A U.S. energy company just discovered a “world class” oil and gas resource in west Texas, out on the fringes of the already prolific Permian basin. The WSJ reports on Apache Corp.’s encouraging new find:

The discovery, which Apache is calling “Alpine High,” is in an area near the Davis Mountains that had been overlooked by geologists and engineers, who believed it would be a poor fit for hydraulic fracturing. It could be worth $8 billion by conservative estimates, or even 10 times more, according to the company. […]  

The company has begun drilling in the area and says the early wells, which produce more natural gas than oil, are capable of providing at least a 30{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} profit margin at today’s prices, including all costs associated with drilling. Some are so prolific that they can break even at a price of 10 cents per million British thermal units, according to the company. Natural gas futures closed Tuesday at $2.72. […]The new play is a short distance from extensive drilling operations and is likely to stoke the speculative fever that has recently engulfed the Permian, a vast swath of geology in West Texas and New Mexico that has been gushing oil and gas for almost 100 years. The Permian has become popular again because producers have found ways to use newer technologies to extract oil from the area at a profit, even at current below-$50-a-barrel prices.

A slim and near-forgotten but altogether fantastic 1991 book by Denise Shekerjian titled Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born (public library | IndieBound) synthesizes insights on creativity from conversations with 40 winners of the MacArthur “genius” grant — artists, writers, scientists, inventors, cultural critics.

Principia Scientific International (PSI) is ostensibly a scientific news site which allows readers to comment upon what they read.  But if you read what it is about, its objective is to return the practice of science to that founded by Galileo with the support of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

And to that of Sir Isaac Newton who built on the new intellectual foundation prepared by the efforts of these three men.  But before Galileo there was Nicholaus Copernicus who dared question the wisdom of Aristotle which had been accepted for nearly 2000 years.

A generation ago, few people had tattoos and those were mostly hidden beneath clothes. More recently, tattoos (both having and showing them) appear to have become common accoutrements of parts of modern society. Just walk down any street in summer temperature and you’ll see all kinds of personal embellishments “engraved” on skins of various ages and colors.

Some of these ancient designs are going to be replaced (??) soon by more modern designs, like those also functioning as electronic signaling devices for your hand-held phone, tabloid, or whatever. Their big feature is supposed to be your ability to control your fridge, home lights, or other electric home gadgets – just by touching your shiny gold-leaf-tattoo as in the pics below.

Proposal for privately funded fusion energy experimental science, R&D leading to commercialization

Its core collapsed within seconds, fused heavy metals, and hurled them into outer space in a cataclysmic blast. A supergiant — reduced to a cloud of dust and gas.

The crime went unreported for eons. Then, about 2.6 million years ago, evidence began to land on Earth. Heavy atoms ejected from the supernova broke through the planet’s atmosphere and settled on its surface as isotopes.

Now, scientists say they’ve uncovered clues to the crime. But something seems suspicious. Soon after the aftermath arrived on Earth, our planet fell into a major ice age — leading many investigators to see the supernova as both victim and accomplice.

When I was still in school, the rule-of-thumb for the human microbiome — the sum total of microbes that live in and on our bodies — was that bacteria outnumbered human cells 10 to 1. Specifically, it was believed that the average person has 10 trillion human cells and carries 100 trillion bacteria.

Not so, say the authors of a new PLoS Biology paper, who re-crunched the numbers. According to their estimate, the human body actually consists of 30 trillion cells, and our bacterial allies only number 38 trillion. The ratio, therefore, is much closer to 1 to 1. The authors explain that the original estimates were little more than “back-of-the-envelope” calculations. As such, they served as useful reference points, but more accurate data is now available.

According to the German DWD national weather service August 2016 recorded a mean temperature of 17.7°C. The start of the month was really cool, but the last part of the month the temperature climbed to peak summer levels, and thus compensated for the otherwise sub-par summer. No record temperature was set, with the month’s high some degrees below the record of over 40°C set for a few minutes in 2015.

Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR) is the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures over a period typically a 24 hour period. The alarmists regard DTR as an essential part of AGW. Karl Braganza, a prominent alarmist at the BoM, for instance describes DTR as afingerprint of AGW. Braganza says:

greater global warming at night and during winter is more typical of increased greenhouse gases, rather than an increase in solar radiation.

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

In this latest of a series of articles about retired science writer, Edsel Chromie, we feature a further example where Chromie demonstrates that natural phenomena can be neatly explained by strong magnetic field current flow, as proven in 1900’s laboratory experiments overlooked today: Electromagnetism on Saturn.

From those same laboratory experiments Chromie has identified how Saturn’s rings and “geysers” of Enceladus also exhibit strong magnetic field current flow that is consistent and reproducible.

In 1980 when the dark fingers within the rings of Saturn were first discovered, Dr. Bradford Smith said: “We just don’t know what to make of them, except they look dark. And that would suggest that it’s a diminution of material”

(Life Issues Institute) — All along I’ve felt somewhat suspect that the Zika virus is linked to microcephaly.  The US Centers for Disease Control and the New England Journal of Medicine both concluded the link is there.  Both are heavy hitters in the realm of research, however, they admit there’s no studied verification. 

Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry were quick to jump on the abortion bandwagon for pregnant women with confirmed or suspected cases of the Zika virus.

But a recent, expansive study has cast legitimate doubt on the Zika/microcephaly connection.

THREE years ago Thomas Herndon, a young graduate student from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, made a splash among economists. Given an assignment to replicate the analysis behind a published academic paper, he pored over the data used for an influential study on government debt written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, both professors at Harvard. Much to the authors’ embarrassment, Mr Herndon found the most elementary of mistakes: they had accidentally omitted five rows of their spreadsheet when calculating an average. When included, the missing figures weakened the paper’s conclusion substantially.

Here we go again!

• A second rate correlation study gets published;
• Because it has the words “bees” and “pesticides” in the headline, the newly privatised research institute’s PR machine generates good media pick-up;
• Main media organisations interview the researchers (who seem to find the right apocalyptic vocabulary), but they have not read the study;
• The NGO activists, who might have read some of the news articles, go into campaign overdrive: buzz, buzz, buzz, spin, spin, spin;
• An activist from Friends of the Earth plants an editorial in the Financial Times;
• Green MEPs print up a banner announcing a bee-pocalypse and pose for a picture in Brussels.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to allow the public to understand better, and reap benefits from, Einstein’s 1905 discovery that rest mass (m) is energy (E) and to explain the chain of events in 1905-1945 that obscured knowledge of a power offering these benefits to all humanity:

1. Abundant energy to sustain human life and to advance human civilization;

2. A better understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, the chemical elements, the solar system, and life on Earth; and

3. Empirical confirmation – in rest masses of ordinary atoms -of many earlier spiritual and scientific insights, including Aston’s 1922 promise of “powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction,” Max Planck’s 1944 assertion that the force creating atomic matter was guided by “a conscious and intelligent Mind” (commonly attributed to God), and Kuroda’s 1945 insight into the “beginning of the world” from Hiroshima’s destruction.

During the last ice age almost all of Canada, along with parts of Europe and Asia, were buried beneath one to two miles of ice. At the same time, sea levels stood 350 to 400 feet lower than today.

Sea levels were so low that the entire continental shelf, at least in eastern North America, was above water. Many states on the eastern seaboard were twice as big as today. New Jersey’s shoreline, for example, stood 60 to 100 miles east of its present location.

Same in the west.

The land between Alaska and Asia rose out of the sea like a bridge (or rather, the sea dropped away from the land), and the Bering Strait, which today is only 18 stories deep at its deepest point, was above water. Our ancestors could have walked to Siberia. (The word bridge is misleading, because the land connection between Alaska and Siberia was almost as wide as Alaska itself.)