Written by Pallab Ghosh
Regulators have given one of the world’s largest drug companies approval to sell a new gene therapy.
The treatment is for an illness called ADA-SCID which prevents babies from fighting off everyday infections.
This is the first approval for a genetic therapy granted to a large multinational drug company, GSK.
Commentators say the development marks the beginning of many more genetic medicines from so-called “Big Pharma”.
Written by Keith Bryer
It is said that Galileo’s middle finger is displayed in Florence, Italy, thus in death “giving the finger” to those who put him under house arrest for daring to claim the Earth was not the centre of the universe. That the sun orbited the Earth was the scientific consensus of the time, backed by Biblical texts.
The penalty for Galileo’s effrontery in saying otherwise was not only prison and then house arrest. He was also forbidden to claim the obvious as fact. He could claim it only as theory.
Time has proved the 16th century scientific-religious consensus spectacularly wrong. Galileo was right. Reason triumphed over superstition.
Meanwhile, in the 21st century, we are asked to wait another 100 years before the truth or fallacy of the prevailing climate theory is proven true or false. Meanwhile, as the Pope once demanded, mouths and minds must be securely shut.
Written by ANDREW FOLLETT
Cambridge University electrical engineering professor Dr. M.J. Kelly concluded in a peer-reviewed journal article that attempts to fight global warming with green energy will impoverish the world.
The Monday article found reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions enough to actually slow global warming in a measurable way simply isn’t possible without significantly reducing standards of living by plunging most of the world into poverty, destitution and starvation.
“Over the last 200 years, fossil fuels have provided the route out of grinding poverty for many people in the world,” states the article. “This trend is certain to continue for at least the next 20 years based on the technologies of scale that are available today. A rapid decarbonization is simply impossible over the next 20 years unless the trend of a growing number who succeed to improve their lot is stalled by rich and middle class people downgrading their own standard of living.”
Written by Jonathan Webb
Based on the camouflage abilities of octopuses and cuttlefish, engineers in the US have built a flexible material that changes colour to match its surroundings.
The new design features a grid of 1mm cells, containing a temperature-driven dye that switches colour on demand.
So far it only responds in black-and-white, but the team hopes that the principles of their design will have commercial and military applications.
The work appears in the journal PNAS.
Senior author Prof John Rogers, from the University of Illinois, said the new sheet was the fruit of a collaboration between experts in biology, materials, computing and electrical engineering.
Written by Jonathan Webb
As The Selfish Gene notches up 40 years in print, BBC News asked Richard Dawkins whether his most famous book is relevant today (answer: yes), whether he has any regrets about public spats over religion (no), and whether he is quitting Twitter (sort of).
“I’d so much rather talk about this than about politics.”
This, from a thinker most famous as a fearless firebrand, sounds rather incongruous. But as Prof Dawkins hunches over his laptop to dig up examples of biomorphs – the computer-generated “creatures” he conceived in the 1980s to illustrate artificial selection – it is transparently, genuinely felt.
Later, we touch on the fact that he sees public debate as a scientist’s responsibility. Right now, he wants to talk about molluscs.
Pretend molluscs.
Written by Dr. Tim Ball
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC)
Maybe my first payment from Exxon for my climate views will arrive with the subpoena from the Attorney General (AG) of the Virgin Islands charging me under the Criminally Influenced and Corruptions Organizations Act (CICO) for trying to tell the truth. This is the Virgin Island’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Most who contribute to WUWT, are included because at the public event,
“Al Gore, announced that his new coalition would find “creative ways” to prosecute fossil fuel companies, individuals, and organizations who disagree with the catastrophic global warming narrative.”
From left to left; Al Gore, NY Ag Eric Schneiderman, and Claude Walker.
Written by L.J. Devon
(NaturalNews) “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of [The New] England Journal of Medicine” — These are the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which is considered to be one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journals in the world.
The Lancet, another top, well respected peer-reviewed medical journal also publishes research findings that are unreliable and many times false. The current editor-in-chief, Dr. Richard Horton recently spoke out about the fake science often published in the prestigious medical journal. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” he warns, as reported by Collective-Evolution.com.
Written by Simon Sharwood
India has successfully launched a scaled-down model of a planned “Reusable Launch Vehicle” (RLV).
Today’s launch was dubbed the “hypersonic flight experiment” (HEX) and saw a 6.5m, 1.75 tonne model of a winged spaceplane hoisted aloft atop a modified sounding rocket using the S9 engine India uses as an auxiliary for its PSV satellite launch vehicles.
That rocket climbed to about 70km, then released the RLV. The dummy craft then made a hypersonic descent to earth, splashing down into the Bay of Bengal about ten minutes after launch.
Written by SHIVAL
An enormous black hole has been spotted in the sun – but do not fear, it doesn’t spell the end of our solar system.
Instead the giant dark spot is a gap in the sun’s corona – its scorching hot atmosphere.
Holes in the sun’s atmosphere are a regular feature and Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has detected a particularly large one covering the northern hemisphere of our star.
The coronal hole was spotted using the orbiting telescope, which stares constantly at the sun to monitor its activity, earlier this month.
Coronal holes are regions of the corona – the aura of plasma surrounding the sun – where the magnetic field reaches out into space rather than looping back down onto the sun’s surface.
