A huge hole in the magnetically hot corona of the sun in the coming weeks will lead to a powerful solar wind and initiate hefty polar lights in the earth’s magnetic field. This will be a brief pause in the solar activity slumber that has taken hold over the past year and thus allowed cosmic rays to penetrate almost freely into the earth’s atmosphere.

The drive to find novel energy storage systems for all the “alternative” energy produced from wind-turbines and solar (photovoltaic) systems is fostering the most bizarre ideas.

Needless to say, government bureaucrats are just too happy to throw taxpayers’ funds at any idea that promises to fulfill the quest. One of the latest “grand schemes” involves hollow concrete balls sunk into the depths of the ocean, the deeper the better and the larger the better too.

So, what am I talking about, specifically? Of course, hollow concrete balls, the latest scheme in the quest to provide “free energy.”

The alleged ‘attack on science’ by U.S. President Donald Trump is exposed as fake news by one of his trusted science advisers. Tony Heller, a respected climate analyst faced the ire of The New York Times as part of a hit piece against EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and Trump’s ongoing reforms.

It is said the devil’s greatest trick was convincing us he doesn’t exist. And for a while he succeeded. He told us that he would help distribute our research to the world. He told us he would put a stamp of approval on the work so that we knew we could trust it.

And the devil did us a favor, for we didn’t have the ability to distribute the work ourselves. Tragically, by the time we were given the gift of fire from the heavens, we had grown too dependent on the devil. We needed his stamp of approval to get jobs, to get grants.

After years of delays, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) finally agreed to review the first-ever application for a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR).

NRC has begun a formal review of a proposed SMR advanced nuclear reactor two months after NuScale Power, the company behind the project filed a 12,000-page application for it. The first NuScale’s SMR is expected to begin operations in 2026.

Now that we’re in the 21st century, a talented scientist should be able to post their important research online so that people who will benefit from the work will have immediate access to it, and the scientist can move on to their next project without spending 1+ years battling with editors/reviewers.

Johns Hopkins University scientist Kirby Runyon wants to make one thing clear: Regardless of what one prestigious scientific organization says to the contrary, Pluto is a planet. So is Europa, commonly known as a moon of Jupiter, and the Earth’s moon, and more than 100 other celestial bodies in our solar system that are denied this status under a prevailing definition of “planet.”

The use of wood for electricity generation and heat in modern technologies has grown rapidly in recent years. For its supporters, it represents a relatively cheap and flexible way of supplying renewable energy, with benefits to the global climate and to forest industries. To its critics, it can release more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than the fossil fuels it replaces, and threatens the maintenance of natural forests and the biodiversity that depends on them.  ¹

This is a difficult post for me to write since I believe in post-publication peer review and F1000Research is seen as a pioneer in using this model.

However, when I envisioned post-publication peer review I never imagined getting rid of editors, allowing the authors to invite their friends to review their articles, relinquishing the responsibilities of accepting or retracting articles, and then passing the articles off as if they underwent a thorough peer-review process.

New peer-reviewed study of raw temperature data for Australia proves no warming trend exists in the actual records – only in the adjustments. Evidence proves that published records by Australian Bureau of Meteorology are intentionally and artificially exaggerated with a subjective (probably political) bias.

Albert Parker of the School of Engineering and Physical Science, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia and Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia show that Australian records since the end of the 1800s give no sign of warming or increased occurrence of extreme weather events.

Measuring from the March 2007 peak to the March 2017 peak (which is the correct way to measure trends) Arctic sea ice extent has expanded about 60 Manhattans per year over the past decade.

Just as we wonder how many shootings it will take for us to change our gun laws, we should be wondering what it will take for us to realize our peer review system is broken.

Peer review supposedly ensures a publication is of sufficient quality to be included in the scientific literature, but time and time again at Retraction Watch and PubPeer we see blatant examples of fraud that have slipped by the academic editors and reviewers.

ONE of the phrases of Albert Einstein, a quotable physicist, that has leaked into the popular consciousness is “spooky action at a distance”. The derisive quotelet arose during the early days of quantum mechanics, a theory that powered a revolution in science that is still playing out.

None of today’s gadgets, for example, could have been made without a deep understanding and exploitation of the theory’s basic tenets. Yet those ground rules come with other predictions so counterintuitive that Einstein came to think that the theory was missing something: what seemed odd was, he argued, just a reflection of a lack of knowledge.

Chronicle Review illustration, iStock

Brian Wansink is nowhere to be found. He’s not in his office. Calls to his cellphone go to voicemail. He was supposed to meet me that morning at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, which he created and directs, but he canceled the night before. Cornell’s media-relations staff is apologetic and accommodating: What about a meeting with the dean instead? Or a tour of campus? The architecture is amazing — and those gorges!

Image copyright: AP

Hans Rosling, the Swedish professor who made global health statistics compelling viewing, died from cancer in February.

Co-founder of Gapminder.org, which continues his work, he was enthusiastically trying to change old-fashioned notions of the world even as his illness took hold. In his final BBC interview – for the BBC World Service series Economic Tectonics– the statistician highlighted five key ways that demographics are shaping the world around us.