The ideas come crowding in: Deep within the Earth's crust is a vast ecosystem of primitive bacteria nurtured by a reservoir of hydrocarbons of unimaginable size, much of it untapped. Even more: The microbes predate all of the planet's other life forms, existing even before photosynthesis became the preferred life-giving form.

In a new book, The Deep Hot Biosphere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, $27), Cornell professor emeritus of astronomy Thomas Gold argues that subterranean bugs are us -- or at least they started the whole evolutionary process, and that there's no looming energy shortage because oil reserves are far greater than predicted.

In the hands of anyone other than Gold, the reaction to all this might be a skeptical raised eyebrow. But Gold, as ever the Cornellian gadfly, makes his argument with erudition and conviction. Founder and director of Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research for two decades, Gold is hardly a stranger to sticking his neck out. He has been proven right in such diverse realms as a theory of hearing, the interpretation of pulsars and a theory of the Earth's axis of rotation.

But Gold's most controversial idea, as physicist Freeman Dyson notes in the book's forward, is that of the nonbiological origin of natural gas and oil, which he first proposed more than 20 years ago. These hydrocarbons, Gold postulated, come from deep reservoirs and are composed of the material from which the Earth condensed. The idea that hydrocarbons coalesced from organic material is, he says, quite wrong. The biological molecules found in oil, he avers, show only that the oil is contaminated by microbes, not that it was produced by them.

NEVER trust the textbooks, even the ones written by great scientists. In his celebrated 1972 tome Gravitation and Cosmology, Nobel prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg called the existence of black holes "very hypothetical", writing that "there is no [black hole] in the gravitational field of any known object of the universe". He was dead wrong. Radio astronomers had already been detecting signals from matter falling into black holes for decades without realising. Today we have lots of evidence that the sky is teeming with them.

The story may now be repeating itself with white holes, which are essentially black holes in reverse. In another renowned textbook, the world-leading relativity theorist Bob Wald wrote that "there is no reason to believe that any region of the universe corresponds to" a white hole - and this is still the dominant opinion today. But several research groups around the world, including my group in Marseille, have recently begun to investigate the possibility that quantum mechanics could open a channel for these white holes to form. The sky might be teeming with white holes, too.

The reason to suspect white holes exist is that they could solve an open mystery: what goes on at the centre of a black hole. We see great amounts of matter spiralling around black holes and then falling in. All this falling matter crosses the surface of the hole, the "horizon" or point of no return, plummets towards the centre, and then? Nobody knows.

'If solar geoengineering is as good as what is shown in these models, it would be crazy not to take it seriously'

Scientists plan to mimic the effects of a massive volcanic eruption in a bid to tackle global warming.

Plans to geoengineer the atmosphere by blocking out sunlight have been floated before, but an experiment launched next year by Harvard researchers will be the first to test the theory in the stratosphere.

The team will use a balloon suspended 12 miles above Earth to spray tiny chalk particles across a kilometre-long area, with the intention of reflecting the Sun's rays away from the planet.

In doing so, they will attempt to replicate on a small scale the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

During this event, the volcano spewed 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, creating a haze that cooled the planet by 0.5C for around 18 months - returning the Earth to its pre-industrial temperature.

The scientists argue that replicating this effect on a large scale could provide the planet with respite from global warming, stopping sea ice from melting and protecting coral from bleaching.


As efforts to tackle climate change appear ever more desperate, geoengineering has emerged as an increasingly appealing prospect - albeit a controversial one that has drawn criticism from scientists and environmentalists.

Some have suggested that solar geoengineering could have profound complications, for example wiping out crops, while others argue it distracts attention from cutting fossil fuel emissions.

It takes two people to make a baby. But to prevent pregnancy, the burden has almost always fallen on the woman.

A new method being tested at the University of Washington aims to change that.

The UW School of Medicine is one of three sites testing a contraceptive gel for men, which works by reducing sperm production when applied daily on the upper arms or shoulders, according to researchers. If the trials are successful, the substance may soon be available to people seeking to avoid unplanned pregnancies whose options traditionally have relied on more than a dozen options for women, including pills, implants, shots, patches and rings, compared with just condoms for men.

"We are neglecting 50 percent of the population with our current methods," Dr. Stephanie Page, a UW School of Medicine endocrinologist and the study's principal investigator, said in a phone interview. "There's every reason for men to be more engaged."

We've reported on Earth's magnetic field before, including studies claiming that the planet's poles may reverse at any time and studies saying that Earth is probably not headed for a polar reversal at all. At the heart of these studies is the undeniable, millennia-old weakening trend in the planet's magnetic field, which, depending on your point of view, is either a temporary phenomenon that will eventually reverse itself (as it has in the past), or the harbinger of a cataclysmic breakdown of the Earth's entire magnetic shield and a subsequent flip of the magnetic poles.

