The deep, dark ocean bottom teems with far more oases of life than once thought.

Searching along the sunless seafloor where tectonic plates pull apart, regions known as spreading ridges, researchers discovered that heat-spewing hydrothermal vents are at least three to six times as abundant as previously assumed. The finding also significantly boosts the likely number of marine ecosystems huddled around vents, the researchers report in the Sept. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice.

In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The People v. O.J. Simpson, statistics play (or ought to play) a vital role in evaluating the evidence. Sometimes the evidence itself is statistical, as with the odds of a DNA match or the strength of a scientific research finding. Even more often the key question is how evidence should be added up to assess the probability of guilt. In either circumstance, the statistical methods devised by Bayes are often the only reasonable way of drawing an intelligent conclusion.

On some planets that orbit whirling stars, spring and autumn might be the best time to hit the beach, whereas summer offers a midyear respite from sweltering heat. These worlds’ orbits can take them over regions of their sun that radiate wildly different amounts of heat. 

“Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange,” says Jonathon Ahlers, a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who presented his findings June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

In a post over at Peter Guest’s blog, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann is quoted making one of the most remarkable statements that I’ve ever heard coming out of a supposed scientist’s mouth:

Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.

He goes on to explain that science is all about “credible theories” and “best explanations” and his gosh-darn critics supposedly don’t offer up any of those.

Now it seems pretty obvious that Mann’s attempt to separate proof from science stems from increasing public awareness that the warming predicted by the high-sensitivity models that Mann and others have championed just hasn’t occurred over the last fifteen years. No matter. You don’t need “proof” when you have “credible theories.”

Intensive physical exercise four hours after learning is the key to remembering information learnt, say Dutch researchers.

Exercise is known to release proteins that can boost the part of the brain related to memory, and this study suggests the timing of it is crucial.

The study, in Current Biology, tested 72 people on their memory recall.

And it found exercising a few hours after learning was more effective than immediately afterwards.

Al Gore even made some hardened liberal journalists sit up and question when in 2007 he told a joint session of the House Energy Committee and The Senate Environment Committee that the climate debate was over, “the science was settled”. The journalists knew, as any moderately informed person does, that science is never settled. But, what does “settled” mean in this context? The most reasonable definition is linked directly to a simple definition of science, namely the ability to predict. If you can’t predict then your science is wrong, as Feynman and others made clear.

Failed predictions prove that the science isn’t settled. Gore and the supporters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) version of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim the science is settled, but their climate predictions (projections) are consistently wrong. The problem is wider because the weather predictions of national weather agencies who are, through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the IPCC, don’t work either.

The climate is the average weather, which raises the question; when does weather become climate? Since climate is an average of the weather, the average temperature for a 24-hour period is the climate of the day. If the science is settled, then the weather forecasts should also be accurate, but they are still increasingly unreliable beyond 48 hours. One use of the millions of weather data points created for my doctoral thesis was by a statistician, Alexander Basilevsky. He was working on Markov Chains defined as follows:

Misconduct by a chemist at a Colorado lab run by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has potentially affected  24 research and assessment projects, supported by $108 million in federal funding, government officials have disclosed.

According to a June 15 statement from the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the USGS, the operator of a mass spectrometer in the Inorganic Section of the Energy Resources Program’s (ERP) Energy Geochemistry Laboratory in Lakewood has been accused of scientific misconduct and manipulating data. The unit is responsible for conducting coal and water quality assessments in projects both in the United States and abroad.

A small asteroid has been discovered in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come.

As it orbits the sun, this new asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”

Ocean experts have called for international action to generate the kinds of maps of global seabeds that space missions have already returned for the Moon and Mars.

The call to “map the gaps” comes from GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean, a body first set up in 1903 to compile maps from naval surveys around the world.

But more than a century on from the first international charts, vast expanses of the ocean are still represented by just a single point where an ancient mariner threw a lead-weighted rope over the ship side.

A paper recently published attempts to measure the relationship between ice accumulation and temperature in Antarctica for the last 31000 years.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068356/full

Night-time vision evolved millions of years ago in early mammals, a study suggests.

The photoreceptors that help us see in dim light developed from colour-detecting cone cells in Jurassic mammals, according to genetic evidence.

The evolution of night-time vision is regarded as a landmark event in the rise of mammals.

A nocturnal lifestyle allowed the first of their kind to avoid predatory dinosaurs, say scientists.

