Tag: science

Conflicts of Interest in Climate Science: A Systemic Blind Spot

The field of climate science has long been presented as an objective, data-driven discipline, immune to the biases and financial conflicts that plague other scientific domains. However, a recent preprint study by Jessica Weinkle et al, Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes, challenges this assumption, shedding light on an alarming lack of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in climate research, particularly in studies linking hurricanes to climate change​. She also has an excellent write up of the study on her Substack, Conflicted.

The study’s findings reveal a disturbing trend: not a single one of the 331 authors analyzed disclosed any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest​. Moreover, the research found that funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior​.

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Breakthrough as Oxford scientists say they’ve achieved teleportation

Scientist claim they achieved a massive breakthrough in teleportation by beaming data between quantum computers.

Researchers at the University of Oxford successfully teleported logical gates – the basic components of a computer algorithm – between two quantum processors separated by more than six feet.

Using particles of light (or photons), the scientists were able to form a shared quantum link between the two separate devices. 

This allowed two processors to work remotely, sharing the same algorithm to complete their computing tasks.

The breakthrough may solve the ‘scalability problem’ that has plagued the construction of usable quantum computers.

Currently, however, a single computer capable of processing millions of qubits would need to be gigantic in size – making them impossible for most people to have. 

Qubits (or quantum bits) replace the traditional bits of a standard computer. 

The new breakthrough changes all that, allowing scientists to move data between a series of smaller devices – instead of building one enormous machine.

The team explains that any quantum device powerful enough to be a game-changing innovation in computer science would need to be able to process millions of qubits. 

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‘Scientific Socialism’ Has Come to Pacific Palisades

“You can’t rebuild the same. We have to rebuild with science. We have to build with climate reality in mind,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN last week in an interview about rebuilding the burned-out Pacific Palisades. “We have to look at infrastructure or redundancy systems. Ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials.”

The interview seems to have flown under the radar, but when I caught it this morning, a bit belatedly, my alarm bells went off left and right.

Well, to be honest, they were all on the left.

Whatever happened to Newsom’s promise that he’d eliminate red tape and accelerate the rebuilding of one of L.A.’s nicest and most historic neighborhoods? The former homeowners of Pacific Palisades who were hoping to quickly rebuild from the ashes now understand to their very cores what Otter told Flounder in “Animal House”: “You f***ed up, you trusted us.“

Anyone dumb enough to believe Newsom’s promise to get people rebuilding within six or nine months… well, they probably voted for him. Gooder and harder, California.

What Newsom says needs to be done before lots can be cleared and construction begins looks to me like a huge, centralized process involving an awful lot of well-connected and high-priced “experts” empaneled to redesign Pacific Palisades according to “scientific” principles involving all the techno-babble Newsom went on about in that CNN sit-down. Instead of, you know, letting people build the homes they want in the kind of city they like. 

If the temporary council to name the permanent council has completed its initial studies on who should conduct the actual studies that will someday mandate a Scientifically Perfect Palisades in terms of those “infrastructure or redundancy systems, ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials” has finished finding a list of acceptable names in six months, I’d be shocked. 

If you think it’s expensive and time-consuming just to get permission to add a small deck on the back of a Pacific Palisades home (which it is), just wait until a panel of experts gets together to redesign the entire neighborhood from the ashes up.

None of this boondogglery (hey, I made up another new word!) comes as a surprise to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™. It wasn’t even two weeks ago that I covered Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s plan to rebuild the Palisades in her own image (shudder), led by philanthropist, “chief recovery officer,” and former LAPD commissioner Steve Soboroff. They’ll hire “an outside consultant to handle a significant rebuilding contract for areas devastated by this month’s Palisades fire,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, and Soboroff promised that “they’re going to represent you and make sure that everybody does exactly what they say they’re going to do.”

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Top Skeptic of Climate Fanatics Spotlights Studies That Torpedo 5 Decades of Liberal Panic

When it comes to questions about “climate change,” bad news for the fanatics is good news for everyone else.

