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Living bacteria were found on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS), and they might have extraterrestrial origins, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov said. The microorganisms will be studied further on Earth. Shkaplerov, an ISS expedition flight engineer who will take his third trip to the ISS in December as part of the Expedition 54 crew, said that scientists found living bacteria while they were taking samples from the surface of the station. Speaking to TASS, he said that the microorganisms might have come from outer space. ... However, traces of bacteria originating on Earth – from Madagascar – and...

The Little Sisters of the Poor are heading back to court to defend themselves against the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services mandate to provide contraception, yet again. In an unusual political move, Pennsylvania and California sued the Little Sisters, demanding the same group who won at the Supreme Court in Zubik v. Burwell provide contraceptives in their state. In early October, HHS issued a new rule that protects religious non-profits like the Little Sisters of the Poor from providing anything like contraception that would violate their religious beliefs. In a press release, Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at Becket and lead attorney...

My heart leapt this week when I placed my hands on your mommy’s belly for the first time and felt you move. Dear beloved grandchild, you are a squirmy one! My daughter giggled at my squeals of joy from feeling you softly “dance” inside her. Little does she know that one day very soon your movements will be powerful kicks instead of gentle flutters. Your mom and dad have decided to wait until your birth to discover if you are a boy or a girl. And they will rejoice in learning your identity, knowing that it is the Creator of...

Mom With MS Finds Nasty Note After Parking In Handicapped Spot By Shannon Antinori, Patch National Staff | Nov 15, 2017 Updated Nov 15, 2017 "You need to think twice before judging someone," the Plainfield mom said. " You have no idea what they've been through." By Shannon Antinori, Patch National Staff | Nov 15, 2017 2:22 pm ET | Updated Nov 15, 2017 11:50 pm ET PLAINFIELD, IL — From all outward appearances, Michele Clarke, 39, looks young and healthy. But 16 years ago, the Plainfield mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Since then she has had to battle...

A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics. According to this view, having a child is a major contributor to climate change. The logical takeaway here is that everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children. Although culturally controversial, the scientific half of this position is fairly well-established. Several years ago, scientists showed that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. That data was recycled this past summer in a paper showing...

The FBI has asked the Senate for unredacted documents it obtained from abortion providers, signaling agents may be investigating whether Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers illegally sold fetal tissue and body parts, according to sources familiar with the document request. The request was made in recent days, the sources said, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), last December referred Planned Parenthood and several other abortion providers to the FBI for investigation after a lengthy probe into the transfers of fetal tissue. Grassley said at the time that his committee had uncovered enough evidence in...

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether a California law requiring private facilities that counsel pregnant women against abortion to post signs telling clients how to get state-funded abortions and contraceptives violates free speech rights. The justices will hear an appeal brought by Christian-based non-profit facilities sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers” of a lower court ruling that upheld the Democratic-backed 2015 California law. The challengers argue that the law, by forcing them to post the information, violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The California challengers included the National Institute of Family...

San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Marquise Goodwin was extremely emotional on the sideline after a long touchdown catch Sunday. After the game, it became clear just why. Goodwin said on his Instagram page that his wife, Morgan Goodwin-Snow, lost their baby boy due to complications during pregnancy early Sunday morning. "Although we are hurt, I am grateful for the experience and grateful that God blessed me with a wife as courageous and resilient as Morgan," Marquise Goodwin said on Instagram. "The pain (physically, mentally, & emotionally) that she has endured is unbelievable. Please Pray for the Goodwin family." Quarterback C.J....

SOUTH KOREA, November 8, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – President Trump blasted the forced abortions and infanticide that are regularly committed in North Korea, asking why China would “feel an obligation” to help a country that kills Chinese babies for being “inferior.” “North Korean women are forced to abort babies that are considered ethnically inferior,” Trump told South Korea’s National Assembly. “And if these babies are born, the newborns are murdered.” “One woman's baby born to a Chinese father was taken away in a bucket,” Trump recalled. “The guard said it did not deserve to live because it was impure.”

They love death “like you love life.” They are the enemies of life, and of creation, and of creativity, of love, of art, of civilization. All they love is death and pain and destruction. They are the quintessential force of evil.“ISIS Vows to ‘Fill The Streets Of Paris With Dead Bodies,'” by Vladi Vovcuk and Gilad Shiloach, Vocativ, July 22, 2015 (thanks to Jerk Chicken): ISIS’ official media wing in Syria’s Hama province published a video Wednesday showing a French-speaking militant shooting a Syrian army prisoner and declaring that the Islamic State “will fill the streets of Paris with dead...

