Researchers at Stanford have laid down the first atom-thick sheet of tin, and it has the potential to revolutionize electronics thanks to its unique power propagation properties. 

The material has been dubbed stanene, a contraction of the Latin word for tin “stannum” and the “ene” suffix used for 2D materials. It does for the metal what boffins have been doing for carbon and other substances for years. The goal for stanene is to build a perfect electrical transmission system without wasted heat, but the new material isn’t playing ball.

According to theoretical physics, stanene should allow electrons to travel along its edges without colliding with other electrons and atoms along the way, thus avoiding wasting energy in heat. Given this would happen at room temperature, the material could bring about vastly more efficient electronics.

“I think the work is a significant breakthrough that once again expands the 2D-material universe,” saidYuanbo Zhang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It’ll be exciting to see how the material lives up to its expectations.”

The Stanford team, along with four partner universities in China, vaporized a sample of tin in a vacuum and let the atoms fall on a lattice of bismuth telluride. While the resultant substance looks like stanene, it appears that the base material that it’s lying on is interfering with the electron flow.

Nevertheless, the upper surface of the stanene does look exactly like the predictions for its composition, so the team is going to try again using larger amounts of tin and a new substrate.

Mankind has gotten a really bad rep lately as environmentalists blame us for everything from blizzards to droughts to rising sea levels and the infinitesimal warming in the last 100 years. So it’s refreshing to read today that when woolly mammoths disappeared 11,000 years ago, we had little, if anything, to do with it. That’s according to a new study detailing how researchers set out to discover why these giant animals went extinct after the last glacial period.

Most theories put forth suggested their demise came from the over-eager predation and habitat intrusion of man. But these new findings showed that abrupt global warming helped kill off the woolly mammoth and that we had a small, secondary role. The study’s lead author, professor Alan Cooper, who is the director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, said “This abrupt warming had a profound impact on climate that caused marked shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns. Even without the presence of humans we saw mass extinctions.”

That’s because short, rapid bursts of global warming dramatically altered rainfall amounts, which in turn resulted in a dearth of vegetation that these ice age animals relied on for sustenance.

Coral reefs are a lot more resilient than previously thought. At least according to a newstudy published yesterday that showed Pacific island coral reef can grow fast enough to match rising sea levels, even with increased ocean temperatures. 

Because they grow vertically on shallow reef flats, researchers observed that Porites microatolls coral is keeping pace with current sea level rise, but may have trouble under the worst-case IPCC scenarios. The Porites microatoll, whose growth is largely lateral and limited by exposure to air, is named for its resemblance to island atolls (see picture).

Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology, who published their study in the Royal Society Open Science, say their findings provide the first evidence that “well-managed reefs will be able to keep up with sea-level rise through vertical growth.” However, if CO2 emissions rise past 670 parts per million (ppm), which may cause ocean temperatures to increase 2.2 degrees Celsius, reefs will have a hard time keeping up with the projected sea level rise.

Currently CO2 levels worldwide are 400 ppm (.o4 percent), but once they cross the 670 ppm threshold, the corresponding rise in ocean temperatures may hamper even a healthy reefs ability to survive. “Reefs will continue to keep up with sea-level rise if we reduce our emission of greenhouse gases,” said Florida Tech’s Rob van Woesik, a professor at FIT’s Department of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. “If reefs lose their capacity to keep up with sea-level rise they will drown.”

The study, which focused on Palau island in the western Pacific Ocean, was also co-authored by researchers from the University of Queensland and the Palau International Coral Reef Center. Palau is an island country that is part of the larger Pacific island group of Micronesia and relies on the reef system to break apart storm waves.

Since 1936 the ‘scientific method’ has been recognised by Australian law (Subsection 73B(1) of the ITAA 1936) as: – ‘Systematic investigative and experimental activities that involve testing a hypothesis (new idea) by deductive formulation of its consequences. 

These deductions must be rigorously tested by repeatable experimentation and logical conclusions drawn from the results of the experiments. The hypothesis must be based on principles of physical, chemical, mathematical, or biological sciences’ (this would include the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

In 1972 Australian universities abandoned the procedure that had been used for award of their highest degrees in science to that time. DSc candidates were required to submit a doctoral thesis embodying an original research finding (details of a tested hypothesis). This was “peer reviewed” by two or more external scientists selected by the university as most appropriately qualified.

It was recognised that a candidate who had tested an original hypothesis may be equally or better able to interpret the results than an external reviewer. Candidates were therefore entitled to a “right of reply” to the written report or comments of the universities’ reviewers. In reply they could produce references or call on reviewers of their own selection.

