Новости за 21.12.2017

Kristian Nielsen, SciNordic
In Copenhagen, 18 August 1959, a cocktail party is in full swing.The Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jens Otto Krag, is deep in conversation with the American Ambassador Val Peterson, but the conversation has just taken a turn. The ambassador has informed Krag that the question of establishing a US scientific military base, powered by a nuclear reactor under the Greenland ice sheet, had moved beyond the embassy's control.

Graham Readfearn, Guardian
When the global temperature readings are in for 2017, it's going to be a very hard sell for climate-science deniers: 2017 will likely be ranked either side of 2015 as the second or third hottest year on record, with 2016 still in top spot.The hottest five-year period recorded in the modern era will be the one we've just had.

Andrew Lawler, Science News
Nearly 4000 years ago, in the royal palace of the Mesopotamian city of Mari, King Zimri-Lim awoke from a nightmare in which nomads from the surrounding desert had captured his beloved wife. Archaeologists have long thought that that Zimri-Lim's fear, described in a cuneiform text, reflects the key roles that nomads played in early urban life.

Kyle Harper, Aeon

At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome's cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it means to be human and how fragile our societies are.

Alex B. Berezow, ACSH
It's the season for Top 10 lists. The challenge, as usual, is to narrow down all the junk science we debunked in 2017 to just the ten best (worst?) stories. It would be far easier to create a top 100 list.(Actually, it would be even easier to create a top 193 list, which is what we did earlier this year with the publication of Little Black Book of Junk Science. You can download it for free.)

The Scientist
When it comes to retractions, we at Retraction Watch always have a lot to say. Especially after spending much of 2017 building our retraction database, which now holds just shy of 16,000 entriesmore than 1,000 from 2017 alone. That's an increase from the 650 total retractions counted by MEDLINE in 2016.