News Articles

As long as mandates and subsidies continue, wind turbines will continue to be part of the alternative energy mix. That means going beyond hype and potential and focusing on physical design, such as spacing and orienting individual turbines to maximize their efficiency and minimize any "wake effects," where the swooping blades of one reduces the energy in the wind available for the following turbine. 

Five environmental groups are alleging that NASA could be about to break the commitments it made in a 2010 agreement to clean up all the detectable contamination at its former Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) rocket testing site in the Simi Hills of California.They claim that NASA may be laying the groundwork for a breach by falsely claiming that commenters on its draft Environmental Impact Study (EIS) on the cleanup were evenly divided on whether NASA should live up to its obligations in the cleanup agreements. When pressed by environmental groups to provide actual data to backup such a claim, they say NASA refused, and one of the groups, Consumer Watchdog, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, obtaining all submitted comments.

In what they are calling the most thorough analysis to date of studies on school bullying, the psychologists who authored a review on the topic in Annual Review of Psychology say that K-12 schools' efforts to curtail bullying are often disappointing and that, unlike public perception, bullying tactics like verbal aggression and exclusion are used by boys as often as girls
The authors say that the most comprehensive programs are effective but they require substantial commitment and school resources to be successful. An assembly once per year does nothing at all. Instead, other studies have found that school programs are teaching bullies how to avoid being caught.      

Pine cone or pine nut? Friend or foe? Distinguishing between the two requires that we pay special attention to the telltale characteristics of each. Psychologists call it selective attention. We hone in on visual information that is new or important and dismissing what is not.
As it turns out, us humans aren't the only ones up to the task. Pigeons share our ability to place everyday things in categories and focus on what is relevant.

The Sun newspaper in the UK has a "check 'em Tuesday" campaign - a weekly call for women to examine their breasts. Readers are even asked to send in photos to prove compliance and can even sign up for a text message reminder.
It sounds like concern for readers and it is, except it doesn't help and may even hurt, according to Glasgow general practitioner Margaret McCartney in BMJ.
McCartney argues that teaching women to examine their breasts regularly "has been shown not to reduce deaths from breast cancer and actually increases the chances of a benign biopsy result." She says it is "unfair to tell women that regular self examination will save their lives when it may simply incur anxiety and have the potential to harm."

The extreme cold weather observed across Europe and the east coast of the US in recent winters is due to to natural, long-term variations in sea surface temperatures, according to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters.

The researchers from University of California Irvine show that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) phenomenon — a natural pattern of variation in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures that switches between a positive and negative phase every 60-70 years — can affect an atmospheric circulation pattern, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), that influences the temperature and precipitation over the Northern Hemisphere in winter.

In unvaccinated hotbeds like California and New York, rich elites rely on 'herd immunity' to protect their children - poor families will get the vaccines and protect the rich ones. That's why in those states, easily preventable diseases have come roaring back, with dangerous consequences.
Developing nations should be a reminder to anti-science progressives about the risks they are inflicting on kids who can't get vaccines, and their own children as well. Nearly 4 million children under 5 die from vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide each year.

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have found that naturally high concentrations of the greenhouse gas methane contributes to energy production in chalk rivers, in a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Chalk rivers, found from Dorset to Cambridgeshire, sustain a diverse range of protected animals and plants, and are renowned globally for fly fishing, an industry worth more than £4M on the Rivers Test and Itchen (Hampshire) alone.
"It's a surprise to find methane is such a big source of energy in these gin-clear waters, famed for their luxuriant plant growth," said co-author Professor Mark Trimmer, Head of the Aquatic Ecology Group at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.

LIVERPOOL, UK – 2 April 2014: Female fruit flies with a large number of sexual partners are playing an invaluable role in preventing the extinction of males, research at the University of Liverpool has shown.
Scientists have found that flies in the northern parts of the United States are more inclined to have multiple partners in order to reduce the occurrence of an X chromosome which causes the production of only female offspring.

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
"Our findings indicate that ancient nomadic pastoralists were key players in an east-west network that linked innovations and commodities between present-day China and southwest Asia," said study co-author Michael Frachetti, PhD, an associate professor of archaeology in Arts&Sciences at Washington University and principal investigator on the research project.

They argue that "universal conclusions about its benefits cannot be drawn" and say further studies and better designed trials are needed.
A growing body of evidence indicates that vitamin D may reduce risks of a wide range of diseases, including bone mineral disease, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune disorders, cancer and cardiovascular problems. Yet, despite hundreds of trials, the evidence for vitamin D is still being debated.
Two papers published on bmj.com today attempt to make sense of the existing data.

These findings differ from previous smaller trials and do not support a general recommendation for the use of probiotics to treat colic in infants.
Infant colic (excessive crying of unknown cause) affects up to 20% of infants and is a major burden to families and health services. Although it spontaneously resolves three to four months after birth, its cause remains elusive and no single effective treatment exists.
Previous small trials suggest that the probiotic Lactobacillus reuteri effectively treats colic in breastfed infants. These studies, however, had limitations as they examined only a highly selective group of infants with colic. The effects of L reuteri on formula fed infants with colic are unknown.