Oil and natural gas aren’t just fuels. They supply building blocks for pharmaceuticals; plastics in vehicle bodies, athletic helmets, and numerous other products; and complex composites in solar panels and wind turbine blades and nacelles.

The USA was importing 65{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of its petroleum in 2005, creating serious national security concerns. But fracking helped cut imports to 40{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and the US now exports oil and gas.

Users of sixteen of the world’s most prestigious optical telescopes – including the Hubble Space Telescope – are revisiting old data in case an analogue-to-digital converter design has polluted the instruments’ measurements.

Analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) are where the real world meets the digital, and in the case of the optical telescopes, they convert pixel data from the charge-coupled devices (CCDs) in the instruments’ cameras.

An international group of researchers trying to identify what looked like a systematic error in an instrument in Hawaii discovered the ADC’s reference voltage could be affected by the ADC’s output – in other words a feedback error.

The use of obscene or taboo language – or swearing, as it’s more commonly known – is often seen as a sign that the speaker lacks vocabulary, cannot express themselves in a less offensive way, or even lacks intelligence.

Studies have shown, however, that swearing may in fact display a more, rather than less, intelligent use of language.

While swearing can become a habit, we choose to swear in different contexts and for different purposes: for linguistic effect, to convey emotion, for laughs, or perhaps even to be deliberately nasty.

The renowned Smithsonian Institute recently published an article “Scientists Create a New Form of Light by Linking Photons.” Yeah, a “New Form of Light” – really?

This revolutionary discovery is eloquently described by freelance journalist Marissa Fessenden in a post published as noted above. The research report she refers to has recently been  published in the Science magazine, authored by no less than ten authors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Princeton University, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Maryland(NIST/UM) , and the University of Chicago, surely, all renowned institutes of higher learning and top notch research. The lead author, Dr. Qi-Yu Liang, currently hails from the NIST/UM.

We are often told that we should trust only scientific studies appearing in ‘respected’ peer reviewed journals. But is the peer review system the true gold standard of scientific merit?

In Britain and elsewhere independent scientists are becoming increasingly frustrated and dismayed as to what mainstream publications class as ‘good science.’ Doubts are rising, even among the elite, as evidenced in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) reporting on the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication (FSSC). In ‘Peer review: not as old as you might think’ (June 25, 2015) The THES asks: “Is peer review broken?”

In my previous essay (https://principia-scientific.com/the-problem-argumentation/), I reviewed some of the wisdom given to the National Academy of Science by Richard Feynman in a 1955 address titled—The Value of Science.  The title of the previous essay was:  The Problem—Argumentation.  Which the portion of Feynman’s wisdom reviewed did not directly address.  But I now consider how he closed his address as the solution to the problem of argumentation.

Serendipity provided two apropos quotes separated by 80 years.  One by Churchill and another by the current U.S. president.

Never give in, never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.  Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.—Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) “Never Give In Speech” Harrow School, 1941

For the first time, scientists were able to use satellites to map the potential warming effect of large-scale changes to vegetation on the Earth’s surface.

“Our results show that vegetation-cover change over the period 2000–2015 has produced on average a brighter but warmer land surface,” reads a new study published in the journal Nature.

This paper was conceived while attending the Electric Universe Conference in Phoenix in 2017.  While the Einstein Universe postulates time as a fourth dimension, this postulates a non-time fourth dimension, i.e., another spatial-type dimension, although we cannot perceive it.

Just as in “Flatland,” a 19th century novella that has often inspired comparisons of inter-dimensional phenomena, particularly how phenomena in dimension n + 1 would be manifested to observers restricted to dimension n, the possibility of light or the Coulombic force being a lower-dimensional (third) manifestation of a higher-dimensional (fourth) phenomenon is considered.  Given our inability to deal with four dimensions, with n = 2, a possible analogy with an extension to n = 3 is considered geometrically as a surrogate.

I published the following article on Canada Free Press (CFP) in 2010. I also posted it to my web site in 2012. This posting was required because CFP withdrew all my articles from their archive at my request. I did this because CFP published an apology written by Roger McConchie, lawyer for IPCC author and Green Party leader in British Columbia, Andrew Weaver. I was not aware of this action but in the three lawsuits filed against me by McConchie he also files against the outlet for the article. I pursued a “not guilty” defense against the lawsuit and as was reported here, the judge dismissed the case.

‘Strong Influence Of Solar Activity’ On 1850s-2014; Ocean Temperatures, ‘Small Contribution From CO2’

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC) and computer modeling, the Sun’s role in modern-era climate change checks in at somewhere slightly above nothing.

Through first-of-their-kind supercomputer simulations, researchers, including a Northwestern University professor, have gained new insight into one of the most mysterious phenomena in modern astronomy: the behavior of relativistic jets that shoot from black holes, extending outward across millions of light years.

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science suggests natural rainfall variation is so great that it could take a human lifetime for significant climate signals to appear in regional or global rainfall measures.

“We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations… and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.” [1-2]

Man-made global warming is not going to make it harder to predict the weather, according to a new study by University of Missouri scientists.

The jet stream is key to the ability of meteorologists to forecast short-term weather patterns, and Atmospheric scientist Anthony Lupo and doctoral student Andrew Jensen wanted to see if adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would affect jet stream flow.

I have written before that Galileo Galilei is the founder of modern physical science.  This because his book, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, is its foundation.  On May 30, 2016 I discovered Principia Scientific International (PSI).  An article http://principia-scientific.org/prevailing-theories-have-been-proven-wrong-before/ by Keith Byer had been posted the day before.  And May 30^th I made my first comment of many to follow.