Scientists cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a new article in Science.

While we may have been spared some of the warming that inevitably results from our reckless C02 emissions, "the heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later," says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the article's lead author.

The researchers warn that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system.

Life and health insurance companies are greedy, for-profit enterprises that do not care about public health, according to Harvard researchers writing in the American Journal of Public Health.

Why such scorn for the insurance industry? The authors of the study found that U.S., Canadian and European-based insurance firms hold at least $1.88 billion of investments in fast-food companies.

Although there is normally nothing wrong with investing in fast food companies, the busy bodies at Harvard are irritated because the health care legislation just enacted in the U.S. essentially guarantees business for these insurance companies, and they are invested in the industry that is supposedly making us unhealthy.

New research conducted by Cardiff University scientists suggests that good parenting is still the best way to prevent teenage smoking.

The three-year-study of 3,500 11 to 15 year-olds found that children whose fathers regularly talk with them about 'things that matter' are less likely to take up smoking during early adolescence.
 
The findings were presented today at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference.

Only children who had never smoked at the time the study began took part. As well as their smoking, children were also asked about the frequency of parental communication, arguments with family members and the frequency of family meals - none which had a significant effect on smoking.

If church attendance is any indication, Americans are as religious as they were 30 years ago. But the makeup of the nation's congregations has undergone significant changes during that same stretch, according to a study published in Sociology of Religion.

The findings challenge the popular notion that church attendance has decreased. Aside from a moderate decline in the 1990s, the study shows that Americans' churchgoing routines have been fairly constant over the decades, at around 23 to 28 services a year.

"There is a small decline in church attendance over time, but not nearly as large as suggested in popular culture, or even by some social scientists," said University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel.

A study published in Environmental Research Letters suggests a link between low solar activity and jet streams could explain why regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might experience more frequent cold winters in years to come.

Scientists say the UK and Europe could experience temperatures not seen since the end of the seventeenth century as a result of the changes in solar activity.

"This year's winter in the UK has been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest," said Lead author Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading. "We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low."

Personalized genetics is hot in the news right now, but in fact we're generally terrible at using genotypes to predict who is going to get a disease. One villain here is the phenomenon known as epistasis, which essentially means that the physiological effect of one genetic variant depends on what other genetic variants (in other genes) are hanging around in the same genome.

Recent comments on a certain article (hey, what does that green button do?) about the future of neural interface technologies have brought up some valid ethical arguments.  Because I didn't want to go Jurassic Park and revel in the possibilities while ignoring the consequences, I thought it a good idea to break down the issues.

CO2 As A Greenhouse Gas


A greenhouse keeps an air volume warm mainly by enclosing it as fixed volume of air.  From that perspective, the term 'greenhouse gas' is a somewhat unfortunate choice of term.  But we seem to be stuck with it.

Obsolete books and web site pages continue to describe the atmosphere in terms of 'well-mixed gases'.  That is counterfactual.  Gases entering the atmosphere from whatever source can take a very long time indeed to become well distributed even even within a single hemisphere.  Or even within a single atmospheric layer.