Free Republic

"Vatican, World Bank partner to launch Year of Mercy with St. Peter's 'climate change' light show" The Catholic Church, founded to shed the light of Christ on the world, has quite literally invited the world to shed its light on her. On December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception as well as the opening of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis has allowed climate-change partisans and population-control advocates to project a light show onto the facade and cupola of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome - the most important church in the Catholic world - so as to "inspire...

"Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, King of the Universe, Who forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates all." (Shacharis prayer) Like anything written by Chazal, these words are filled with eternal significance. What do they have to do with Chanukah? Plenty. What is darkness? Is it simply the absence of light or does it have substance in itself? Darkness is associated with suffering. "In the evening one lies down weeping, but with dawn . . . a cry of joy" (Tehillim 30). In Mitzrayim, during the ninth plague, the darkness was so thick it prevented the Egyptians...

Your days are not ending they are merely flowing into Me.So don't worry in trying to catch up for you have already arrived, Just be seated in my righteousness and dwell in my glory with the understanding that the fullness of my spirit is with you as I AM your heartbeat and breathe so I own you for you have given your life to me. So now just rest in me as I complete my agenda for I AM your daily bread, counselor and King . . . Matthew 11:27-30 27 All things have been entrusted and delivered to Me...

Photonic devices, which use light to transport large amounts of information quickly, have the potential to enhance or even replace the electronic devices that are ubiquitous in our lives today. But before such optical connections can be integrated into telecommunication systems and computers, researchers need to make it easier to manipulate light at the nanoscale. A new on-chip zero-index metamaterial makes this possible, opening the door for technological innovation and research. This new metamaterial was developed in the lab of Eric Mazur at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and is described in the...

Rosh Hashana is coming up. "Head of the year" But what makes it the head, the "first" day of the year. Especially perplexing since in Jewish tradition, it is celebrated on the 6th day of creation, the day Adam was formed, gained knowledge of himself and his Creator-- and "coronated" Him as his King. This was Rosh Hashana. ...It follows then, that now, today, 5 days prior to Rosh Hashana, would be the first day of creation. Therefore: Happy Let There Be Light day!

A startup team calls their work a product. They also call it a social movement. Many people in the over-7,000 islands in the Philippines lack access to electricity .The startup would like to make a difference. Their main ingredient is salt. Their product is a lamp that takes two tablespoons of salt and a glass of water in order to work. This is from the Sustainable Alternative Lighting, or SALt Corp. This is a startup focused on delivering a cost effective, environmentally safe lamp that runs on salt water. Their lamp could be an alternative to kerosene/battery powered lamps and...

<p>AP) -- Scientists say they have identified an ocean sponge living in the darkness of the deep sea that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication.</p> <p>The natural glass fibers also are much more flexible than manufactured fiber optic cable that can crack if bent too far.</p>

Visit another world without ever leaving your yard. A NASA website gives you the time of day when light on Earth is the same as you would see on Pluto.You can't fly to Pluto. You will never have the opportunity to set foot on its inhospitable surface. It took NASA's New Horizons spacecraft over nine years just to get close. Don't let this deter you from experiencing a little bit of Pluto back here on Earth. NASA has unveiled a "Pluto Time" website that helps space fans replicate the light conditions on the dwarf planet from any location in the...

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different...

Why is Christmas a Nighttime Event? By: Msgr. Charles PopeO Holy night! Yes, a silent night! And it came upon a midnight clear. Christmas, it would seem, is a festival of the middle of the night. Jesus is born when it is dark, dark midnight. We are sure of it. And why not?Even though we are not told the exact hour of His birth, we are sure it must have been at night. Scripture does say that the shepherds who heard the glad tidings were keeping watch over their flock “by night” (cf Luke 2:9). Further, the Magi sought him...

Advent and the Drama of Light and Darkness By: Msgr. Charles PopeHere are the summary notes from a talk I gave tonight at the Parish of St. Columba, here in D.C.Many people think of Advent merely in terms of pre-Christmas time: office parties, shopping, decorating etc. But in the Church, Advent is a penitential time, a time of preparation for both the Christmas Feast and the Second Coming of the Lord. The purple vestments signal penance. The faithful are encouraged to go to Confession, and the liturgical texts and readings emphasize readying for the coming of the Lord.The theme of preparation...

==> Click here <== to watch video. Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart Plus 6 days ago All Audiences In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system. I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as...

Bright lights, not human rights: Why North Koreans envy their neighbors /snip December 16th, 2014 Je Son Lee /snip This week Chris M. in the USA asks: What do people in remote areas like Mt. Paektu think about those in neighboring China and those who live in Pyongyang? Issues such as human rights or political systems are considered unimportant by most North Koreans. As a result, while those of us living along the border did have envy for the Chinese, it was usually for material reasons: jealousy of the bright lights and products we knew to exist there. Because there...

Photons generally do not interact with each other in free space but instead one passes through the other with no effect to either one. Vienna University of Technology researchers have made a significant and groundbreaking discovery in the field of quantum mechanics. A team of researchers has developed some unique hardware, which enable photons to interact. This hardware is composed of micro-thin fiber made of glass, which in turn attached to a device called a resonator. The photon particle light can enter the resonator, moves in a circular fashion and then returns to the glass fiber. This change in pathways...

The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our cultural understanding. We all grew up learning that Fire is Hot and Ice is Cold. Therefor red and orange are warm colors while blue and cyan are cool colors.This association in our mind is so strong that filmmakers can actually invoke a sense of temperature just by the color palette they use in their films.Take for example Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing”The film beautifully photographed by Ernest Dickerson, is awash in yellows, oranges and reds invoking the heat of a long, hot day in the Bed Stuy...

Physicist James Franson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has captured the attention of the physics community by posting an article to the peer-reviewed New Journal of Physics in which he claims to have found evidence that suggests the speed of light as described by the theory of general relativity, is actually slower than has been thought. The theory of general relativity suggests that light travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. It's the c in Einstein's famous equation after all, and virtually everything measured in the cosmos is based on it—in short,...

Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of...

Scientists are throwing cold water on yet another purported "alien" sighting by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Though UFO enthusiasts may beg to differ, mission team members say bright flashes of light visible in Mars photos taken by the Curiosity rover on April 2 and April 3 almost certainly have a perfectly ordinary explanation. "One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun. When these images were taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the sky," Justin Maki, the...

We are to move from the darkness to the light, move from fear into love, and live in the abundance and victory of Christ. So many hold on to their hurt and they walking through life with a chip on their shoulder. Yes, hurting people say and do hurtful things. 
Let's help them discover the wonder of falling in love with Jesus; being forgiven, living free, and learning to focus on the abundance of love and grace - instead of living like God's love is a rare commodity. There is no limit to His love, His loves overflows. God's love...