It was probably the trip of a lifetime. In 2012, biologists on an expedition to East Timor in southeast Asia spotted a brahminy blind snake wriggling out of somewhere quite unexpected: the rear end of a common Asian toad.

Mark O’Shea from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK and his colleagues witnessed the unusual event by chance after finding the pair under a rock. It is the first account of prey surviving digestion by a toad and of an animal as big as a blind snake emerging from a digestive tract alive.

Top American Climatologist, an expert in climate modeling, exposes the fallacy that current climate models provide a realistic or reliable prediction of future climate change. In a 1-2-3 step guide to disposing of the global warming debate Dr. Duane Thresher says successful modeling with modern computers is “mathematically impossible.”

Science is now controlled by money-driven nitwits bereft of scientific acumen, brainwashing the populous at large by the application of the methods of the advertising executive and the marketing manager, as they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, with their evil eye and greedy, their stunted forms and weedy.

“We are leaving the Era of the Sun as planetary lord (1980–2016) and entering a new era where Saturn will be Lord of the new planetary cycle (2017–2053.)” I read this in a posting by an astrologer I follow. I don’t know how he came to this assessment, but it caught my interest. So I started looking at Saturn.

A new paper on the evolutionary history of bears (Bears breed across species borders: Kumar et al. 2017) has concluded that hybridization is common and natural among all species of ursids. And while some media outlets (e.g. DailyMail) have framed this as surprisingly convincing proof that experts were wrong to claim that climate change is the cause of recent polar bear X grizzly hybrids, definitive evidence against that interpretation has been available for years to anyone who bothered to look: see my recent “Five facts that challenge hybridization nonsense.”

… Dr. [J. Elliott] Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that  in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said.

– Carl Simmer, A Global Greening, New York Times, April 5, 2017.

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A consortium of British companies has unveiled a plan to test driverless cars on UK roads and motorways in 2019. The Driven group also plans to try out a fleet of autonomous vehicles between London and Oxford. The cars will communicate with each other about any hazards and should operate with almost full autonomy – but will have a human on board as well.

Deaths from air pollution is a topic which frequently claims newspaper headlines. Rightly so. The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights air pollution as the number one reason for environment related deaths in the world. It’s estimated to be the cause of seven million premature deaths every year – 4.3 million from indoor air pollution, and 3 million from ambient outdoor pollution. With historical links to development and economic growth, we expect the number of deaths from outdoor pollution to grow (largely in Asia and Africa).

The world is in the grip of global warming. Everything will keep getting hotter and hotter. Then we’ll all die. That’s the consensus from the scientific “community.” That’s the “settled science” always talked about.

But getting to the point that any science is actually “settled” – as in 100 percent accurate – is very difficult. There may be strong evidence to point to one conclusion, but it may turn out that we didn’t have all the information needed to arrive at the correct finding, or, data may change over time, leading us down a different path.

In an open letter to Donald Trump, climate expert Dr. Duane Thresher has urged the President not to give in to his daughter Ivanka’s misguided views on global warming and her insistence that the U.S. remain in the Paris climate agreement ratified by Barack Obama last August.

In medicine, a crisis signals the turning point of a disease: a moment of inflection in which the course of the illness turns either for better or worse. Yet a crisis can also be developmental; it can signal the transition from one state of being to another. Sometimes this is referred to as a “maturational crisis.” In this piece, I argue that the United States is facing precisely such a maturational crisis. Moving through it to a better future requires nothing less than a re-founding of the republic on terms different from the theological inheritance that characterized our Enlightenment-era establishment.

The story of how Maurice Strong (pictured) and the Club of Rome set up the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to direct political and scientific focus on CO2 to ‘prove’ it was causing global warming is well documented.

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Norwegian scientists have put forward a new theory to explain the inspiration behind one of the most famous works of art ever produced. The Scream (1892), by Edvard Munch, depicts a figure holding its face, which is making an agonised expression. But look above this individual and the sky is full of colourful wavy lines.

The claim of “consensus” is one of the pillars of sand that is supporting the climate change political movement. The problem is, the way this conclusion was reached, it isn’t defensible. Searching published articles for certain words doesn’t prove a “consensus.” No one went or record supporting the claims of “consensus,” it all came from research of articles.

Is atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter better explained under a new concept of electromagnetic resistance generating heat? Retired science writer and analyst, Edsel Chromie, provides a novel and compelling re-examination.

On April 19, 2017 the Science channel ran a program titled “Curse of the Gas Giant” It stated:

“The NASA satellite probe recorded a temperature of 1,300 degrees F. above the clouds in the area of the auroras of Jupiter. Jupiter is 400 million miles away from the warmth of the Sun. The data defies scientific explanation. We have several pretty nice theories but all of them have problems Scientists need more data before we can really figure out what’s going on with Jupiter. For now. the mysterious heat source on Jupiter remains unknown.”

The March for Science was last Saturday. Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is  “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.