Just when it looked like Net Zero sceptics were winning the argument, the green lobby hit back. But David Turver says scratch beneath the headlines and the data simply doesn't stack up.
The post Green Empire Strikes Back appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have stopped short of officially blaming Iran for a spate of cyberattacks on Minnesota's water systems, but consensus is that Iran is likely behind them. That, of course, hasn't stopped Donald Trump from sharing his own theory - that Governor Tim Walz is to blame and telling reporters that "I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack."
Trump's comments come shortly after the FBI issued a warning that the cyberattacks on American infrastructure were spreading to other states. In Minnesota alone, at least 30 community water systems had been targeted in what a …
New AI models, advanced robots and specialty computer chips are unsettling markets and the US tech industry
Over the past month, a series of advancements in China’s artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond.
Silicon Valley has long pointed to China’s tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China’s progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.
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© Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
A local judge has ruled that Waymo can no longer use its side-by-side charging facilities overnight in Santa Monica, California, as these may pose a “public nuisance.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bradley S. Phillips granted this week the City of Santa Monica’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the city’s ongoing public nuisance lawsuit against the autonomous vehicle giant.
City officials and neighbors assert that the constant stream of vehicles at the charging stations create light and sound pollution and cause undue traffic congestion on the streets and nearby alleys, creating a collective bother and disruption.
© Waymo
On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results.
In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.
Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent the scraping of protected content. Google told Ars that it planned to amend its complaint to keep its lawsuit alive, but SerpApi told Ars that Google and Reddit were both trying to “use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.”
© picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance
One of the first schools to shut down after students were found making AI nudes of female classmates is now asking a court to toss a lawsuit filed by victims who claimed that the school stayed silent for months while the emboldened boys targeted many more girls.
In a motion to dismiss this week, Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS)—a private K-12 school in Pennsylvania with fewer than 600 students—argued that it was false to say the school never reported the harm to law enforcement. The tip that the school received came from the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, which is itself a law enforcement agency, the filing said.
It’s also false to say the school knew that girls were being targeted, the school argued, because the tip did not mention any specific student victims.
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Netflix has been sued after admitting that an unencrypted drive containing an unreleased, hotly anticipated 2026 blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage was stolen from its offices.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Netflix was accused of waiting a week to warn the production company, Op-Fortitude, that the movie, Fortitude, was swiped, along with other drives that were “stolen right off a Netflix desk.”
“Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,” Sean Berney, director of Netflix Original Film, said in an email to a production company representative after several attempts to get Netflix to return the drives were allegedly ignored.
© Kristina Bumphrey / Contributor | Variety
A new analysis suggests that psychological research is rapidly moving from journals into the machinery of U.S. governance, with findings increasingly cited in policy documents addressing education, health, and social justice. The trend highlights how behavioral science is becoming a preferred source for guidance that aims to be evidence-based, testable, and actionable across institutions.
Researchers reviewed how a broad set of psychological studies is referenced in government policy materials and found that citations are not uniformly distributed. Instead, the most frequent appearances cluster around topics where human behavior, motivation, and learning processes can be translated into measurable outcomes, such as classroom achievement, public health adherence, and interventions aimed at reducing inequities.
The study emphasizes that psychology’s influence often comes through research that offers clear mechanisms—how thoughts, beliefs, and social contexts shape behavior over time. In policy language, these mechanisms become frameworks for designing programs, evaluating impact, and justifying resource allocation, even when the original work is not a “policy trial” per se.
A key technical takeaway is the role of systematic constructs from psychology—such as expectancy, self-efficacy, stigma dynamics, and behavioral choice architectures—being mapped onto policy levers. By linking experimental or observational findings to specific policy implementations, document authors can argue that interventions should work for defined populations under defined conditions.
The authors also note that citation patterns can reflect more than scientific quality. They may signal changing editorial norms within policy agencies, increased availability of review literature, and the growing use of structured evidence standards that encourage referencing peer-reviewed work.
