Cambridge University reacted to one of its academics tweeting “White Lives Don’t Matter” by ignoring the backlash and promoting her to a full professorship.

Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown and its latest discovery is pretty significant. It is using observed data – hospital figures, infection numbers and so on – to construct a picture of what was happening in March.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said it best: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Testing theories with data is how theories are validated. Yet the need to “‘kick the tires’ on a theory is often overlooked when the media assesses extreme weather.

Nearly two centuries ago, amid a fungal infestation that destroyed Irish potato crops and brought famine, starvation, death, and the emigration of countless men, women, and children, Gulliver’s Travels author Dr. Jonathon Swift offered “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick [sic].”

Human medical trials have begun on severely ill COVID-19 patients using low-doses of radiation. The first results on a very small group were published this week in a non-peer-reviewed journal that exists to get critical results out quickly to the scientific and medical community. The results were quite extraordinary.

Scientists have discovered an astronomical object that has never been observed before. It is more massive than collapsed stars, known as “neutron stars”, but has less mass than black holes.

Such “black neutron stars” were not thought possible and will mean ideas for how neutron stars and black holes form will need to be rethought.

The head of the government’s Environment Agency is claiming that the UK is no longer a wet and rainy country and is urging us to turn off taps and take showers rather than baths to save water.

Sir James Bevan, CEO of the Agency, is backing a report, The Great British Rain Paradox, which warns of potential water shortages in the UK in years to come. The report claims that the major factor for this is climate change.

The German online Business Insider here reports on just how climate (un)friendly electric cars really are. It concludes that e-cars in Germany are “far from being climate-friendly.”

As much of the public already suspects, the electricity coming out of German outlets is still largely produced by fossil fuel plants. And so e-cars indeed leave a large carbon footprint.

A secret group email, or listserv, of progressive data analysts has been outed after one of its members was ostracized for publicly sharing data showing that violent rioting doesn’t tend to be effective in persuading people to support a political cause.

Nine types of hand sanitizers made by Eskbiochem SA de CV, a Mexican company, contain methanol, a wood alcohol that can be toxic when absorbed through the skin or ingested, according to the FDA, and consumers should discontinue use immediately.

Today we look at the NASA data from six stations from the US Southeast region. In every case, the trends were warmed up by what NASA calls “adjusting”.

Four of the six stations showed a clear cooling trend, which were then altered by NASA GISS (pictured) to show warming.

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) senior scientist has made an unprecedented admission: he and his colleagues–he says– committed scientific misconduct to cover up a meaningful link between vaccines and autism in black boys.

Rather than focus on the number of cases of coronavirus, why won’t the media spend more time focusing on the fact that so few of them are serious and that we have overreacted to the virus since March?

We’re one step closer to better understanding our planet.

An impressive collaboration that is working towards mapping out the entire ocean floor has triumphantly managed to carry out one-fifth of its mission.

Surely one of the more embarrassing moments in Anderson Cooper’s career as the host of his CNN nightly show was the night back in May when he brought in 17-year-old Greta Thunberg as a star interview for a CNN Town Hall — not on the climate crisis, for which Thunberg has been famously treated as an expert of sorts, but on the COVID-19 crisis.

Scientists have developed a way to remotely control the release of adrenal hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.

Previous studies have linked problems with the regulation of hormones from the adrenal gland with mental health disorders, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.