The Hubble Space Telescope may be old enough to rent a car, but the aging orbital lab is still making new discoveries, the latest being the furthest-recorded object ever spotted.

Scientists with the European Space Agency (ESA) said that they have detected the light from GN-z11, which had been an infant galaxy when its light was emitted around 400 million years after the Big Bang. 

The galaxy is believed to be at least 13.4 billion light years from Earth, and the detection gives astronomers a look at what they believe was the first generation of galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

The result is also a tribute to Hubble’s longevity. Launched in 1990 and serviced by the since-retired NASA space shuttle fleet, Hubble is ancient by modern technological standards, though it has been given significant hardware upgrades over the years.

Scientists previously thought that such distant objects would be detectable only by newer telescopes such as the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope.

NEW YORK – A physician in Miami has developed a Federal Drug Administration-approved highly effective treatment for prostate cancer that does not require surgery, radiation therapy or chemotherapy. 

The High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound treatment, or HIFU, directs acoustic energy into the body and destroys cancerous cells in the prostate.

It was developed by George M. Suarez, M.D., F.A.C.S., F.A.A.P., a Board-certified urologist and a former faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Urology.

“I became interested in the HIFU technology back in 2001,” Suarez told WND in a telephone interview. “The technology was first used in 1999, in Europe. While the technology has been approved for medical use in Europe for some 15 years now, when I first became interested in the technology, it did not have FDA approval here in the United States.”

Water is essential for all life, and happily it is abundant on our blue watery planet. However, salty oceans cover 70{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Earth’s surface and contain 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Earth’s water.  Salt water is great for ocean dwellers but not directly useful for most life on land. Another 2{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Earth’s water is tied up in ice caps, glaciers and permanent snow, leaving just 1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} as land-based fresh water.

To sustain life on land, we need to conserve and make good use of this rare and elusive resource.

Luckily, our sun is a powerful nuclear-powered desalinisation plant. Every day, solar energy evaporates huge quantities of fresh water from the oceans. After a stop-off in the atmosphere, most of this water vapour is soon returned to earth as dew, rain, hail and snow – this is the great water cycle. Unfortunately about 70{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of this precipitation falls directly back into the oceans and some is captured in frozen wastelands.

 

Is it not great that the courageous Professor Will Happer should once again declare roundly that Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant? Is it not great again that he should emphasize the role, indeed the huge benefits, to plants and agriculture from more atmospheric Carbon Dioxide? What he says is basic Biology. Everybody knows that green plants feed on Carbon Dioxide and produce Oxygen as a by-product for us humans to breathe.

Why then does he once again shoot himself in the foot by declaring: –

“Second, the “warming” from CO2 — and yes, CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” — has been much less than predicted by the climate models Obama bases his policies on. For 20 years, the temperature has been virtually unchanged, in stark contrast to model predictions.”

Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/02/20/princeton-physicist-dr-will-happer-the-supreme-court-sided-with-science-against-obama-epa-regs-bravo-for-the-courts-vote-for-solid-science/#ixzz40ngUqPLn

The award-winning song of the Von Trapp Family in the musical The Sound of Music is getting a new lease on life from an unexpected corner – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO for short, in Australia. There, at CSIRO, emphasis is shifting from climate modelling to mitigation and adaption. 

Further afield, things don’t look much better for the anti-carbon crowd that is recommending “decarbonisation” with battle cries like “Leave it in the Ground” and related ideas. One of the most recent findings is that coral reef bleaching (i.e., coral death) may just be a result of viral infections. Up till now, most studies claimed the bleaching to be the result of “climate change.”

Major changes in world climate politics are afoot as policymakers realize climate models are incapable of computing outcomes from global warming mitigation strategies.  Respected scientist, Dr Klaus L E Kaiser writes:

The famous poem “Der Zauberlehrling” or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Germany’s most acclaimed poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), is coming into focus again. And the ones affected, today’s apprentices of the climate doom “religion” are screaming hell and murder.

Guess what happened:

Dr. L. Marshall, the director of Australia’s foremost climate science research establishment, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO for short, ordered a change of their research emphasis, away from measuring and modelling and more work towards mitigation and adaption.

You’d think that would be great news, actually trying to cope with nature’s 4,500 million years of changing climate on earth. Oh no, CSIRO’S past “apprentices of climate doom and gloom modelling” are all upset.

