Image copyright: XIUJIE WU

Two skulls found in China shed light on the ancient humans who inhabited the region before our own species arrived. We know that Europe and western Asia was dominated by the Neanderthals before Homo sapiens displaced them.

But remains belonging to equivalent populations in East and Central Asia have been scarce.It’s unclear if the finds are linked to the Denisovans, a mysterious human group known only from DNA analysis of a tooth and finger bone from Siberia.

It may have been one of the world’s largest oil spill disasters but the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico appears to have had little effect on the ecosystem as dozens of new species of animals are living in the body of water.

A group of oceanographers from the research project the Deepend Consortium have been looking into the effects of the 2010 oil spill that leaked 3.19 million barrels of oil over the course of three months. What they discovered is that sea life is actually flourishing in the Gulf according to Quartz.com.

In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.

In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.

There are many deadly and disastrous stories associated with the deception that human CO2 is causing global warming. Some are more obscure than others, but no less deadly in the unnecessary damage and destruction they caused. One was the myth of what was called “Arab Spring.”

It never occurred, but what happened was a result of ‘green’ policies based on non-existence science. Unintended consequences are the inevitable result of actions and must not be used to inhibit action and progress. However, there is a difference if the objective was based on evidence and provides benefits or was based on concocted evidence and was mostly detrimental.

https://twitter.com/greenpeace/status/837005520313679872

Today’s fake news story comes from Greenpeace. The supposed record comes from Esperanza. As Jim Steele at WUWT points out, Esperanza is at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, at a latitude of 63.4S, just about as far outside the Antarctic Circle as you could get.

Radiant energy can transfer from a colder to a warmer radiator.

Abstract: The rigorous model of simultaneous thermal and radiant energy transfer proves energy transfer by radiation can flow from a colder radiator to a warmer one, heating the warmer one further. It explains and quantifies how dissimilar walls in a room can have different steady-state temperatures.

Only the general laws of thermal and radiant energy transfer and the First Law of Thermodynamics, conservation of energy, are employed. [Editor’s note: since publication PSI has negatively reviewed this post*]

Introduction: Many claim radiant energy can only transfer from a hot radiator to a colder one. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics would be violated.

According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of American 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace.

Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.

Image copyright: SPACEX

Elon Musk, it seems, loves nothing more than to spin plates. When most of us might be looking to lighten the load, he’s piling on the ambition.

The serial entrepreneur’s latest gambit is to fly people around the Moon. Two wealthy individuals have apparently lodged significant deposits with his SpaceX company to make this journey. We have no idea who they are, just that these space tourists include “nobody from Hollywood”.

Scientists have created “artificial embryos” using stem cells from mice, in what they believe is a world first. The University of Cambridge team used two types of stem cells and a 3D scaffold to create a structure closely resembling a natural mouse embryo.

Previous attempts have had limited success because early embryo development requires the different cells to coordinate with each other. The researchers hope their work will help improve fertility treatments. It could also provide useful insights into the way early embryos develop.

Ask a climate academic which, if ANY, gas has great power to ‘trap heat’ and you will be told ‘carbon dioxide, you idiot!’ This is fake news, junk science. Ask an applied scientist the same question and you will be told, ‘no gas can trap heat – it’s physically impossible!’

‘But, but….there is 160 years of climate science (e.g. Fourier, Tyndall, etc) to say it is so!’ comes the retort from the climate clowns and their revisionism of history.

The summer holidays stretched before us, hot and tempting. After the Kaikoura earthquake and the surprise of losing our prime minister before his term was out, we lusted for the Kiwi summer. The year had felt long, turbulent and tiring.

We needed summer, because everyone felt bruised and battered by 2016. We needed her warm temperatures to soften our bones and untwist the knots in our spine. We needed to feel coal-hot bitumen burn our bare feet, and taste bland sausages charred on the barbecue.

The Pacific Ocean called too, wondering when I’d visit for a swim, opening my mouth wide in her depths to let the salt and bubbles scour my throat.

A new study led by The Australian National University (ANU) has found seawater cycles throughout Earth’s interior down to 2,900km, much deeper than previously thought, reopening questions about how the atmosphere and oceans formed.

Image copyrigh: tM DODD

Scientists have discovered what they say could be fossils of some of the earliest living organisms on Earth. They are represented by tiny filaments, knobs and tubes in Canadian rocks dated to be up to 4.28 billion years old.

That is a time not long after the planet’s formation and hundreds of millions of years before what is currently accepted as evidence for the most ancient life yet found on Earth.The researchers report their investigation in the journal Nature.

Climate-change alarmists who have been largely unchallenged by the media over the past decade have finally met their match in Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And it ain’t pretty.

Since the premiere of his new nighttime show, Carlson has frequently confronted the dogma of man-made global warming, pushing “experts” to cite data and evidence to back up their claims rather than allowing them to repeat well-worn platitudes about a scientific consensus and the planet’s impending doom.

As U.S. President Donald Trump works towards deep cuts to federal funding for climate research an independent Japanese climate researcher shows why climate modeling was really junk science all along.

Kyoji Kimoto, a retired expert in fuel cell energy and thermodynamics, points to recent evidence to prove a statistical “hoax” in a heated email exchange with a top UN climate modeler, Dr Robert D Cess of Stony Brook University, New York.

Will Rogers (and Mark Twain) observed, “It’s not ignorance that is the problem, but that so much of what we know just ain’t so.” Adding to the “33C without an atmosphere” that is completely wrong is the case of Venus.
Venus, we are told, has an atmosphere that is almost pure carbon dioxide and an extremely high surface temperature, 750 K, and this is allegedly due to the radiative greenhouse effect, RGHE. But the only apparent defense is, “Well, WHAT else could it BE?!”