Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have created artificial heart tissue with functioning vasculature by stripping a spinach leaf of its original cells and replacing them with human cells.

The spinach leaf was used to solve a problem faced by biological engineers when creating artificial tissues and organs. Methods such as 3D printing that generally make good copies do not have the ability to recreate the complicated vascular systems that are needed to ensure the success of any bioengineered tissue. If oxygen and nutrients cannot be transported to the cells, then that organ will fail and die.

Britain’s government seems to have specifically removed quantitative estimates of the costs of wind and solar power from an official report.

The report was  published roughly one year late and has seemingly had most of its cost estimates removed. The few stats that remain are entirely qualitative and do not include numerical approximations, like dollars per megawatt hour, which would normally be considered the principal output of such research.

From the Daily Caller:

Six nonprofit groups that criticized President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts failed to mention the nearly $179 million in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants they’ve received since 2009, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group (The DCNF) analysis of federal spending data.

There are bones hidden away in almost every cupboard in many of the rooms of New York University’s primatology department, and James Higham is keen to explain to me what they can tell us about an important part of our evolution: why we have such big, heavy brains.

The “Extreme Weather” meme has earned its place in climate change history as the fundamental driver of climate scaremongering, used deceptively and effectively to promote the catastrophic man-made climate change theory by instilling fear, doom and gloom directly into the human psyche through simple imagery and repetitive correlation rhetoric.

Image copyright: SPL

The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015.

However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. There are growing concerns around the world over research integrity.

In 2001, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the earth to warm and developed computer models to predict how much the earth would warm in the future.

Does any empirical scientific evidence exist to support this premise of the IPCC? The answer is no, in fact it is just the opposite, CO2 has a cooling effect. The major components in the atmosphere that cause the earth to be cooler than it would be otherwise are the so-called greenhouse gases.

If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously?

In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia. Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists.

(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch today announced it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to compel the U.S. Department of Commerce to turn over all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement (Judicial Watch v. Department of Commerce (No. 1:17-cv-00541)).

Yours truly has a preference for spuds over rice as the dietary “carb.” So, you may forgive me for being interested in news about this tuber-kind being potentially feeding the future colonists on planet Mars.Surely now, our venerable Canadian Broadcasting Service (CBC) would not lie!

As the report says:

The [potato growing] experiment was conducted in soil in the Atacama Desert in Peru, which is most similar to what is found on Mars.

Cells are basically tiny computers: They send and receive inputs and output accordingly. If you chug a Frappuccino, your blood sugar spikes, and your pancreatic cells get the message. Output: more insulin.

But cellular computing is more than just a convenient metaphor. In the last couple of decades, biologists have been working to hack the cells’ algorithm in an effort to control their processes. They’ve upended nature’s role as life’s software engineer, incrementally editing a cell’s algorithm—its DNA—over generations.

Image copyright: ANU

Have you ever thought about discovering a planet? It may not be as fanciful as you think. Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU) want help in searching for a ninth planet thought to be orbiting our Solar System.

With a working title of Planet Nine, it is speculated to exist beyond Pluto. Amateur stargazers have been promised input on naming the planet if they spot it on a website showing digital images of space.

In the period from 2000-2015, the hole in the ozone layer shrank by more than 4 million square kilometers—nearly a billion acres—according to a new report in the journal Science.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, news of a massive hole in the ozone layer caused worldwide panic, stoked by everything from rumors of sheep being blinded by increased atmospheric radiation to the fear of a skin cancer pandemic and even comparisons to “AIDS from the sky.”