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Klein slams Al Gore interview on oil sands JIM MACDONALD Canadian Press EDMONTON — Alberta Premier Ralph Klein has criticized former U.S. vice-president Al Gore for comments he made in a magazine interview in which he attacked the massive oil-sands industry in northern Alberta. Mr. Gore told an interviewer in the latest issue of Rolling Stone that oil-sands processing is a huge waste of energy and creates an eyesore on the landscape of Western Canada. “For every barrel of oil they extract there, they have to use enough natural gas to heat a family's home for four days,” Mr. Gore...

See for example this thread first. The Times let itself in for flame When it published that aspartame was involved in a suit but their point, it is moot: There's neither case, lawyers, plaintiff, nor blame!

That the institution of marriage has been on the decline in Europe for quite some time is hardly news. More and more couples choose to live out of wedlock. Assorted factors, from the unique demands of modern living to independent, working women, have been cited to explain away the popularity of what would have been uncommon a generation back. But now, researchers have come up with a new explanation. A recent survey of over 10,000 people across Europe says wedding rings should come with a health warning, especially for women. Apparently, wedlock shortens a woman's life by over a year....

An international group of scientists have filed a "friend of the court" brief with federal Judge John E. Jones III advising him that "the identification of intelligent causes is a well-established scientific practice" and asking him to allow "the freedom of scientists to pursue scientific evidence wherever it may lead." Jones is presiding over the Dover intelligent design trial. The 24-page brief — carrying the names of 85 scientists in fields including chemistry, molecular biology, mathematics, neurological surgery and environmental science — states "the definition of science and the boundaries of science should be left to scientists to debate." "Any...

Millions 'wasted' planting trees that reduce water By Charles Clover, Environment Editor (Filed: 29/07/2005) Millions of pounds in overseas aid are wasted every year planting trees in dry countries in the belief that they help attract rainfall and act as storage for water, scientists said yesterday. In fact, forests usually increase evaporation and help to reduce the amount of water available for human consumption or growing crops, according to a four-year study. Research on water catchments on three continents says it is "a myth" that trees always increase the availability of water. Even the cloud forests of tropical Costa Rica...

CHICAGO (AP) -- New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow. The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked. Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent. That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in...

CHICAGO - It's no secret that size matters in the National Football League, but a new study suggests that a whopping 56 percent of NFL players would be considered obese by some medical standards. The NFL called the study bogus for using players' body-mass index, a height-to-weight ratio that doesn't consider body muscle versus fat. The players' union said that despite the familiar sight of bulging football jerseys, there's no proof that obesity is rampant in the league.

Andrew Wakefield prize for preposterous extrapolation from a single unconvincing piece of scientific data With its place at the kernel of Bad Science reporting in the news media, this was bound to be a hotly contested category. Were there any sense in the world, a small army of media studies graduates would be carefully documenting the number of "science" or "health" stories that related to genuine published data rather than overheard rumour, and diligently measuring how closely these stories kept to the facts. In the absence of such quantitative academic work, it was sadly left to our panel to select...

Global warming hitting home Inland cities will adjust more easily, but deaths will rise, study says By Edie Lau -- Bee Science Writer Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, September 14, 2004 People accustomed to scorching summer days in Sacramento, Fresno and other inland cities will endure the heat of global warming better than those who live on the coast, a projection on the health effects of climate change in California suggests. But being used to hot weather can go only so far. Scenarios released Monday by an environmental advocacy group show that heat-related deaths in Sacramento could double, triple or...

Russia Puts Global Climate Pact in Doubt MOSCOW - A senior adviser to President Vladimir Putin outlined strong reservations Tuesday about ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, saying the pact to limit greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficiently grounded in science and would harm Russia's economic growth. Although Putin's economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, stopped short of ruling out Russia's ratification of the protocol, which is necessary for it to take effect, his strong criticism of the agreement appeared to leave little hope for approval of the document. Illarionov, an influential adviser, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. World Climate...

