I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.

• We now have an idea what colour a species of feathered dinosaurs were; white and orange stripes.
• After an heroic 10 month battle to free itself from a patch of soft sand, the Mars rover Spirit is stuck for good and will be used as a static monitoring station. Its sibling robot Opportunity is still mobile nearly 6 years after its warranty expired.
• The Kepler planet-hunting space telescope found its first five new planets around other stars a few weeks ago.

• Climate models ignore water vapour, which is a far more important greenhouse gas than CO2.
• Emissions from people burning fossil fuels are too small to change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• Volcanoes produce by far the greatest amounts of CO2.

• Water vapour is important and behaves differently than CO2, and climate models do not ignore it.
• Emissions from burning fossil fuels are sufficient that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (whether measured in New Zealand, Hawaii or the South Pole), has risen over the last 120-ish years to a higher level than has been seen for at least the last 650,000 years. CO2 concentrations for the last thousand years measured from bubbles trapped in ice is summarised here; steady at 280 parts per million from 1000AD until 1880, since which it's gone up to over 380 ppm today.
• As for volcanoes being by far the largest emitters of CO2, the US Geological Survey have the following to say:

  Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually. ... while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.

  My emphasis. Volcanoes only produce "by far the greatest" amount of CO2 if your definition of "by far the greatest" includes "less than 130th as much as burning fossil fuels".

he claimed that CO2 levels are too negligible to cause warming, that water is a greater greenhouse glass and that in any case plants absorb excess CO2.
An article published on the New Scientist’s website yesterday provides a wealth of scientific evidence against such claims. Ball also made some less decipherable comments that insects’ and spiders’ natural emissions were more damaging to the climate than fossil fuels.

A police force has defended spending £20,000 investigating a man's death after his ghost was said to have told psychics that gangsters had forced him to drink petrol and bleach. ... An inquest this week recorded a verdict of suicide after hearing there was no evidence of foul play. However the coroner, Peter Brunton, queried the murder inquiry held after mediums tipped off police, suggesting that the words "lion, a horse and a man called Tony Fox" were significant. "There was a great deal of communication between the mediums and the police," he said. "A great deal of effort was expended in following these leads up."

When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells

Further to your email to David Tredinnick MP, following his Adjournment Debate, he has asked me to send you details of the book he used in researching the topic to which you referred.
It is "Astrology and Compassion the Convenient Truth", by Roy Gillett, Kings Hart Books 2007, particularly paragraph 2, page 45.
I hope that is of assistance.

In a letter, the home secretary wrote: "I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD."

A conversion kit claiming to allow vehicles to run more efficiently using water does not work, a BBC investigation has discovered ... Its main component is a stainless steel vessel containing water and electrodes. It generates bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen gas by electrolysis, using an electrical current. The device is fitted under the bonnet of the car and draws its power from the car battery. The mixture of oxygen and hydrogen is piped into the air intake of the engine and is supposed to add to the conventional fuel.

When confronted with the evidence, Steven Cordner of Hydro-Fuel Systems claimed the system worked but admitted he had no proof to show us. He said they had stopped selling the product.

The Wellcome Collection has a couple of excellent 1890s adverts for implausible magnetic medical devices peddled by Mr Harness' Medical Battery Company. What's better is that PubMed has a copy of a British Medical Journal article from 1893 taking the Medical Battery Company to task in no uncertain terms: THE MEDICAL BATTERY COMPANY, LIMITED, AND THE BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OUR readers may remember that in the issue of the BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL of November 12th last the following paragraph appeared: "We have good grounds for stating that the Times has recently refused a four-column advertisment from the Harness Electropathic Belt Establishment, of the value of £80, a course worthy of the high and honorable traditions of the that journal" The object and intention of the paragraph was, we now unreservedly state (as Mr Harness himself has put it in the action he brought against the JOURNAL), that the Medical Battery Company (that is, Mr Harness) "carried on so dishonest and disreputable a trade and business, and were so notorious and of such ill repute as a trading company, that it was discreditable and unworthy on the part of a newspaper proprietor of high position and standing to transact with the plaintiff company the ordinary business of newspaper proprietors with traders in accepting and inserting at all, or even upon more favorable terms, the plaintiffs' trade advertisements" ... It's a great read, and all in moustache-quivering Victorian language. Long story short; the BMJ called Mr Harness out as a quack, he sued the BMJ, the BMJ stuck to their guns and the quack backed down.

In 2001 I raised in the House the influence of the moon, on the basis of the evidence then that at certain phases of the moon there are more accidents. Surgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective and the police have to put more people on the street.

"It is a good system as it solves the problem of dealing with animal waste and it provides heat," said Mr Virta.

there is a theory that the emergence of the [HIV] virus in humans was itself caused by trials of the polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

Two Bangladeshi newspapers have apologised after publishing an article taken from a satirical US website which claimed the Moon landings were faked. ... Neither [the Daily Manab Zamin] nor the New Nation, which later picked up the story, realised the Onion was not a genuine news site. Both have now apologised to their readers for not checking the story. ...

• Plucky train-loving four year old worries parents.
• "Can psychics be good for your health?"? Well, no, but thanks for asking.
• The best place in the world to build an observatory has just been found, and it's rather cold and remote.
• Quality vintage ad for travel insurance.
• According to Pork Magazine the US Dept of Agriculture is splashing out $30 million on pork products to stimulate the American pork industry. And Kansas City recently hosted Bacon-Fest.
• d'oh!

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

• Woo-hoo, the Kepler space telescope works. And a big new telescope in the Canary Islands has opened.
• A robot called HAL is being developed to help the elderly. This should be great, unless people need to open the pod bay doors.
• Drunken baboon-like mating display ends in flames and pain.

A haggis recipe was published in an English book almost two hundred years before any evidence of the dish in Scotland, an historian has claimed. ...

The EU should sink boats carrying illegal immigrants to prevent them entering Europe, British National Party leader Nick Griffin has told the BBC. [...] Pressed on what should happen to those on board, he said: "Throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya".

An investigation is under way into how 30 chimpanzees escaped their enclosure at Chester Zoo, forcing its evacuation.

FSB sources are reporting to President Medvedev today that American pop icon Michael Jackson was “most assuredly” assassinated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after an examination of data transmitted by a Russian Military’s Kosmos 2450 satellite show “conclusively” that immediately prior to the music stars death in Los Angeles an electromagnetic pulse consistent in pattern to EMR weapons looted from the former Soviet Union by the United States was employed at the “exact coordinates” of the rock stars home.

To the reason behind the CIA needing to assassinate Michael Jackson, these reports continue, was an out of court settlement the pop icon signed with son of the king of Bahrain, Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Khalifa, this past November in London, and which stated, in part, that in exchange for millions of dollars previously lent to Mr. Jackson by the Sheikh, Mr. Jackson would allow his sold-out United Kingdom concerts to be a “platform” for warning the World of a soon to occur mass genocide event.

Suddenly an old woman breaks from the crowd, screaming for mercy. Three or four people go after her, beat her and drag her back, pushing her onto - what I can now see - is a raging fire. [...] Village youths who took part in the killings told me that the five victims had to die because they had bewitched a young boy. "Of course some people have been burned. But there is proof of witchcraft," said one youth.