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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has signed a new directive that prevents scientists that are receiving grants from the EPA from serving on the agency’s advisory committees. Pruitt says that this unprecedented move is to remove what he perceives to be a potential bias from the committees, stating that the members of three key EPA boards — the Science Advisory Board, Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and Board of Scientific Counselors — have received an estimated $77 million in agency funding. The move was quickly criticized by scientists and environmentalists as one that would bar the country’s most qualified scientists from these committees, and at the same time leave the door open for Pruitt to appoint industry-friendly members to advise the EPA.read more

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There has been a great deal of concern over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as of late, with PDRK dictator Kim Jong-Un threatening, on numerous occasions, to launch a nuclear attack against the United States. These concerns have focused primarily on the possibility of a direct nuclear strike, but experts speaking at a House of Representatives hearing held on October 12 pointed out that, while a limited nuclear exchange with direct strikes would cause terrible destruction, North Korea could conceivably wipe out 90 percent of the population of U.S. within a year with the deployment of a single device: the detonation of a high-altitude EMP bomb.
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A new study of 90 different species of whales and dolphins has found a striking similarity in the evolution of the brains of cetaceans and primates, including humans. The study looked at the social complexity of each species, and used that factor to determine if brain size could be used to predict the richness of the culture of each type of marine mammal.
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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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