Free Republic

The president vowed to make climate change a top priority in his second term, suggesting that a major assault on industry is coming if he is re-elected. So before the potential onslaught, some real-world perspective on climate change is essential. First, note that the tool used to both develop future global climate scenarios and to panic the public on meteorological mayhem is atmospheric modeling. Most of my nearly 35 years of professional life has been involved with atmospheric modeling in one... --snip-- What I and so many other air modelers have discovered is that, as impressive as modeling has become,...

New procedures were rushed into theaters of war without rigorous review The U.S. Army has quietly altered or abandoned some of its more experimental medical treatments for troops injured in combat, as advances it once hailed as groundbreaking are foundlargely ineffective or perhaps even dangerous. Advanced battle dressings, a blood-clotting drug, alternative procedures for emergency blood transfusions - each was introduced early in the Iraq war, often with little evidence to support them beyond anecdotes or tests on animals. A few were adopted widely by civilian hospitals, based almost exclusively on accolades from the military. But an investigation by The...

Scientists have long wondered why organisms bother with sexual reproduction. It makes a whole lot more sense to just have a bunch of females that can clone themselves, which is how asexual reproduction works. Turns out sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection, a new computer model suggests. The classic explanation for the onset of whoopee, about 1 billion years ago, is that it provides a way for organisms to swap and shuffle genes and to create offspring with new gene...

NETL and Carnegie Mellon team up to create new paradigms for hydrogen production NETL and Carnegie Mellon develop new computational modeling tool PITTSBURGH--The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new computational modeling tool that could make the production of hydrogen cheaper as the United States seeks to expand its portfolio of alternative energy supplies. The research, supported by the DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and reported in the current issue of the prestigious journal "Science" published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, predicts hydrogen flux through metal alloy...

The most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived just a few thousand years ago, according to a computer model of our family tree. Researchers have calculated that the mystery person, from whom everyone alive today is directly descended, probably lived around 1,500 BC in eastern Asia. Douglas Rohde of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues devised the computer program to simulate the migration and breeding of humans across the world. By estimating how different groups intermingle, the researchers built up a picture of how tightly the world's ancestral lines are linked. The figure of 1,500...