Faked peer reviews prompt 64 retractions
A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an internal investigation discovered fabricated peer-review reports linked to the articles’ publication.

Berlin-based Springer announced the retractions in an 18 August statement. In May, Springer merged with parts of Macmillan Science and Education — which publishes Nature — to form the new company Springer Nature.

The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing "reviews from fabricated reviewers". The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves....

Deceptive temperature record claims
...But government spokespeople rarely mention the inconvenient fact that these records are being set by less than the uncertainty in the statistics. NOAA claims an uncertainty of 14 one-hundredths of a degree in its temperature averages, or near twice the amount by which they say the record was set. NASA says that their data is typically accurate to one tenth of a degree, five times the amount by which their new record was set.

So, the new temperature records are meaningless. Neither agency knows whether a record was set.

Such misrepresentations are now commonplace in NOAA and NASA announcements. They are regularly proclaiming monthly and yearly records set by less than the uncertainties in the measurements. Scientists within the agencies know that this is dishonest.

They also know that calculating so-called global average temperatures to hundredths of a degree is irrational. After all, there is very little data for the 70 percent of Earth’s surface that is ocean. There is also little data for mountainous and desert regions, not to mention the Antarctic. Much of the coverage is so sparse that NASA is forced to make the ridiculous claim that regions are adequately covered if there is a temperature-sensing station within nearly 750 miles. This is the distance between Ottawa, Canada, and Myrtle Beach, S.C. cities with very different climates. Yet, according to NASA, only one temperature sensing station is necessary for the two cities and the vast area between them to be adequately represented in their network....

OF 100 PUBLISHED PSYCHOLOGY STUDIES, LESS THAN HALF COULD BE REPRODUCED SUCCESSFULLY
One of the pillars of scientific research--perhaps the one that makes science as definitive as it is--is that any study should be capable of being repeated under the same methods and conditions and if the research holds true, the same result will be found every time the experiment is performed--something known as a study’s reproducibility.

A group of researchers found that when they actually tried to reproduce 100 psychology studies, they managed to replicate the results in less than half the cases. Their results were published today in Science, and online as a resource for other scientists at The Reproducibility Project.

These new results piggyback on previous studies that attempted to replicate study results already published in scientific journals. This report also follows in the wake of a highly-publicized psychology study, originally published in Science about attitudes towards same-sex marriage, which was found to be inaccurate, and was retracted from Science in May....

The Real Winner Of Obama’s ‘War On Coal': George Soros
The real winner of President Barack Obama’s so-called “war on coal” isn’t the EPA, nor is it the natural gas industry. It’s liberal billionaire George Soros.

Last week, Obama’s EPA announced sweeping regulations for U.S. power plants, forcing them to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent by 2030. The news sent shockwaves through the coal industry, sending stocks tumbling and forcing the industry’s two biggest players to consider bankruptcy filings.

That’s where liberal billionaire Soros steps in. In the days after the Clean Power Plan was announced, Soros bought more than 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal — the country’s two biggest publicly-traded coal companies.

Both Peabody and Arch Coal “have seen their market values plummet” due to “competition from cheap natural gas, new environmental regulations and a slowing export market,” according to SNL Financial. Soros was able to pick up these coal stocks on the cheap, in part, due to Obama administration regulations targeting coal-fired power plants and coal mines....