Image adapted from PAGES 2k, 2015

Five years ago, the release of the PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) “global” temperature data set was accompanied by a great deal of fanfare.

Advocates deemed the conglomeration of proxy temperature data from 7 land regions as scientific confirmation of the notorious hockey-stick-shaped temperature reconstruction popularized by Michael Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, TAR) in the early 2000s.

A week ago we asked if ‘Novichok’ poisons are real. The answer is now in: It is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Several Russian scientist now say that they once researched and developed lethal poisons but they assert that other countries can and have copied these.

Image copyright NASA/ESA/P. VAN DOKKUM

An unusually transparent galaxy about the size of the Milky Way is prompting new questions for astrophysicists. The object, with the catchy moniker of NGC1052-DF2, appears to contain no dark matter.

If this turns out to be true, it may be the first galaxy of its kind – made up only of ordinary matter. Currently, dark matter is thought to be essential to the fabric of the Universe as we understand it.

Trying to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.

The scare about global warming is overdone, according to more than 40 scientific papers published in just the first three months of 2018.

What their charts clearly show is that “nothing climatically unusual is happening.”

In the chart below from a study by Polovodova et al, we see that 20th-century warming is perfectly normal in a long-term historical context. It was no warmer – indeed, is slightly cooler – than either the Roman Warm Period or the Medieval Warming Period.

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm.  How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward.

Image copyright CARNEGIE

A £42m wave energy project off the Cornish coast has yet to produce any electricity despite being up and running for eight years. Wave Hub, an undersea electrical socket installed to test wave energy machines, has hosted just one device since 2010.

A mysterious network of fluid-filled channels may be the key to how cancerous cells spread throughout the body.

Using advanced endoscopy techniques, a team of medical researchers expected to find evidence that the bile duct is protected by a wall of dense external tissue. Instead, what the discovered was a strange series of patterns. When they brought the results to New York University School of Medicine Pathologist Neil Theise, he immediately set to work, trying to explain what they were seeing.

It’s well-recognized that the incidence of autoimmune diseases has been rising at an enormous rate. A study indicates that a significant factor in causing them may be the common bakers or brewers yeast, Sacccharomyces cerevisiae[1] used in many vaccinations, including HepB, which is given to nearly all newborn babies in the United States before they’re a day old.

A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) counters media hype over recent warm global temperatures, showing that almost all of the sudden increase in temperatures in the last couple of years was caused by a record strong natural El Nino phenomenon rather than global warming.

Perhaps the best challenge to the hysterical claims that humans are causing unusual climate change is the demonstration that “exceptional” weather events can be predicted in advance based on their natural occurrence in history.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.  Einstein

In (https://principia-scientific.com/dr-jerry-l-krause-how-stupid-am-i/, 1/18/2018) I wrote:

However, having grown up in northeastern South Dakota where the precipitation was commonly much less than that of Iowa, the result was that our relative humidity was usually significantly less than that of humid Iowa.  So I knew the reason for the warmer nights in Iowa was that dew generally formed on stuff there much earlier in the evening then it did where I grew up.  And sure enough this example of the greenhouse effect quietly disappeared.  And I forgot about dew.

Stephen Hawking lost his longtime battle with ALS on March 14, 2018 — what would have been Albert Einstein’s 139th birthday. While Hawking’s scientific achievements led the field of astrophysics forward in a number of important ways, his impact on the general public was much more of a mixed bag.

Image copyright FELICE FRANKEL / CHELSEA TURNER

Researchers have produced a metal with exotic electrical properties by mimicking a pattern from Japanese basket-weaving. Kagome baskets are characterised by a symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing triangles; the pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades.

Paper Reviewed: Bettoni, M.M., Mogor, A.F., Pauletti, V. and Goicoechea, N. 2017. The interaction between mycorrhizal inoculation, humic acids supply and elevated atmospheric CO2 increases energetic and antioxidant properties and sweetness of yellow onion. Horticulture, Environment, and Biotechnology 58: 432-440.