Sciences

Proposed Texas Social Studies Textbooks Get Climate Change Wrong Too

As if Texas social studies textbooks haven't been getting enough flack for pointed political and religious biases, a report released Monday by the National Center for Science Education highlights inaccuracies about climate change in proposed state textbooks. See also: SMU Academics Speak Out Agains ... More >>

El Niño Is Coming and It's Going to Be Good for North Texas

The National Weather Service and International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University announced Friday that the groups were bumping their estimation of the likelihood of a summer El Niño this year to 70 percent. Depending on where you get your online news, this was eithe ... More >>

The Sinbad of Science

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Still Doesn't Believe in Climate Change

Global climate change is real, it's caused by people, and it will have a significant, often unpredictable impact on the United States and the human beings who live here. Those are the takeaways from the third-ever National Climate Assessment, an 840-page, congressionally mandated tome released by t ... More >>

Tyler News Director Goes on Rant about Climate Change, Calls Global Warming "Laughable"

Tyler, Texas, which has produced many yellow roses and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, is also home to Neal Barton. Barton is the news director of KETK, the local NBC affiliate, who occasionally takes the liberty of delivering a bombastic on-air op-ed. Think Dale Hansen, minus the humor and self- ... More >>

Exxon Is Way More Optimistic on Climate Change Than the UN

We're all getting sophisticated enough to agree that climate change is real, climate-deniers are wrong and someone should do something about it. Good for us. But what any of that actually means is still a major point of debate. On Monday the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ... More >>

SMU Will Deploy Seismic Monitors Around Azle to Learn Source of Earthquake Swarms

The shaking around Azle and Reno, which I will hereafter refer to as "San Andreas MInor," has attracted the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey precisely because the area has almost no record of seismic activity. A few studies, including one recently from SMU, point to correlation between the ep ... More >>

Most Texans Believe Global Warming Is Real, Just Not that People Are Causing It

Good news: The vast majority of Texans think global warming is real. Seventy percent, according to a just-released study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. That's way more than one might expect from listening to the people they choose for statewide office and proof that Texas' ma ... More >>

The Last Ride of Legendary Storm Chaser Tim Samaras

He had an uncanny knack for finding tornadoes. Then one found him.

Texas Sues the Feds, Part Infinity: Greg Abbott Wants to Take Greenhouse Gas Challenge To Supreme Court

Last summer, Texas, Big Oil interests, the automotive industry and other assorted industrial polluters were dealt an unambiguous defeat in a legal challenge to dismantle greenhouse gas regulations. The Feds, a federal appeals court panel ruled, were "unambiguously correct" for setting limits on carb ... More >>

How the Bastards Win: A Greedy Lying Bastards Review

EPA: Dallas-based Luminant Produces a Hell of A Lot of Greenhouse Gas, And So Does Fracking

The Environmental Protection Agency -- that scourge of freedom-loving Texans -- just released a nifty little interactive greenhouse-gas database that will almost certainly threaten your liberty, the free market and the Second Amendment, somehow. For starters, the data it compiled indicates Dallas- ... More >>

Hold Me, Nerd. Things Might Get Crazy.

How Texas Came Within an Atom's Breadth of Discovering the God Particle

Study: Texas' Hellacious 2011 Summer Is A Prime Example of Loaded Climate Dice

Our record-busting summer 2011 continues to be an object of fascination to climate scientists all over the world. Alongside floods in Thailand, drought in Eastern Africa and the European heat wave, the driest, hottest year in recorded Texas history has provided a case study for gauging the influence ... More >>

Has the "God Particle" Been Found? Let's Ask the SMU Prof Who's Been Looking.

In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they've discovered the elusive "God Particle," aka the Higgs boson. For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chao ... More >>

Ralph Hall Demands to Know What NOAA Spends on Magicians, Comedians, Mind Readers

Rep. Ralph Hall finally found his General Services Administration-style confab scandal. No, it doesn't involve EPA employees playing a blindfolded game of Crucify the Energy Executive during a conference at The Venetian. But it's the next best thing: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrati ... More >>

Did Climate Change Create Texas' Hellacious 2011 Summer, Or Just Make It Worse?

​Texas's pasture-desiccating, road-warping devil heat last summer has earned a spot alongside hot spells in Moscow (2010) and France (2003) as one of the wild outliers of a climate pushed to extremes. A study from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia Earth Institute say g ... More >>

Dueling Research: Fracked Shale Gas Worse For Climate Change Than Coal! Or, The Opposite!

In the rarefied halls of Cornell, the atmospheric-science equivalent of the gauntlet has been thrown. At stake is nothing less than the suitability of one of the most plentiful, domestically producible forms of energy in North America to replace a fuel speeding climate change and emitting tons of kn ... More >>

North Texas Bets Big on Pumping from Lake Texoma

Environmentalists fear plan will let invasive zebra mussels spread.

