The Balkan Chronicle

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of 'massaging' evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original 'climategate' emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.

The United Nations nuclear agency is reporting higher than normal radiation levels in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in Europe, but states the increase is not a public health risk. The International Atomic Energy Agency says that "very low levels" of iodine-131 have been measured in the atmosphere.

The IAEA does not know the source of the radiation, but says it is not related to Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which spread radiation around the world in March.

Following the disaster, scientists warned that Fukushima radiation posed a threat to Europe. In April, an independent French radiation commission said the health risk from iodine-131 contaminationwas "no longer negligible."

The Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité said the warning was not only applicable to France, but other European nations as well, including Belgium, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

One scientist says major study used to defend global warming theory actually shows it is no longer occurring

The debate over whether or not so-called "global warming" is real, and whether or not human activity plays any role, will likely continue on for years to come. But one climate scientist says that even if past data suggests that global warming did occur many years in the past, today's data shows that it has since stopped, with global temperatures having remained stable for at least the past 13 years.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, some countries have decided to rethink their energy policies and initiate moves towards safer energy alternatives. Following in the footsteps of Germany, the European nation of Belgium has reportedly decided to phase out its nuclear energy sector, beginning with the shutdown of three of its oldest reactors by 2015.

In what could herald a significant shift in policy for a region that has been in the forefront of advocating action to combat climate change, the European Union is for the first time clearly questioning whether it should press ahead with plans to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if other countries don't follow suit.

In a document seen by The Wall Street Journal, the European Commission's energy department says the EU should consider whether the region should seek to switch its domestic energy base away from carbon-emitting sources in the absence of a global climate-change deal.

The European Union's top court ruled Tuesday that scientists cannot patent stem cell techniques that use human embryos for research purposes, a ruling some scientists said threatens important research since no one could profit from it.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said the law protects human embryos from any use that could undermine human dignity.

This is one bid that could spice up anyone's portfolio. The German service provider Dussmann has signed a multi-million euro contract with a Saudi Arabian company to examine the feasibility of a new catering facility for religious pilgrims in the desert state.

It's uncharted territory for the Dussmann Group, a company that has in the past limited itself to less exotic endeavors like building sanitation, providing security or the administration of retirement homes. Having finalized a consulting contract with the Saudi company Hijaz Catering Co. Ltd., the Germans have been asked to conduct a "feasibility study" on the planning, construction and operation of a new production facility to provide meals for religious pilgrims to the Muslim holy city of Mecca and bolster Hijaz's foothold in the catering business.

California Premiere: Challenging Misconceptions, Illuminating Diversity

Long overlooked or often misattributed, the remarkable contributions of Muslim scholars in science and technology have quietly floundered as no more than common footnotes of world history.

Visitors educated in the Western world will be surprised to learn of discoveries and inventions in the Muslim World which predate by years, sometimes centuries, discoveries thought to be developed in the West.

One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.

The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.

In a recent piece in Scientific American, neuroscientist Trevor Lamb wrote that vertebrate eyes contain numerous defects that he called "the scars of evolution." He cited these "flaws" as powerful evidence that blind evolutionary forces are responsible for the "invention" of eyes. But research has proven that these supposed defects are entirely fictional.

Villagers and veteran hunters have captured a one-ton saltwater crocodile which they plan to make the star of a planned ecotourism park in a southern Philippine town, an official said Monday.

Mayor Edwin Cox Elorde said dozens of villagers and experts ensnared the 21-foot (6.4-meter) male crocodile along a creek in Bunawan township in Agusan del Sur province after a three-week hunt. It could be one of the largest crocodiles to be captured alive in recent years, he said, quoting local crocodile experts

Western science has had remarkable success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind, it has very little to say. And when it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science.

For years, scientists have been predicting the Sun would by around 2012 move into solar maximum, a period of intense flares and sunspot activity, but lately a curious calm has suggested quite the opposite.

According to three studies released in the United States on Tuesday, experts believe the familiar sunspot cycle may be shutting down and heading toward a pattern of inactivity unseen since the 17th century.

"Yes," says Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, in her essay Absence of Mind, based on the Dwight H. Terry Lectures she delivered at Yale University in 2009.

Robinson is particularly critical of fundamentalist scientism as preached by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, among others. The reading is tough, but well worth it. Her arguments are dead on, as is her prose:

The troubles of the Fukushima nuclear-power plant -- and other reactors -- in northeast Japan have dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms that have been trumpeting a nuclear-power renaissance.

But the risks that seaside reactors like Fukushima face from natural disasters are well known. Indeed, they became evident six years ago, when the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 inundated India's second-largest nuclear complex, shutting down the Madras power station.

The latest scientific studies suggest that the damage to wildlife and fauna continue unabitated in and around the Chernobyl exclusion zone - and far beyond.

Research recently concluded provides more evidence that contamination has a "significant impact" on biodiversity.

On the other side of the world lies Easter Island, located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at a distance of 3,747 kilometers west of Concepción, Chile. Its original inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, are now Chilean citizens (officially since 1966), and number about 3,000, confined to the island’s sheltered west coast, while some have migrated to mainland Chile over time.

Airports across Britian were deserted today after an unprecedented lockdown of airspace prompted by the threat from a deadly cloud of volcanic ash.

The National Air Traffic Service (NATs) has now grounded flights in and out of the UK until at least 1am tomorrow.

A leading scientist has revealed that Europe could be just five years away from the start of a new Ice Age.

While climate change campaigners say global warming is the planet's biggest danger, renowned physicist Vladimir Paar says most of central Europe will soon be covered in ice.

The freeze will be so complete that people will be able to walk from England to Ireland or across the North Sea from Scotland to northern Europe.

With this New Year's Eve blue moon, "there is nothing scientific about it, and it has no astronomical significance," said Mark Hammergren, a staff astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.

"But I believe it does give us some insight into history and makes us think of how our calendar system has derived from motions of objects in the sky."