Historically, large atmospheric events like fires and volcanic eruptions have had cooling effects. It is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", for example, part of which was inspired by the gloom from a volcanic eruption that led to 'a year without a summer' in Europe of 1816.

Fires and other events cause the release of soot and other aerosols to be released which can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and increasing cloud brightness. A new study finda that such a cooling effect on the planet may have been significantly underestimated by previous researchers. 

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organisation, which is part of the United Nations, but it is really its own agency that shares little in common with WHO. Whereas WHO wants to save lives, IARC has taken to using statistics to scaremonger trace chemicals by conflating hazard and risk. So if high doses, 10,000 exposures of a chemical all at once, might be linked to cancer by looking at statistics, their flawed methodology, where five orders of magnitude are considered equal, will cause them to declare even 1 exposure a hazard. 

And though they do not calculate risk, they frequently talk about risk in their media kits for journalists, which leads to confusion in media and therefore the public.

Metastasis is the formation of secondary tumors and a leading contributor to deaths related to cancer. The exact mechanism for how cellular function becomes broken in cells far removed from a cancer’s primary tumor have been unclear.

But it's been pondered for almost a hundred years. It was postulated that metastatic cells spontaneously caused secondary tumors by fusing their cellular material with regular cells and re-establishing their errant gene expression, but spontaneous is not a concept scientists like, so the search for the real causes has been ongoing.

Ground sharks (Carcharhiniformes) are the most diverse shark group living today, with over 200 different species, and they are one of the major groups that survived the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction which is why we have the Tiger, Hammerhead, and Blacktip Reef sharks and lamniforms by the Great White and Mako sharks.

Before the mass extinction that killed-off non-bird dinosaurs and marked the end of the Cretaceous period and the Mesozoic era 66 million years ago, dinosaurs dominated terrestrial environments and Mackerel sharks (Lamniformes) were the dominant shark forms of the sea.

In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and in a presentation at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool, a team announced one of the largest 3D maps of the infant Universe.

And along with it almost 4,000 early galaxies, many of which will have evolved into galaxies like our own Milky Way. 


The COSMOS field in the constellation of Sextans, seen in infrared light. Credit:  ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

Looking back in time: 16 different epochs between 11 and 13 billion years ago

 If you have seen a face in the clouds or you have been part of a phenomenon called "pareidolia" - a willingness to recognize a non-face object as a human face.

Humans sometimes perceive an inherently meaningless object such as a pattern, landscape or object as another object, one that has meaning. It's why alternative science proponents, the Jeffrey Smith's and Pete Myers of the world, believe in spirit photographs. 

Some have even argued that pareidolia occurs in relatively low-level visual processing, and a new paper examines the relation between behavior when a face-like object is viewed and brain activity to reveal the level of visual processing at which face-likeness is recognized.