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SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years....In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It would be no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line. A short tour...

Blue is sometimes not an easy color to make. Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat). So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident. The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide,...

This is an older video, by a couple years but it is amazing to watch. The experiment pits Japanese researchers vs chimps in a memory experiment.

VeriChip (CHIP), the company that markets a microchip implant that links to your online health records, has acquired Steel Vault (SVUL), a credit monitoring and anti-identity theft company. The combined company will operate under a new name: PositiveID. The all-stock transaction will leave PositiveID in charge of a burgeoning empire of identity, health and microchip implant businesses that will only encourage its critics. BNET previously noted that some regard the company as part of a prophecy in the Book of Revelation (because the HealthLink chip carries an RFID number that can be used as both money and proof of ID)...

This year has seen the discovery in Ethiopia of Ardi, the fossil skeleton believed to be the oldest human relative. But long before Ardi came Java Man, who was unearthed in the Indonesian village of Sangiran 120 years ago. Christine Finn has been on a quest to find the origins of this paleo-celebrity... Java Man. The name sounds like a 1970s men's aftershave. One possibly not much used because the face, lovingly reconstructed by the palaeontologists, suggested he was no great shaver. He also had small, deep-set eyes and an enormous jaw. But Java Man was still a hero when...

An engineer peers at damaged magnets inside the Large Hadron Collider on December 11, 2008 -- almost a month after an electrical glitch stopped the first attempt at sending a beam of protons around the world's largest particle accelerator. After more than a year of repairs, physicists now have both beams of protons stable and circulating though the collider's main ring, LHC managers announced on November 23, 2009. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN

HUNTSVILLE, AL, Nov. 25 Christian Newswire -- Two creation films called "inappropriate" were denied the opportunity to be shown in government facilities this week--which marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". While the intelligent design film "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" has not been granted permission for a showing in California, "The Mysterious Islands", a new 90-minute Vision Forum film that challenges Darwin's evolution by taking audiences back to engage the enchanted Galapagos Islands, has enjoyed a victory and will premiere as previously scheduled tonight, Nov. 25, at 6:30 PM, at...

3 Trees Said to Prove Warming! --snip-- That's another thing, folks. People said, "I don't get why you believe in God, Rush. Your belief in God, how does that tell you that global warming is a hoax?" Well, belief in God is a very personal thing, but I happen to believe in a loving God of creation -- and I just intellectually cannot accept the fact that a loving God which has created all this beauty and has blessed this country -- I cannot believe that a God like that -- would punish the human being he created for progress,...

CNN correspondent Max Foster’s short report about Richard Dawkins on Tuesday’s Situation Room played more like a commercial which promoted the militant atheist’s new book. Despite Dawkins’s past inflammatory statements about Christianity, Foster only labeled him “an outspoken critic of creationism....[whose] atheist views have put him at the center of controversy” [audio clip available here]. Anchor Suzanne Malveaux’s introduction for the correspondent’s report highlighted the 150th anniversary of the printing of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” and how Dawkins was a “controversial successor [to Darwin] carrying the torch for evolution.” Foster gave a very basic description of Dawkins’s...

An NRO Symposium The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s e-mail account was hacked earlier this month, exposing communications among CRU faculty members and researchers that reveal their willingness to distort climate-change data. Do those e-mails mark a sea-change moment in the global-warming debate? National Review Online asked environmentalism experts to weigh in. H. STERLING BURNETTWhy anyone should be surprised by this, I don’t know. Twenty years ago, Steve Schneider of Stanford stated that to be effective advocates on the issue of global warming, scientists would have to “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little...

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact. For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests. Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth. We don't know who "Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's...

Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December. It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria. The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put...

More details are now coming out from the lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), filed in the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of Los Angeles (Central District). AFA's lawsuit contends that the California Science Center engaged in viewpoint discrimination when cancelling AFA's contract to screen the pro-intelligent design (ID) documentary Darwin’s Dilemma at the Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25th. As discussed below, AFA's complaint contains e-mails from California Science Center staff revealing that the Center cared more about how it would be perceived by ID-critics in the...

A lawsuit has been filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) for cancelling the AFA’s contract to screen the Darwin’s Dilemma documentary on October 25th. According to AFA’s press release: American Freedom Alliance (AFA), a non-profit group, has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against a popular science museum for cancelling an event exploring the topic of intelligent design. The group says its free speech rights were violated when the California Science Center (CSC) abruptly reversed a decision to allow the showing of a pro-intelligent design documentary at the museum’s IMAX Theater. The program was...

Ultracold beryllium ions tackle 160 randomly chosen programs Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to run many different programs on a single piece of machinery. The new...

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity. Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr Hořava,...

