Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about how the world was taken in by the climate madness of a pseudo-scientific doomsday cult, writes Princeton physicist Professor William Happer.
The post The Climate Cult appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Photosynthesis does not always result in wood growth, a key factor in carbon dioxide sequestration
Trees may not be able to store as much planet-heating carbon as hoped, a study suggests, with researchers finding photosynthesis does not always lead to wood growth.
Scientists studied 137 sites across the US and found trees stopped growing months before the point in the year at which photosynthesis stopped.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Drbouz/Getty Images
© Photograph: Drbouz/Getty Images
© Photograph: Drbouz/Getty Images
As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into the workplace, many employees worry that machines could replace them. Workplace experts say that fear is understandable. But they also say humans still have skills that AI cannot easily match. Those strengths include empathy, relationship-building, critical thinking, ethical judgment, and the ability to make decisions in uncertain situations.
Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, said the skills most resistant to AI are the ones most closely tied to human behavior.
Those include building trust, resolving conflict, motivating others, and making ethical decisions, she said. Flynn’s organization calls them “durable skills” because they keep their value through economic shifts, new technology, and labor market disruption.
Employers are looking for these skills in many fields, including technical roles such as IT support, Flynn said. They want workers who can communicate clearly, take initiative, and lead when needed.
Empathy remains one of the clearest examples. Humans can read tone, body language, and emotion in ways AI still struggles to understand. Those skills matter in jobs that depend on care, trust, and sensitivity.
Marco Iansiti, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said he saw that during a hospital stay. Nurses, he said, offered more than routine care. They gave comfort, built trust, and created a human connection.
As AI changes the workplace, experts say the most valuable skills may still be the most human ones.
Empathy, critical thinking, relationship-building and ethical judgment could help workers stay relevant as companies adopt more AI tools. pic.twitter.com/dhcZ1RcmPA
— Tom Marvolo Riddle (@tom_riddle2025) June 12, 2026
AI may still help in hospitals, he said. It can take over paperwork and other routine tasks. That could give nurses more time to focus on patients.
Relationships also remain difficult to automate. Salespeople, managers, and client-facing workers often rely on years of trust and personal knowledge. A client who has worked with the same person for years may not transfer that trust to an AI system, Iansiti said.
Human connection also matters when conflict arises. Flynn said people are still needed to manage expectations, calm tensions, and help teams move forward.
Colleen Adler, a director analyst in Gartner’s human resources practice, said managers and co-workers still shape how employees feel at work. AI may assist with tasks, but it does not yet match the tone of human connection, she said.
Critical thinking is another skill gaining importance. AI systems can produce quick answers, but they can also make mistakes.
Amalia Kaufman, a course developer and instructor at the University of California, Irvine Division of Continuing Education, said workers need subject knowledge to judge AI output. They must know when information is wrong and check facts before using it.
A study published in Science also found that AI chatbots were more likely than humans to flatter users and validate their feelings. That makes human judgment even more important.
Experts say ethical judgment may be harder for AI to copy. Iansiti said AI can appear to understand conscience because it has read about ethics. But it lacks emotion, lived experience, or responsibility.
That matters in high-stakes decisions, including hiring or the use of military force. Guardrails can help guide AI systems, Iansiti said, but human oversight remains necessary.
AI can process large amounts of data. But experts say people still bring context, experience, and judgment to gray areas where there is no clear answer.
As AI changes work, Flynn said, employees should be able to identify and explain the human skills they bring. Those skills may help workers remain valuable in a future shaped by machines.
Technique that examines fragments of foetal DNA in mother’s bloodstream could limit need for invasive screening, according to researchers
A new maternal blood test that can detect thousands of serious genetic conditions in the developing foetus could limit the need for invasive screening during pregnancy, according to scientists.
The test, to be described at the European Society for Human Genetics conference in Gothenburg on Saturday, relies on detecting tiny fragments of a foetus’s DNA that circulate in the mother’s bloodstream during pregnancy. Using advanced sequencing techniques, scientists were able to identify a very high proportion of genetic conditions, such as cystic fibrosis, that are currently only reliably diagnosed using amniocentesis or other invasive tests.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Teresa Crawford/AP
© Photograph: Teresa Crawford/AP
© Photograph: Teresa Crawford/AP
Ancient Greeks made some of the most impressive astronomical discoveries in history, including Eratosthenes’ calculation of the circumference of the Earth.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that we managed to launch satellites into space and determine the exact kilometers of the circumference of the Earth: 40,030.2 kilometers.
But how, then, could the ancient Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes, manage to find pretty much the exact same number without having any pictures of Earth from space or even proper measuring tools?
Amazingly, Eratosthenes didn’t have much more than a stick and his brain when he made the amazing discovery.
Born in Cyrene, an ancient Greek colony in modern-day Libya in 276 BC, Eratosthenes was a polymath, meaning that he had vast knowledge of many different subjects, including mathematics, astronomy, music theory, and poetry.
Over two thousand years ago, Eratosthenes heard that in Syene, a town south of Alexandria in Egypt, no vertical shadows were cast at noon on the summer solstice, as the sun was directly overhead.
The Greek mathematician wondered if this was the case in Alexandria, too, a few hundreds of miles to the north of Syene.
He decided to conduct an experiment. On June 21st, he went to Alexandria and put a stick directly in the ground and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon.
It turns out there was one, and he tried to measure it. The shadow cast measured to about seven degrees.
After conducting the experiment, Eratosthenes came to a very logical conclusion that if the sun’s rays are coming in at the same angle at the same time of day and a stick in Alexandria casts a shadow of seven degrees while the stick in Syene does not cast a shadow at all, it must mean that the Earth’s surface is curved.
Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, author, and science communicator was renowned for making difficult scientific concepts understandable to the millions; he did exactly this at the beginning of his renowned series Cosmos by explaining the thought process of Eratosthenes.
The idea of a spherical Earth was already known by Pythagoras around 500 BC and validated by Aristotle a few centuries later.
If the Ancient Greeks before him were right, and the Earth was a sphere, Eratosthenes could use his observations to calculate the circumference of our planet.
After hiring a man to pace the distance between Syene and Alexandria, he found out that the two cities were five thousand stadia apart, which is about eight hundred kilometers.
He could then use simple proportions to find the Earth’s circumference—7.2 degrees is 1/50 of 360 degrees, so 800 times 50 equals 40,000 kilometers.
And just like that, an ancient Greek calculated precisely the circumference of our entire planet with just a stick and his brain over two thousand years ago.
Eratosthenes accomplished many feats throughout his life, including the creation of a chronology of Greek history, an algorithm to find every prime number, and the first global projection of the Earth.
Ancient Greeks made some of the most impressive astronomical discoveries in history, including Eratosthenes’ calculation of the circumference of the Earth.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that we managed to launch satellites into space and determine the exact kilometers of the circumference of the Earth: 40,030.2 kilometers.
But how, then, could the ancient Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes, manage to find pretty much the exact same number without having any pictures of Earth from space or even proper measuring tools?
Amazingly, Eratosthenes didn’t have much more than a stick and his brain when he made the amazing discovery.
Born in Cyrene, an ancient Greek colony in modern-day Libya in 276 BC, Eratosthenes was a polymath, meaning that he had vast knowledge of many different subjects, including mathematics, astronomy, music theory, and poetry.
Over two thousand years ago, Eratosthenes heard that in Syene, a town south of Alexandria in Egypt, no vertical shadows were cast at noon on the summer solstice, as the sun was directly overhead.
The Greek mathematician wondered if this was the case in Alexandria, too, a few hundreds of miles to the north of Syene.
He decided to conduct an experiment. On June 21st, he went to Alexandria and put a stick directly in the ground and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon.
It turns out there was one, and he tried to measure it. The shadow cast measured to about seven degrees.
After conducting the experiment, Eratosthenes came to a very logical conclusion that if the sun’s rays are coming in at the same angle at the same time of day and a stick in Alexandria casts a shadow of seven degrees while the stick in Syene does not cast a shadow at all, it must mean that the Earth’s surface is curved.
Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, author, and science communicator was renowned for making difficult scientific concepts understandable to the millions; he did exactly this at the beginning of his renowned series Cosmos by explaining the thought process of Eratosthenes.
The idea of a spherical Earth was already known by Pythagoras around 500 BC and validated by Aristotle a few centuries later.
If the Ancient Greeks before him were right, and the Earth was a sphere, Eratosthenes could use his observations to calculate the circumference of our planet.
After hiring a man to pace the distance between Syene and Alexandria, he found out that the two cities were five thousand stadia apart, which is about eight hundred kilometers.
He could then use simple proportions to find the Earth’s circumference—7.2 degrees is 1/50 of 360 degrees, so 800 times 50 equals 40,000 kilometers.
And just like that, an ancient Greek calculated precisely the circumference of our entire planet with just a stick and his brain over two thousand years ago.
Eratosthenes accomplished many feats throughout his life, including the creation of a chronology of Greek history, an algorithm to find every prime number, and the first global projection of the Earth.
© Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
Exclusive A vast area of the Bellingshausen Sea should be covered by sea ice by now, with one expert calling the loss of ice ‘depressing’
Antarctica’s west coast is missing an area of winter sea ice the size of France, sparking concerns for threatened penguins other marine life and global sea levels.
One expert said the loss of ice in the Bellingshausen Sea was “depressing” and the failure of ice to form could have intensified a heatwave over the continent’s peninsula last week that saw daytime temperatures peak at 15.4C which is more than 20C above average.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute
© Photograph: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute
© Photograph: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute
Former defence secretary’s accusation, that PM lacks impetus and is easily swayed by chancellor’s demands, is familiar territory
One of the most scathing accusations made by John Healey in his resignation letter on Thursday was that the prime minister lacks the authority to stand up to his chancellor.
“You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats,” the former defence secretary wrote.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
Desperate US parents pay up to $20,000 a session for a procedure scientists say could be bogus
Autistic children as young as 18 months old are being injected with human stem cells derived from umbilical cords in unapproved, unproven and potentially harmful “treatments” that scientists warn are proliferating across the US under the active encouragement of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Clinics in Florida, Texas and other states are selling what they bill as “regenerative medicine” to families with autistic children who have intensive care needs. Parents who have taken their children through the process talked to the Guardian about their hopes and fears for a therapy that appears to be gaining ground in the US.
Continue reading...
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images/Alamy
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images/Alamy
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images/Alamy
Just who does Financial Times journalist Pilita Clark think she is, encouraging parents to ensure their children are sufficiently alarmed about the climate, asks Tilak Doshi. How far the pink paper has fallen.
The post Why is the Financial Times Encouraging Parents to Make Their Children Anxious About Climate Change? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Doctors say therapy that genetically modifies person’s T-cells could offer cure for chronic autoimmune disease
Five lupus patients in England are in remission after being treated with a revolutionary therapy that genetically modifies their own cells, in a medical breakthrough that could offer people a cure, doctors have said.
CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy involves removing a type of white blood cell also called T lymphocytes, which are crucial for hunting out infected or damaged cells, and engineering them to spot and destroy disease. The T-cells are then fed back into the patient via an infusion to reset their immune system.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Lucy North/PA
© Photograph: Lucy North/PA
© Photograph: Lucy North/PA
Login