Good news about growing wealth, the availability of food, and actual human ingenuity in facing challenges tends to put a monkey wrench in globalist plans to wreck world economies to battle what amounts to a phantom menace.

And two studies about global development published by credible experts on the subject show just how good the news actually is.

In a commentary piece published in January by the New York Post, one of the world’s best-known skeptics of the “climate change” movement highlighted the studies that show how wrong the greenies really are.

In fact, the Post’s headline said it all: “Climate change fanatics want to bankrupt the entire world for little to no reward.”

Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, another think tank based in Massachusetts.

He’s also an author, writing works such as 2001’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World,” 2023’s “Best Things First,” and 2024’s “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

He was named in 2004 as one of Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

In short, he’s no piker when it comes to environmental controversies — and he’s a thorn in the side for “climate change” alarmists, whether they’re youthful ignoramuses like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg or nonagenarian veterans of mass scares like biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” helped kick off liberal panic over the future of the planet that’s now in its sixth decade.

And the studies Lomborg spotlighted should make the “climate change” world very uneasy.

To summarize: The studies found that technological advances and human ingenuity are more than capable of handling the challenges of a changing climate caused by human industry. (Lomborg appears to accept the basic premise that humans are behind “climate change.” He’s just skeptical of the climate fanatics’ ideas to combat it.)

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Scientists Produced a Particle of Light That Simultaneously Accessed 37 Different Dimensions

Classical and quantum mechanics don’t really get along as the science of the subatomic can get, well, weird. Take, for instance, quantum entanglement, which says that the state of one particle can be determined by examining the state of its entangled pair regardless of distance. This strange fact flies in the face of classical physics, and even led Albert Einstein to famously describe this quantum quirk as “spooky action at a distance.”

This is what is known as “quantum nonlocality,” where objects are influenced across distances (seeming beyond the speed of light) whereas classical physics follows local theory, the idea that objects are influenced by their immediate surroundings. This is a pretty sharp divide as explained by the famous no-go theorem known as the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) paradox, which essentially details how quantum theory cannot be described by local realistic description.

Named for the physicists who described the paradox in 1989, GHZ-type paradoxes show that when particles can only be influenced by proximity they produce mathematical impossibilities. As New Scientist reports, the paradox can even be expressed through a calculation where 1 equals -1. This paradox is useful in showing how quantum properties can not be described using classical means, but a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, decided to see just how strange these paradoxes could get.

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How Consciousness Opens Doors To Higher Dimensions

Dr. Eben Alexander was at the height of his career as a neurosurgeon. With a doctorate in medicine from Duke University and a residency from Harvard, he believed he understood consciousness and the brain. However, on Nov. 10, 2008, a rare and severe bacterial infection attacked his brain, challenging everything he thought he knew.

He fell into a coma and, seven days later, awakened with a complete physical recovery. Yet, while asleep, his mind was not idle. He recalls that his consciousness had gone to another dimension—a place furnished with clouds, shimmering beings, and ethereal sceneries.

“I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent orbs, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them,” Alexander wrote in his book, “A Proof of Heaven.”

“I witnessed all of that realm in all of its majesty,” Alexander recounted during an interview with The Epoch Times. “Though I didn’t know where I was or even what I was, I was absolutely sure of one thing: This place I’d suddenly found myself in was completely real,” he said.

Similarly, Dr. Sam Parnia, a medical doctor and research scientist, observed that seven percent of resuscitated patients recounted visits to an unearthly dimension during their near-death experience (NDE)—an experience people sometimes have on the precipice of death and may remember after recovery. Further, Dr. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands, reported that 29 percent of people with NDEs describe entering a vast, beautiful realm beyond our physical reality.

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China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth’

Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.

The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.”

The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world’s largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.

The new project, according to lead scientist Long Lehao, the chief designer of China’s Long March rockets, would be “as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”

“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long added during a lecture in October hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as reported by the South China Morning Post. “The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”

Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar power, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations — such as intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground.

