soil culture could solve one of the most pressing medical problems of the modern age: antibiotic resistance. New drugs could save millions of lives lost to killer microbes. 

A paper in the journal Nature details how the new antibiotic, dubbed teixobactin, proved completely effective at healing mice infected with the most common drug-resistant forms of super-bug MRSA and tuberculosis. What’s more, it could take a long while for bacteria to become resistant – which is particularly useful as pathogens around the world build up resistance to treatments.

“The need for new antibiotics is acute due to the global problem of pathogen drug resistance.Teixobactin’s dual mode of action and binding to non-peptidic regions suggest that resistance will be very difficult to develop,” said Dr Kim Lewis, co-founder of biotech firm NovoBiotic, which helped develop the drug.

For years now, doctors have been warning about the problems coming down the line from antibiotic resistance. The overprescription of the drugs, and their wholesale use in the livestock farming business, has led to the evolution of illnesses that laugh in the face of even the most complex antibiotic compounds.

Last month a UK government study [PDF] on the subject estimated that antibiotic-resistant infections kill 700,000 people each year worldwide, and that without new forms of the medicine, that could rise to 10 million a year by 2050.

I don’t care much for Facebook which is filled with trivia, nevertheless some eminent Skeptics have made use of it.  So I must admit that I was both amused and flattered to be invited to be a Friend with Jim Peden, the Astrophysicist, and one of my absolute heroes. So two days ago I was lead by Jim on Facebook to an essay in Climate Change Dispatch by his colleague at Principia Scientific International, Dr Pierre R Latour.

What were the headlines?

Fred Singer closing in on Fact: CO2 Doesn’t Affect Global temperature!

Here is the link and I hope and pray that all Skeptic Professors and sincere sceptic writers and so on and so forth will read this article by Dr Latour. I immediately passed it on to Hans Schreuder since it vindicates his well-known essay that Greenhouse Gases cool the Planet. This essay by Hans Schreuder is central to what I call my book – Climate for the Layman – but which is, in fact, a compilation of articles and essays.

For too long many of us Skeptics have been fighting on marshy ground – that is on the same marshy ground as the Warmists, with just a light variation. While the Warmists declared and still declare every day that the Globe is warming dangerously by virtue of the Greenhouse Gases, some Skeptics have conceded that Greenhouse Gases warm the atmosphere but only a little, not dangerously.

That is what I mean by fighting on marshy ground, by fighting on the same ground as the Warmists. No wonder they stand their ground – it is as if the Skeptics are fundamentally in agreement with them, only differing in scale.

Scientists have found that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reduces transpiration and overall evapotranspiration in all biomass. As a consequence, the overall amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is reduced.  

The findings are published in ‘CO2 and Temperature Effects of Evapotranspiration and Irrigated Agriculture,’ (Jorge A. Ramfrez and Bryce Finnerty). [1]

The authors found that the result of lowering atmospheric water vapour is to buffer the “positive feedback” of supposed global warming. Conventional climate science has for decades believed that rising atmospheric CO2 causes rises in global temperature. But global thermometer readings and satellite data proves no increase in temperatures for nearly twenty years despite a substantial increase in atmospheric CO2 levels during the same period.

Most climate scientists had believed that more CO2 in the climate system causes a positive feedback i.e. rises in temperature. Typically, their thesis is that:

“The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere exists in direct relation to the temperature. If you increase the temperature, more water evaporates and becomes vapor, and vice versa. So when something else causes a temperature increase (such as extra CO2 from fossil fuels), more water evaporates. Then, since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this additional water vapor causes the temperature to go up even further-a positive feedback.” [2]

However, findings by independent scientists (outside the realms of politicized government climate science) and involved in researching plant evapotranspiration, supports earlier peer-reviewed scientific research from the 1980’s that flies the face of positive feedback meme. There is now a growing recognition of a body of evidence telling us that the global biomass of plants significantly impacts evapotranspiration and changes in planted environment directly impact climate.

Let’s simply state what the First Law of Thermodynamics is.  From Wiki:

First law of thermodynamics: When energy passes, as work, as heat, or with matter, into or out from a system, its internal energy changes in accord with the law of conservation of energy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.

So whether you’re talking of a steel shell around a heated sphere, or a gas around a planet, or a component of a gas around a planet, ask yourself the question:

“Does it pass energy as work, heat, or with matter, into the sphere or planet?“

Consider the passive steel shell around the internally heated sphere, the so-called steel greenhouse.

1.  Does the passive steel shell do work on the sphere?  No, it doesn’t touch the sphere, or at most, simply rests upon the sphere’s surface.

2.  Does the passive steel shell send heat to the sphere?  No, it’s passive firstly, and secondly, it’s cooler.  It has no heat to send to the sphere.  Therefore, it sends no heat to the sphere.

3.  Does the passive steel shell pass matter into the sphere?  No, there’s no exchange of matter.

Therefore, the shell does not cause the sphere to heat up beyond the heat input that the sphere is internally provided.  QED.

The same goes for a gas around a planet, in the context of the sophistically-named “radiative greenhouse effect” of climate pseudoscience.

The First Law of Thermodynamics is all you need to debunk climate alarm, and its sophistical greenhouse effect.

Comical, really.

If you ever walked along an ocean shore you’ll have seen the constant waves rolling in. According to Wikipedia, the idea to harness that wave energy has been proposed as early as 1799. Over the last 15 years several technologies have been proposed. Among them, the Pelamis wave power system is one of a couple of dozens of ocean wave energy extraction schemes.