For two millennia the Great Drain has carried the mineral-rich waters of Britain's only hot spring from the Roman Bath in Bath to the nearby River Avon. The drain runs for nearly half a mile under the city but although parts of it are large enough for a man to walk through, it has never been fully explored. Archaeologists will have their first opportunity to get inside the previously inaccessible sections of the Great Drain this month when engineers open it up for repairs. A stretch of drain built long after the Romans is causing the difficulties. The extension was...

Scientists from Northern Illinois University and Nasa's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston found dozens of valleys, shown in red, after using new software to analyse images of the surface and create the most accurate map to date. The valleys, first spotted in 1971, were caused by a network of rivers more than twice as extensive as previously mapped, pictured right. The new map shows water channels in a belt between the equator and mid-southern latitudes. Experts say this is consistent with heavy rain, and the presence of an ocean covering most of Mars's northern half. "It would also explain...

A nondescript sign along an anonymous road east of Dallas announces the location of bustling and urbane Caddo Mills Municipal Airport (former home of Southwest Soaring, phone number now obscured by time or paint). A passing traveler might overlook the large white hangar with the doors wide enough to admit the reaching wings of delicate glider planes.

Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

...Maine has a reputation of pulling archaeology out of Sunday supplement romances into science. The University of Maine excavation at Passadumkeag, along with several smaller digs scattered through the state, resulted in a detailed picture of Red Paint Man, inhabiting Maine about 1,000 B.C. His tools, utensils, and other Old Stone Age handicraft along with his usage of red ochre strongly suggest that this proto-Indian still practised Cro-Magnon culture. Another excavation at Pemaquid Point awoke a successful settlement from its long sleep under several feet of soil. Radiocarbon dating set it as early as 1540 A.D., and the colony persisted...

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

LONDON: A first edition of Charles Darwin's seminal On the Origin of Species will be sold this week after it was found in a family's toilet in southern Britian, an auction house said on Sunday.

Today, November 24, it is exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. The world has been gearing up for this “second echelon” of celebrations for this international “Year of Darwin”, following on from the 200th anniversary of his birth this last February. Atheists and humanist groups in particular have seemed to be relishing the thought of giving further prominence to the ideas of their patron saint. Their adulation is heightened by their knowledge that...

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby. This first one I put together from two of the south polar plume images – you can see all four of the tiger stripes, and the plumes issuing from them, in this wide shot. I mosaicked two images, matching their levels, rotated them 180 degrees to put "ground" at the bottom and "sky" at the top, and filled in a little of the background in the corner at lower right to fill out the whole image. Enceladan south polar vents...

BOULDER, Colo. – Call it Operation: Plymouth Rock. A plan to send a crew of astronauts to an asteroid is gaining momentum, both within NASA and industry circles. Not only would the deep space sojourn shake out hardware, it would also build confidence in long-duration stints at the moon and Mars. At the same time, the trek would sharpen skills to deal with a future space rock found on a collision course with Earth. In Lockheed Martin briefing charts, the mission has been dubbed "Plymouth Rock – An Early Human Asteroid Mission Using Orion." Lockheed is the builder of NASA's...

Enlarge ImageGreen gold. A complex geological process produced this sample of nickel sulfide. Credit: Marco Fiorentini, Science Those spare nickels in your pocket might not be there without the help of ancient volcanoes that blasted sulfur dioxide into the sky billions of years ago. The discovery solves a mystery that has dogged researchers for decades, says geochemist Edward Ripley of Indiana University, Bloomington, who was not affiliated with the study. The nickel in ore deposits is actually nickel sulfide, a compound that is rich in sulfur. The sulfur is "critically important," says geochemist Douglas Rumble of the Carnegie Institution...

SCOTLAND. It’s a long way from anywhere to this particular spot on the steep flank of the Hill of Bohuntine, gazing east across the great green heathery abyss of Glen Roy to where it admits the mouth of the more gently scooped-out Glen Glaster. Certainly if you’re coming from the States—from Petersburg, Kentucky, say, or Dayton, Tennessee, or any other of the thousand places where you would be safer lighting a Marlboro off a burning American flag than being caught with a copy of On the Origin of Species—you’re going to find it quite a hike. But you’ll be glad...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive "dumbos" that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits. A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life. "Parts of the deep sea that we assumed were homogenous are actually quite complex," said Robert S. Carney, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University and a lead researcher...

A first edition of Charles Darwin's seminal "On the Origin of Species" will be sold this week after it was found in a family's toilet in southern Britain, an auction house said Sunday. The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie's auction house said. The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said. The book will go under the hammer in London on Tuesday, to coincide with the...

"This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud" - That's how world-renowned climatologist Patrick J. Michaels described revelations contained in a 61Mb ZIP file that shows the systematic attempts by climate "scientists" to lie, manipulate evidence, and go to extraordinary lengths to stop the publication of any information or data which did not support the man-made global warming theory. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. In this leaked files are 1079 emails and 72 documents that thoroughly expose the lie underpinning Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth". Remember this, as...