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People Are More Physically Active On Days They Use Marijuana, New Federally Funded Study Shows, Smashing ‘Lazy Stoner’ Stereotype

A new federally funded study examining the associations between cannabis use and other health-related behaviors finds that adults are more physically active on days they used marijuana—evidence that contradicts the “lazy stoner” stereotype—although they also drank alcohol more heavily and smoked more cigarettes.

The paper, by a team of ten researchers from across the U.S., was published by the journal Addictive Behaviors late last month. It used data from a four-week nationwide study of 98 adults over the age of 18 that tracked behaviors such as moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) as well as consumption of controlled substances.

Only people who reported marijuana use on at least one of the 28 days were included, allowing the team to assess how past-month cannabis consumers’ use on a particular day was associated with other health behaviors that same day. Participants were asked questions via smartphone-based surveys such as, “In the past 24 h, which of the following have you used?” with regard to substances, and “How many minutes of VIGOROUS leisure time physical activity did you get yesterday?” with examples including running, aerobics and heavy yard work.

Authors—from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences, University of Texas School of Public Health, University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M-Commerce, Louisiana State University Health Science Center, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Colorado Boulder—said the study of is “among the first” to use the real-time tracking data, called ecological momentary assessment (EMA), “to examine associations between cannabis use and same-day MVPA, alcohol consumption, and cigarettes smoked.”

Though the analysis didn’t compare marijuana users to non-users, the team said their findings supported earlier research that found cannabis consumers were more active.

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Dark Energy Doesn’t Exist, Proponents of Controversial New ‘Timescape’ Theory Claim

Groundbreaking new findings are challenging the existence of dark energy, based on research that suggests the uneven structure of the universe could provide an alternate explanation for its accelerating expansion.

A long-hypothesized repulsive force that overcomes gravity and accounts for the increasing rate of expansion of our universe, the mysterious “dark energy” astrophysicists believe to be affecting the universe at the largest scales remains elusive.

Now, a new theory dubbed the “timescape” model presents an alternative: that the observed acceleration of our universe is not the result of an unseen force in the cosmos, but could instead arise from the irregular distribution of matter within it.

The model, developed by a research team at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, challenges long-held assumptions about the supposed invisible force driving the acceleration of cosmic expansion, and could potentially help astronomers resolve several anomalies that have long perplexed cosmologists.

Questioning Dark Energy’s Existence

Although long accepted as a fundamental force behind one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries, dark energy’s existence remains theoretical. The concept of a mysterious invisible force was initially introduced to help account for phenomena that the standard model of physics currently cannot explain.

However, many scientists have acknowledged the persistent inconsistencies the theory presents, which include what astronomers call the “Hubble tension,” where observed predicted rates of cosmic expansion differ from those proposed by models that conform to the standard model.

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Scientists have fiercely debated the existence of ‘Planet 9’ for a decade. Some say evidence is piling up

Our solar system used to have nine planets. Astronomer Mike Brown, also known as “the man who killed Pluto,” said he got hate mail from kids and obscene calls at 3 a.m. for years after his most famous finding helped change that.

Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, discovered another small world called Eris in the Kuiper Belt — a vast ring of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit that also happens to be the former ninth planet’s neighborhood. The 2005 revelation set off a chain of events that led to Pluto’s still-controversial demotion from planet status the following year.

But now, just as the Kuiper Belt effectively took a ninth planet away, Brown and other scientists believe it could give one back.

The belt, which astronomers believe is made of leftovers from the solar system’s formation, extends 50 times farther from the sun than Earth, with a secondary region that reaches beyond it for nearly 20 times that distance. Pluto, now classified as a dwarf planet along with Eris, is just one of the largest among the scores of icy bodies that exist there — and doesn’t dominate its own orbit and clear the orbit of other objects. That’s why it can’t have the same standing as the remaining eight planets, according to guidelines laid out by the International Astronomical Union.

Because objects in the Kuiper Belt are so far away from the sun, however, they are difficult to spot. For more than a decade, astronomers have been searching that area for a hidden planet that has never been observed, but its presence is inferred by the behavior of other nearby objects. It’s often called Planet X or Planet Nine.

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