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Dozens of scientists have endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) sweeping plan to combat global climate change after fellow Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that “not a single solitary scientist thinks it can work.” The former vice president derided Sanders’ proposed $16.3 trillion Green New Deal during a campaign stop last week in New Hampshire, adding that “you can not get to zero emissions by 2030. It’s impossible.” Sanders swung back over the weekend, telling a crowd in Iowa that he would soon unveil “a long list of scientists” who back his plan. The Sanders campaign delivered on Tuesday, releasing...

A team of Chinese researchers have turned cheap copper into a new material “almost identical” to gold, according to a study published in peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on Saturday. The discovery will significantly reduce the use of rare, expensive metals in factories, said the authors. Professor Sun Jian and colleagues at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Liaoning, shot a copper target with a jet of hot, electrically charged argon gas. The fast-moving ionised particles blasted copper atoms off the target. The atoms cooled down and condensed on the surface of a collecting...

Dr. Serkan Gölge, a NASA scientist who was sentenced to seven years, six months in prison in February due to his alleged links to the Gülen movement, has said he has been unlawfully kept behind bars for two years, which he says shows he is being held hostage by the Turkish government, the t24 news website reported on Tuesday. A dual citizen of the US and Turkey, Gölge, 38, was detained as part of an investigation into the Gülen movement, which the government accuses of masterminding a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, on July 23, 2016. He was arrested...

A deadly nerve agent linked to the poisoning of four people in southern England could have been carried inside a lipstick tube-like container before being planted, a Russian scientist who developed the substance told Euronews. “The substance is very stable. It can be washed away by rain, it can evaporate under the sun. But it won’t decompose." Vladimir Uglev Scientist Vladimir Uglev, 72, took a leading role in developing A-234, a strain of the Novichok family of agents believed to have been used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury earlier this year. Like...

David Goodall listened quietly as his loved ones started to sing. Then he took a breath, made a wish and blew out the flames. But Goodall was not wholeheartedly celebrating the milestone this month in Perth, Australia. The botanist and ecologist, who is thought to be the country’s oldest scientist, said that he has lived too long. And now, he said, he is ready to die. “I greatly regret having reached that age. I would much prefer to be 20 or 30 years younger,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. When asked whether he had a nice birthday, he said:...

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. In a paper published today in the journal Science, University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought. A 40-mile-wide black hole 8,000 light years from Earth named V404 Cygni yielded the first precise measurements of the magnetic field that surrounds the deepest wells of...

Lucy Smith reports for the Townsville (Queensland), Australia Bulletin: A RENOWNED climate scientist has been jailed for fraudulently claiming half a million dollars in reimbursements from his employer. Over seven years, Australian Institute of Marine Science senior researcher Daniel Michael Alongi lodged 129 claims for fictitious purchases totalling $553,420.

A new congressional investigation has determined that the Obama administration fired a top scientist and intimidated staff at the Department of Energy in order to further its climate change agenda, according to a new report that alleges the administration ordered top officials to obstruct Congress in order to forward this agenda. Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, released a wide-ranging report on Tuesday that shows how senior Obama administration officials retaliated against a leading scientist and plotted ways to block a congressional inquiry surrounding key research into the impact of radiation....

IT ALL began with the best, if exceedingly ambitious, of intentions – to develop a machine that by a simple pinprick on a patient’s finger could detect any disease known to man. But it ended in the most tragic of circumstances, with the firm behind the invention crashing and a British scientist who had devoted himself to the project taking his own life. Now his widow has spoken out about the treatment he suffered before and after his death at the age of 67, accusing his employers of heartlessness.

The widow of a scientist who killed himself in fear he was about to lose his job at troubled bio-tech start-up Theranos has told of the company's paranoid culture. Ian Gibbons, the head scientist at the blood test company, died after taking an overdose of painkillers in May 2013 within hours of being summoned for a meeting. According to his widow, Rochelle, he had found faults in machines the company claimed would 'change the world' by being able to diagnose diseases from a single pinprick of a patient's blood. Having recently been diagnosed with cancer, he stopped going to work...

Every weekday at 6.30 a.m., Edward McSweegan climbs into his Volkswagen Passat for the hour-long commute to the National Institutes of Health. He has an office in Bethesda, a job title -- health scientist administrator -- and an annual salary of about $100,000. What McSweegan says he does not have -- and has not had for the last seven years -- is any real work. He was hired by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988, but says his bosses transferred the research grants he administered to other workers eight years later, leaving him with occasional tasks...

NASA’s top climate scientist took to Twitter Friday morning to criticize British voters for choosing to leave the European Union, calling the so-called Brexit vote “stupid and selfish.” Gavin Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but long before becoming the space agency’s lead climate scientist, Schmidt was born in Britain. He’s obviously not a fan of U.K. voters’ decision to leave the EU.

(CBS SF) — The fault that produced a 4.0-magnitude earthquake in Fremont early Tuesday morning is expected to produce a major earthquake “any day now” and Bay Area residents should be prepared, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist said. The 2:41 a.m. earthquake on the border of Fremont and Union City occurred on the Hayward Fault at a depth of 5 miles. The epicenter was at a spot just north of the intersection of Niles Canyon Road and Mission Boulevard. The quake caused some BART delays early today while work crews checked the tracks, but appears to have caused no major...

DENVER (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul courted donors from the new marijuana industry Tuesday, making the Kentucky senator the first major-party presidential candidate to publicly seek support from the legal weed business. Paul's fundraiser at the Cannabis Business Summit - tickets started at $2,700, the maximum donation allowed for the primary contest - came as the marijuana industry approached its first presidential campaign as a legal enterprise....

Researchers say it may be possible to slow and even reverse aging by keeping DNA more stably packed together in our cells In a breakthrough discovery, scientists report that they have found the key to keeping cells young. In a study published Thursday in Science, an international team, led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the Salk Institute, studied the gene responsible for an accelerated aging disease known as Werner syndrome, or adult progeria, in which patients show signs of osteoporosis, grey hair and heart disease in very early adulthood. These patients are deficient in a gene responsible for copying...

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

VIENNA: The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, may have handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran. State of War by James Risen, the New York Times reporter who exposed the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying operation, claims the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran's nuclear drive. But the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by sophisticated Russian nuclear scientists, the book said. The operation, which took place during the Clinton administration in early 2000, was codenamed Operation Merlin and "may have been one of the most reckless operations in...

killed Friday when his small plane went down in Van Nuys are discussing his contributions to JPL and NASA. Alberto Enrique Behar, 47, crashed into the busy intersection of Hayvenhurst Avenue and Vanowen Street in Lake Balboa. He was the sole occupant of the experimental single-engine Lancair plane, which he used to commute from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., to this job in Pasadena, according to a friend. The friend described Behar as a husband, father of three, and renowned scientist.

High-profile Republicans converged this year around a new favorite refrain when it comes to climate change: “I’m not a scientist.” Party leaders and candidates for office repeated variations of the theme throughout the year when asked whether manmade climate change is happening and what should be done about it. “What I have said repeatedly is I’m not a scientist,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told a Kentucky sports radio show. “I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) said of the Obama administration’s climate rule for power plants. “I’d leave it to the...