Not everyone was surprised this past weekend when Dr. George A. Ricaurte of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a retraction in the journal Science of an earlier paper asserting that MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy, negatively affected dopamine function in two species of nonhuman primates. Writing with four other authors, including his wife, Una D. McCann, Ricaurte admitted that “the drug used to treat all but one animal . . . came from a bottle that contained d-methamphetamine [a known dopamine toxin] instead of the intended drug, racemic MDMA.” Ricaurte et al. blamed the lab for mislabeling the two...

ITHACA -- A Cornell University professor has published a study he says cements his assertion that ethanol is a less efficient, more environmentally harmful fuel than gasoline. David Pimentel, an emeritus professor of ecology, has been studying ethanol for about 25 years, leading a Department of Energy study on the subject in 1980. Ethanol is a corn byproduct that is combined with gasoline to make gasohol, a gasoline substitute that proponents claim lowers pollution and eases demand for foreign oil. Because corn production uses more pesticides than any other field crop, and because millions of dollars in government subsidies are...

This week, scientists claimed that chimps are so close to mankind that they should be reclassified as practically human. So should they have the same rights as us? Tim Radford reports on a debate that could help save them from extinction, while Stephen Moss visits them in 'person' at London Zoo Chimps have language. They can, and do, communicate with humans. There is a linguist chimp called Nim Chimpsky with a vocabulary of 125 signs, all used correctly. Chimps can solve problems, use tools and when they lose their teeth, even improvise a makeshift food blender. Two observers have now...

Who Killed Kyoto? by Iain Murray [ 20/05/2003 ] TCS We've heard it now for so long that it's drummed into our heads. President George W. Bush soured relations with the E.U. by refusing to accept the Kyoto Protocol. In doing so, he took the U.S. into unilateralism and demonstrated his disdain for world opinion. That's what is at the root of the current divide between Europe and America. We're hearing that argument trotted out by various contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, most notably Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. The trouble is, it just isn't true. The Kyoto...

Chimpanzees are more closely related to people than to gorillas or other monkeys and probably should be included in the human branch of the family tree, a research team says. The idea, sure to spark renewed debate about evolution and the relationship between humans and animals, comes from a team led by Morris Goodman at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. CURRENTLY, HUMANS are alone in the genus Homo. But Goodman argues, “We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes.” He says humans and chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA, the molecule that codes for life.

A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species

THE world’s deserts are blooming again because of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, according to Israeli scientists. Instead of global warming causing desertification, the researchers found that it is leading to the greening of deserts as the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere help plants to flourish. Vegetation creeping back into arid lands could be soaking up billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that goes “missing” from the atmosphere. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, studied the Yatir Forest, which was planted on the edge of the Negev desert 35 years ago. Their research,...

HARTFORD, Conn. - Angering both sides of the abortion debate, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a fetus is a body part, akin to teeth, skin and hair that are eventually shed. The ruling unanimously upheld the conviction of a man who tried to induce a miscarriage by slipping his girlfriend labor-inducing drugs. Edwin Sandoval argued he could not be charged with attempting to commit aggravated assault because the fetus was the target, not the mother.

POLE POSITION: Gary Hererra, a "pond jumper" at Pacific Lumber Co.'s mill in Scotia, pushes logs through a water canal in this photo from 1999. A judge has ordered the company to temporarily halt its logging operation. Without a court-ordered stay, Judge John Golden said logging that could hurt timberlands and wildlife would continue. August 31, 2002 — 2:13 a.m. SACRAMENTO (AP) — Environmental groups on Friday hailed a Humboldt County Superior Court judge's unexpected ruling ordering a temporary halt to logging by Pacific Lumber Co. The company, however, believes the order will have no immediate impact, particularly if...

<p>For the first Earth Day in 1970, overpopulation guru Paul Ehrlich wrote a fictitious report for the Progressive presenting an eco-gloomster's portrait of the U.S. in 2000. The population had fallen to 22.6 million, 8% of the current population, and the diet was less than the daily calorific intake of an African. By 1974, Mr. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, worried that "global cooling" would diminish agricultural output -- that the world was becoming unsustainable.</p>