TV News LIES

Wyoming, the U.S.'s leading coal-producer, has become the first state to reject new K-12 science standards put forward by national education groups after officials objected to the teaching of man-made global warming as a fact.

The Wyoming Board of Education decided recently that the Next Generation Science Standards needed more review after questions were raised over the treatment of global warming.

Board President Ron Micheli said the review will look into whether "we can't get some standards that are Wyoming standards and standards we all can be proud of."

An international team of researchers has created the most complete visual simulation of how the Universe evolved.

The computer model shows how the first galaxies formed around clumps of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter.  It is the first time that the Universe has been modelled so extensively and to such great resolution.

The research has been published in the journal Nature.

Stephen Hawking, in an article inspired by the new Johnny Depp flick Transcendence, said it would be the "worst mistake in history" to dismiss the threat of artificial intelligence.

In a paper he co-wrote with University at California, Berkeley computer-science professor Stuart Russell, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professors Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, Hawking said cited several achievements in the field of artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars, Siri and the computer that won Jeopardy!

"Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring," the article in Britain's Independent said.

By the end of the Jurassic period, most primitive species of the order Pterosaurs became extinct. But one lineage of the order evolved rather quickly into pterodactyloids, and managed to survive.

These were some of the largest creatures ever to take to the skies, says University of South Florida paleontologist Brian Andres.

A 162.7 million-year-old fossil of the oldest pterodactyloid species unearthed in northwest China sheds light on how such species adapted to their environments.

Chris Sloan, formerly with National Geographic and now president of media company Science Visualization, first spotted the fossil in 2001.

A new study published in PLOS ONE details the oldest human footprints found outside of Africa.  Found and studied by archaeologists from the British Museum, the footprints are estimated to be anywhere from 780,000 to one million years old.

The footprints were discovered pressed into estuary mudflats along the coast of Happisburgh, England, a small village in low-lying Norfolk county. Happisburgh had previously been identified as one of the earliest sites of human activity outside of Africa, when ancient flint tools were discovered there in 2010.

While scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang, most Americans put a big question mark on the concept, an Associated Press-GfK poll found.

Yet when it comes to smoking causing cancer or that a genetic code determines who we are, the doubts disappear.

When considering concepts scientists consider truths, Americans have more skepticism than confidence in those that are farther away from our bodies in scope and time: global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and especially the Big Bang from 13.8 billion years ago.