University authorities were able to fairly assess the candidate’s new research finding and determine if it merited the award of their highest degree. This procedure raised standards in all scientific disciplines to which it applied but by 1974 it was abandoned by all Australian universities as too tedious and time consuming to cope with the rapidly increasing number of candidates aspiring to higher degrees.

With continuing rates of increase since 1970’s, Australian universities now resemble production-line ‘higher degree factories’!

Australian National University astronomer Professor Brian Schmidt (picture) is a Nobel Laureate for physics.  On Monday the 15th of September 2014 he appeared on the ABC national Australian television programme Q&A. 

His response to a question put to him by an eleven year old boy in the audience is a typical example of why it is very unwise to passively accept the word of an Authority. Presented here are a number of the nonsensical claims made by a Nobel Laureate on matters of cosmology and mathematics; symptomatic of just how intellectually decrepit astronomy and astrophysics have become.

1. Expanding Infinity

The question put to Professor Schmidt by eleven year old Lachlan Irvin, via his father Peter, was, “how can something as infinitely large as the universe actually get bigger?”[1]

Such a reasonable question requires a reasonable answer. Alas, it did not come. Schmidt began his reply withthe following:

“Ah, yes, this is always a problem: infinity getting bigger. So, if you think of the universe and when we measure the universe it, as near as we can tell, is very close to being infinite in size, that is we can only see 13.8 billion light years of it because that’s how old the universe is, but we’re pretty sure there’s a lot more universe beyond the part we can see, which light just simply can’t get to us. And our measurements are such that we actually think that very nearly that may go out, well, well, thousands of times beyond what we can see and perhaps an infinite distance.” [1]

A number of malicious Black Hole and Big Bang creationism zealots, adducing no arguments of their own devise, have resorted to merely citing the following equally feckless quintet, either in full or in part, on a number of blogs and other websites, in irrational and  feverish attempts to refute my proofs that Black Hole universes and Big Bang universes are nonsense:

1. Gerardus ‘t Hooft, Nobel Laureate (physics)

2. William Clinger

3. Jason J. Sharples

4. Christian Corda

5. G. W. Bruhn

I have dealt thoroughly with ‘t Hooft, Sharples and Bruhn elsewhere, and so will not again address them specifically.

A common mathematical issue of the ‘quintet’ is the alleged ‘extension’ of Droste’s solution to Hilbert’s solution. It is from the latter that the black hole was first conjured. Cosmologists always and incorrectly call Hilbert’s solution “Schwarzschild’s solution”. However, it is an irrefutable fact that Hilbert’s solution is not Schwarzschild’s solution, which can be easily verified by reading Schwarzschild’s original paper and comparing it toHilbert’s scribblings. Droste’s solution is equivalent to Schwarzschild’s solution but Hilbert’s ‘solution’ is not.

The equivalence of the Schwarzschild and Droste solutions is easily established. Here they are (in both cases the speed of light in vacuum, c, is set to unity):

The constant α is positive but otherwise indeterminable. Note that Droste’s r = α corresponds to Schwarzschild’s r = 0. In both cases ds² is then undefined (i.e. ‘singular’) because the coefficient in the second term on the right side produces -1/0. Contrary to the practice of cosmologists (who claim that 1/0 = ∞), division by zero is undefined. Compare now to Hilbert’s ‘solution’ (here c = 1 and G = 1 in the ‘Schwarzschild radius’ r_s = 2Gm/c²):

Note that Hilbert’s r = r_s = 2m corresponds to Droste’s r = α and Schwarzschild’s r = 0, but that neither Schwarzschild’s nor Droste’s solution possess values corresponding to Hilbert’s 0 ≤ r < 2m. Consequently Hilbert’s solution is not equivalent to Schwarzschild’s and Droste’s. Also note that according to Hilbert, Einstein, and the cosmologists, the constant m in Hilbert’s solution denotes the mass that is the source of a gravitational field allegedly produced by it.

NASA announced on Wednesday that by using NOAA‘s recently altered temperature data, June 2015 was tied as the warmest June on record.  As previously reported here, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reworked its climate data in order to eliminate the 18-year-and-counting pause in global warming. In early June, NOAA released a study saying that long-existing instrument biases have been masking rising sea surface temperatures. Once they “readjusted” the data, the current warming hiatus disappeared. Put simply, by cooling the past, NOAA made the the last two decades look warmer.

With the release of global temperature data for June, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has essentially changed how it analyses measurements by using the same sea surface dataset that was readjusted by NOAA. In using NOAA’s highly controversial dataset, NASA can now say that global average temperatures last month tied June 2015 with June 1998 as the warmest on record. The global surface temperature anomaly for June was +0.78 degrees Celsius, which they say was driven by temperature inconsistencies in the Northern Hemisphere.

