So were Pons & Flieschman right, or what?

Link is to New Scientist story, (taken from Nature, apparently) whose headline blithely reads "Tabletop Fusion Demonstrated." The article takes great pains, it seems to us, to avoid mentioning Pons & Flieschman, the real discoverers of the effect (a similar one anyway) of cold fusion. And EVERYBODY tried to shoot them down on the grounds that it COULDN'T be real.So to report some few years later with a yawn that the impossible effect has been demonstrated seems pretty outrageous to us, especially if you're not even going to mention the original cold fusion fiasco out of embarrassment for your own complicity. That headline should read, "Nothing to See Here, We're Going to Dress This Up As A Completely Different Effect and Pretend that We Still Win."

Aquatic Ape Scientist Interview

This is fascinating stuff from one of the main promoters of the Aquatic Ape theory, the theory that humans evolved as a swimming, semi-aquatic species.

Claim: Cold Fusion style energy discovered

Funny how the term cold fusion is studiously avoided in these obviously cold fusion, platinum-at-room-temperature experiments.

Story: Man Sitting On Incredible Bigfoot Video, Waiting For Right Offer

Viewers of video claim: "It's the real deal," an eight-to-ten foot creature striding gracefully by the water's edge and looking into the camera. Hope this one pans out; that would be cool to be in the aftermath of the one that breaks it wide open, assuming it's real... it would be an excellent case study of the blind spots of knee-jerk skepticism. And since it's a bitch to prove a negative, the myth at least will always persist, of giants in our midst ...

Better Living Through Chemistry - Not

Even MORE poisonous chemicals in your toothpaste, BESIDES fluoride. This one, triclosan, is in a lot of things these days as an all-purpose antibacterial.

Well, triclosan has links to dioxin among other things, like hormone disruption and antibiotic resistance. But they knew all that BEFORE they put it in your toothpaste. What they didn't know, and just found out, was that triclosan reacts with chlorinated water to make chloroform gas, which over long term exposure, will kill your ass.

Happy brushing!

DMT in the crosshairs

Government bid to disallow use of Amazon plant sacrament by religious adherents.

Active ingredient of said sacrament is DMT, a molecule of some scientific interest for its ability to reliably produce experiences of contact with otherworldly intelligences.

Mad Cow Coverup Alleged Against US Officials

We knew it. More shananigans at the expense of public safety, with a complicit paid staff of scientists. Hoping this one's not even true, but fearing it's actually much, much, worse ...

World's oldest object lends support to alternative oil theory

In our estimation anyway; it won't say that in the article we link to here. But it says this one tiny crystal has been dated to be 4.4 billion years old, making it a very early rock - if the dating schemes are correct, but we'll have to look at that another time. But with that caveat, they have determined this oldest object on earth to have formed in a colder environment than they thought was around back then. So the entire earth must have formed at cooler temperatures than was assumed. This little zircon flake has rewritten all of geology.

And where it lends support to to the abiogenic theory of oil formation is the following. If earth formed at a cooler temperature, that lends support to the solar nebula origin of the earth, which was on the cooler side. (Some earth origin theories are hot.) This cool formation of gathering rock and dust in a solar nebula would have plenty of hydrocarbons (oil etc) from the outset. You do not need to invoke a "fossil fuels" origin of compressed ferns and such for oil.

So the "peak oil" worries might not pan out; we should act like peak oil is coming anyway in order to arrest the greenhouse effect.

Interesting

Link is to a story about a fossil find that indicates our homind ancestors cared for their elderly.

It's interesting only because everyone's playing it up as being SO interesting, which it wouldn't be if not for our species chauvinism. So something nearly human acted nearly human? That is boring.

What's more interesting to me is the way the scientists get all frothy with speculation about the evolutionary and "fitness" benefits of keeping your grandma alive even after she's lost her teeth. Like it never even occurs to them to consider that these creatures felt compassion and love for their dear ol' nearly-human grammy.

Again, anthropomorphizing animals is underated and yields greater understanding, not less.

One last test for ether

A $200,000 experiment is ramping up to test the last possible experimental window for the existence of the ether (a light-carrying medium suffusing all space). The magazine New Scientist is all over this.

If they find any ether at all with this experiment, then Einstein gets replaced with Lorenz, which (I'm pretty sure) means black holes will no longer be possible, because Lorenz's equations don't collapse into singularities. Then both Morphogenetic Fields and Tom Van Flandern's "Meta Theory" become much more plausible in one stroke. Short version: Holy crap. That would be like proving the existence of alchemy, ESP, and magic with a single experiment. Is an ether discovery on the horizon?

We snipped this from the subscription-only New Scientist article:

The Earth is travelling at 30 kilometres per second around the sun, not to mention racing around the centre of the galaxy. So Michelson and Morley reasoned the ether wind should reduce the speed of light travelling in the same direction as the Earth by at least 30 kilometres per second - 0.01 per cent of the speed of light. The experiment was easily sensitive enough to detect an effect of this magnitude. To the disappointment of the experimenters, it did not, and reluctantly they accepted the conclusion that there is no ether.

Many similar experiments have been performed since then: in every case the official conclusion has been the same. But not everyone has swallowed the story. In 1902, William Hicks published a study of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and claimed the results supported the existence of an ether wind blowing over the Earth at 8 kilometres per second. Although the pair had carried out their observations over a number of days, they had then averaged out their results as if the experiment's orientation to a prevailing ether wind had not changed. Hicks pointed out that this would cancel out any effect. Some years later Dayton Miller, a former colleague of Michelson's, reworked the Michelson-Morley measurements and also came out with a speed for the ether wind of about 8 kilometres per second. He then redid the experiment with Morley and obtained the same result, but this time with a much smaller error range.

In 1921 Miller took the result to Einstein, who thought there was probably some mistake. He suggested that Miller's result might be explained by slight temperature differences in the apparatus. "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not," Einstein declared. So Miller repeated the experiment 1800 metres up, on the snowy summit of Mount Wilson in California. "He got exactly the same result as Michelson and Morley in the warm basement of the Case Institute," Consoli says.

According to Consoli, many interferometer experiments carried out over the past century have shown a measurable ether wind. "The textbooks say the experiments produced null results," he says. "The textbooks do not tell the truth."

Solar System: an unbelievably happenin' place

Impermanent features of the solar system are always a surprise to scientists, who assume everything here is so old that no impermanent features remain: the demeanor of the solar sytem is viewed as grand, stately, and slow.

Link is to an article about the rings of Neptune which seem to be falling apart before our eyes, and the scientists are dumbfounded and have no clue what to say about it.

What it means is, the features of the solar system have been inaccurately portrayed as old and permanent. But really it's a wild, chaotic, dynamic system, and don't assume nothin' ... shit flyin' everywhere ...

170,000 tons of genetically modified corn accidentally shipped to UK; US says "We knew months ago and didn't tell you until it came out in print"

Could purposeful contamination - ultimately benefitting US business - be the real story? Naah. Why would anyone even say such a thing? Oh yeah it's because of the abuse of patent law that allows Big Biotech to go around demanding money from farmers whose crops have been contaminated by Big Biotech. As the patented genes spread via contamination, so do the profits.