Written by Helen Briggs
Image copyright: ROBERT PARKScientists say they have made a step forward in the fight against a wheat disease that threatens food security. Wheat is a staple food crop, making up a fifth of the calories on our plates.
But in many parts of the world, the crop is being attacked by stem rust (black rust), a fungus that can ravage a farmer’s fields. Researchers from the UK, US and Australia identified genetic clues that give insights into whether a crop will succumb to stem rust.
Written by Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.
He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation.
Written by www.co2science.org
Paper Reviewed: Verhage, F.Y.F., Anten, N.P.R. and Sentelhas, P.C. 2017. Carbon dioxide fertilization offsets negative impacts of climate change on Arabica coffee yield in Brazil. Climatic Change 144: 671-685.
Written by Friends of Science
On Dec. 11, 2017, a day before the Macron Paris climate change summit, in a story entitled“Exxon to provide details on climate-change impact to its business,” Reuters incorrectly reported that world temperatures might rise by 35.6°F because Reuters used a Celsius-Fahrenheit conversion, instead of stating the temperature change equivalencies of 2°C – which turn out to be only 3.6°F, says Friends of Science.
Written by Paul Kunert
On-Call Here is the latest festive instalment of On-Call, the place to be for techies with tales to tell. It might be cold outside but this may just make the blood boil as it goes to show what happens when bean-counters take over the asylum.
Written by Kenneth Richard
In a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, three MIT scientists assert that the human influence on the climate of the Central United States is dominated by agricultural activity rather than greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Written by Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The impact of changes in solar activity on Earth’s climate was up to seven times greater than climate models suggested according to new research published today in Nature Communications.
Researchers have claimed a breakthrough in understanding how cosmic rays from supernovas react with the sun to form clouds, which impact the climate on Earth.
The findings have been described as the “missing link” to help resolve a decades long controversy that has big implications for climate science.
Written by Andrea Thompson
The continental rock underlying the east coast of North America is pretty boring, tectonically speaking. The last dramatic geological goings-on there happened around 200 million years ago, and most change since then has been from glacial, wind and water erosion.
Written by Sarah Knapton
Nasa is to fund a helicopter mission to hunt for alien life on Saturn’s largest moon – the ocean world of Titan. The US space agency announced this week that the project, dubbed Dragonfly, has been selected as a finalist for a new expedition which will launch in the 2020s.
Written by Chris Foxx
Image copyright: GETTY IMAGESApple has confirmed the suspicions of many iPhone owners by revealing it does deliberately slow down some models of the iPhone as they age. Many customers have long suspected that Apple slows down older iPhones to encourage people to upgrade.
Written by Maria Popova
“Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, “transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?
Written by Steve Milloy
C.Arden Pope, III’s latest exercise in secret epidemiologic junk science is a study claiming that PM2.5 causes heart attacks in people with blood types A, B, and AB but not type O (45{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the population). Pope didn’t even bother to publish the study, he just made a presentation at an American Heart Association meeting on November 14.
Written by Mac Slavo
NASA’s own data is showing that the star our globe revolves around is dimming. With no sunspots reported in 96 days, the sun is going dark and the evidence could point to an approaching ice age.
As the sun gets successively more blank with each day, due to lack of sunspots, it is also dimming, says the website Watts Up With That? According to data from NASA’s Spaceweather, so far in 2017, 96 days (27%) of the days observing the sun have been without sunspots.
Written by Thomas Claburn
Analysis A study of 913 pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, found those exposed to high levels of magnetic field (MF) non-ionizing radiation had a 2.72x higher risk of miscarriage than those exposed to low MF levels.
Written by Dr Jerry Krause
Chance Favors The Prepared Mind (Louis Pasteur) What is a prepared mind? John O’Sullivan, editor of PSI, recently posted, unknown to me, an essay I had written in 2013. (https://principia-scientific.com/education-and-science-science-and-education/) This essay was from a blog-site I had begun at that time. (http://semivision.blogspot.com/)
Written by Charles Q Choi
The world’s first nuclear fusion plant has now reached 50 percent completion, the project’s director-general announced on December 6, 2017.
When it is operational, the experimental fusion plant, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), will circulate plasma in its core that is 10 times hotter than the sun, surrounded by magnets as cold as interstellar space.