The June 2015 data released by NASA uses the same readjustments of global sea surface temperature records created by NOAA, which increases the rate of overall global warming (both land and sea) in the last 15 years. NOAA’s dataset, known as the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 4 (ERSST v4), reflects these readjustments and have now been arrogated by NASA.

More troubling is the fact that NASA and NOAA have joined forces to hide the global warming pause, even though there are more robust, accurate datasets available that clearly show it.

New study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles. Says that between 2030 and 2040 solar cycles will cancel each other out. Could lead to ‘Maunder minimum’ effect that saw River Thames freeze over. 

The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

New study shows climate scientists have previously under-estimated the major cooling role forests play in regulating climate. Forests cover over 21{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Earth’s surface. Scientists say their global regulation of surface temperature highlights the important role of forests in local, regional and global climate. 

The new paper [1] published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, shows that the transpiration of forest ecosystems through the growing season dissipates more energy and lowers the Bowen ratio. In other words, this study reinforces the need for government climate researchers to include land use and land cover change when seeking to calculate human impact on the global energy balance.

Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point. 

The accumulation of kilometres of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica (the same ones that are sometimes used to fuel ideas of global warming) show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no melting or flow. Except around the edges, ice sheets flow at the base, and depend on geothermal heat, not the climate at the surface. It is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to ‘collapse’.

In these days of alarmist warnings about climate warming, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have an important role. Many papers have described their melting at the present times, and dire predictions of many metres of sea level rise are common. Christoffersen and Hambrey published a typical paper on the Greenland ice sheet in Geology Today in May, 2006.

Their model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland Ice Sheet, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. They predict the behaviour of the Ice Sheet based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

The same misconception is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson and others, popular magazines such as the June 2007 issue of National Geographic, and other scientific articles such as Bamber et al. (2007), which can be regarded as a typical modelling contribution. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then.

In the present paper we shall try to show how the mechanism of glacier flow differs from this simple model, and why it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to collapse. To understand the relationship between global warming and the breakdown of ice sheets it is necessary to know how ice sheets really work.

This article makes two significant points: – 1) The IPCC definition of “Greenhouse Effect” on page 946 of their Report No. 4, 2007, is wrong and no “Greenhouse Effect” is possible from the way IPCC define it. 2) Radiant energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is the only source of heat to maintain or vary global climate. Total radiant heat gained must establish equilibrium with total radiant heat lost.

As in the past, global climate change can only be due to longer or shorter-term variations in solar radiation.

The erroneous IPCC definition

Readers are invited to consider a fundamental error in physics in the IPCC Report No. 4, 2007.

The definition of ‘Greenhouse Effect’ on page 946 contains an erroneous statement that would invalidate the premise on which most of the report is based.

We should have particular regard to the IPCC sentences that state: “Atmospheric radiation is emitted to all sides, including downward to the Earth’s surface. Thus, greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system.”

The definition then goes on to explain that the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere decreases with height and the infrared radiation emitted to space originates from high altitude where the average temperature is -19°C in balance with the net incoming solar radiation.

The enveloping atmosphere keeps the Earth’s surface at a much higher temperature as IPCC says averaging +14°C so there is a temperature gradient all the way up to the limits of our gaseous atmosphere with, on average, all higher parts of the column of air being at lower temperature than those below it.

This gradient is measured thousands of times each day as our aeroplanes climb to high altitude but of course the main transfer of heat to the upper atmosphere is by convection. This is quite violent at times with typhoons, hurricanes, or tropical thunderstorms each afternoon.

Nevertheless, total radiant heat outward from the whole Earth must remain in equilibrium with the radiant heat inward from the Sun. The IPCC definition (below) claims that ‘Greenhouse gases’ (CO2, methane, water vapour, etc.) absorb thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface and by the atmosphere itself due to the same gases.

In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen announcedto a select committee in Congress that over the next ten years, temperatures would increase .35 degrees Celsius. The actual increase was .11 degrees.  Hansen (pictured being arrested) overestimated his findings by 300 percent. Now Hansen has a new study coming out this week in the journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry warning that humanity could face a “sea level rise of several meters by the end of the century.” That’s a ten-foot-rise of sea levels, over 300 percent higher than what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted.

In fact, the IPCC conservatively estimates that if temperatures increase 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, we may see a three-foot-rise in sea levels. However, as an April 2015 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports showed, “global warming was not progressing as fast as it would even under the most severe emissions scenarios as outlined by the IPCC.” The study indicated that climate models underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate variability, which leads to an “over-interpretation of short-term temperature trends.”

