The Great Barrier Reef is dead. It has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and gone to join the bleedin’ choir invisible. It is an Ex Great Barrier Reef.

In late 2015, Soon, Connolly, and Connolly (hereafter SCC15) published a  comprehensive (101 pages) analysis of how the modern anthropogenic global warming (AGW) paradigm has been constructed.  The paper, published in  Earth Science Reviews, is entitled Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century.

A new report revealing that using wood pellets to generate electricity can actually speed up global warming should be the final nail in the coffin for the flawed policy of biomass subsidies. Policies designed to incentivise green energy use are not only having a dubious effect on climate change, they are destroying biodiversity and even killing many thousands of people.

On a lab benchtop, a handful of glass vials taped to a rocker gently sway back and forth. Inside the vials, a mixture of organic chemicals and tiny particles of fool’s gold are begging a question seemingly beyond their humble appearance: Where did life come from?

A University of British Columbia-developed system that uses bacteria to turn non-potable water into drinking water will be tested next week in West Vancouver prior to being installed in remote communities in Canada and beyond.

The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year’s unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe.

Image copyright: DANA BERRY

Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time. They have studied a world known as GJ 1132b, which is 1.4-times the size of our planet and lies 39 light years away. Their observations suggest that the “super-Earth” is cloaked in a thick layer of gases that are either water or methane or a mixture of both.

A controversy that first appeared in these pages five years ago, came to an end last week. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that human experiments with air pollutants conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were not dangerous — meaning EPA has been lying to the public and Congress for years about the extreme danger of the “pollutants” in question.

In April 2012, I broke the news that EPA had been quietly conducting human experiments with certain outdoor pollutants that EPA had claimed were, essentially, the most toxic substances on Earth. EPA had repeatedly claimed since at least 2004 that any level of inhalation of fine particulate matter emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes could cause death within hours or days. The old, young and sick were most vulnerable, according to EPA.

In the February 18 American Thinker edition, Dennis Avery described path-breaking findings by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reviving the Sun as the controlling mechanism of climate and debunking the so-called global warming “consensus.”  Perpetuators of the global warming myth had proposed that historical global average temperatures manifested a “hockey stick” shape of sharply higher temperatures in the last decades of the twentieth century.

On Energy Matters we’ve discussed at length the potential for blackouts resulting from the closure of fossil fuel plants. There is, however, another potential cause of blackouts that we haven’t addressed – solar storms, or more accurately coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Experts disagree as to the likely impacts of a major CME, with estimates ranging from a few days of power outages affecting a comparatively small number of people to months or even years of outages affecting hundreds of millions.

World leading climate expert Richard Lindzen admits existence of compelling evidence discrediting mainstream greenhouse gas theory (GHE) of man-made global warming; apologizes for emphasis on carbon dioxide. The focus on CO2 since the 1980’s was due to politics, not science.

In a step back from consensus thinking Professor Lindzen declares, “leading figures in atmospheric physics from the mid-1950’s to at least the early 1980’s, clearly did not emphasize greenhouse warming.”

Dr Lindzen joins the growing ranks of prominent scientists prepared to defy the crumbling mainstream “settled science” that wrongly characterizes earth as a ‘greenhouse.’

The ‘greenhouse gas’ scare story was successfully sold to the public and centers around carbon dioxide – a benign trace gas essential to plant growth. In the 1980’s it became the dominant factor in a concocted dangerous ‘climate forcing’ (CO2 sensitivity) metric conceived in the mind of former top NASA climate scientist, Dr James Hansen.

Hansen succeeded in orchestrating a pseudo-scientific narrative that this trace gas had been widely accepted to be the climate’s control knob for over a century. But as another decade passes without dramatic rises in temperature, despite CO2 levels still rising,  Hansen’s back story – along with his ‘CO2 sensitivity’ metric –  is being recognized as a fiction.

Weather forecasters rely on statistical models to find and sort patterns in large amounts of data. Still, the weather remains stubbornly difficult to predict because it is constantly changing.

“When we measure the current state of the atmosphere, we are not measuring every point in three-dimensional space,” says Paul Roebber, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “We’re interpolating what happens in the in-between.”

Dr Wes Fraser from Queen’s led an international research project ‘Colours of the Outer Solar Systems Origins Survey’ Col-OSSOS, which uses data collected from the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) both on Maunakea in Hawaii. By simultaneously using two world class telescopes, Dr Fraser’s team was able to produce unique research with a global impact.

Image copyright: F WALSH

What really happens when we make and store memories has been unravelled in a discovery that surprised even the scientists who made it. The US and Japanese team found that the brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events.

One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found. It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one. Experts said the findings were surprising, but also beautiful and convincing.

‘Significant advance’

Two parts of the brain are heavily involved in remembering our personal experiences. The hippocampus is the place for short-term memories while the cortex is home to long-term memories. This idea became famous after the case of Henry Molaison in the 1950s.

His hippocampus was damaged during epilepsy surgery and he was no longer able to make new memories, but his ones from before the operation were still there. So the prevailing idea was that memories are formed in the hippocampus and then moved to the cortex where they are “banked”.

The team at the Riken-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics have done something mind-bogglingly advanced to show this is not the case. The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too.

They involved watching specific memories form as a cluster of connected brain cells in reaction to a shock. Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons – they could literally switch memories on or off.

The results, published in the journal Science, showed that memories were formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the cortex. Prof Susumu Tonegawa, the director of the research centre, said: “This was surprising.” He told the BBC News website: “This is contrary to the popular hypothesis that has been held for decades.

“This is a significant advance compared to previous knowledge, it’s a big shift.”

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

The mice do not seem to use the cortex’s long-term memory in the first few days after it is formed. They forgot the shock event when scientists turned off the short-term memory in the hippocampus. However, they could then make the mice remember by manually switching the long-term memory on (so it was definitely there).

The surface tension of a liquid is a measure of the cohesive forces that hold the molecules together. It is responsible for a water drop assuming a spherical shape and for the effects of surfactants to produce bubbles and foams.

The value of the surface tension of water at room temperature is known accurately to four significant figures and is recommended as a standard for the calibration of other devices. New research in which Ines Hauner and Daniel Bonn (Institute of Physics) are involved now shows that this value is not as universal as previously believed.

On April 3, 2017, as Jupiter made its nearest approach to Earth in a year, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope viewed the solar system’s largest planet in all of its up-close glory.

At a distance of 415 million miles (668 million kilometers) from Earth, Jupiter offered spectacular views of its colorful, roiling atmosphere, the legendary Great Red Spot, and it smaller companion at farther southern latitudes dubbed “Red Spot Jr.”