Greg Laden News Today

Four weeks after a wildfire began in the Canadian province of Alberta, thousands of structures in Fort McMurray have been destroyed, over 100,000 people have been evacuated, and 2200 square miles have gone up in smoke. The fire has also shut down commercial extraction of tar sands, a source of fossil fuel and the reason for Fort McMurray's prosperity.

Gratefulness is an important part of a happy life, but are we right to be thankful for an ill-gotten bounty?  In a country of 300 million people, a turkey on every table (or a chicken in every pot) means that many birds live hard and die fast.  They are also plucked, gutted, inspected, and packaged as quickly as possible, leaving human workers to pay the price.

The law of superimposition says that stuff found on top is younger than stuff found lower down, in a geological or archaeological column. This is generally true, but there are exceptions, mostly trivial and easily understood. If a cave forms in a rock formation, the stuff that later ends up in that cave is younger in depositional age than the rock underneath which it rests (the rock in the roof of the cave, and above).

In a validation of Albert Einstein's genius, the power of new technology, and the relevance of the scientific method (even if it takes a century), scientists working on a project called LIGO have witnessed ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by gravitational waves. First predicted by Einstein in 1916 on the basis of general relativity, gravitational waves are cosmic shock waves that can result from the interactions of massive objects like black holes and neutron stars. Unlike electrom...

DJ Grothe has done some great things and he's taken the James Randi Educational Foundation a long way; he's made an important mark and we should all appreciate him and his prior efforts. Hell, we should create an award named after him and give it to people every year. Thank you DJ Grothe for all you've done for the skeptic movement. Read the rest here.

In the wake of the Willie Soon scandal, scientists are taking a hard look at the Smithsonian and other institutions at the forefront of research and public outreach.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.

Marc Morano condones threats of violence against climate scientists and their families. That tells you everything you need to know about his character, and about the character of the people who employ or work with him.

In response to being put on a list of Top Climate Stories for 2012 for comparing climate realists to serial killers, Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast continued his habit of responding to his critics with dishonesty, deception, and hypocrisy.

Those who say climate change is a threat to the planet continue to call for actions against climate skeptics. On May 19, PBS’ “Moyers & Company” played a clip of scientist, David Suzuki, calling for politicians skeptical of man-made climate change to “be thrown in the slammer.” On day later, a tweet by well-known alarmist Michael Mann suggested that skepticism could be a “crime against humanity.” As least far back as 2006, and as recently as March 2014, liberal journalists and ...