Correlation does not mean causation.  Is the Zika virus being used as a scapegoat for Pharma’s dangerous adverse effects? 

The world of modern medicine has since its inception been one of controversies, scandals and cover ups. Each such episode has bettered the other and is done with a finesse that appears clearly criminal in intent. The Zika virus episode is one of the best examples of this and hides a very cruel agenda behind it.

On February 1st 2016, the WHO declared the Zika virus epidemic a global public health emergency. This was even before it formally sat for a Skype meeting on February 2nd. What caused this urgency? The Zika virus, WHO claimed, had caused an epidemic of microcephaly in Brazilian children around 4000 of who had been affected since October 2015. Microcephaly is a condition where children are born with a small size of the skull and sometimes with under developed brains.

Winter was coming. In AD 536, the first of three massive volcanic eruptions ushered in a mini ice age. It coincided with an epidemic of the plague, the decline of the eastern Roman Empire, and sweeping upheavals across Eurasia. 

Now we have the first evidence that the disruption to climate continued a lot longer than a decade, as was previously thought. The extended cold period lasted until around 660, affecting Europe and Central Asia, and perhaps the rest of the world too.

The work builds on research that used ice cores to identify three significant volcanic eruptions in the years 536, 540 and 547. Now Ulf Büntgen at the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf and his colleagues have used tree ring data from Europe and Central Asia to show that decades of cooler summers – in some cases 4 °C cooler – ensued, probably caused by volcanic particulates in the atmosphere.

“New robot shows off human-like qualities” says the headline. The media think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. My dearest is excited too: finally, she will no longer have to remind me of my chores, that the (yet to be acquired super-duper) robot with its well-programmed memory and a mind of its own will perform without being asked—and even without any snarky comments on the side.

And here comes the latest news: “Artificial intelligence, human brain to merge in the 2030s, says futurist Kurzweil.” I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work but I’ll give it the benefit of doubt. Presumably, it’s not just the physical work I can then palm off to the robots, but the thinking as well! What a relief, no work, no complaints and nothing but bliss; what could possibly go wrong?

Indeed, what could possibly go wrong?

Computers are already running major parts of the communication networks, travel schedules, and other infrastructure controls of much of the world. Even many manufacturing processes, from the cutting of clothes to assembling whole cars are already done by robots of sort. Such specialized machines became of age with the era known as the Industrial Revolution (IR). At first, the IR made short shrift of the most laborious aspects of creating textiles.

Three key scientific studies that would reveal possible risks to human and environmental health from the use of the herbicide chemical glyphosate have been held back in the name of ‘trade secret protection.”

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has been asked to reveal all the possible original elements of these studies that allowed the agency to call glyphosate an ‘unlikely’ human carcinogen. Members of the European Parliament are also being asked to reject the Trade Secrets Directive in the April 2016 plenary vote on the final text.

The data withheld in these scientific documents is what the European Commission used to grant market authorization for the sale of glyphosate. Greenpeace Netherlands, and Pesticide Action Network have been fighting for full disclosure since 2011 at the European Court of Justice.

With all the talk about CO2 and global warming today, it’s odd that the heating mechanism to blame for this concern – the Greenhouse Effect – is seldom contemplated or discussed. Rather, it’s taken for granted.

It is a popular view that “greenhouse gases” act like a blanket or winter clothing. As a thermal camera consistently testifies, after all, a body that suppresses heat loss cools off less, which is to say “stays warmer.” 

Indeed, notice in this case the bright thermal radiation escaping from the children’s bare faces versus the darkness of their winter jackets.

Insulation limits heat loss, pure and simple. And that’s what the Greenhouse Effect does too.

Compared to this popular belief, however, the scientific view proposes something quite peculiar. It contends that under a jacket of greenhouse gases the Earth will radiate as much to its surroundings as it would WITHOUT such insulation.

Former Science Adviser to Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Terri Jackson, issues stinging attack on what she describes as “scientific fraud” woven into climate policies. 

As Britons gear themselves up for a crucial referendum on further membership of the troubled European Union Jackson, founder of the Energy (climate) group at the Institute of Physics in London exposes the multi-billion Euro climate scam that relies heavily on junk science.

In a hard-hitting, fact filled summary of the key points known to many thousands of skeptical scientists, Jackson urges voters to beware stark admissions from Christiana Figueres (pictured right), the U.N. climate change chief since 2010 made in February last year.

