Free Republic

Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, was given a suspended sentence of 3½ years for playing the mobile phone game during a service in the Church of All Saints in the Ural mountain city of Yekaterinburg last August. ... “But, you know, I didn't catch the rarest Pokémon that you could find there — Jesus,” Sokolovsky, says at the end of a YouTube video he posted of himself playing the game. “They said it doesn’t even exist, so I’m not really surprised.” ... The Church of All Saints holds special meaning for Orthodox Christians because it was built on the site where Russian...

NASA and other agencies have spent billions of dollars to reconnoiter Mars—assailing it with spacecraft flybys, photo-snapping orbiters and landers nose-diving onto its surface. The odds are good, many scientists say, for the Red Planet being an extraterrestrial address for alien life—good enough to sustain decades’ worth of landing very expensive robots to ping it with radar, zap it with lasers, trundle across its terrain and scoop up its dirt. Yet against all odds (and researchers’ hopes for a watershed discovery), Mars remains a poker-faced world that holds its cards tight. No convincing signs of life have emerged. But astrobiologists...

he Cassini spacecraft is nearing the end of its lifespan. This September, after spending the past twenty years in space – twelve and a half of which were dedicated to studying Saturn and its system of moons – the probe will be crash into Saturn’s atmosphere. But between now and then, the probe will be making its “Grand Finale” – the final phase of its mission where it will dive between the planet and its rings 22 times. In addition to exploring this region of Saturn (something no other mission has done), the probe will also be using this opportunity...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted early Wednesday that ordering would begin later in the day. Musk said the tiles will be sold worldwide. They’ll go to U.S. customers first this year and to other countries next year. He gave no other details. Palo Alto-based Tesla, which makes electric cars, announced last fall that it would produce the tiles with solar power company SolarCity Corp. Tesla and SolarCity completed a merger in November. The glass tiles are designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. They contain photovoltaic cells that Tesla says are invisible...

2017 HX4 passed us by at a very safe distance. In fact, the asteroid’s closest approach to Earth was estimated to be at a distance of 3.7 Lunar Distances (LD) – i.e. almost four times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This, and other pertinent information was tweeted in advance by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (IAU MPC) on April 29th. This object was first spotted on April 26th, 2017, using the 1.8 meter Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), located at the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii. Since that time, it has been...

Gone are the days of mutually assured destruction, when we assumed that everyone with nuclear weapons could be considered a "rational act." Instead we wonder about the sanity of North Korean leaders, the religious zeal of Pakistan's military, Iran's calls to wipe Israel off the map, and the ever-present danger of rogue terrorist groups... It goes without saying that a nuclear attack is a horrific circumstance, but it can be survived at distances of less than a mile from ground zero, depending on the strength of the explosion. Of course, there are a lots of variables, but you shouldn't assume...

'The region, in shadow for the first part of the Cassini mission, now enjoys full sunlight, which enables Cassini scientists to directly image it in reflected light.' ... 'Around it swirl the clouds, driven by the fast winds of Saturn.' Although the poles of Saturn are at the center of all of this motion, not everything travels around them in circles. Some of the jet-stream patterns, such as the hexagon-shaped pattern seen here, have wavy, uneven shapes. The famous hexagon shape itself circumscribes the northern polar vortex – seen as a dark spot at the planet’s pole in the above...

SEOUL, May 9 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. naval ship collided with a South Korean fishing vessel in the East Sea on Tuesday during its training mission, defense authorities here said. "There was an accident involving the U.S. cruiser USS Lake Champlain and the South Korean fishing ship 502 Namyang in the waters south of Ulleung Island at around noon today," a military official said. But there was no report of any casualties from the accident involving the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, he added. As part of the Carl Vinson Strike Group, the cruiser is participating in joint drills with South Korea's...

Our current theories regarding the formation of the Solar System claim that the planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a Solar Nebula (i.e. Nebular Hypothesis). Consistent with this theory, Jupiter is believed to have formed as a result of gravity pulling swirling clouds of gas and dust together. Jupiter acquired most of its mass from material left over from the formation of the Sun, and ended up with more than twice the combined mass of the other planets. In fact, it has been conjectured that it Jupiter had accumulated more mass, it would have become a second star....

Artificial islands have been discovered surrounding Sohae Satellite Launching Station, a missile development and testing site roughly 70 miles northwest of Pyongyang. Satellite images suggest the islands are home to military installations and have been under development for at least five years. While their purpose is unknown, suspicions are high that the islands could be used to launch missiles. ... The missile theory is being rebuffed by some. North Korea expert and political science professor Dr. Bruce Bechtol does not think the islands deserve so much focus. “As far as the islands being something that could present a real imminent...

