The 1955 Cesium Atomic Clock at the National Physical Laboratory, UK. It kept time to a second in 300 years.

A “cesium (-beam) atomic clock” (or “cesium-beam frequency standard”) is a device that uses as a reference the exact frequency of the microwave spectral line emitted by atoms of the metallic element cesium, in particular its isotope of atomic weight 133 (“Cs-133”). The integral of frequency is time, so this frequency, 9,192,631,770 hertz(Hz = cycles/second), provides the fundamental unit of time, which may thus be measured by cesium clocks.

If you have ever grabbed the metal handle of pot being heated over a campfire, you have painfully experienced heat transfer. There are four ways in which heat is transferred from one object to another: conduction, radiation, convection and advection.

Image copyright: EPA

Scientists think they can now better explain the recent surge in methane levels seen in the Earth’s atmosphere. Although only a trace component in the air, CH4 is a ‘greenhouse gas’ and has been rising rapidly since about 2006.

Tropical wetlands and fossil fuels are suspected as major sources – but the sums do not add up.

Climate change alarmists continue to preach the dogma of global warming in a textbook case of cognitive dissonance, despite record low temperatures in different points around the globe. This past week, Buffalo and Watertown, New York, registered their coldest week in recorded weather history.

Global warming scientists continue struggling to find an explanation for the nearly two-decade-long global warming pause that has taken hold of the planet since the late 1990s.

The most recent temperature spike was due to the natural El Nino event at the equatorial Pacific, and that has disappeared over the last months. Alarmists claim that the global temperature is still 0.5°C above normal, yet it’s been that way for the past 20 years!

Travelling into space in the future may become a challenge because of the amount of debris that’s currently orbiting the planet. It’s believed that there are currently around 600,000 pieces of space junk surrounding the Earth.

They measure anywhere between 1cm to 10cm wide and have become an increasing problem. It’s believed that at least one satellite a year is destroyed by coming into contact with space junk.

On Twitter December 28, President Trump wrote: “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

As Penn State climate professor, Michael Mann faces certain defeat in his libel suit against Dr Tim Ball, we examine why climate alarmism needed Mann’s notorious graph to bolster their claims of human-caused climate catastrophe.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has provided stunning images of the “temperature anomaly” in the U.S., as much of the country faces the perils of a winter storm dubbed the “bomb cyclone.”

The image above, known as a temperature anomaly map, uses data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The heat maps are land surface tempeatures taken from Dec. 26, 2017-Jan. 2, 2018 and are compared to the eight-day average from 2001 to 2010.

Image copyright: BEN POTTER

The 11,500-year-old remains of an infant girl from Alaska have shed new light on the peopling of the Americas. Genetic analysis of the child, allied to other data, indicates she belonged to a previously unknown, ancient group.

Scientists say what they have learnt from her DNA strongly supports the idea that a single wave of migrants moved into the continent from Siberia just over 20,000 years ago.

Does the mystery of how the Sun’s outer corona (a few million degrees) is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface (5800 to 6000 C) have a hitherto unexplained connection to Earth’s climate? Perhaps solar flares are linked to global warming after all. Richard F Cronin explains:

Tales of doom and gloom about polar bears reflect what some people think might happen in the future, not what is happening right now.

Currently, polar bears are doing just fine despite the low summer sea ice coverage they’ve experienced since 2007 (Crockford 2017a; York et al. 2016).

It is very cold here in the Eastern US and the President is joking about the lack of global warming. More interesting by far is the fact that there appears to have been no CO2-induced warming in the last 40 years, which is as far back as the satellite measurements go.

Paper Reviewed: Ochoa-Hueso, R., Hughes, J., Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Drake, J.E., Tjoelker, M.G., Piñeiro, J. and Power, S.A. 2017. Rhizosphere-driven increase in nitrogen and phosphorus availability under elevated atmospheric CO2 in a mature Eucalyptus woodland. Plant and Soil 416: 283-295.

This time next year, there may be a new world leader in lunar exploration. If all goes according to plan, China will have done something no other space-faring superpower has been able to do: land on the far side of the moon. China is rocketing ahead with its plans for lunar exploration.In 2018, they will launch a pair of missions known collectively as Chang’e 4. It is the fourth mission in a series named after the Chinese moon goddess.