The group known as Islamic State (IS) reportedly used a sulpur-mustard gas against US troops in Iraq.

In nuclear reactors, energetic neutrons slam into metal atoms that are ordered in a lattice, displacing them with enough force to trigger a cascade of collisions. Laurent Béland,Yuri Osetsky and Roger Stoller, of the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution Energy Frontier Research Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled radiation damage and discovered that the number of defects ultimately created in a material correlates with atomic displacements that high-pressure shock waves generate early in the collision cascade.

Researchers produced the first molecular map of the genes that are active in the various cells of the human pancreas. They have also revealed differences in genetic activity between people with type 2 diabetes and healthy controls. 

So now we know what the news is, as expected, Hubble has found new evidence of possible plume activity on Europa. In a series of ten observations, they saw them on three occasions. Here are the images they created.

The possible plumes are in the seven o'clock position, not far from the South pole - though the central image here has another possible plume that's close to the equator.

Interestingly, they spotted them in the same position as the previous plume detection in 2012:

For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t, and one popular notion was that methane, with 23-34 times (yes, it is unclear) the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially. 

Environmentalists today are in a panic about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today—too weak to warm the planet on its own. Earth required a potent mix of heat-trapping gases to keep the oceans liquid and livable.

Jeremy Corbyn has recently been re-elected to leader of the labour party in the UK with an even stronger mandate than before of 62% of the vote, as many of you will know. This opens up the possibility of a future prime minister of the UK who has said that he will never authorize use of nuclear weapons to kill civilians. So is he right to say this? Well yes I’d say he is right. For my whole life ever since I understood what it meant, since the 1960s, I’ve been against the bomb and in favour of unilateral disarmament by the UK. The situation is more complex for the US and if I was in the US I don't know what I'd say.

Postglacial rebound, uplift in Greenland blamed on global warming, has actually made it harder to measure ice loss due to global warming, according to a new paper in Science Advances.

Yesterday I read with interest and curiosity some pages of a book on the search and discovery of the Higgs boson, which was published last March by Rizzoli (in Italian only, at least for the time being). The book, authored by physics professor and ex CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli, is titled "La nascita imperfetta delle cose" ("The imperfect birth of things"). 

The third non-browning Arctic apple variety - yes, using science - the Arctic Fuji, has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS). Science has shown they are the same as conventional apples, they just won't brown as much, so all of those organic food people will have a lot less food waste.

Except organic food shoppers will never buy these, because they love food waste and environmental strain if it means getting to hate science again.

In 2012's "Science Left Behind" I noted something that was perfectly obvious to anyone who was not in a progressive ideological bunker - that while both the American left and right were each anti-science about some things, only the right wing got any science media attention about it. And that was despite the fact that the left's anti-science beliefs are far more dangerous.