Figueres said:

“This is the first time in history we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally within a decade to change the economic development model that has been reigning since the Industrial revolution”

Jackson retorts: “So what she wants is an end to capitalism founded on ‘fossil fuels’ which has brought prosperity to millions and a return to the hell of communism centred on the UN. She is in that same club as the first UN head of environment the late Maurice Strong who was a dedicated communist.”

The greenhouse gas theory, cornerstone of man-made global warming ‘science’, is further undermined by Canadian scientist, Joseph E Postma.  This Astrophysicist, like a growing number of skeptics,  points to how respected textbooks on Thermodynamics are contradicting the hitherto popular notion that carbon dioxide can dangerously warm Earth’s atmosphere.

Postma writes:

They Agree with the Debunk

From “Thermodynamics”, G. J. V. Wylen, John Wiley & Sons, 1960:

“Heat is defined as the form of energy that is transferred across a boundary by virtue of a temperature difference or temperature gradient. Implied in this definition is the very important fact that a body never contains heat, but that heat is identified as heat only as it crosses the boundary. Thus, heat is a transient phenomenon. If we consider the hot block of copper as a system and the cold water in the beaker as another system, we recognize that originally neither system contains any heat (they do contain energy, of course.) When the copper is placed in the water and the two are in thermal communication, heat is transferred from the copper to the water, until equilibrium of temperature is established. At that point we no longer have heat transfer, since there is no temperature difference. Neither of the systems contains any heat at the conclusion of the process. It also follows that heat is identified at the boundaries of the system, for heat is defined as energy being transferred across the system boundary.”

Thus, there is no heat transfer from the atmosphere to the surface, or from a cooler object to a warmer object in general. And since positive heat flow is what is required for temperature increase, then no cooler object raises the temperature of a warmer object by utilization of its thermal energy.

A recent paper by HJ Schellnhuber et al. from the PIK ([translated as] Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Consequences Research), also associated with the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, has put a new dimension on “climate change.” According to the study by Schellnhuber (pictured), carbon dioxide has a much longer half-life in the earth’s atmosphere than previously found.

Another scientist, Michel Crucifix of the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, not associated with the study, proclaimed “In fact, the mean half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is of the order of 35,000 years. Consequently, anthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere in 50,000 years’ time, and even 100,000 years, which is enough to prevent any glaciation.”

You see, the “good news” supposedly is that the presumed “climate-change” villain or evil-extraordinaire de jour, i.e., carbon dioxide (CO2) will postpone the onset of the next ice age by 50,000 to 100,000 years or more.

A study published in the journal Vaccine has brought to light an extremely disturbing though still virtually unreported dark side to immunization campaigns within low-income countries, namely, the observation that infant mortality sometimes increases when the number of co-administered vaccines increases. 

This finding is diametrically opposed to the widely held belief that vaccination is always a life-saving intervention, and that the more vaccines administered to infants the better.  

Study Links DTP and Yellow Fever Vaccines To Infant Deaths

The new observational study from the West African country Guinea-Bissau titled, “Co-administration of live measles and yellow fever vaccines and inactivated pentavalent vaccines is associated with increased mortality compared with measles and yellow fever vaccines only,”[i] opens with a reference to the already consistent observation in the biomedical literature that the co-administration of inactivated diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine and live attenuated measles vaccine (MV) increases mortality compared with receiving MV only. [ii] [iii]

I am a climate skeptic. Many skeptics know that and have even contributed to my book Climate for the Layman. But we are losing the argument and for one simple reason.  We keep, – or at least some of us – keep up the illusion that there is such a thing as a Global Temperature. There is no such entity and never has been. Furthermore there is no such thing as an average Global Temperature either.

Peace be to Dr. Christy of the University of Alabama, for whom I have the greatest respect. He assures me that there is an average Global Temperature arrived at by inference from remote sensing from satellites. This is done by counting the number of joules, which as you all know I trust, are units of energy.

But may I humbly beg to differ. It is manifestly impossible to put in all the data in order to arrive at an average. It is clear that an average such as NASA provides based upon some 3,486 weather stations situated at 5ft above the ground is just nonsense. Why? Because in the whole of this sacred Planet of ours to determine the temperature based upon such a sparse amount is truly ridiculous. Moreover of the 3,486 stations 3,269 are situated in the relatively warm areas of Europe, America, and Africa. How many stations are there in the vast continent of Antarctica? Merely 8. Read that again – merely 8.