Competing claims over cause of cosmic cold spot

Written by Keith Cooper, Physics World

A survey of more than 7000 galaxies has concluded that a mysterious cold spot in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is not caused by a giant void in space, potentially opening the door for more exotic explanations.

Continue Reading

Oddity: Are Trump’s Climate Science Enemies Proving Him Right?

Written by Michael Bastach

A study meant to debunk a claim made by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt in his confirmation hearing ended up doing the opposite — it proved him right.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, found that Pruitt’s claim of a “leveling off of warming” over the past two decades is unsupported by satellite-derived temperature data, which measures the lowest few miles of the atmosphere.

Continue Reading

What To Do with ‘Uncorrectable Science?’

Written by Joseph E Postma

What happens if science is actually uncorrectable, or becomes uncorrectable?  This is the response I get from other scientists who I ask to consider the skeptical arguments which debunk climate alarm:

“since we expect climate scientists to trust our own work and expertise in astrophysics, then why wouldn’t we return that trust to the experts in climate science?”

Continue Reading

“Mini Ice Age is here to stay,” says astrophysicist

Written by PSI Staff

British Physicist and weatheraction.comeatheraction.com front man, Piers Corbyn, issues a stark rebuke to climate alarmists who claim the 18-year-old pause in global warming won’t last.  “The mini ice age is here to stay!”

Illustrating his analysis of the data with deft graphwork Corbyn shows that in April 2017 temperatures in both the northern and southern hemispheres plunged dramatically last month. “The mini ice age is in a new phase and is here to stay for at least 20 years.”

Continue Reading 4 Comments

A Discussion of the Equations of Transfer

Written by Joseph E Postma

I was having an email discussion with an old professor of mine (from undergad) about the fraud of the radiative greenhouse effect who has himself implied doubt about the greenhouse effect.  Actually the proff is Dr. Essex who wrote the book “Taken by Storm“.  He suggested that I look at the “equations of transfer” in regard to the problem, which of course I have already done extensively and am quite familiar with.  I will post the reply here since it may help some people:

Continue Reading

3D-printed ‘bionic skin’ could give robots the sense of touch

Written by University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering

Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a revolutionary process for 3D printing stretchable electronic sensory devices that could give robots the ability to feel their environment. The discovery is also a major step forward in printing electronics on real human skin.

Continue Reading

How hard did it rain on Mars?

Written by Elsevier

Heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet’s impact craters and carved out river-like channels in its surface billions of years ago, according to a new study published in Icarus. In the paper, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory show that changes in the atmosphere on Mars made it rain harder and harder, which had a similar effect on the planet’s surface as we see on Earth.

Continue Reading

Triatomic molecules cooled with lasers

Written by Hamish Johnston, Physics World

Molecules containing three atoms have been laser cooled to ultracold temperatures for the first time. The feat was achieved by John Doyle and colleagues at Harvard University in the US, who used a technique called Sisyphus cooling to chill an ensemble of about a million strontium-monohydroxide molecules to 750 μK. The team says the work opens the door to a range of applications, including quantum simulation and precision measurements.

Continue Reading

We’re finally ready to know: is there life on Mars?

Written by Ethan Siegel

“They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonized’ it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!” –Andy Weir

In 1960, just three years after Sputnik 1, humans began launching missions to Mars.

Continue Reading

What is the electric universe?

Written by S Schirott

Open a standard textbook in astronomy and read the discussion of galaxies, stars, and planets. It will appear that gravity alone organized the cosmos and now keeps it running. We all know that electricity powers our lights runs our computers and, in an unleashed form, creates static shocks and awe-inspiring lightning bolts.

Continue Reading 1 Comment

Peer-Reviewed Journal Publishes Gender Studies Hoax Claiming Penises Cause Climate Change

Written by Peter Hasson

A peer-reviewed academic journal published on Friday a hoax gender studies paper titled, “The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct.”

Two academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, used pen names to successfully submit the hoax paper — which argued that “the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct” — to the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. Boghossian and Lindsay cited 20 sources, none of which they say they read, and five of which are fake papers that were “published” in journals that don’t actually exist.

Continue Reading

History of Titan’s landscape resembles that of Mars, not Earth

Written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The environment on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, may seem surprisingly familiar: Clouds condense and rain down on the surface, feeding rivers that flow into oceans and lakes. Outside of Earth, Titan is the only other planetary body in the solar system with actively flowing rivers, though they’re fed by liquid methane instead of water. Long ago, Mars also hosted rivers, which scoured valleys across its now-arid surface.

Now MIT scientists have found that despite these similarities, the origins of topography, or surface elevations, on Mars and Titan are very different from that on Earth.

Continue Reading

GLOBAL GREENING: Scientists Find ‘Lost’ Forests The Size Of Seven Texases

Written by Michael Bastach

Scientists looking at forest cover in some of the world’s driest places found something astounding — “lost” forests covering an area nearly seven times the size of Texas.

“We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia,” biologists Andrew Lowe and Ben Sparrow wrote of their study, which had 28 other co-authors.

Continue Reading

High levels of exercise linked to nine years of less aging at the cellular level

Written by Brigham Young University

Despite their best efforts, no scientist has ever come close to stopping humans from aging. Even anti-aging creams can’t stop Old Father Time.

But new research from Brigham Young University reveals you may be able to slow one type of aging — the kind that happens inside your cells. As long as you’re willing to sweat.

Continue Reading

Humans rely more on ‘inferred’ visual objects than ‘real’ ones

Written by eLife

Humans treat ‘inferred’ visual objects generated by the brain as more reliable than external images from the real world, according to new research published in eLife.

The study, from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, reveals that when choosing between two identical visual objects — one generated internally based on information from the blind spot and an external one — we are surprisingly likely to show a bias towards the internal information.

Continue Reading