The most recent study from the EDIFICE project, a geophysical research initiative based in France, claims we're headed for a cataclysm. According to Dr. Nicolas Thouveny, one of the principal investigators for EDIFICE: "The geomagnetic field has been decaying for the last 3,000 years. If it continues to fall down at this rate, in less than one millennium we will be in a critical (period)."

In my medical research into the infectious cause and origin of cancer, I never imagined I would become enmeshed in the strange world of Wilhelm Reich. For two decades I had studied the work of scientists linking bacteria to cancer, but never once did I come across Reich's important experiments with the deadly "T-bacilli" that he discovered in cancer.

I first learned about Reich in 1982 from Lorraine Rosenthal who heads the Cancer Control Society in Los Angeles. Her mother worked in his laboratory in the 1950s, and Lorraine was sure his cancer work was related to my cancer microbe research. She recommended I read Reich's two most revolutionary books: The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life (1938) and The Cancer Biopathy (1948). These two volumes provide valuable and fascinating insights into the origin of the cancer cell and his discovery of cancer "T" bacteria.

Lawrence - About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

The effects of such a supernova - and possibly more than one - on large ocean life are detailed in a paper just published in Astrobiology.

"I've been doing research like this for about 15 years, and always in the past it's been based on what we know generally about the universe - that these supernovae should have affected Earth at some time or another," said lead author Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. "This time, it's different. We have evidence of nearby events at a specific time. We know about how far away they were, so we can actually compute how that would have affected the Earth and compare it to what we know about what happened at that time - it's much more specific."

Melott said recent papers revealing ancient seabed deposits of iron-60 isotopes provided the "slam-dunk" evidence of the timing and distance of supernovae.

"As far back as the mid-1990s, people said, 'Hey, look for iron-60. It's a telltale because there's no other way for it to get to Earth but from a supernova.' Because iron-60 is radioactive, if it was formed with the Earth it would be long gone by now. So, it had to have been rained down on us. There's some debate about whether there was only one supernova really nearby or a whole chain of them. I kind of favor a combo of the two - a big chain with one that was unusually powerful and close. If you look at iron-60 residue, there's a huge spike 2.6 million years ago, but there's excess scattered clear back 10 million years."

Melott's co-authors were Franciole Marinho of Universidade Federal de São Carlos in Brazil and Laura Paulucci of Universidade Federal do ABC, also in Brazil.

During a seven-hour spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts have ripped off sections of the Soyuz spacecraft insulation to locate and take samples from a small hole that caused an air leak from the International Space Station in August.

Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Oleg Kononenko performed the one-of-a-kind seven-hour spacewalk to unseal the thermal lining covering the hole that appeared on Soyuz MS-09. It was patched-up by a Russian crew using a sealant repair kit back in August.

"Slashing the spacecraft with a knife makes my heart bleed," Kononenko told the Mission Control Center (MCC) as he cut through the insulation layer to find a tiny hole behind the cover. "Yes, we also observe it [the hole]," an MCC officer, responded.

In a recent article for Quillette, Colin Wright argued that left-wing scientific denialism poses a greater threat to academic freedom than right-wing scientific denialism. In the past, evolutionary biologists could dispute the claims of creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design without jeopardizing their careers. But the same cannot be said of scientists who publicly dissent from progressive dogma when it comes to, say, the biology of group differences.

The reason, according to Wright, is because the Christian Evangelicals who denied the basic principles of evolutionary biology held no power in academia, while their secular equivalents are often professors, department chairs, deans, administrators, college presidents, journal editors, and so on. Indeed, the new denialist orthodoxy when it comes to biological sex - that it is "assigned" at birth, rather than observed and recorded - is now the official view of the scientific establishment, having been embraced by Scientific American and Nature. As Jordan Peterson wrote in The National Post two years ago: "Look out evolutionary biologists. The PC police are coming for you."

Norway has officially opened the longest suspension bridge above the Arctic Circle. The 1.5 kilometer span was built in cooperation with a Chinese company.

Chinese workers, locals and officials took part in the opening ceremony of the new Norwegian super bridge, dubbed Halogaland, near the northern port city of Narvik. With pylons soaring 180 feet into the clouds, the bridge crosses the Rombaken fjord and boasts a free span of 1,145 meters. With a length of 1,533 meters, it is the longest suspension bridge ever built above the Arctic Circle.

Built with assistance of China's Sichuan Road and Bridge Group (SRBG), it provides a significant shortcut on the European route E6 highway - the main north-south road through Norway and the west coast of Sweden. The Chinese firm delivered the steel constructions and was responsible for the mounting of the bridge, which took more than five years to build.