Free Republic

The Koch brothers might be part of buying Time magazine, and a former Time science editor is so panicked he wrote an article for the leftist magazine The Nation titled "Don't Let the Koch Brothers Buy Time Magazine." Charles Alexander wrote about how his life’s work of screaming environmental bias may be about to go down the drain: Can you imagine what it would be like to see your life’s work suddenly go down the drain? I can—right now. As a former Time editor who spent 13 years editing the magazine’s coverage of environmental issues, I am in despair over...

A new study of the microbial settlers on old paintings, sculptures, and other forms of art charts a potential path for preserving, restoring, and confirming the geographic origin of some of humanity's greatest treasures. Genetics scientists with the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), collaborating with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project and supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, say identifying and managing communities of microbes on art may offer museums and collectors a new way to stem the deterioration of priceless possessions, and to unmask counterfeits in the $60 billion a year art market... The genetic detectives caution that additional...

A Darwinist Religious Experience Described April 11, 2009 — As millions of Jews just completed Passover, and as millions of Christians gather to celebrate Easter, a Darwinist reporter was experiencing “existential vertigo” – a sweeping sense of dizziness as her imagination zoomed in and out of the implications of her faith. It may be the closest thing that a secular materialist can call a religious experience. And religious experience is an accurate description: it was the outworking of an all-encompassing world view, with ultimate causes, ultimate destinies, moral imperatives, and heavy doses of faith. Amanda Gefter (see her previous attack...

MRSA 'deadlier than bioweapons' Last Updated: 2:44am BST 23/10/2007 Superbugs such as MRSA pose a far greater threat to humanity than bioterrorism, a genetics pioneer claimed. Dr Venter warns of the superbug threat The warning came from Craig Venter, an American scientist currently working on a project which uses DNA building blocks to create the world's first synthetic life form. Critics argue that artificially-created microbes – bacteria which can cause disease – potentially pose a grave danger, by either invading the environment or being used to manufacture deadly bioweapons. But Dr Venter maintains that drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA are...

Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies. The result burns. And when Henry Ford...

In any competition to determine what living person will be most influential in the next decade, J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, surely is at the top of the list. After decoding the human genome, he's now on a project to genetically engineer the planet's temperature.Technologically, this might not be so difficult, and Venter makes no bones about what he is after: a homogenerated bacterium that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide. Increasing carbon dioxide is the likely cause for a small rise in planetary temperature in the last 50 years of about 0.4ºC. Despite the...