Co-researcher Dr William Ted Allison of the University of Alberta, Canada, said the development of night vision was a “critical step” in the dominance of mammals.

Hardly a month or even a week goes by without a new study.

The most recent of these climate drivers brought to my attention was brought to light in a study in Nature Communications.coming out examining another natural factor scientists have found that provably affects temperature or climate — a factor neither the climate models, nor the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have or, perhaps even can, account for.

In it, researchers at the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences measured trace elements and stable isotopes in stalagmites from the Indonesian island of Flores, comparing ancient rainfall patterns to records from East Asia and the central-eastern equatorial Pacific. They found alternating multi-century-long El Niño/La Niña-like patterns have affected global climate for at least the past 2,000 years. Climate models do not reproduce those patterns.

The primary source of warmth for the Earth is radiant energy provided by our Sun. Just as the Sun radiates energy into space, the Earth, being warmer than space, also radiates energy out into space. Most of the energy it radiates into space is in the form of infra-red radiation, though light is a contributor as well. The Earth will radiate about the same amount of energy into space as it receives from the Sun on average. The Earth is often called a black body radiator, though this is not technically correct.

The energy equilibrium with the Sun ignores some heat from the Earth’s core, energy due to the Earth’s magnetic field interactions with the magnetic field of the Sun, gravitational tide effects due to the moon, or energy due to material from space entering our atmosphere at high speeds. It is commonly claimed by those who advocate catastrophic global warming due to man’s emissions of carbon dioxide that the total greenhouse gas effect is a warming of the Earth’s surface by about 33ºC.

They say this warming is caused by the infra-red (IR) radiation absorbing gases of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane in the atmosphere. These gases are said to cause the Earth to retain and even multiply the energy it receives from the Sun, so that the Earth’s surface is warmer than it would otherwise be. Of these gases, water vapor is much the most important, but carbon dioxide is said to have a large enough effect that man’s additions to the concentrations in the atmosphere will do serious harm to the Earth’s flora and fauna, as well as man himself.

‘Cargo Cult Science’ was the title of the commencement address delivered by Richard Feynman to the graduates of Caltech in 1974.  The following are excerpts from an edited version of this address as published in his book titled “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” 

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.  In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.”  …

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is persecuting ExxonMobil and now me for having opinions on fossil fuels she disagrees with. My company, the Center for Industrial Progress, is one of the 10 cited in the new subpoena of Exxon, meaning that Exxon is supposed to release any private or confidential correspondence any of its employees have ever had with anyone from my company.  I have nothing to fear whatsoever about what such a witch-hunt would or wouldn’t reveal on my end, but I do not tolerate anyone violating my rights.

So I wrote the Attorney General a three-word response that is not appropriate for a family publication. See it here.

That is all she deserved but it’s worth elaborating on some of the legal, moral, and scientific questions involved, particularly since the word “fraud” has been thrown around.

The government has no right to demand a single email of mine or Exxon’s unless it has evidence that we are committing fraud by concealing or fabricating evidence. In the case of the climate impact of CO2, this is impossible–because all the evidence about CO2 and climate is in the public domain, largely collected and disseminated by government agencies or government-funded educational institutions.

What ExxonMobil is being prosecuted for is expressing an opinion about the evidence that the government disagrees with. Or, in the case of the #ExxonKnew meme, they are being prosecuted for failing to express an opinion the government agrees with.

Introducing their work, Butterly et al. (2016) write that rising atmospheric CO₂concentrations are projected to increase the productivity of agricultural cropping systems in the future, primarily via enhanced photosynthesis and reduced evapotranspiration when water and nutrients are not limiting. One field crop that is economically important in many semi-arid locations is the common pea plant (Pisum sativum); yet according to Butterly et al., “few studies have examined the effects of elevated CO₂ on field pea.”

Therefore, in an attempt to rectify this situation, the team of four Australian researchers set out to examine the interactive effects of elevated CO₂ and soil nitrate (NO₃^–) concentration on the growth, nodulation, and nitrogen (N₂) fixation of pea plants. Nodules house bacteria that “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which serves as plant food.

The study was conducted in a semi-arid location at the SoilFACE facility of the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources Plant Breeding Centre in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. There, pea plants were grown for a period of 15 weeks in Vertisol soils containing either 5, 25, 50 or 90 mg NO₃^–-N kg^-1 under either ambient (390 ppm) or elevated (550 ppm) carbon dioxide concentrations maintained using free-air CO₂enrichment (SoilFACE).