Free Republic

In announcing the new warning, Iranian state TV journalist Dr. Afruz Eslami warned that if people fail to follow any guidance, it could collapse Iran's already-strained medical system. If the "medical facilities are not sufficient, there will be 4 million cases, and 3.5 million people will die," she said. . . Late Monday night, angry crowds stormed the courtyards of the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad and the Fatima Masumeh shrine in Qom. Many people visit the shrine in Qom 24 hours a day, seven days a week, touching and kissing the shrine.

There’s something about Japan and electronics that go hand and hand, and there may be no better showcase of that than Maker Faire Tokyo. The Tokyo Faire is a favorite to many who have had the opportunity to see it, with an incredible assortment of innovative creations. Tiny electronics, intricate art, and traditional crafts all meld together in new and wonderful ways throughout the entire exhibition. Produced by the O’Reilly Japan team (Fumi Yamakawa, Hideo Tamura, and Yuko Asahara), their latest event brought in over 24,000 visitors to see the incredible projects of 600 makers set up inside the largest...

An extraordinary treehouse with 64 diamond-shaped windows forming an 11,000-pound pinecone that dangles high in the trees is on the market for $150,000. If you have a piece of open land with towering trees, think Redwoods, this could be a great opportunity. Dustin Feider, of O2 Treehouse in Oakland, is the brains behind the design and says the work was built earlier this year for home goods company S.C. Johnson and their Glade fragrance line. "They gave me artistic freedom," says Feider whose company has built more than 60 treehouses since its founding in 2006. "They wanted something clear and...

Mathematicians Chase Moonshine’s Shadow Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory. In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.McKay, of...

This "Modern Damascus" is made from several types of steel and iron slices welded together to form a billet, and currently the term "damascus" (although technically incorrect) is widely accepted to describe modern pattern welded steel blades in the trade. The patterns vary depending on how the smith works the billet. The billet is drawn out and folded until the desired number of layers are formed. In order to attain a Master Smith rating with the American Bladesmith Society, the smith must forge a damascus blade with a minimum of 300 layers. Special thanks to the band Foreign Fields from...

"We knew the time had come to create something wondrous with pickles," Sam Bompas, one half of gin-cloud generating, wedding cake-exploding culinary masters Bompas & Parr, tells Wired.co.uk. The pickle has been overlooked for too long. Bompas is relaying the story of how the Gherkin Chandelier -- a gherkin-powered piece of lighting with an eerie glow akin to the Grinch lit up at Christmas -- came to be. "Thinking about the development still gives me goosebumps. Risking death to explore an everyday sultan of savour!" You might not associate gherkins with imminent death, but it takes rather a lot of...

Google showed off its first venture into wearable computing, called Project Glass. If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses. On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing. The glasses are not yet for sale. Google will, however, be testing them in public.

An agile bear jumped a fence, walked atop walls and wandered into the backyard of a home Wednesday in San Dimas. The bear was spotted at 1:35 p.m. in the 2400 block of Terrebonne Avenue, sheriff's Sgt. Richard Ramirez said. It jumped over a chain-link fence and walked on top of a stone wall like a gymnast on a balance beam. Once in the backyard of a home, the bear dipped its front paws into the pool, but disappeared behind the residence to search for food. After rummaging through two garbage cans, the bear returned to the pool for a...

LOS ANGELES — As a promising Caltech graduate student in applied physics, Stephen Kurtin could have taken a job offer from Intel at the dawn of the microelectronics era 40 years ago. Instead he followed the path of a lone inventor, gaining more than 30 patents in fields including word processing software and sound systems, culminating in the pair of glasses resting on his nose, which he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses. The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible...

This was just too cool to ignore. The Bolshevik Bashing will resume shortly.

We need technologies that will allow our bodies to be repaired as thoroughly as we repair our cars. Some UCSD researchers find that titanium nanotubes can cause stem cells to become osteoblasts that speed bone repair. San Diego, CA, January 29, 2009 --Engineers at the University of California at San Diego have come up with a way to help accelerate bone growth through the use of nanotubes and stem cells. This new finding could lead to quicker and better recovery, for example, for patients who undergo orthopedic surgery.

See for example this thread first. A novel plan to design nukes On-line simulation of flukes It straddles the line 'tween Darwin and Design The thread ought to bring out the kooks!

For 16 years, Aviation Week & Space Technology has investigated myriad sightings of a two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small military spaceplane in orbit. Considerable evidence supports the existence of such a highly classified system, and top Pentagon officials have hinted that it's "out there," but iron-clad confirmation that meets AW&ST standards has remained elusive. Now facing the possibility that this innovative "Blackstar" system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we've learned about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological breakthrough vanish into "black world" history, known to only a few insiders. U.S....

Jong-Yong Yun, Vice Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, tonight hosted an elaborate display of some of the company's newest products and technologies — some shown for the first time in North America. (snip) Following Mr. Yun's address, attendees at the Global Road Show experienced in sound, video, and live demonstrations, a wide range of new products and devices including: • A 40-inch OLED television, the largest working prototype of this new screen technology. • The world's largest commercialized DLP (digital light projector) TV, measuring 71 inches. • A Blu-ray disc recorder with a built-in HD digital terrestrial tuner. •...

First Flight of SpaceShipOne into Space This is from a guy who has a rich obsession with aviation. I wish it were me but I'm not nearly rich enough to make the rounds like him... First Flight of SpaceShipOne into Space On June 21, 2004, I joined twenty seven thousand other people to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private-venture craft to attempt to leave the earth's atmosphere and enter space, defined as an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles). I and the other afflicted technophiles gathered in the pitch blackness of Mojave airport in California sometime after 3...

Actor Used Personal Fortune To Finance Filming COLORADO SPRINGS -- Actor Mel Gibson won rave reviews from religious leaders here this week after asking them to make sure his upcoming film, "The Passion," accurately depicts the Gospel. The star of the "Lethal Weapon" series said his Christian faith inspired the movie, which depicts the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ (pictured, left). Gibson is still looking for a distributor. The script, which Mel Gibson co-wrote, is based on the diaries of St. Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) that are collected in the book "The Dolorous Passion of Our...

The Matrix Makers One year, two sequels—and a revolution in moviemaking. An exclusive look behind the scenes of 2003’s hottest flicks Jan. 6 issue — The Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank, Calif., is frenetic on most days, but on a Thursday in early November it was really humming. The company’s box-office Bigfoot for 2002, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” was set to open in eight days, and nearly every division of the studio was working furiously to get it ready. Until 2:30 p.m. That’s when everything stopped. For the next half hour, the boy wizard had to...

Pentagon chiefs are planning to ring America with a fleet of huge unmanned airships to watch for missile attacks and terrorist activity. The plan is seen as a high-technology reprise of the barrage balloons that guarded London during the Blitz. The Pentagon has asked America's largest defence contractors to come up with bids for the giant airships, known as dirigibles, by the beginning of next year, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The airships would be capable of hovering high in the stratosphere for months, carrying a 4,000lb payload of detection equipment. They would probably be powered by ultra-lightweight solar...

ELLETTSVILLE, Ind. -- When Jim Bristoe told his wife he wanted to build a cannon that would shoot a pumpkin a mile, she told him he wasn't all there. But he built one anyway, with a 30-foot-long barrel. It is powered by a 700-gallon air tank and is appropriately named "Ain't All There." It looks much like a mobile anti-aircraft gun. "You don't need to cover your ears, but you're going to know I shot it," the 42-year-old electrician and mechanic said during a demonstration on Wednesday. When Bristoe fires the cannon, a 10-pound pumpkin is hit with 11,300 pounds...