Stanford researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were “stunned” by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients. While the research involved only 18 patients and was designed primarily to look at the safety of such a procedure and not its effectiveness, it is creating significant buzz in the neuroscience community because the results appear to contradict a core belief about brain damage — that it is permanent and irreversible.

The results, published in the journal Stroke, could have implications for our understanding of an array of disorders including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and Alzheimer’s if confirmed in larger-scale testing.

The work involved patients who had passed the critical six-month mark when recoveries generally plateau and there are rarely further improvements. This is the point at which therapies are typically stopped as brain circuits are thought to be dead and unable to be repaired. Each participant in the study had suffered a stroke beneath the brain’s outermost layer and had significant impairments in moving their arms and-or legs. Some participants in the study had had a stroke as long as three to five years before the experimental treatment.

(NaturalNews) Think the Zika virus is responsible for all the cases of microcephaly in South America? Think again: There is no reliable scientific evidence linking the two. The developmental deformities are actually caused by exposure to toxic insecticide and larvicide chemicals, not Zika virus.

But because Zika virus fear fits a convenient funding narrative for chemical giants and vaccine manufacturers, it is being played up by the corrupt, criminally-run CDC and the Obama administration to funnel billions of dollars into the hands of vaccine corporations while ignoring the real causes of microcephaly.

Here are the top 10 reasons why the Zika virus fear mongering is a total scam:

Scientists have discovered the specific mutation that famously turned moths black during the Industrial Revolution.

In an iconic evolutionary case study, a black form of the peppered moth rapidly took over in industrial parts of the UK during the 1800s, as soot blackened the tree trunks and walls of its habitat.

Now, researchers from the University of Liverpool have pinpointed the genetic change that caused this adaptation.

They have also calculated the most likely date for the mutation – 1819.

Quoting from a post on vampires, “In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called ‘Bayesian priors’ or just ‘priors’), and then you ‘update’ them as you receive new evidence.”

This is the standard metaphor, and it’s not so much wrong as unhelpful, misleading, and restricting. The metaphor derives from Bayes’s rule (details which can be looked up anywhere) and which gives a formula which on the right-hand-side is supposed to be an element representing “prior beliefs.” The formula itself is correct, as most math is. But because math is correct does not mean that it means what you think it means.

(Incidentally, all (as in all) frequentist methods should be dumped forthwith: no hypothesis testing, no p-values, no parameters, no infinities. It is a false dichotomy to suppose that if not Bayes then frequentist, and vice versa.)

Do you recall how the experts wanted to tell us that cold winters were linked to global warming? For example Spiegel Online wrote on 27 October 2014:

“Weather bridge: Ice melt in the Arctic cooling winters in Europe
Climate scientists have discovered a meteorological remote link: When the sea ice melts in the Arctic, atmospheric currents get shifted – winters in Europe and Asia get cooler.
According to a study, ice melt over the past decades has led to especially harsh winters in Europe and Asia.

Scientists at the UK Meteorological Office (Met Office) have released a new paper this week indicating the recent slowdown of the North Atlantic Ocean current system is natural, and not due to man-made global warming.

Over the past ten years, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, appeared to be decelerating, causing scientists to worry that this was a result of climate change. Al Gore even proselytized this event happening in hi documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”.

This new Met Office research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows that the slowdown trend is likely due to the current’s natural recovery from an earlier acceleration. Laura Jackson, the lead author of the paper, said in a press release that the AMOC plays a vital role in the climate because it carries heat north, keeping Europe relatively warm.

The science behind the research…

Read the full article here: us.blastingnews.com

Newly released internal e-mails show George Mason University climate professors plotting a petition calling on government to prosecute skeptics of global warming using RICO laws designed to go after the mob. They got 20 scientists to sign their petition and sent it to government officials before withdrawing in the face of controversy.

The new emails show GMU professors Jagadish Shukla and Edward Maibach discussing everything from how to craft their petition to appeal to conservatives, to getting warnings from others that the petition would go over poorly, to evading media questions.

The spectacular, flat landscape that dominates the left side of Pluto’s icy “heart” can now be explained, say scientists.

Sputnik Planum is the most prominent feature on the diminutive world, covering 900,000 square km.

Broken into an array of polygons, it is devoid of any impact craters.

Reporting in the journal Nature, the researchers say that roiling cells of nitrogen ice remove any blemishes, maintaining a super-smooth appearance.

