Global temperatures have dropped 0.5° Celsius in April according to U.S meteorologist Ryan Maue. In the Northern Hemisphere they plunged a massive 1°C . As the record 2015/16 El Nino levels off, the global warming hiatus is back with a vengeance.

Japanese climate researcher who identified evidence that extreme weather in Japan is linked to solar activity and global cooling produces a new study showing that government computer models rely on a faulty back-of-the envelope calculation from a 1976 science paper.

Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

Beijing: China plans to build 110 nuclear power plants by 2030 with an investment of over $78 billion overtaking the US which has 100 such plants amid criticism that Beijing is yet to implement enough measures to develop safety controls in existing projects.

Meteorite impacts can produce more than craters on Earth — they can also spark volcanic activity that shapes its surface and climate by bringing up material from depth. That is the headline finding of an international team, led by geochemists from Trinity College Dublin, who discovered that large impacts can be followed by intense, long-lived, and explosive volcanic eruptions.

Image copyright: PA

English winemakers have warned that at least half of this year’s grape harvest has been wiped out by heavy frost. The air frost that hit last week caused “catastrophic” damage to buds that had bloomed earlier than usual thanks to a warm start to the year. About 75% of buds at Denbies Wine Estate in Surrey – which produces 500,000 bottles of wine a year – were affected, its chief executive said. England has 133 wineries, which produced five million bottles in 2015.

Image copyright: DAVID FINLAY

An Australian photographer has captured images of rare sprites, a meteor shower and the Southern Lights – all in a single night. Sprites – flashes of electricity – can reach the Earth’s upper atmosphere, often displaying as a brilliant light.

“It’s an intense electrical discharge out of the very top of a thunderstorm,” photographer David Finlay told the BBC. He took photos of the “space lightning” at Kiama, 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney.

Image copyright: MPI FOR EVO ANTHRO / J. KRAUSE

The DNA of extinct humans can be retrieved from sediments in caves – even in the absence of skeletal remains. Researchers found the genetic material in sediment samples collected from seven archaeological sites. The remains of ancient humans are often scarce, so the new findings could help scientists learn the identity of inhabitants at sites where only artefacts have been found. The results are described in Science.

A cream or ointment may soon cure baldness or stop hair turning grey, a new study suggests. The cells that makes hairs and turns it grey was accidentally discovered by US scientists as they explored how certain cancer tumours form. The breakthrough could one day identify possible treatments for balding and hair greying and also explain why we age.

Image copyrigh: tNASA

Nasa is seeking help from coders to speed up the software it uses to design experimental aircraft. It is running a competition that will share $55,000 (£42,000) between the top two people who can make its FUN3D software run up to 10,000 times faster. The FUN3D code is used to model how air flows around simulated aircraft in a supercomputer.

Nuclear reactor accidents are so devastating and world-changing that you know them by one name: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima.

March 11, 2011 was a day of unimaginable tragedy in northern Japan, a tragedy exacerbated by the reactor meltdowns and release of contamination. But the nuclear part of this horrible day was, if the longest-lasting, certainly the least lethal event. Yet it’s the part that still engenders so much fear. With the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima accident upon us this month, let’s take a look at where things stand today with recovering from this calamity, and what might be happening next.

It all started with Al Gore. Coming off a gig as Vice President, an ignoble job to begin with, to the most embarrassing President in US history, Bill Clinton, he then proceeded to lose the Presidential election to a political lightweight, George W. Bush.

After that Gore was desperate to be taken seriously but wondered how. Science was his solution. And “global warming” (see terminology note at bottom) was a hot topic at the time (no pun intended). It didn’t matter that he did badly in the two “science for poets” courses he took in college or that he didn’t even take any math courses there.

Last weekend was the 47^th annual Earth Day. It is worth reflecting on how completely, totally wrong environmental alarmists often are. Few things tell us more about the environmental movement—where it’s been and, more importantly, where it is now—than its dismal track record in the predictive department.

Case in point: Paul Ehrlich, who is as close to a rock star as you’re apt to find among environmentalists. Ehrlich is most famous for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” in which he famously predicted that, during the 1970s and 1980s, humanity would suffer mass famine and starvation due to overpopulation. “At this late date,” Ehrlich wrote, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Imagine a raincoat that heals a scratch by shedding the part of the outer layer that’s damaged. To create such a material, scientists have turned to nature for inspiration. They report in ACS’ journal Langmuir a water-repellant material that molts like a snake’s skin when damaged to reveal another hydrophobic layer beneath it.

It’s official: the greenhouse gas theory and the litany of fake science claims it spawned about carbon dioxide climate forcing suffer two hammer blows in the peer-reviewed literature.

Shrewdly relying only on accepted chemistry and physics plus official data from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), experts from the ‘hard’ sciences present two new papers offering an objective appraisal of the science argued over in the politicized global warming debate.

A new NASA study is challenging a long-held theory that tsunamis form and acquire their energy mostly from vertical movement of the seafloor.