Physicists have learned how they could breed Schrödinger cats in optics. Scientists tested a method that could potentially amplify superpositions of classical states of light beyond microscopic limits and help determine the boundaries between the quantum and classical worlds. ... Co-author and University of Calgary graduate student Anastasia Pushkina explains: "The idea of the experiment was proposed in 2003 by the group of Professor Timothy Ralph of the University of Queensland, Australia. In essence, we cause interference of two "cats" on a beam splitter. This leads to an entangled state in the two output channels of that beam splitter. In...

"It is a clear sign of hope to French Muslims that they can live in harmony and respect of French values", La Grande Mosquée de Paris said in a statement.

Lindsay Cutshall and Jason Allen were on a three-day sightseeing tour of Northern California in 2004 when they were shot to death at their campsite on a remote beach in Sonoma County. The slayings, just weeks before the couple were to be married, stunned the area and remained a cold case for more than a decade. But on Friday, a 38-year-old Forestville man was accused of the crime. Sonoma County Sheriff Steve Freitas said Shaun Gallon gunned down Cutshall, 22, and Allen, 26, as they camped on a beach in Jenner. Gallon, who was long considered a person of interest...

[T]he team conducted a detailed analysis of the system that showed how it has an architecture remarkably similar to what astronomer believe the Solar System once looked like. Led by Kate Su – an Associate Astronomer with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona – the team includes researchers and astronomers from the Department of Physics & Astronomy of Iowa State University, the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory at the University of Jena (Germany), and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ames Research Center. ... [P]revious studies of Epsilon Eridani indicated that the system is surrounded by rings made up...

A strong rain fell overnight in downtown Los Angeles. It also fell in the Grapevine, which winds through the San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains, where temperatures flirted with freezing and conditions were slick along Interstate 5. However, the freeway remained open and there were no major accidents. Meanwhile, several inches of snow fell in the San Bernardino Mountain area of Lake Arrowhead. Caltrans was requiring chains for drivers on State Route 18 from Heaps Peak Dump to Big Bear Dam.

The disaster struck without the least warning. The ship had angled its blunt nose toward the mooring mast, the spider-like landing lines had been snaked down and the ground crew had grasped the ropes from the nose, when the explosion roared out, scattering ground crew and spectators like frightened sheep. The passengers, who were waving gayly a minute before from the observation windows, were so stunned they could not describe late what happened. Some jumped to the sandy landing field along with members of the crew. Others seemed to have been pitched from the careening skyliner as it made its...

Investigators who nicknamed the street mixture have detected it or recorded overdoses blamed on it in Alabama, Georgia and Ohio. The drug looks like concrete mix and varies in consistency from a hard, chunky material to a fine powder. The substance is a combination of several opioids blamed for thousands of fatal overdoses nationally, including heroin, fentanyl, carfentanil — sometimes used to tranquilize large animals like elephants — and a synthetic opioid called U-47700. ... Last year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration listed U-47700 in the category of the most dangerous drugs it regulates, saying it was associated with dozens...

The National Advisor Bureau, headquartered in Masdar City, Abu-Dhabi, plans to source the massive blocks of ice from Heard Island, around 600 miles (1000 kilometres) off the coast of mainland Antarctica. It will then transport them around 5,500 miles (8,800 km) to Fujairah, one of the seven emirates which make up the UAE. One iceberg could provide enough for one million people over five years, according to the company. And the scheme could begin as early as the start of 2018. The firm's director says they have already travelled the transportation route and used simulators to check the feasibility of...

he ECM, as it is known for short, was able to produce factually coherent answers whilst also imbuing its conversation with emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust. ... The paper found that 61% of humans who tested the machine favoured the emotional versions to the neutral chatbot. Similar results have been found in so-called “Wizard of Oz” studies in which a human typing responses masquerades as advanced AI. “It is not a question whether they are desirable – they clearly are – but in which applications they make sense and where they don’t,” said Schuller. Minlie Huang, a computer...

Eta Aquarids have a most interesting lineage. Unlike some of the other annual meteor displays whose history can be traced back for many centuries, the Eta Aquarids were not "officially" discovered until the late 19th century. In 1870, while sailing in the Mediterranean Sea, Lt. Col. G.L. Tupman sighted 15 meteors on the morning of April 30, and another 13 a few mornings later. All the meteors Tupman sighted appeared to emanate from the constellation of Aquarius. Then in 1876, professor Alexander Stewart Herschel pointed out that the orbit of Halley’s comet nearly coincided with Earth's orbit around May 4,...