Tag: science

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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Who Is Wei Cai, German Public Health’s ‘Hidden’ Scientist from Wuhan?

So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicised press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.

As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.

Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.

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Team presents first demonstration of quantum teleportation over busy internet cables

Northwestern University engineers are the first to successfully demonstrate quantum teleportation over a fiberoptic cable already carrying internet traffic.

The discovery introduces the new possibility of combining quantum communication with existing internet cables—greatly simplifying the infrastructure required for distributed quantum sensing or computing applications.

The study is published on the arXiv preprint server and is due to appear in the journal Optica.

“This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible,” said Northwestern’s Prem Kumar, who led the study. “Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiberoptic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level.”

An expert in quantum communication, Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.

Only limited by the speed of light, quantum teleportation could make communications nearly instantaneous. The process works by harnessing quantum entanglement, a technique in which two particles are linked, regardless of the distance between them. Instead of particles physically traveling to deliver information, entangled particles exchange information over great distances—without physically carrying it.

“In optical communications, all signals are converted to light,” Kumar explained. “While conventional signals for classical communications typically comprise millions of particles of light, quantum information uses single photons.”

Before Kumar’s new study, conventional wisdom suggested that individual photons would drown in cables filled with the millions of light particles carrying classical communications. It would be like a flimsy bicycle trying to navigate through a crowded tunnel of speeding heavy-duty trucks.

Kumar and his team, however, found a way to help the delicate photons steer clear of the busy traffic. After conducting in-depth studies of how light scatters within fiberoptic cables, the researchers found a less crowded wavelength of light to place their photons. Then, they added special filters to reduce noise from regular internet traffic.

“We carefully studied how light is scattered and placed our photons at a judicial point where that scattering mechanism is minimized,” Kumar said. “We found we could perform quantum communication without interference from the classical channels that are simultaneously present.”

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Physicists Baffled by Odd Quasiparticle That Seems to Have No Mass—Until It Changes Direction

Scientists report the first known observation of a variety of quasiparticle that exhibits a very peculiar behavior: it appears to have mass, but only while moving in one direction.

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University recently succeeded in detecting the unusual quasiparticle while conducting studies involving a semi-metallic crystalline material. Known as a semi-Dirac fermion, this unique formation of particles was first theorized more than a decade ago, but until now had never been directly observed.

The discovery potentially paves the way toward future advances in a range of emerging technologies that include power storage and novel forms of sensor technologies.

Detecting a Novel Quasiparticle

Quasiparticles are small collections of particles that normally appear within crystal lattices or under other special conditions, which generally possess both momentum and position, and under certain conditions may also be considered particles.

Discovering a novel quasiparticle like a semi-Dirac fermion had not been something Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author of a new paper revealing the discovery, had anticipated when he and his colleagues began experimenting with ZrSiS, a semi-metal crystal material that became the focus of their efforts.

“We weren’t even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn’t understand—and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none.”

Particles Without Mass

More than a century ago, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that anything moving at the speed of light will have no mass. Because of this, physicists already recognize that a particle can essentially be massless under certain circumstances, namely when its energy comes entirely from its motion. Under such conditions, particles are recognized as manifestations of energy moving at the speed of light, such as in the case of photons.

However, quasiparticles moving through solid materials like crystalline structures can sometimes behave differently. In the observations of the Penn State research team, this apparently resulted in the appearance of particles that have mass in only one direction.

Beginning in 2008, it was initially predicted that mass-shifting properties might be observed in certain kinds of quasiparticles, which provided the theoretical framework for semi-Dirac fermions. Based on these initial predictions by scientists with the University of California, Davis and Université Paris Sud in France, such quasiparticles would seemingly be massless when moving in one direction but would almost paradoxically appear to possess mass when moving in another direction.

Shao and the Penn State team happened upon the discovery of such bizarre quasiparticle behavior while utilizing what is known as magneto-optical spectroscopy, which allows researchers to observe infrared light reflected off materials that are placed under the influence of strong magnetic fields.

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