A blood test can predict, from four biological markers, whether a person is likely to die of any of a range of illnesses in the next five years. An Estonian study which suggested this has been replicated by Finnish scientists.
[URL="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/would-you-take-the-death-test-simple-blood-test-predicts-chances-of-dying-within-five-years-9155135.html"]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/would-you-take-the-death-test-simple-blood-test-predicts-chances-of-dying-within-five-years-9155135.html
[/URL]

[URL="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/27/world/africa/egypt-aids-cure-claim/"]Egypt's army claims it has invented a cure for AIDS and hepatitis C[/URL]

[url=http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews]Over 100 "peer reviewed" auto-generated gibberish articles pulled from science journaks[/url]

These aren't in "squishy" social/philosophy-of--science journals as was the Sokal paper, either:
[quote]The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. ([i]Nature News[/i] has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
[i]
*Update: One of the named authors replied to Nature News on 25 February. He said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013; and that he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper. "The matter is being looked into by the related investigators," he said.
[/i]
[b]How to create a nonsense paper[/b]

Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘[url=http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7036/full/nature03653.html]Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper[/url]’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website [url=http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/]arXiv vs. snarXiv[/url]. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. [i]Nature[/i] has not heard anything from a few enquiries.[/quote]
Now, I realize poor money-starved publishing houses like Springer and IEEE can't be expected to deploy such kinds of cutting-edge anti-fraud technologies without very good reason, but I have a suggestion: Put in place a system that requires the kind of detailed commentaries from reviewers designed to ensure that [b]a paper has actually been read by a so-called expert before it gets published[/b]. I know, I know, I'm being ridiculously pedantic here.

[URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/music-your-best-workout-buddy/2014/02/18/13799ad6-8f79-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html"]Music: Your Best Workout Buddy[/URL]

[URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/science/its-snack-time-in-the-cosmos.html?_r=0"]It's Snack Time in the Cosmos[/URL]

[URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/20/280220511/these-reindeer-really-do-glow-and-its-for-their-own-good"]These Reindeer Really Do Shine, And It's For Their Own Good[/URL]

[URL="http://www.medicaldaily.com/key-remembering-dreams-found-two-brain-regions-3-ways-stop-forgetting-269509"]Key To Remembering Dreams Found In Two Brain Regions: 3 Ways To Stop Forgetting[/URL]

[URL="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/19/newser-cats-dogs-vision/5607195/"]Cats may see things that are invisible to us[/URL]

[URL="http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-a-planet-bonanza/#.UxZeXtwqVFw"]NASA's Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza, 715 New Worlds[/URL]

[URL="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201402/is-technology-worsening-our-basic-restlessness"]Is Technology Worsening Our Basic Restlessness?[/URL]

[URL="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/20/joe-hanson-scifi/"]Why Science-Fiction Writers Are So Good at Predicting the Future[/URL]

[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-s-lost-theory-uncovered-1.14767"]Einstein’s lost theory uncovered[/URL]

[URL="http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26354217"]Girls' growing brains 'more resilient', study suggests[/URL]

This in my mailbox today:

[QUOTE]Major Discovery announced by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics - Live Stream on Monday

LISA Mission changed the event time to
Mon, March 17, 4:00 PM GMT

[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Major Discovery announced by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics - Live Stream on Monday
LISA Mission invited you
Mon, March 17, 9:00 AM
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces a major discovery in a press event live at 16:00 UT on Monday. You can view a live stream at
[url]http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/news_conferences.html[/url]

The Guardian reports it could be about gravitational waves from the rapid acceleration (inflation) of the Universe immediately after the Big Bang.
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep[/url]

Image credit: NASA - [url]http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10128[/url]
Official website:[url]http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/news_conferences.html[/url]
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=only_human;369000][URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html?_r=0"]This in my mailbox today:[/QUOTE]
Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun[/URL][QUOTE]If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.

“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.

If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/19/nasa_scopes_show_how_earth_missed_devastating_solar_storm_by_nine_days_in_2012/[/url]

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;369416][URL]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/19/nasa_scopes_show_how_earth_missed_devastating_solar_storm_by_nine_days_in_2012/[/URL][/QUOTE]
Astronomers can lead the public to water, but they can't make it drink.

I fear that, as has so often happened before, the public will not authorize/take/urge preventative measures until after the catastrophe happens (with Y2k being a notable exception).

[QUOTE=only_human;369341]Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun[/QUOTE]BTW, this announcement is going to force some editing over at answersingenesis.org:

[quote=http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v8/n4/big-bang-evolution-of-theory]There is no independent evidence that inflation indeed happened ...[/quote]

[quote=http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/ud/more-recent-developments-in-cosmology]Almost no one has noticed that there are no direct observational tests for inflation ...[/quote]

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/super-cheap-paper-microscope-could-save-millions-lives-133616732.html[/url]

[url]http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-surprising-failures-of-12-steps/284616/[/url]