It is now generally admitted that the BICEP2 Collaboration has not yet produced an evidence for the existence of primordial B-modes in the measured polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Contrary to the claim contained in the initial  (March 2014) version of their article arXiv:1403.3985v1 and to the strong media coverage that followed this announcement, the Physical Review Letters 112, 241101 version (June 2014) explicitly recognizes that the experimental and phenomenological situation is not so simple.

It sounds like it should be easy enough to know if ice is growing or retreating, but it really isn't.  Antarctic sea ice has been expanding, we are told, while Arctic sea ice is retreating, both at dramatic rates.

How accurate is satellite data? Processing errors can be a problem, but they are more heavily scrutinized whenever a study finds that sea ice anywhere is increasing. A paper in The Cryosphere tackles the satellite data problem, for the increase measured in Southern Hemisphere sea ice.

A vacuum - empty space - is not as empty as one might think. In fact, empty space is a bubbling soup of various virtual particles popping in and out of existence – a phenomenon called "vacuum fluctuations". Usually, such extremely short-lived particles remain completely unnoticed, but in certain cases vacuum forces can have a measurable effect.

A team of researchers have proposed a method of amplifying these forces by several orders of magnitude using a transmission line, channeling virtual photons.

"Borrowing" Energy, but just for a Little While

In the 1990s, it was claimed that minorities were less likely to get home mortgages 30 years after anti-discrimination laws were added to specify housing, so policies were instituted requiring justification when people were denied a home loan. As a result of widespread loan liberalization, everyone was able to get loans and there was a resulting mortgage loan crisis after the core of the system was revealed as flawed.

At various times, Alan Turing was hailed as a brilliant cryptologist, leading a team of code breakers at Bletchley Park which cracked the German Enigma machine cypher during World War II, and then later as a gay martyr. Now, due to popular media accounts of computers seeming 'human' over and over, he is known for The Turing Test and is getting a biopic, "The Imitation Game", starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role.

In a 1950, Turing propose The Turing Test, where he outlined a standard for a computer being considered human and proposed that the solution to artificial intelligence would be a program with the mind of a child and teach it to think.  So the goal of the test is not to determine if a machine is correct, but whether or not it is considered real.

Many new particles and other new physics signals claimed in the last twenty years were later proven to be spurious effects, due to background fluctuations or unknown sources of systematic error. The list is long, unfortunately - and longer than the list of particles and effects that were confirmed to be true by subsequent more detailed or more statistically-rich analysis.

Kepler-421b
has been revealed as a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year - 704 days. For comparison, Mars orbits our Sun once every 780 days.

 The farther a planet is from its star, the less likely it is to transit the star from Earth's point of view. It has to line up just right, and most of the 1,800-plus exoplanets discovered so far are much closer to their stars and have much shorter orbital periods. The host star, Kepler-421, is located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra. 

Easy metrics like 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' or 'it takes 140 liters of water to make a cup of coffee' get mainstream media because they are outrageous. They are outrageous because they are completely wrong.

What is the 'real' cost of eating beef? Are the other animal or animal-derived foods better or worse?

Mammoths and mastodons, the famously fuzzy relatives of elephants that lived in the American midwest, weren't as nomadic as previously believed – or Cincinnati was just a great place to be at the end of the last ice age. A study led by Brooke Crowley, an assistant professor of geology and anthropology at the University of  Cincinnati, shows the ancient proboscideans enjoyed the area so much they likely were year-round residents and not nomadic migrants as previously thought. 

They even had their own preferred hangouts. Crowley's findings indicate each species kept to separate areas based on availability of favored foods here at the southern edge of the Last Glacial Maximum's major ice sheet.

Statistical analysis of average global temperatures between 1998 and 2013 shows that the slowdown in global warming during this period is consistent with natural variations in temperature, according to research by McGill University physics professor Shaun Lovejoy.

In a new paper, Lovejoy concludes that a natural cooling fluctuation during this period largely masked the warming effects of a continued increase in man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.