Free Republic

Washington: In an encouraging sign of life beyond earth, Nasa scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. Though the presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exo-planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds, Nasa said. The strengths of their water signatures varied, it said. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the other three planets, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b,...

Economic equality will never be possible because some people are too stupid to get ahead, Boris Johnson said on Wednesday night. Natural differences between human beings will always mean that some will succeed and others will fail, the Mayor of London said in a speech. Despite calling for more to be done to help talented people from poor backgrounds to advance — including state-funded places at private schools — Mr Johnson said some people would always find it easier to get ahead than others. “Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a...

Nov. 21, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-life activists looking for up-to-the-minute news and commentary about pro-life issues have another website to add to their bookmark bar, with the launch of ProLifeWire today. Styled on the extremely popular conservative news nexus The Drudge Report, the creator and editors of ProLifeWire hope to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the current news on pro-life issues around the world, by providing carefully vetted and categorized headlines and links to other news agencies. The brainchild of pro-life activist Andy Moore, ProLifeWire has in been development for barely a week, after the idea for the site...

A patient in a seemingly vegetative state, unable to move or speak, showed signs of attentive awareness that had not been detected before, a new study reveals. This patient was able to focus on words signalled by the experimenters as auditory targets as successfully as healthy individuals. If this ability can be developed consistently in certain patients who are vegetative, it could open the door to specialised devices in the future and enable them to interact with the outside world. The research, by scientists at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBSU) and the University of...

Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower...

The Maryland Board of Physicians has decided not to take action against late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart for the death of Jennifer Morbelli, a 29-year old woman who suffered fatal complications from a very late 33-week abortion. The official death certificate for Jennifer Morbelli confirms the young woman died on February 7, 2013, from complications to a 33-week abortion done by late-term abortion practitioner LeRoy Carhart. But the Maryland county police closed their investigation Monday without filing criminal charges. The medical examiner’s office confirmed a botched 33-week abortion killed the young woman. “We are horrified at the decision of the Maryland...

If you listen carefully, you can hear echoes of the resurrection in the great, epic stories we return to again and again. Those stories lead us to a poi­nt of despair where all seems to be lost, only then to erupt into uncontainable joy as good triumphs over evil. There is a reason these stories resonate with us. In one way or another, they model and mimic the true story of our world. A story of perfection and paradise, corrupted by human sin and wickedness, redeemed by a selfless sacrifice, and restored through a triumphant return. This is the true...

“Fascinating,” says medical resuscitation expert Sam Parnia of a recent PLOS One study finding highly unexpected electrical activity in the hippocampus of one man, and 26 cats, with flat-lined “isoelectric” electroencephalograms (EEGs). The isoelectric flat line—so popular in movies and on TV shows—helps determine if patients are in a brain death they can’t recover from.

The video below shows the span of one woman’s life, some seventy years in less than a minute. How swiftly she moves through the stages of her life, from infancy to her golden years.My mind drifted back to a photo album my father once assembled not long before his death. In the frontispiece he etched a quote, from Psalm 103:But as for man, his days are like the grass, or as the flower of the field. The Wind blows and he is gone, And his place never sees him, anymore.Indeed, our lives do pass swiftly. I often wonder of the...

**SNIP** “Here’s a president, who less than a year ago, won the election by 5 million votes, 5 million votes. ObamaCare has been the law for four years. Why don’t they get a life and talk about something else? People deserve better,” he said. The battle to fund the government now heads back to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Scientists at a British university say they are confident they found evidence of life that originated in space. Researchers at the University of Sheffield sent a scientific balloon into the stratosphere — often described as the edge of space — during a Perseid meteor shower, which collected small organisms they believe are not from Earth. “Most people will assume that these biological particles must have just drifted up to the stratosphere from Earth, but it is generally accepted that a particle of the size found cannot be lifted from Earth to heights of, for example, 27km. The only known exception...

Sarah Palin wants to switch the national conversation back to death panels and to “bomb Obamacare.” The former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate posted a new video from SarahPAC, her PAC, to her YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts on Monday called “Just Sayin.’” The two-minute video cycles through clips of the media talking about Palin’s warning of “death panels” in Obamacare, starting with criticism before transitioning to clips that Palin was right all along.

New research has revealed that chemical reactions previously thought to be 'impossible' in space actually occur 'with vigour,' a discovery that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions. A team at the University of Leeds, UK recreated the cold environment of space in the laboratory and observed a reaction of the alcohol methanol and an oxidising chemical called the 'hydroxyl radical' at minus 210 degrees Celsius....

Evidence is building that Earth life originated on Mars and was brought to this planet aboard a meteorite, said biochemist Steven Benner of The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida. An oxidized form of the element molybdenum, which may have been crucial to the origin of life, was likely available on the Red Planet's surface long ago, but unavailable on Earth, said Benner, who presented his findings today (Aug. 28; Aug. 29 local time) at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Florence, Italy. [The Search for Life on Mars (Photo Timeline)] "It's only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidized...

Bernice King "it all begins – as does life – begins in a woman’s womb,” King said. “And so we incubate, we nurture and we birth out things and we can never, ever forget that." The enraged sponsors went wild...

Congress passed it, the Supreme Court upheld it, and Americans rejected the presidential candidate who vowed to repeal it. But the battle over Obamacare continues to rage, and on Wednesday, Tampa was ground zero. Some 500 people fired up to kill the health care overhaul turned out for a town hall meeting Wednesday night to bemoan the law — and jeer and groan at any mention of Republicans skittish about refusing to fund it. “They’re afraid to have a showdown with someone who’s tearing up our country,” said Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who now leads the conservative...

Nine-month pro-choicers who speak out against bullying are beyond hypocrisy.[And other gems from this new pro-life spokesman.]

Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling was banned for life from the Missouri State Fair rodeo after he wore an Obama mask and taunted bulls on Saturday night. Now, thousands of fans are flocking to support Tuffy. “Support Rodeo Clown Tuffy Gessling” Facebook Page has amassed over 25,000 supporters in a little over a day. Via The Missouri Torch: Poor Tuffy. A rodeo clown’s gotta eat.

And why not? If we go on defining human life down, we’ll end up determining that anyone can be killed at any time in the name of the greater good.That’s where this road of warped ethics inevitably leads. The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born. You know, if you’re going to call for murdering babies, maybe you...