A remarkable new study says European explorers weren’t the first to bring tuberculosis to the Americas, as has long been suggested.
An earlier strain of the disease existed long before Christopher Columbus’s arrival — brought from Africa by seals and sea lions, it says.
“It was a surprise for us, too,” said Anne Stone, professor of human evolution at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Nature. “We had not thought about seals.”

h/t nv53

Eventually, everything we’re told to do will be proven to be wrong.

For years, we’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Did I say “wrong”? I meant “bullshit”.

But scientific support for that idea has been surprisingly meager…

Related.

Normalized US Hurricane Losses 1900-2013

So, that’s why we stopped hearing about it…

… the scientific underpinnings of shaken baby syndrome have been called into question,” said Denise McWilliams, executive director of the project. “There’s a good amount of evidence that shaken baby syndrome might, at best, be questionable and it might, at worst, be totally bogus.”

Via WUWT;

A paper published in the Journal of Climate finds from 800,000 observations a significant decrease in longwave infrared radiation from increasing greenhouse gases over the 14 year period 1996-2010 in the US Great Plains. CO2 levels increased ~7% over this period and according to AGW theory, downwelling IR should have instead increased over this period.

So long as we’re still to blame. From the comments;

Maybe, just maybe there is a fundamental problem with using sheets of glass or plastic enclosing a space as an analogy for a free flowing gas of a planetary atmosphere …

WUWT: An updated list of at least 29 excuses for the 18 year ‘pause’ in global warming

“A courtesy note ahead of publication for Risbey et al. 2014″

The “Science Publishing Complex”;

Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996-2011. However, only 150,608 (<1%) of them have published something in each and every year in this 16-year period (uninterrupted, continuous presence [UCP] in the literature). This small core of scientists with UCP are far more cited than others, and they account for 41.7% of all papers in the same period and 87.1% of all papers with >1000 citations in the same period.

The evolving story of a word;

The patient, dedicated men and women, the living realities of the word scientist, working in laboratories and communicating in an esoteric language only with their peers, do not satisfy the general craving for definitive answers to social, economic, and political problems, which, so the great half-educated has been led to expect, ‘science ‘ has it in its power to deliver. An abstraction named ‘the scientist’ has been given form in people’s minds as a new figure of authority, corresponding to the priest or witch-doctor of a more primitive culture, whose ‘scientific’ statements can be accepted with child-like reliance. The notion is dangerous not merely because it is untrue but because it is irrational. The quest for absolute scientific validity is as hopeless as the quest for the philosopher’s stone. There may be incidental good in a political or religious philosophy that claims ‘Scientific’ authority and that stands ready to identify itself with the ready-made image in the popular mind of the infallibility of science; but the willingness to assume and exploit that role betrays the unprincipled shrewdness of the publicist.