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ERICE, SICILY – It’s official. The scare is over. The World Federation of Scientists, at its annual seminars on planetary emergencies, has been advised by its own climate monitoring panel that global warming is no longer a planetary emergency. The President of the Italian Senate, Judge Pietro Grasso, who was the judge in Sicily’s first maxiprocesso, a class-action prosecution of dozens of Mafiosi who were sent to prison for a total of 2600 years, gave the magistral lecture at the opening plenary session of the seminars, which ended this week. Both Judge Grasso and the President of the Federation, Professor...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got political on his Q2 2013 earnings call yesterday, criticizing America for not producing enough talented engineers for him to recruit.

Climate Change: The New York Times is wondering, as are other mainstream media outlets, "What to Make of a Warming Plateau." If the media had a more critical eye, they'd see what they've been expecting is wrong. The Times reported Monday that "The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace." The reporter admits the break in temperature increases "highlights important gaps in our knowledge...

An overwhelming 97 percent of climatologists endorse the idea of human-caused global warming. As if the backing of NASA, 18 independent American scientific societies, and an intergovernmental panel established under the United Nations weren't enough to quell the protests popping up in comment sections across the Internet, a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters confirms — once again — that climatologists almost unanimously believe that climate change is directly related to human-made carbon emissions. Researchers pored over nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1991 to 2011. These papers, according to Michael Todd at Pacific Standard, represented the...

Roy Spencer is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama Huntsville who may be the world's most important scientist. He has discovered scientific insights and theories that cast great doubt on global warming doctrine... --snip-- The pressure that is building on climate doctrine is the failure of the Earth to warm, a trend that has now continued for 16 years. The longer warming is stalled, in the face of constantly increasing CO2, the harder it becomes for the believers to continue believing. Compounding the failure of the Earth to warm is the failure of the oceans to warm for...

Rats or Humans? Inside Saddam's Extermination Plant(August 29, 2002)This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/ He was introduced as director of research and development at Falluja, one of the remote factories where the United States claims Saddam Hussein could be making chemical and biological weapons. Asked if he had worked on any of Saddam's chemical weapons programs, Dr Mohammed Frah played a straight bat: "In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al-Muthanna." This is the name of a critical centre in Saddam's weapons program - a huge pesticide complex that produced...

Slough and his colleagues are working on a system that shoots ringlets of metal into a specially designed magnetic field. The ringlets collapse around a tiny droplet of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, compressing it so tightly that it produces a fusion reaction for a few millionths of a second. The reaction should result in a significant energy gain. "It has gain, that's why we're doing it," Slough said. "It's just that the form the energy takes at the end is hot, magnetized metal plasma. ... The problem in the past was, what would you use it for? Because it kinda...

The drugs are synthetic versions of resveratrol, found in red wine, an organic chemical believed to have an anti-aging effect, by boosting activity of a protein called SIRT1. GSK, the pharmaceutical firm, is testing them on people with particular medical conditions, namely Type II diabetes and psoriasis, a serious skin condition. David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard University, said aging might not actually be an "irreversible affliction". He said: “Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. "Things there are also looking promising. We're finding that aging isn't the irreversible affliction that...

It turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system. It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS. As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information...

Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America's scientist shortage -- the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy. But perhaps it's time they start talking about our scientist surplus instead. I am by no means the first person to make this point. But I was compelled to try and illustrate it after reading a report from Inside Higher Ed on this weekend's gloomy gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In short, job prospects for young science Ph.D.'s haven't been looking so hot these last few...

The London accountant who accompanied Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan to Timbuktu on three occasions in 1998, 1999 and 2000 says the 'father' of the Pakistani bomb witnessed the digging of a well, toured an ancient Islamic library and enjoyed the views of the desert. A remote outpost in the middle of the West African desert, Timbuktu usually attracts explorers associated in the popular mind with the adventures of the comic character Tin Tin. And Pakistani dissidents told rediff.com the reason for Khan's visit to Timbuktu, part of landlocked West African state of Mali, was to prospect for uranium. They say...