As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

Via.​You've probably heard that an international contingent of physicists in Switzerland is this close to identifying the Higgs boson, aka the "God particle." Currently, the Higgs is the theoretical mechanism that explains how matter obtained mass following the Big Bang. The theory is that it ... More >>

UT Southwestern Docs May Have Found the Pathway to Revolutionary Cancer Treatment

Researchers at UT Southwestern published a study in the journal Nature Sunday identifying a cancer-specific metabolic pathway that fuels only the growth of certain kinds of kidney and adrenal tumors. This is a pretty remarkable finding, chiefly because if you can halt that specific metabolic process ... More >>

There Are No Texas Oysters in Your Near Future

Steven Doyle​Houston-based food journalist Robb Walsh wrote yesterday about the red tide outbreak, which has caused the delayed opening of Texas' oyster beds. Oyster harvesting was closed until further notice by the Texas Department of Health State Services (DSHS) on October 26, leaving Walsh ... More >>

Chatting With a NOAA Meteorologist About This Drought: What It Is and What It Ain't

Photo by Brantley HargroveA stock pond in Archer County​So, what's our problem? Mostly, it's La Nina, that little trollop. She's been messin' with Texas for a long time. And the relationship between her cool Pacific sea-surface temperatures and dry times here is pretty well established. For n ... More >>

Toxic Avenger: In the War Between the Feds and Texas, EPA Chief Al Armendariz has Science on His Side. Is That Enough?

Next Week at SMU, the Discovery Institute's Finally Nailing Darwin For Good

​If you fell prey to the siren call of the Discovery Institute's 2007 Darwin vs. Design conference at Southern Methodist University, well, dust off your fossil records and get your ape suit to the dry cleaners, because next Thursday night we're gonna do it all again.Next week's panel discussion, " ... More >>

Texas Motorplex Celebrates Its Unlikely Silver Anniversary With A Little Help From Championship Driver John Force.

Spaced Out

No Vampires Here

Energy Matters

Centraltrak presents Setina's dark works

A Shooting Zooey

See the stars of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Pro-evolution Forces Take an Unexpected Win at the Texas Board of Education

Give this round to science in the fight over how to teach evolution in Texas schools

Turns Out, the Failed Superconducting Super Collider Was Kinda Super

How the SSC never became the world's largest skate park remains a mystery to science. It's been forever since the words "Superconducting Super Collider" were heard around these parts. Fifteen years ago Congress axed the project due to escalating costs -- what was supposed to run about $4 billion wou ... More >>

Before Tomorrow's Shareholder Showdown, Exxon Severs Some Ties

In advance of tomorrow's ExxonMobil shareholders get-together at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center -- always a good time -- the Irving-based oil behemoth announced today it will no longer fund some groups who insist global warming ain't got nothing to with people. Among the organizations to whi ... More >>

Battle Against Teaching Evolution in Texas Begins

Should creationism win out, textbooks throughout the country–not just Texas–will challenge the theory of evolution in science curricula

Dinosaurs, Evolved

Global Warming, Suck It

Be Organic in the City at Fair Park

God in the Details

For a quarter-century Roy Abraham Varghese has been assembling God proofs. Along the way he won over the world's most influential atheist.

TXU, The Buyout and the Power of "Greenmail"

I am sure you've read your latest issue of Pensions Management by now, but if you've yet to crack the April ish, here's a sneak peak at one column inside. Douglas Cogan, who's the environmental, social and governance research director at Institutional Shareholder Services, writes that on the very sa ... More >>

Humble Pi

WaterTower hearts love 'n' rockets

Life, Death and Money

Will Texas pony up bucks to lead in stem cell research? Pro-lifers hope not.

Bugs in the Tubs

Texas consumers take on the whirlpool business--and that mysterious black crud shooting out of their bathtub jets

Planet Mold

The latest environmental hazard in Dallas and the country is displacing homeowners, covering walls and pets, and making lawyers even richer. Welcome to the weird world of "black mold."

Seeds of Discontent

Can growing protests stem the tide of genetically engineered crops?

Whizzing inside the tent

ExxonMobil shareholders use their stock to push a corporate giant toward change

Planting SEEDs of hope

An innovative math program recalculates which students will succeed and which will fail at DISD

Jurassic bucks

Trade in dinosaur bones pits entrepreneurs against scientists

Vicious cooties

Math wars

Plano parents lay siege to enthusiasts of the "New New Math" in a fight over how to fix the sorry state of math instruction in the public schools

Death on tap

Cryptosporidium kills AIDS victims in Dallas. Who will the pathogen claim next?