It all started with Al Gore. Coming off a gig as Vice President, an ignoble job to begin with, to the most embarrassing President in US history, Bill Clinton, he then proceeded to lose the Presidential election to a political lightweight, George W. Bush.

After that Gore was desperate to be taken seriously but wondered how. Science was his solution. And “global warming” (see terminology note at bottom) was a hot topic at the time (no pun intended). It didn’t matter that he did badly in the two “science for poets” courses he took in college or that he didn’t even take any math courses there.

Last weekend was the 47^th annual Earth Day. It is worth reflecting on how completely, totally wrong environmental alarmists often are. Few things tell us more about the environmental movement—where it’s been and, more importantly, where it is now—than its dismal track record in the predictive department.

Case in point: Paul Ehrlich, who is as close to a rock star as you’re apt to find among environmentalists. Ehrlich is most famous for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” in which he famously predicted that, during the 1970s and 1980s, humanity would suffer mass famine and starvation due to overpopulation. “At this late date,” Ehrlich wrote, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Imagine a raincoat that heals a scratch by shedding the part of the outer layer that’s damaged. To create such a material, scientists have turned to nature for inspiration. They report in ACS’ journal Langmuir a water-repellant material that molts like a snake’s skin when damaged to reveal another hydrophobic layer beneath it.

It’s official: the greenhouse gas theory and the litany of fake science claims it spawned about carbon dioxide climate forcing suffer two hammer blows in the peer-reviewed literature.

Shrewdly relying only on accepted chemistry and physics plus official data from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), experts from the ‘hard’ sciences present two new papers offering an objective appraisal of the science argued over in the politicized global warming debate.

A new NASA study is challenging a long-held theory that tsunamis form and acquire their energy mostly from vertical movement of the seafloor.

….  The next time a warmist starts blathering on about carbon pollution, hand him a glass of tonic water and say “Here, have some carbon pollution.” Yes, that seltzer water contains plenty of the dreaded carbon dioxide. And because the media have warned of “carbon pollution” so often, the public now confuses CO2 with perceived soot emissions. But America’s modern coal-fired power plants use advanced scrubbers to remove mercury, nitrous oxide, sulfates, and particulate matter, leaving only a mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide to rise up the “smokestack.” Of course, CO2 is also a key nutrient for all plant life and, according to NASA, is making the Earth greener.

“[The robots] are expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts”

You might think — or hope, if you’re a nerd deep inside — that this excerpt belongs to an unpublished novel from Isaac Asimov. Sadly, at least for sci-fi lovers, it actually comes from “The Rise of the Robots”, a book that explores the impact of technology on the future of our society.

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Could advances in technology, genetics and artificial intelligence lead to a world in which economic inequality turns into biological inequality? asks the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Inequality goes back at least 30,000 years.

Hunter-gatherers were more equal than subsequent societies. They had very little property, and property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. But even they had hierarchies. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, however, something changed. Equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

Meteorite impacts can produce more than craters on Earth — they can also spark volcanic activity that shapes its surface and climate by bringing up material from depth. That is the headline finding of an international team, led by geochemists from Trinity College Dublin, who discovered that large impacts can be followed by intense, long-lived, and explosive volcanic eruptions.

Image copyright: PA

English winemakers have warned that at least half of this year’s grape harvest has been wiped out by heavy frost. The air frost that hit last week caused “catastrophic” damage to buds that had bloomed earlier than usual thanks to a warm start to the year. About 75% of buds at Denbies Wine Estate in Surrey – which produces 500,000 bottles of wine a year – were affected, its chief executive said. England has 133 wineries, which produced five million bottles in 2015.

Image copyright: DAVID FINLAY

An Australian photographer has captured images of rare sprites, a meteor shower and the Southern Lights – all in a single night. Sprites – flashes of electricity – can reach the Earth’s upper atmosphere, often displaying as a brilliant light.

“It’s an intense electrical discharge out of the very top of a thunderstorm,” photographer David Finlay told the BBC. He took photos of the “space lightning” at Kiama, 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney.

Image copyright: MPI FOR EVO ANTHRO / J. KRAUSE

The DNA of extinct humans can be retrieved from sediments in caves – even in the absence of skeletal remains. Researchers found the genetic material in sediment samples collected from seven archaeological sites. The remains of ancient humans are often scarce, so the new findings could help scientists learn the identity of inhabitants at sites where only artefacts have been found. The results are described in Science.

Worry — it does a body good. And, the mind as well. A new paper by Kate Sweeny, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, argues there’s an upside to worrying.

Taxpayers have spent more than $3 million on unreliable academic research, as science experts warn that research fraud and plagiarism in Australia is not being properly policed.

Twenty-one research projects largely funded by the federal government breached integrity standards in the past two years, figures from the Australian Research Council reveal. The federal government body, which provides tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research grants, stopped funding three grants, recovered funding for one grant, and placed restrictions on funding for one researcher.

The role of sleep changes with every stage of life, from infancy to old age. The latest neuroscience is discovering how crucial sleep is to an infant’s growing brain, while the latest epidemiology is discovering how irregular sleep doubles the risk of death as we grow older. To mark National Sleep Week, Thrive Global spoke with some of the top researchers in sleep science to give you a map of how sleep changes through your lifespan.

Image copyright: BRET HARTMAN/TED

A British inventor, who built an Iron Man-style flight suit, has flown it at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. Richard Browning’s short flight took place outside the Vancouver Convention Centre in front of a large crowd.

Since he posted the video of his maiden flight in the UK, Mr Browning has had huge interest in his flying suit. But he insists the project remains “a bit of fun” and is unlikely to become a mainstream method of transportation.