Written by Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser
Modern technology is so wonderful. Among the latest inventions patented is a way to get glued to a car’s hood—in the event of being scooped up (unintentionally of course) by an autonomous vehicle. As pointed out by Michael Irving (who also introduced the term “Gloogle”) in a post at gizmag.com, the U.S. Patent 9,340,178 B1, awarded on May 17, 2016, explains it all in detail.
If you happen to take a leisurely stroll along the road, as shown in the graph 6A, and get “rear-ended” you’ll end up like shown in graph 6B—firmly (?) glued to the hood of the vehicle.
Among the claims of this patent is “A method for protecting a colliding object from a secondary impact….” Well, that’s fine and dandy but better yet is to avoid any impact at all if possible. This could involve not walking along the middle of the lane—or hiding behind the bushes when you see an autonomous car approaching.
Written by Charles Moore
Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.
The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.
Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? Similarly, in his 2006 report on the economic consequences of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern wrote that, “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever.” To the extent that this sentence means anything, it is clearly wrong (how are we losing five per cent GDP “now”, before most of the bad things have happened? How can he put a percentage on “forever”?). It is charlatanry.
Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet.
The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).
These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.
The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China and India, from its rigours.
The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.
Since then, the international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU, including Britain, continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.
Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful clarity.
Read more at: telegraph.co.uk
Written by Rebecca Morelle
China is super-sizing science.
From building the biggest experiments the world has ever seen to rolling out the latest medical advances on a massive scale and pushing the boundaries of exploration from the deepest ocean to outer space – China’s scientific ambitions are immense.
Just a few decades ago the nation barely featured in the world science rankings. Now, in terms of research spending and the number of scientific papers published, it stands only behind the US.
But despite this rapid progress, China faces a number of challenges.
Here are five key science projects that illustrate its enormous strengths, as well as some of its weaknesses, and may help answer the question whether China can become a global leader in research.
Written by Thomas Richard
An Inuit hunter from Arviat, Canada, shot a blonde polar bear and it’s causing quite a stir this week. Not because the hunter, Didji Ishalook, killed the animal for sustenance, but rather the various news outlets alleging this was a grizzly-polar bear hybrid, a clear sign of global warming. While DNA evidence was only recently sent out to make a ‘hybrid’ determination, that didn’t stop The Washington Post from running a misleading story that global warming was forcing grizzlies to hook up with polar bears. The DNA results are still being processed.
Ishalook, who hunts mainly in Canada’s Nunavut territory, brought the blonde bear to people’s attention when he shared his kill photos on social media May 15, writing beneath it: ” “Female grizzly/polar bear. Got my first bear woohoo!!” (See slideshow) Inuits hunt bears for food and use their skin for clothing.
The media machine took the normally common story of Inuits hunting and built another rickety polar bear story about grizzlies invading the Arctic and raping the natural world, namely the female polar bear population, due to climate change. That was the final straw for zoologist Dr. Susan Crocker, who devoted three postings on her Polar Bear Science website trying to insert the facts into the global warming hybrid hysteria.
Written by James E. Kamis
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and many universities are at a loss to explain recent conflicting temperature trends from Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. It can be boiled down to this: temperatures of the Earth’s three big fluid systems are each trending in different directions. The temperature of the Pacific Ocean is rising, the temperature of the atmosphere has remained constant, and the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is cooling.
That’s a problem.
Written by Joe Olson
The search for scientific truth in one field often leads to unexpected insights into other fields. In researching the ignored or vastly underrated role of Earth’s nuclear fission in climate change another truth became self evident. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. The proton, neutrons and electrons released during nuclear fission become ‘elemental’ atoms, as mentioned before in this chapter.
Under the high heat and high pressure of the fission reactor the simplest of these atoms join into either diatomic atoms like Hydrogen, Helium, and Oxygen or into simple ‘elemental’ molecules. Since we have no direct knowledge of these processes, we must assume certain parameters about these reactions.
It is first assumed that the Uranium fission occurs in the molten zone somewhere near the Iron crystal core. Uranium has one of the highest densities of any natural occurring element and in a ‘liquid’ suspension would sink to the lowest level. The lighter, elemental atoms and compounds produced by fission at this great depth would naturally form bubble tracks thru the molten rock. The diatomic gases, along with elemental water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide would then rise up into solidified rock formations beneath the Earth’s crust.
Written by Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser
Ben Hur “a la moderne.” That’s what the new technology of “autonomous cars” is promising. How long until “Hollywood” is providing an updated version of the epic movie? Movie star Charles Heston (RIP) would probably have to take “driving lessons” on autonomous chariots for that too; the unplanned non-autonomous kind of chariot experience was scary enough, see picture nearby.
Screenshot of the chariot race in the 1959 movie Ben Hur—actor Charles Heston (or stunt double ?) barely managed to hang on (it wasn’t planned to be that way).
The modern chariots come with additional benefits like “back-seat comfort” while you text your significant other and so forth. But that’s nothing in the grand scheme of modern civilisation, where your every step is recorded for eternity by cameras at every intersection, drones in the sky to scrutinize your every move, recording and analysis of your email and phone conversation, internet searches, etc. Of course, it’s all solely for your comfort, convenience and—most importantly—safety.