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Blind, slippery and prone to burrowing underground, a newly discovered amphibian has much in common with President Donald Trump, claims the British company that named the creature.

EDISON - A recent study has ranked New Jersey 47th in the U.S. for the least Christmas-friendly states. The survey was done by GetCenturyLink. The rankings were based on online activity and areas of culture.

Academic Freedom — Sweeping Up the Shards Rob Sheldon December 4, 2018 The online magazine Quillette has a tradition of providing a forum for people who can’t get heard on the regular channels, perhaps due to political correctness. Here is an article, “The New Evolution Deniers,” by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright at Penn State. He thinks that the slogan “gender is a social construct” denies Darwin. Here are the conclusions: Back when evolution was under attack from proponents of Biblical Creation and Intelligent Design, academic scientists were under no pressure to hold back criticism. This is because these anti-evolution movements...

A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy...

... The new U.S. report, as well as a United Nations report issued in October, instead aim at frightening the public—exactly the approach that so manifestly has failed to move the needle for 35 years. Maybe it’s because voters are skeptical of doom-mongering. Maybe they have grown fatalistic about climate change. Or maybe, reflecting the folly of climate campaigners, they’ve gotten a message that acting on greenhouse gases requires giving up prosperity. Reporting Sunday on the French fuel-tax demonstrations, the New York Times noted: “Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that...

Sybil was the first major book to tie "MPD" to child abuse. Published in 1973, it was followed by a compelling 1976 movie. Sybil played a substantial role in the cultural and psychiatric tsunami, later known as the "false" or "recovered" memory debate. According to author Debbie Nathan "In the entire history of Western civilization, there had been less than 200 cases over a period of centuries. But after the book and film, suddenly there were hundreds and thousands. And by the late 1980s there were 40,000 cases diagnosed in the United States alone." See Sybil Exposed

Imagine if you crossed a rhino with a giant turtle and then supersized the result: You might get something like Lisowicia bojani, a newly discovered Triassic mammal cousin that had a body shaped like a rhinoceros, a beak like a turtle, and weighed as much as an African elephant, about 9 tons. Paleontologists say this startling creature offers a new view of the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs. "Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" marvels Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of...

Unchecked climate change will cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars and damage human health and quality of life, a US government report warns. "Future risks from climate change depend... on decisions made today," the 4th National Climate Assessment says. The report says climate change is "presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth". The warning is at odds with the Trump administration's fossil fuels agenda. The White House said the report - compiled with help from numerous US government agencies and departments - was inaccurate. Spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said...

When the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN and other fact-challenged news outlets reported a few months ago that the oceans were warming at a catastrophic rate due to climate change, they all missed a glaring math error in the original science paper. The paper, co-authored by Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was published in the science journal Nature. It erroneously claimed that ocean temperatures were skyrocketing at a rate that was 60 percent higher than the IPCC’s known rate of ocean temperature trends. But the paper suffered from a glaring mathematical error that has since been exposed....

Earlier this week, the newly-elected Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped by Rep. Nancy Pelosi's Capitol Hill office. She was not there to say hello to her new colleague but to show support for a group of environmentalists hosting a sit-in in the potential Speaker of the House's workspace. The move rankled party leadership and consultants. But what exactly was Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez showing support for? It was the "Green New Deal", a massive overhaul spending plan of the United States' economy in an effort to supposedly combat climate change. According to Politico, Ocasio-Cortez met with members from the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide...

Let me be absolutely clear: I am in no doubt there are people who feel they are one gender while having the body of the other. Living with such constant, internal conflict is horrifying for many of those affected, and it should never be ignored. No one should seek to suppress another person’s genuinely held sexual orientation or gender identity. But the question we must ask ourselves today is this – how do we decide whose needs are genuine? And how, then, should we treat them? I have been a psychotherapist for more than 30 years and, in that time,...