Whether it’s glowing lava snaking into the sea or lightning blooming in billowing ash clouds, the sight of an erupting volcano inspires awe and wonder.

Now imagine 1,500 of these suckers all shooting off at once. That’s how many active volcanoesdot the Earth, plus an unknown number hidden under the ocean. Every day, between 10 and 20 volcanoes are erupting somewhere on Earth, but scientists say the chance of every volcano on the planet erupting at once is so small that it’s impossible. But what if it did happen? Would Earth as it we know it survive?

Not likely, said Parv Sethi, a geologist at Radford University in Virginia. Even if only the volcanoes on land blasted in sync, the effects would trigger an environmental domino chain many, many times more powerful than a nuclear winter, Sethi said. “Things will become so bad that I wouldn’t want to survive on an Earth like this,” he told Live Science.

The two big hazards from a worldwide volcanic cataclysm are ash and volcanic gases. (While the explosions and outpourings of lava would be deadly to people living close by, the number of deaths would pale compared to those caused by the ensuing climate change.)

SAN FRANCISCO — The ancient Maya civilization collapsed due to a century-long drought, new research suggests. 

Minerals taken from Belize’s famous underwater cave, known as the Blue Hole (pictured from space, right), as well as lagoons nearby, show that an extreme drought occurred between the year 800 and 900, right when the Maya civilization disintegrated. After the rains returned, the Maya moved north — but they disappeared again a few centuries later, and that disappearance occurred at the same time as another dry spell, the sediments reveal. [In Photos: Stunning Sinkholes]

Although the findings aren’t the first to tie a drought to the Maya culture’s demise, the new results strengthen the case that dry periods were indeed the culprit. That’s because the data come from several spots in a region central to the Maya heartland, said study co-author André Droxler, an Earth scientist at Rice University.

The Maya civilization flourished in the Yucatan peninsula from 300 to 700. These ancient Mesoamericans built stunning pyramids, mastered astronomy, and developed both a hieroglyphic writing system and a complex calendar system. The Maya calendar became famous in recent years when some doomsayers wrongly claimed that it predicted the end of the world in 2012.

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in China was an era of significant advances in science and art. Europe also flourished, leaving the Middle Ages behind and embracing what became known as the Renaissance. 

The news is abuzz with a socket wrench having been printed with a 3D printer at the international space station. It’s claimed that this wrench was required to be used in an unstated task. 

Today is the shortest day of the year, so it should follow that mornings will start getting brighter from now on, shouldn’t it? Not necessarily, writes Kris Griffiths. 

This Sunday, 21 December, the northern hemisphere will experience the shortest day of its year, marked at 23:03 GMT by an astronomical phenomenon known as the winter solstice – the moment the North Pole is tilted furthest from the sun as the Earth continues on its orbit.

The solstice doesn’t always occur on 21 December. Sometimes it nudges into the early hours of 22 December, which will happen again next year. The hour of day also varies. Last year’s arrived at 17:11. Next year’s will at 04:38.

Whatever day or time it happens, for many commuters it means leaving the house and returning from work in darkness, in the knowledge that from here on in the long nights will get shorter, with the sun rising earlier and setting later as we journey again towards the spring equinox.

However, the more astute of these early risers might have perceived a curious development, which may have passed by the more bleary-eyed unnoticed.

It would seem logical that after the shortest day has elapsed the mornings would start getting lighter earlier, but this isn’t what happens – the mornings continue darkening until early in the new year.

Meanwhile, those who thought that the winter solstice would mark the earliest sunset would also be wrong as the earliest sunset arrives a couple of weeks earlier.

Hardly a day goes by without a news item about air pollution here or there, about the current “evil extraordinaire,” i.e. carbon dioxide (CO2), about “chemicals” of whatever description that may cause all kinds of unknown problems, and so forth. Nearly without fail, such media reports about CO2 are accompanied by pictures of “smokestacks.” More often than not, you are shown large (and even nuclear) power plant cooling towers with large volumes of white clouds belching out. Please, do have a closer look at such pictures and videos.

If the documentary evidence you are watching on the tube provides a large enough overview area, then you’ll notice that this white “pollution” quickly disappears in the air not far above their source, i.e. the top of the “smokestacks.” There is a simple reason for that:

The scene could be straight from a science-fiction film: a vision of everyday life, but with one jarring difference that makes you realise you’re on another planet, or in a distant future era.

A sports class is in full swing on the outskirts of Beijing. Herds of children charge after a football on an artificial pitch, criss-crossed with colourful markings and illuminated in high definition by the glare of bright white floodlights. It all seems normal enough – except for the fact that this familiar playground scene is taking place beneath a gigantic inflatable dome.

“It’s a bit of a change having to go through an airlock on the way to class,” says Travis Washko, director of sports at the British School of Beijing. “But the kids love it, and parents can now rest assured their children are playing in a safe environment.”

The reason for the dome becomes apparent when you step outside. A grey blanket hangs in the sky, swamping the surroundings in a de-saturated haze and almost obscuring the buildings across the street. A red flag hangs above the school’s main entrance to warn it’s a no-go day: stay indoors at all costs. The airpocalypse has arrived.

The European Space Agency has administered the last rites to its Venus Express probe, saying that the spacecraft is now out of control and has gone “gently into the night.”  Its nine years of exploration ending up as Venusian rubble.