Beyond what is cited, the analysis points to how psychological research can travel: through policy briefs, synthesis reports, and cross-disciplinary writing that converts statistical results into guidance. This translation step matters, because policy documents prioritize clarity and generalizability, while academic papers emphasize boundaries and uncertainty.
In a viral science-news moment for researchers, the findings suggest psychology is not merely being used—it is being “operationalized.” That means researchers’ results are increasingly treated as building blocks for frameworks that guide interventions, performance metrics, and stakeholder communication.
Importantly, the researchers call attention to the potential risks of citation without careful fit. If a policy references a study whose populations, settings, or effect sizes differ from the target context, implementation may underperform or misestimate benefits. The work therefore implicitly argues for tighter alignment between evidence and local decision-making.
Overall, the analysis positions psychological science as an expanding influence in U.S. policy, especially where behavior is central and where policymakers want interventions grounded in empirically tested models. As the citation footprint grows, so does the need for rigorous evidence translation and scrutiny.
Subject of Research: Psychological research citations in U.S. policy documents, especially for education, health, and social justice.
Article Title: Psychological research is increasingly cited in U.S. policy documents especially for education, health and social justice issues.
Article References: Yu, CW., Hu, HY., Furnas, A.C. et al. (2026). Commun Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00516-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00516-6
Keywords: Psychological research, U.S. policy, education policy, health policy, social justice, citations, evidence-based interventions
In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu.
His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote.
In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content.
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Paramount Skydance agreed to a longer-term delay of its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, preventing the companies from combining until after a judge rules on the merits of a case in which a dozen states challenged the legality of the merger.
Under a stipulation filed in court today, the states and companies agreed that the merger will not be completed and the firms will not integrate their operations until "five days after the merits determination in these matters," or on June 1, 2027, whichever is earlier. The delay was also agreed to by the Writers Guild of America, which filed its own lawsuit to block the merger. If there is no merits determination by June 1, the plaintiffs could seek a preliminary injunction to keep blocking the deal.
The agreement amounts to "a months-long halt" to the merger, New York Attorney General Letitia James' office said. “Halting this merger while our case proceeds is a critical victory in our efforts to uphold the law and protect the film and television industries," James said.
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In a widely expected move, a committee organized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has voted to endorse removing restrictions on the manufacture of peptides for human use. Thursday's panel meeting saw a sharply divided group recommend lifting limits on four peptides; votes on three additional peptides are scheduled for today. The move comes despite a continuing lack of evidence regarding their safety and effectiveness.
The move had been telegraphed months earlier as peptide enthusiast and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took steps to ensure this outcome.
Like proteins, peptides are composed of amino acids that are chemically linked into a chain. Peptides differ merely by length; they're often 10–20 amino acids long, in contrast to proteins, which can be hundreds or thousands. Some of them, such as insulin, are specifically made by targeted processing of a protein into shorter fragments, and the resulting peptide interacts with receptors that have evolved to send signals to cells based on its levels.
© Getty | Michael M. Santiago
After criticism from a federal judge, the Department of Justice yesterday withdrew demands for phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times reporters who wrote about security concerns related to the Air Force One jet donated to Trump by Qatar.
It was a setback in the Trump administration's attempts to unmask journalists' confidential sources. US District Judge Arun Subramanian "grilled Justice Department lawyers for nearly an hour over their handling of the subpoenas" during a hearing on Thursday, The New York Times wrote.
“Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas,” Subramanian reportedly told Sean Buckley, chief counsel for the US attorney in New York's southern district.
© Getty Images | Angela Weiss
The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushbackacross the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development. Any changes could have major consequences for how ordinary people are given notice about new or expanded polluting facilities coming into their neighborhoods.
“As someone actively working in communities with data centers, I know this to be fundamentally true: People want to have a say,” Vanessa Lynch, a Pennsylvania organizer with Moms Clean Air Force, said at the EPA hearing.
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