Matt Stone and Trey Parker — the “South Park” creators known for their take-no-prisoners mockery of cultural issues from both sides of the sociopolitical aisle — apparently are feeling a little guilty for mocking Al Gore’s climate change evangelism. See, way back in 2006, a “South Park” episode featured the former vice president warning South Park Elementary School students about the “single biggest threat to our planet” — i.e., ManBearPig, a monster representing climate change, NBC News reported. Gore was a month away from releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” when that episode came out — and the network noted that since...

Harvard scientists reexamined the bizarre, interstellar space object known as “Oumuamua,” which rocketed through our solar system late last year, resurrecting the possibility that it may be an alien probe. Academics and scientists were quick to write off the cigar-shaped object as a previously unknown type of bolide – a comet or asteroid – propelled in a highly unusual manner, but their observations are once again, being challenged. Oumuamua, which means “a messenger sent to reach out in advance,” was first observed by Robert Weryk at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. He measured the object to be several hundred...

It forms at speeds of more than 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h), it lies deep beneath our feet, it could destroy hopes for alien life, and — finally — scientists understand how it works. Back in March, researchers writing in the journal Science revealed that they have found the first evidence for this ice, called "Ice VII." Scientists had predicted its existence beforehand. Under the right conditions, it was believed, ice could form in a pool of water without a layer of heat at the leading edge of its growing surface. That — along with super-intense pressures and temperatures — would...

This story came out earlier this week but it was shocking enough that it bears a look. The transgender activist community was all abuzz on Thursday over a letter that had actually been featured in the New York Times a week earlier. Buzzfeed picked it up and ran with it, adding to the celebratory mood. The document in question was an open letter published by a gaggle of 1,600 scientists who are rejecting the anticipated HHS memo defining sex and gender in traditional, scientifically accepted terms for purposes of Title IX questions. What’s truly amazing is the fact that these...

Research shows that the harmful effects of light drinking outweigh the benefits touted by other studies ST. LOUIS — We often see studies that tell us not only is light or moderate drinking not harmful to our health, in some cases, it’s actually good for us. But new research out of Washington University’s School of Medicine suggests that daily glass of wine may not be such a good idea after all. Instead, it actually raises your risk of dying sooner. According to the study of more than 400,000 American adults, light drinkers — regardless of age — are 20 percent...

Researchers say that the world has seriously underestimated the amount of heat soaked up by our oceans over the past 25 years. Their study suggests that the seas have absorbed 60% more than previously thought. They say it means the Earth is more sensitive to fossil fuel emissions than estimated. This could make it much more difficult to to keep global warming within safe levels this century. What have the researchers found?According to the last major assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's oceans have taken up over 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse...

FULL TITLE: Want to know when you’re going to die? Your life span is written in your DNA, and we’re learning to read the code. ------------------------------------------------------------------ It's the ultimate unanswerable question we all face: When will I die? If we knew, would we live differently? So far, science has been no more accurate at predicting life span than a $10 fortune teller. But that’s starting to change. The measures being developed will never get good enough to forecast an exact date or time of death, but insurance companies are already finding them useful, as are hospitals and palliative care teams....

Researchers looked at pairs of identical twins where one of each set was straight The homosexual twin tended to have a more 'male' hand with differing fingers Essex University scientists said the differences may be determined in the womb _____________________________________________________________________ The length of a person's fingers could provide a clue to their sexuality, with women whose ring fingers are longer than their index digits more likely to be lesbian, a study has suggested. Researchers at Essex University looked at sets of identical twins where one of the siblings was heterosexual. They found that the homosexual twin tended to have a...

Add beer to chocolate, coffee, and wine as some of life’s little pleasures that global warming will make scarcer and costlier, scientists say. Increasing bouts of extreme heat waves and drought will hurt production of barley, a key beer ingredient, in the future. Losses of barley yield can be as much as 17 percent, an international group of researchers estimated. That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation, according to the study in Monday’s journal Nature Plants . In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple. The findings come...