Image copyright: OLEG YAKOVLEV

Image copyright: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SSI

The Cassini spacecraft is sending data back to Earth after diving in between Saturn’s rings and cloudtops. The probe executed the daredevil manoeuvre on Wednesday – the first of 22 plunges planned over the next five months – while out of radio contact.

Nasa’s 70m-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone, California, managed to re-establish communications at 06:56 GMT (07:56 BST) on Thursday.

Despite Saturday’s so-called “March for Science,” the almost simultaneous release of a Second Edition of a Research Report showing the exact opposite of what some of the marchers claim to be the conclusions of climate science has brought home the Orwellian reality that the marchers have gotten their claims concerning what the science says exactly backwards. The Climate March website says their forces of “The Resistance” won’t tolerate institutions that try to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.” If the marchers really support science, they should be supporting climate skeptics, not the climate alarmists. How Orwellian can you get? The science is clear.

Image copyright: CÉSAR HERNÁNDEZ/CSIC

A caterpillar that munches on plastic bags could hold the key to tackling plastic pollution, scientists say. Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the larvae of the moth, which eats wax in bee hives, can also degrade plastic.

Experiments show the insect can break down the chemical bonds of plastic in a similar way to digesting beeswax. Each year, about 80 million tonnes of the plastic polyethylene are produced around the world.

The world is in the grip of global warming. Everything will keep getting hotter and hotter. Then we’ll all die. That’s the consensus from the scientific “community.” That’s the “settled science” always talked about.

But getting to the point that any science is actually “settled” – as in 100 percent accurate – is very difficult. There may be strong evidence to point to one conclusion, but it may turn out that we didn’t have all the information needed to arrive at the correct finding, or, data may change over time, leading us down a different path.

In an open letter to Donald Trump, climate expert Dr. Duane Thresher has urged the President not to give in to his daughter Ivanka’s misguided views on global warming and her insistence that the U.S. remain in the Paris climate agreement ratified by Barack Obama last August.

In medicine, a crisis signals the turning point of a disease: a moment of inflection in which the course of the illness turns either for better or worse. Yet a crisis can also be developmental; it can signal the transition from one state of being to another. Sometimes this is referred to as a “maturational crisis.” In this piece, I argue that the United States is facing precisely such a maturational crisis. Moving through it to a better future requires nothing less than a re-founding of the republic on terms different from the theological inheritance that characterized our Enlightenment-era establishment.

The story of how Maurice Strong (pictured) and the Club of Rome set up the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to direct political and scientific focus on CO2 to ‘prove’ it was causing global warming is well documented.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Doing moderate exercise several times a week is the best way to keep the mind sharp if you’re over 50, research suggests. Thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis, a review of 39 studies found. This remained true in those who already showed signs of cognitive decline.

The Biobag may not look much like a womb, but it contains the same key parts: a clear plastic bag that encloses the fetal lamb and protects it from the outside world, like the uterus would; an electrolyte solution that bathes the lamb similarly to the amniotic fluid in the uterus; and a way for the fetus to circulate its blood and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. Flake and his colleagues published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Many people are unsure about exactly what machine learning is. But the reality is that it is already part of everyday life. A form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to learn from examples rather than having to follow step-by-step instructions.

The Royal Society believes it will have an increasing impact on people’s lives and is calling for more research, to ensure the UK makes the most of opportunities. Machine learning is already powering systems from the seemingly mundane to the life-changing. Here are just a few examples.

It was probably the trip of a lifetime. In 2012, biologists on an expedition to East Timor in southeast Asia spotted a brahminy blind snake wriggling out of somewhere quite unexpected: the rear end of a common Asian toad.

Mark O’Shea from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK and his colleagues witnessed the unusual event by chance after finding the pair under a rock. It is the first account of prey surviving digestion by a toad and of an animal as big as a blind snake emerging from a digestive tract alive.

Top American Climatologist, an expert in climate modeling, exposes the fallacy that current climate models provide a realistic or reliable prediction of future climate change. In a 1-2-3 step guide to disposing of the global warming debate Dr. Duane Thresher says successful modeling with modern computers is “mathematically impossible.”

Science is now controlled by money-driven nitwits bereft of scientific acumen, brainwashing the populous at large by the application of the methods of the advertising executive and the marketing manager, as they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, with their evil eye and greedy, their stunted forms and weedy.

“We are leaving the Era of the Sun as planetary lord (1980–2016) and entering a new era where Saturn will be Lord of the new planetary cycle (2017–2053.)” I read this in a posting by an astrologer I follow. I don’t know how he came to this assessment, but it caught my interest. So I started looking at Saturn.

A new paper on the evolutionary history of bears (Bears breed across species borders: Kumar et al. 2017) has concluded that hybridization is common and natural among all species of ursids. And while some media outlets (e.g. DailyMail) have framed this as surprisingly convincing proof that experts were wrong to claim that climate change is the cause of recent polar bear X grizzly hybrids, definitive evidence against that interpretation has been available for years to anyone who bothered to look: see my recent “Five facts that challenge hybridization nonsense.”