A new study takes Norwegians to task for continuing to use wood stoves as part of their bucolic northern heritage. Drive outside cities and it is common to see stacks of wood lining the walls of houses and smoke rising from the chimneys, especially on cold days. Due to that heritage, there was even a national "wood night program" on NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which ran for 12 hours and attracted international attention.

While spending a few vacation days on a trip around central Italy I made a stop in a place in the Appennini mountains, to visit some incredible caves. The caves of Frasassi were discovered in September 1971 by a few young speleologists, who had been tipped off by locals about the existence, atop a mountain near their village, of a hole in the ground, which emitted a strong draft wind - the unmistakable sign of underground hollows.

Relativity is a form of symmetry and for that reason already of fundamental importance for science. Symmetry means: You can change something in some quite fundamental way, for example rotate the whole circle, and yet, the result is in some other important way the same, the circle is in all ways we can notice as it was before the rotation. The law of the conservation of energy is such symmetry: We transform local chemical energy into non-local kinetic energy and back, yet its mass stays the exact same throughout. We usually call ‘Relativity’ a symmetry that involves transforming the observer/describer and his perspective. They are mainly:

How do you miss an organ important for the function of all organs, most tissues and the mechanisms of most major diseases? Easy, you don't look for it. 

The James Webb Space Telescope, originally scheduled to be completed in 2007, now might be ready in 2020. If you still believe anything coming from Big Space. 

Meanwhile, Big Space claims it is under-funded. While it's true many worthy small experiments can't get the money they need, the reason is not due to the Bush, Obama or Trump administrations, it is because all three of them have watched JWST, the supposed successor to Hubble, bleed funding dry with its constant misses and overruns.

A new paper is proposing that methane due to lakes is scarier than carbon dioxide, but it tells only one sider of the story: methane has much greater warming impact, they rightly note, but leave out that it is so short-lived it is having zero impact on climate change.

Do you buy bagged bread in the grocery store?  There are usually several options including bread made with whole grains or containing several different kinds of grain. 

You have probably noticed that such breads stay nice and soft for quite a while.  Some people are even suspicious about that imagining that the bread might be “loaded with preservatives.” 

A few weeks ago the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) released the results of the largest study ever conducted on bisphenol A (BPA).  The CLARITY Core study was conducted by senior scientists with the U.S.

In 1984, activist groups won a stunning victory for political allies they had placed inside the Federal government. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 gave "deference" to agencies when interpreting statutes Congress required them to administer. The White House, regardless of voters or Congress, could legislate using regulations and be judge, jury and executioner when it came to science. Perfect for activism, but terrible for public trust in science. 

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman is clearly on the campaign trail for his next job, because even in a state that is lawsuit happy like New York he is setting records for most pointless emails about investigations and lawsuits.

But now he says the science is on his side, not just his political interpretation of the law, and that will get a response where the usual politics won't. So let's see if this is about science or greed.