Giordano Bruno has submitted to PSI a supplement to his article ‘Does the PNAS have an interest in selling windmills, solar panels and sea walls and collecting carbon taxes?https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/does-the-pnas-have-an-interest-in-selling-windmills-solar-panels-and-sea-walls-and-collecting-carbon-taxes/

Giordano writes:

Just a few remarks on my post: I wish to note how the authors of the extreme paper on the committed sea level rise of 9.9 meters that can only be approved and not criticized in PNAS are not exactly the academics that should write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America. Similarly to the authors that were permitted to comment the paper to approve the claim and allow the authors of the original extreme paper one more reply, they are all minus one partners of climate blogs, financial companies and other organizations having nothing to do with science or academy.

An osprey was hit by a wind turbine blade in Scotland, and had to be euthanised. Normally, these accidents are not reported – see  Windfarms: bird mortality cover-up in the UK

What’s particularly interesting in this case is that we can read, in the media reporting the news, all the lame excuses being put-up by the wind company to hide the fact that this was perfectly previsible.

For instance: “The scheme’s operator Eneco is working with RSPB Scotland and a conservation expert to try to establish if there are site-specific factors that attracted the bird.” In other words: we goofed when we planned that wind farm; there was something particular about the site, and we didn’t see it. We´ll do better next time – end of story.

A smattering of water is buried deep inside the Moon and it arrived during the satellite’s very early history, a new study concludes, when asteroids plunged into churning oceans of magma.

How and when water got trapped in volcanic lunar rocks is a huge and open question for planetary scientists.

This international team has compared the chemistry of Apollo mission samples with various types of space rock.

They say that icy, early asteroids were the likely source of most of the water.

After such impacts the Moon’s developing crust could have trapped the water in the cooling magma.

A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionise optics, according to its US inventors.

Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses.

It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure.

Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre.

“In my opinion, this technology will be game-changing,” said Federico Capasso of Harvard University, the senior author of a report on the new lens which appears in the journal Science.

The Antarctic Ocean has remained unchanged by global warming due to the Deep Ocean water that is constantly pulled to the surface in a centuries-long pas de deux, a new study has found. The University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s latest research discovered that ocean currents and strong winds keep the seawater around Antarctica at nearly the same temperature, despite some warming in other bodies of seawater.

Climate models

Climate models and satellite imagery show that the unique currents around Antarctica are constantly pulling seawater up to the surface, which last touched the Earth’s atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution. The paper was published online May 30 in the journal Science Direct in Remote Sensing of Environment. It shows gale-force westerly winds are constantly whipping around Antarctica and pushing surface water north, continuously drawing up water from far below. The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so deep, that it takes centuries before the water reaches the surface and interacts with the atmosphere. Even if it does, the average temperature above the Southern Ocean is so cold that its impact is insignificant.

Read the full article here: us.blastingnews.com

PSI ASSOCIATES are steadfast in their support of the traditional scientific method as encapsulated  in the ideas of Karl Popper.

PSI opposes post-normalism and endeavors to provide society with an antidote (from the Greek αντιδιδοναι antididonai, “given against”) to the seemingly gargantuan and pervasive rise of post-normal science by way of our publishing, educational and media-focused materials and presentations. For, as Karl Popper advocated, any hypothesis that does not make testable predictions is simply not science. Such a hypothesis may be useful or valuable, but it cannot be said to be science.

Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists by her 2010 book,Merchants of Doubt and its scurrilous demonization of climate skeptics as paid hacks parroting the fossil-fuel industry’s self-serving opposition to the “consensus view” of man-made climate catastrophe, but that screed doesn’t reveal the flaws in her work.

A short, obscure, error-riddled essay titled, “My Science is Better than Your Science,” that she wrote in 2011 is more significant. It was a chapter in a book titled, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, and examined the 1991 origin of the “skeptics are paid industry shills” narrative supposedly found in a legendary set of “leaked Western Fuels memos.”

That short chapter is important because Oreskes totally misinterprets the “memos” as Big Coal’s plan for a vast national campaign with paid climate scientists that created the lasting public doubt about global warming. That’s the very same interpretation repeated endlessly by climate alarmists including Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997’s The Heat Is On), Canadian public relations flak James Hoggan ’s attack website DeSmogBlog, and many others.

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.

But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.