In a Twitter age, one where mainstream media desperately needs to keep people watching and reading, every event is magnified. A tropical storm that hit New York City was transformed into a Superstorm and a drought in the West is a harbinger of global warming that will crack the planet.

Star Wars Day is May 4th so you are probably wondering how you would build deflector shields in case the US government is worried about turtles on its former nuclear testing grounds and thinks your cows will harm the ecosystem and sends a Death Star after you.

You're in luck; not only are they scientifically feasible, the principle behind them is already used here on Earth.

If you're too young to have seen the original, and missed the flawed prequels, you needn't feel left out - in almost every science-fiction scenario, spaceships are protected by a shield defense system that deflects enemy laser fire. 

One of the most powerful events in our universe – Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) – behave differently than previously thought, and this evidence from observation of a GRB rules out most of the existing hypothetical predictions concerning the afterglow of the explosions.

Parents are always worried about their special snowflakes - unless a phone call needs to be  made. Then, parents are no less likely to engage in cell phone and other distracting behavior than the general public, according to a new paper in Academic Pediatrics.

The use of lamps that emit UV radiation in nail salons has raised some concern about the risk of cancer, but previous studies have lacked a large enough sampling of lights from a variety of salons.

To create a more authoritative sample, the authors of a new study tested 17 light units from 16 salons with a wide range of bulbs, wattage and irradiance emitted by each device for their research letter.

Higher-wattage light sources were correlated with higher UV-A irradiance emitted.

University of California, Berkeley, geologist William Dietrich pioneered the application of airborne LIDAR, light detection and ranging, to map mountainous terrain, stripping away the vegetation to see the underlying ground surface - but he still couldn't see what was under the surface: the depth of the soil, the underlying weathered rock and the deep bedrock.

He and geology graduate student Daniella Rempe have now proposed a method to determine these underground details without drilling, potentially providing a more precise way to predict water runoff, the moisture available to plants, landslides and how these will respond to climate change.

Over 60 years of data collected across 8 states by citizen scientists may demonstrate their potential to contribute to monitoring long-term lake water trends over a large area, according to results published April 30, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Noah Lottig from University of Wisconsin and colleagues.

A good guitar player tunes their guitar by putting a tuning fork in their mouth and matching the vibrations. They made need it when they are older.

A new paper in Occupational & Environmental Medicine finds that professional musicians are almost four times as likely to develop noise induced hearing loss as the general public, and they are 57% more likely to develop tinnitus - incessant ringing in the ears - as a result of their job.

In light of recent results from the "world's longest experiment", spanning more than 90 years, at the University of Queensland, a group of researchers from Trinity College Dublin explain the background behind their own pitch-drop experiment in this month's Physics World and offer an explanation as to why their research hit the headlines in 2013.

MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance

As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft wreck at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal my bogusness meter went off the scale.  A whois search shows the company is registered to a small private residence.   The company claims to have identified an underwater object using multispectral images.

Quoted words below are from the Georesonance Pty. Ltd. press release posted by Air Traffic Management.net.


Nonsense on stilts