**SNIP** The uncompromising language of the report, and the stark picture that its authors have painted of the likely effects of global warming, have profound implications for the rest of the world. If the world's greatest economy is already feeling the strain of global warming, and is fearful of its future impact, then other nations face a very worrying future as temperatures continue to rise as more and more greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere. "The report makes for sobering reading," said Professor Chris Rapley, of University College London. "Most people in the UK and US accept human-induced climate...

The formula seems simple: parents pass down what they believe to their children. Atheist parents don’t believe in God or go to church, therefore…. Yet, a surprisingly large number of atheist scientists from elite universities raise their children in a religious community such as a church. Sociologists Elaine Ecklund (Rice University) and Kristen Lee (University of Buffalo, SUNY) found that these atheist scientists do so because they want to give their children religious choice, have a religious spouse, or think that religious communities will give their children moral bearings and community. Unfortunately, very little research has been done concerning how...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — This year's drought is consistent with predictions that global climate change would bring about weather extremes including more frequent droughts, said a report released Monday. The Iowa Climate Statement updates the 2010 report, reflecting the year's lingering drought and the belief that it signifies what many scientists have predicted — increasing instability in weather patterns will lead to extremes during both wet and dry years. ... The report was signed by 138 scientists and researchers from 27 Iowa colleges and universities. They said they wanted to release the updated report now while the drought is...

Proof Positive - In My Opinion True Source Found For "Innocence of Muslims." (Obama)This is a Youtube video produced by user Montagraph who speculated that "Innocence of Muslims" was a false flag op. So did I. He has done a lot of work tracing numerous websites connected to the original uploading of the now famous video. His narrative starts out very slow but give it a chance. He does explain it all in detail and has sourced it all with URLs below his vid. Montagraph declines to say that his evidence is definitive so you be the judge. The internet...

A hacker or an “angry” employee has overtaken the official NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Twitter account to re-tweet rants against US Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “@NASAJPL Why are you re-tweeing anti-Romney Tweets?” a Twitter user wrote in response. Shortly after, the culprit started to delete the tweets, but at that point, Twitter was already buzzing because NASA was apparently getting very involved in politics. “Items retweeted this evening were not intended nor approved for this account. They do not in any way represent the views of NASAJPL,” NASA JPL representatives wrote after regaining the account. They haven’t revealed if...

This week the Enquiring Hitchhiker has several new interviews. The first of these is with  Dr. Gregory Benford. Dr. Benford is one of the leading authors of hard science fiction working today. His novel In the Ocean of Night was one of my first introductions to the idea of artificial intelligence.

We've written about how college students should major in science, tech, engineering or math (STEM). This conventional wisdom is based on government propaganda (Obama: "This is what will make a difference in this country over the long haul.") and studies showing that science majors from the past forty years have scored better jobs. Unfortunately today's science job market doesn't live up to the hype (via @curriculumveto). Jim Austin of ScienceCareers tells WashPo's Brian Vastag: “There have been many predictions of [science] labor shortages and . . . robust job growth. And yet, it seems awfully hard for people to find a job....

We may not be alone. But our cosmic companions might be moist creatures in watery worlds -- lacking, of course, E.T.'s impulse, or ability, to phone home. The growing evidence of wet planets -- and its implications in our search for extraterrestrial life -- is among the marvels shared this weekend at a Santa Clara gathering of astronomers, astronauts and science fiction fans. The theme of the three-day SETIcon event: the exploration of universe and the quest to find life beyond Earth. Scientists agreed that the neighborhood is looking a lot friendlier. What began as a trickle of new planet...

The Earth is reaching a "tipping point" in climate change that will lead to increasingly rapid and irreversible destruction of the global environment unless its forces are controlled by concerted international action, an international group of scientists warns. Unchecked population growth, the disappearance of critical plant and animal species, the over-exploitation of energy resources, and the rapidly warming climate are all combining to bring mounting pressure on the Earth's environmental health, they say. Scientists from five nations, led by UC Berkeley biologist Anthony Barnosky, report their analysis Thursday in the journal Nature. They likened the potential impact of the forces...