Recently, I gave a seminar on “fake news” to professors and grad students at a large public university. Early in my talk, I polled the audience: “How many of you believe climate change is the world’s #1 threat?”Silence. Not a single person raised his or her hand.

Was I speaking in front of a group of science deniers? The College Republicans? Some fringe libertarian club? No, it was a room full of microbiologists.

Viewers may question much of what they hear and read about scientific and medical studies after watching the latest “Full Measure” cover story. It’s a cautionary note issued by respected industry leaders who say unseen interests are exerting enormous control over research and what is—or isn’t—published. Their startling claim: that a large percentage of articles in prestigious medical journals are simply not to be believed.

A new haul of ancient human remains has been described from an important cave site in South Africa. The finds, including a well-preserved skull, bolster the idea that the Homo naledi people deliberately deposited their dead in the cave.

Evidence of such complex behaviour is surprising for a human species with a brain that’s a third the size of ours. Despite showing some primitive traits it lived relatively recently, perhaps as little as 235,000 years ago. That would mean the naledi people could have overlapped with the earliest of our kind – Homo sapiens.

Global temperatures have dropped 0.5° Celsius in April according to U.S meteorologist Ryan Maue. In the Northern Hemisphere they plunged a massive 1°C . As the record 2015/16 El Nino levels off, the global warming hiatus is back with a vengeance.

Japanese climate researcher who identified evidence that extreme weather in Japan is linked to solar activity and global cooling produces a new study showing that government computer models rely on a faulty back-of-the envelope calculation from a 1976 science paper.

Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

In recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more that 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Niño.

Inevitably, when even satellite temperatures were showing 2016 as “the hottest year on record”, we were going to be told last winter that the Arctic ice was at its lowest extent ever. Sure enough, before Christmas, a report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was greeted with such headlines as “Hottest Arctic on record triggers massive ice melt”.

The biggest cowards in America today can be found in colleges and universities; they are the administrators, followed closely by a large number of their faculty. They have and continue to allow our institutions to be taken over by a monolithic world view that is increasingly totalitarian and antithetical to the diversity of opinion on which the search for truth depends.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Microsoft has released an urgent update to stop hackers taking control of computers with a single email. The unusual bug, in Microsoft anti-malware software such as Windows Defender, could be exploited without the recipient even opening the message. Researchers working for Google’s Project Zero cyber-security outfit discovered the flaw at the weekend. The fix has been specially pushed out hours before the software giant’s monthly Tuesday security update.

The biggest mistake made by supporters of the ‘consensus’ for man-made climate alarm is believing that government climate science has standing in the wider scientific community. It doesn’t. Below we explain why.

First, most people do not realize that the history of climate science – as taught in schools and universities and spoken about in a quiescent press – is less science, more propaganda. The narrative sold is that climate research is a long-established, prestige discipline which is composed of elite experts espousing long-accepted scientific proofs on how our climate works. This myth is not only laughable but is readily exposed when the diligent reader performs their own research.

Perhaps, that will be better—or not; time will tell. Of course, I’m talking about the plant Cannabis sp., known as marijuana, the new “vice of choice.” As Money Morning reports:

Over half of the country, or 28 states, have legalized marijuana in some form. You see, the marijuana craze is sweeping the nation …

A cream or ointment may soon cure baldness or stop hair turning grey, a new study suggests. The cells that makes hairs and turns it grey was accidentally discovered by US scientists as they explored how certain cancer tumours form. The breakthrough could one day identify possible treatments for balding and hair greying and also explain why we age.

Image copyrigh: tNASA

Nasa is seeking help from coders to speed up the software it uses to design experimental aircraft. It is running a competition that will share $55,000 (£42,000) between the top two people who can make its FUN3D software run up to 10,000 times faster. The FUN3D code is used to model how air flows around simulated aircraft in a supercomputer.

Nuclear reactor accidents are so devastating and world-changing that you know them by one name: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima.

March 11, 2011 was a day of unimaginable tragedy in northern Japan, a tragedy exacerbated by the reactor meltdowns and release of contamination. But the nuclear part of this horrible day was, if the longest-lasting, certainly the least lethal event. Yet it’s the part that still engenders so much fear. With the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima accident upon us this month, let’s take a look at where things stand today with recovering from this calamity, and what might be happening next.