Hansen’s new study, which was previewed by the Daily Beast today, says that the IPCC’scomputer models are underestimating the sensitivity of ice sheets to rising temperatures. Hansen et al combined “ancient paleo-climate data with new satellite readings” and a new and improved computer model of the climate system to demonstrate that “ice sheets can melt in a matter of decades,” and not millenia. Sea level rise has been occurring at roughly the same rate since about 10,000 years ago.

If all this doom and gloom sounds a lot like the climatastrophe flick The Day After Tomorrow, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Much of that movie was based on research done by Hansen and incorporated into Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. “Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water,” Hansen told the Daily Beast, “but you couldn’t live there.” He also believes that averting warming by only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 would create a “highly dangerous” future.

In the past decades we have been overwhelmed by books on Global Warming and its successor Climate Change. We have also been exposed to a large (though much smaller) number of books that take a skeptical view of these issues. 

Earth has only three significant sources of energy. 

First is geothermal energy from Earth’s molten core and decaying radioactive minerals in Earth’s crust. This energy moves continents, powers volcanoes and its heat migrates towards the crust, warming the lithosphere and the deep oceans. It can be harvested successfully in favourable locations, and radioactive minerals can be extracted to provide large amounts of reliable heat for power generation.

Second is energy stored in combustible hydrocarbon minerals such as coal, oil, gas, tar sands and oil shale. These all store solar and geothermal energy collected eons ago and they are the primary energy sources supporting the modern world and its large and growing populations.

Third are radiation and gravitational energies from the Sun and Moon which are captured by the biosphere as heat, winds, tides, rain, rivers and in biomass such as forests, crops and animals. These are the natural “Green” energies that support all processes of life and still support a peasant existence for some peoples.Green zealots believe that we can and should run modern societies exclusively on “Green” energies, and they have embarked on a war on hydrocarbons.

Scientists make cell activity breakthrough in war on cancer. We each begin our existence as a single cell, which divides into new cells which divide into new cells. Old tissues are replaced, wounds heal, our ears – not especially useful – keep on growing even once they’re quite big enough, thank you*.

Cell division is pretty much the miracle of life – and yet we still don’t understand it especially well. It would be good if we could, as like most terrifically powerful processes, cell division has a darker side. Sometimes it goes wrong; cancer cells divide uncontrollably, with often fatal consequences.

So it’s good news that today the process of cell division is a bit less mysterious, with the publication of new boffinry from scientists in Britain and Canada. Specifically it is the critical cytokinesis part of division – the bit where the two new daughter cells actually separate – that has given up some of its secrets.

“It is well known,” we are told, “that microscopic cable-like structures, called microtubules, are involved in pulling chromosomes to opposite poles of the cell during the division process.”

Any fule kno that, of course. So what’s new?

“At this time, microtubules physically separate the chromosomes via their central kinetochores while other microtubules signal to the cortex of the cell where its equator is, i.e., where division will take place,” says Gilles Hickson of the Université de Montréal, in an explanation which caused us to stroke our beards and try to look as though we knew what a kinetochore is**, here on the Reg biology desk.

Like us, you readers may have been labouring under the delusion that the chromosomes just sit there and let the microtubules get them by the kinetochores. But Hickson and his colleagues have found that this is not the case at all:

In an editorial published in Science magazine on July 3, Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief of the Science Journals, removed all doubt concerning the direction that this once prestigious journal is taking. 

In “The beyond-two-degree inferno”, she wrote: “The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed.”

Then, she strongly supports the contrived effort of the European Union to keep “global warming” below 2°C above the preindustrial level – a number for which we have no rigorous measurement or logic.

She advocates the political position of the Administration in forcing reductions in carbon dioxide emission (CO2) by stating “The United States has pledged reductions of 26 to 28{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} below 2005 levels by 2025…” Of course, there is no such pledge by the American people and its representatives in Congress. The Administration’s pledge is arbitrary and authoritarian. Ms. McNutt concludes with a description of the nine circles of Hell found in Dante’s Inferno.

Ms. McNutt continues a trend established in the Science journals by Donald Kennedy (2000-2008), who declared while he is editor, Science would no longer accept articles contradicting the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global warming, later termed climate change, regardless of the empirical data presented.

The IPCC reports featured glaring deficiencies such as the falsely named distinct human fingerprint, a hot-spot over the tropics, which no one can empirically find; Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick, based on sparse data, from which contradicting data was deleted; and global climate models, which greatly overestimate warming, as current measurements demonstrate. The logic behind this editorial policy can be described as selective ignorance.