Darwinism and the adoption of Chinese Marxism According to James Pusey, writing in Nature, "Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895-98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War." There were two groups seeking change: the reformers, who were loyal to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and the revolutionaries, who wanted a clean break with the past. --snip-- The reformers and the revolutionaries debated vigorously "with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner" The leaders of these movements imbibed the message of scientific racism coming from America and Europe and presented themselves as 'fit'...

Fungi are single or multi-celled organisms that break down organic materials, such as rotting wood, in order to absorb their nutrients. Neither plant nor animal, they range from mushrooms to single-celled yeast. Scientists were investigating organic chemicals trapped in an Italian sedimentary rock formation when they found evidence that an extinct fungus feasted on dead wood during a time when the world’s forests had been catastrophically eradicated.[1] What could have caused such a universal effect on forests, and why does organic material remain in rocks that are supposedly 251.4 million years old?...

AMATEUR archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Scotland's oldest human settlement, dating back 14,000 years. The team dug up tools that have been shown to date from the end of the last Ice Age. It is the first time there has been proof that humans lived in Scotland during the upper paleolithic period.

Scotland already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country -- reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north. Now the number is set to increase. The first comprehensive survey of Roman remains for 30 years will boost the total of officially recognised sites and give them greater legal protection, officials said yesterday. Traces of at least 225 Roman military camps dot the Scottish countryside from the Borders to Aberdeenshire... They can be spotted today mostly from the air, where the distinctive bank and ditch defences thrown up by the legionaries still mark the...

ScienceDaily: “Slowing Evolution to Stop Drug Resistance” --snip-- For years, evolutionists have pointed to antibiotic resistance as proof of evolution in action. The argument often amounts to this (in simplified form): the fact that certain organisms grow resistant to certain antibiotics is evidence for the evolutionary idea that all animals must have descended from a single ancestor. Collapsing the argument does make it seem a bit silly, but that’s our point. We certainly don’t want to belittle the very real threat of dangerous organisms becoming immune to the best drugs we now have (though the vast majority of microbes are...

Scientists have watched as a new species is “born”—or is that “evolved”?—on one of the Galapagos Islands, home of Darwin’s famous finches...

<snip>2.4 Diagnosis #4: The Attraction of Magnificent Academic Trusels. A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel and probably will not be thought to be magnificent.) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" (MAT) is a trusel that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its...

Like the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, this is the gift that goes on giving. It won’t, unfortunately, derail Copenhagen (too many vested interests involved) or cause any of our many political parties to start talking sense on “Climate change”. But what it does demonstrate is the growing level of public scepticism towards Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. That’s why, for example, this story is the single most read item on today’s Telegraph website. [...] But in the case of “Climate Change”, the MSM has been caught with its trousers down. The reason it has been so ill-equipped to report...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip. It’s ironic, then, that the search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.

Its inventors are comparing it to the Star Trek phaser: a way of exploiting an on-off 'switch' in nematodes that paralyzes them when they're exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off. But when exposed to ordinary light, they become unparalyzed and wake up. It's the first time that photoswitching has been demonstrated in a living animal. The report describes the development and successful testing of a photoswitch composed of the light-sensitive material, dithienylethene. The scientists grew the transparent, pinhead-sized worms - C. elegans - and fed them dithienylethene. When...

It has always amazed me how unconcerned evolutionists seem to be about entropy and the problems it poses both for a natural origin of life and for macroevolution. The argument from entropy is one of the most powerful arguments against the spontaneous formation of life from a random association of non-living chemicals...

National Academy of Title IX Malcolm A. Kline, November 20, 2009 As we’ve reported over and over again, no matter how unscientific their data, elites continue to insist that women are underrepresented in the sciences. Now, the national Academy of Sciences is publishing a whole reading list sure to tilt the playing field even further towards regulators idea of a Title IX utopia. NAS is even throwing in finger puppets of Marie Curie and George Washington Carver, two scientists who managed to achieve all that they did without the aid of the divisive rules. Among the titles that NAS is...

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,� Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

"Breaking News Story: Hadley CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released 19 11 2009 The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown"

It's a solid doomsday prediction that in about 5 billion years the dying sun will expand as a bloated red giant and engulf the Earth. But imagine if in just a few weeks the middle-aged sun suddenly ballooned out to the orbit of Saturn and immediately vaporized Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system! And, even before this happened, imagine that every morning you awoke the sun was ever more sweltering until it began evaporating the oceans, spontaneously starting forests ablaze, and melting asphalt! This sounds like the stuff of a far-out science fiction movie. But...

Clocks are clocks are clocks – or so you may think. However, some clocks are astronomical both literally and metaphorically. Here is a great selection of astronomical clocks of Europe.