If this keeps up, no one's going to trust any scientists.

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world's governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium -- and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to "save the planet."

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of "the best scientists and engineers worldwide" (as the group's own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give "high-quality advice to international bodies," has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices -- and found them badly wanting.

Read more here.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – A top Swedish prosecutor said on Wednesday she was reopening an investigation into rape allegations against Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks published more than 70,000 secret military files on Afghanistan in July in what U.S. officials have called one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. military history.

Assange has denied the charges, which a lower official had withdrawn two weeks ago, and said he has been warned by Australian intelligence that he could face a campaign to discredit him after leaking the documents.

Neither Assange nor his lawyer could be immediately reached for comment.

Whole story here.

Australian officials used explosives to blow up a terminally ill humpback whale that became stranded on a beach near Perth two weeks ago.

After attempts to return the juvenile whale to the sea failed, the state Department of Environment and Conservation had intended to let the 31-foot creature die naturally.

The whale was stranded on a beach in Albany, about 240 miles southwest of Perth, the state capital.

Whole story here.

(CNN) -- How do computers remember things?

It's something most of us never think about. But you may start to take notice if HP Labs is successful in commercializing a new version of computer memory, which would make our electronics dramatically faster and more energy efficient.

The technology is called memristor, and it is designed to work more like our brains and less like the electronic on and off switches that run computer memory now.

"The memristor has properties very similar to synapses in a brain," said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP Labs, which has been working on this technology since 1998.

Unlike conventional computer memory, which stores data with electronic on and off switches, Hewlett-Packard's memristor technology works on the atomic level. As electrons move across a titanium dioxide memristor chip, they nudge atoms ever so slightly, sometimes no more than a nanometer.

Source.

This could be our next generation DDR5 RAM, or GDDR7 graphics processing memory module.

New York (CNN) -- Some people collect stamps or build miniature boats, while others obsess over their tricked-out cars -- but what if your hobby was building a nuclear fusion reactor? For Mark Suppes, it is.

By day, Suppes is a freelance web developer at Gucci, but at night he works in a warehouse lab in Brooklyn, New York, experimenting with nuclear fusion.

Suppes says he became hooked on fusion after watching a video featuring Robert W. Bussard, an American physicist who worked primarily in nuclear fusion energy research.

"It very quickly struck me as one of the better ideas for new forms of energy," Suppes says.

Paul Schatzkin, founder of Fusor.net, says people typically think of Hiroshima or the Chernobyl disaster when they hear the word nuclear. "And when they hear it they should think sun," he says, "because what they are building is a miniature synthetic star. A fusion reaction is a star."

Source.

We should have more of these guys in tech forums.

A 28-year-old woman severely burned when a stranger threw an acid-like liquid in her face was listed in serious condition in a Oregon hospital.

Bethany Storro, of Vancouver, Wash., was getting something out of her car in downtown Vancouver when the attack happened Monday evening, her mother Nancy Neuwelt told The Oregonian.

Neuwelt said a young woman walked up to her daughter, said: "Hey pretty girl, do you want to drink this?" and tossed a cup of liquid in Storro's face.

"I’m a nice girl and I don’t know why this happened," Storro, 28, said Tuesday in her hospital room in the Oregon Burn Center at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, The Columbian newspaper reported.

More about it here.

A radical enviornmentalist who took three hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters while wearing what police may be explosives was shot and killed by officers, police said.

Manger said the suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

Manger said police will search the building looking for other potential explosives Lee may have left inside.

"All the hostages are safe," Manger said, ending a four hour standoff in which some 1,900 employees were evacuated from the building as well as the company's on-site daycare center.

Read the news here.

London, Aug 29 (Calcutta Tube) A seven-year-old maths prodigy, who became the youngest Briton to gain the top grade in GCSE maths, now advises the government on the country’s finances, a media report said Sunday.

Oscar Selby, who last week got an A* at less than half the age at which most pupils take the exam, has demonstrated a new talent – advising the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the nation’s finances, Daily Mail reported on its website.

Oscar took a break from building sandcastles on holiday Saturday to urge George Osborne to cut taxpayer funding to the banks and ask for cash they have borrowed to be paid back.

Asked how he would tackle Britain’s biggest maths problem – the 170.8-billion-pound budget deficit – he advocated raising taxes and creating jobs.

Source.

Why let your waste go to waste when it could be powering your mobile phone – or even your car?

IT IS a bright spring morning here at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, where I have come to meet my interviewee for this article, Shanwen Tao. Normally when I interview someone, I give them a business card and maybe the latest issue of New Scientist. Today, I give Tao a bottle of my own pee.

Chemist Tao doesn't find this odd. Urine, he believes, could help solve the world's energy problems, powering farms and even office buildings. And he has agreed to use my offering to show me how.

Urine might not pack the punch of rocket fuel, but what it lacks in energy density it makes up for in sheer quantity. It is one of the most abundant waste materials on Earth, with nearly 7 billion people producing roughly 10 billion litres of it every day. Add animals into the mix and this quantity is multiplied several times over.

As things stand, this flood of waste poses a problem. Let it run into the water system and it would wipe out entire ecosystems; yet scrubbing it out of waste water costs money and energy. In the US, for instance, waste water treatment plants consume 1.5 per cent of all the electricity the country generates. So wouldn't it be nice if, instead of being a vast energy consumer, urine could be put to use.

Source.

A group of researchers led by Terry Hazen, a senior ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have discovered a new species of microorganism. Hazen's team started research in May this year.

Their findings were based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deep-water sites in the Gulf of Mexico between May 25 and June 2. The new species is distinctive for its oil-consuming activity in a wide range of conditions, and is playing a role in depletion of oil spills in the area.

Scientists had been puzzled by the disappearance of oil in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Detailed maps were made on how the spilled oil went underwater and how far it was spread; however, some of it seemed to have disappeared.

Main source.
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