May 5, 16-year-old Jchandra Brown hanged herself at a campground in Payson, Utah. Her friend Tyerell Przybycien is accused of helping her by buying the rope and tying the noose she put around her neck, and the compressed air she used to knock herself out before dying. Przybycien encouraged Brown to go through with the suicide, even providing running commentary as he recorded her last moments on video, according to court documents. Now, Przybycien, 18, is being charged with first-degree murder in her death. If convicted, he would face a minimum of 15 years in prison. Prosecutors say Brown wouldn’t...

Twitter has blocked Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn's (Tenn.) Senate campaign announcement ad, ruling that a pro-life statement was "inflammatory."At one point in the video, Blackburn, who announced last week that she is running for the Senate in Tennessee, heralded how she "stopped the sale of baby body parts," a reference to her investigation into Planned Parenthood's reported practice of "donating" body parts in return for monetary compensation.But a Twitter representative told the Blackburn campaign that Twitter blocked the ad from being promoted, calling it "an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction," the Associated Press reported Monday. Twitter said...

Advice from an old man Posted on October 5, 2017 by Paul -Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong. -Keep skunks and bankers at a distance. -Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. -A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor. -Words that soak into your ears are whispered… not yelled. -Meanness don’t jes’ happen overnight. -Forgive your enemies; it messes up their heads. -Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you. -It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge. -You cannot unsay a cruel word. -Every...

The oldest evidence of life on Earth ever discovered may lie within rocks that are 3.95 billion years old, a new study finds. The new finding represents the earliest sign of life yet on Earth by 200 million years or more, the researchers said. Evidence of life early in Earth's history remains sparse because few well-preserved rocks have survived from the Eoarchean era, which spanned from about 4 billion to 3.6 billion years ago. During that time, Earth's primitive atmosphere and oceans — as well as the oldest signs of life — first emerged. Until now, the earliest hints of...

Charles Mutua Mulli, one of the most interesting and inspirational people you’ve probably never heard of, woke up in his family’s hut in a tiny village in Kenya one morning in 1955 and discovered that his parents had taken his brother and fled. Charles had been abandoned. He was 6 years old. The tale of that child’s experiences over the ensuing 60 years is told in a compelling new documentary titled “Mully” (he later changed the spelling of his surname), directed by the actor/filmmaker Scott Haze. It is a rags-to-riches story of extraordinary dimensions – i.e., Mully literally went from...

From blob-like jellyfish to rock-like lichens, our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognise some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. ‘The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,’ said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. ‘The question is,...

It has become axiomatic that life naturally evolved out of nonliving materials billions of years ago. Given enough time and the chemical opportunity, living cells self-assemble.However, the experts on the development of complex molecules from simpler ones, the synthetic chemists, do not know how this process actually occurs. There are no known pathways to create the components that make up a living cell from nonliving matter. They have no idea how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and enzymes), nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA), saccharides (also called carbohydrates or sugars, the scaffolding for DNA and...

NEW YORK - After 12 years advocating for abortion rights, Joe Solmonese might have opted for a less divisive field of work. Instead, he is taking over leadership of the largest national gay-rights group at a time when the same-sex marriage debate rivals abortion for volatility and virulence. "My challenge is to talk about why the equality we seek is not just important to our community, but should be important to everyone," Solmonese said. "I have to believe in the optimism and fair-mindedness of the American people." Solmonese was named last week as the new president of the Washington-based Human...

A Wyoming mother who sacrificed cancer treatment for her sixth child has passed away. According to a Facebook post, Carrie DeKlyen died early Saturday morning, three days after giving birthday to Life Lynn DeKlyen. “She is an amazing inspiration and I am so proud to call her family… She made the ultimate sacrifice by giving up herself for her child and that’s just what moms do,”

Ever since I was a child, I presumed the universe would be teeming with alien life. Star Wars and Star Trek reinforced this belief, and I yearned for the day when we would meet and communicate with other intelligent beings. But as every potential alien discovery turned out to be natural, and our initial assumptions about the chance that life can naturally emerge from non-living materials turned out to be wildly optimistic, perhaps it is time to honestly reappraise the likelihood of us ever detecting, let alone communicating with other technologically-intelligent extraterrestrial species. In this vast universe, there appear to...