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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that their hypersonic HTV-2 test aircraft crashed during an August 11 flight test, but not before demonstrating that it could maintain control at twenty times the speed of sound — for three minutes, at least.

DARPA’s unmanned prototype Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) was launched from Vandenberg AFB in California, and was propelled above the atmosphere by a Minotaur IV rocket. The HTV-2 then proceeded to glide along it’s planned course over the Pacific Ocean, but encountered a still-unidentified anomaly nine minutes into the mission, prompting the craft’s automated systems to ditch the plane in a controlled splashdown.
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In a continuing trend within the scientific community, Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of respected medical journal The Lancet, has announced that a large portion of the medical literature being published today is false, with perhaps up to half of the material being presented being based on bad science.

In an article titled "Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?", Horton addresses concerns that were made as part of the presentations made at a symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London. These concerns regarded the issue of scientific malfeasance in published papers, due to a variety of factors, ranging from small sample sizes, poor methodology, and corporate bias.
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Storms across the southern and central US have left at least 35 people dead and devastated many communities. While flooding and severe thunderstorms continued in the southeast on Sunday, north Texas and Oklahoma began to experience dramatic temperature drops and heavy snowfall. On November 18, our Climatewatch section predicted "because of warm, moist air from the 2015 el Nino extending up into the central United States, there will be an unusual amount of thunderstorm activity in that area into the winter. Severe storms with copious snowfall could become commonplace." Climatewatch, which has been running since 2000, has rarely failed to accurately predict future weather.read more

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Over the years, the long-standing assumption that Christopher Columbus discovered North America has persisted in our history books, despite archaeological evidence that other European explorers landed here well before him, and even set up settlements, as was the case with Norse settlers. While some evidence of an Ancient Roman presence here has been found, a new artifact has been uncovered, of which may solidify that concept.
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