Free Republic

Researchers have recreated the evolutionary lineage of adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) to reconstruct an ancient viral particle that is highly effective at delivering gene therapies targeting the liver, muscle, and retina. This approach, published July 30 in Cell Reports, could be used to design a new class of genetic drugs that are safer and more potent than those currently available. "Our novel methodology allows us to understand better the intricate structure of viruses and how different properties arose throughout evolution," says senior study author Luk H. Vandenberghe of Harvard Medical School. "We believe our findings will teach us how complex biological...

...[Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)] says they asked whether they could see those agreements. He says IAEA officials replied, “ ‘Oh no, of course not, no, you’re not going to get to see those.’ And so everybody on our side of the table asked, ‘Has Secretary Kerry seen these?’ ‘No, Secretary Kerry hasn’t seen them. No American is ever going to get to see them.’ ” It turns out that only the two parties — the IAEA and Iran — get to see the actual agreements (though you can see a picture of Iranian and IAEA officials holding up what appear...

A Monday piece in IO9 contained some revelations about the upcoming sequel to 1996’s “Independence Day,” which is entitled “Independence Day: Resurgence.” 20 years after the great alien invasion flattened many of Earth’s largest cities and killed untold millions of people, the world is still united in building up its defenses against a return engagement. These defenses apparently include a moon base.

With the most recent assault on sanity the last few days, I think if we are changing offensive names on public places, why not public people? Recall that our 42d president's middle name is Jefferson. It may or may not be for Jefferson Davis. (Why quibble?) None the less, that is too close to President Davis's Christian name (can I use that term) so let's change it just in case. Then we have Sheila Jackson Lee. Now there is a two-fer revision :Andrew Jackson the slave owner and General Lee. Both names must go in Ms Sheila's name. And I...

Support is growing within the Church of England to rewrite its official liturgy to refer to God as female following the selection of the first women bishops Support is growing within the Church of England to rewrite its official liturgy to refer to God as female following the selection of the first women bishops. Growing numbers of priests already insert words such as “she” and “mother” informally into traditional service texts as part of a move to make the language of worship more inclusive, it has been claimed. But calls for a full overhaul of liturgy to recognise the equal...

After another long school year at the University of California San Diego, students are exhausted from their “Peruvian Folk Dance” finals and the watermelon toss contest. Most of the gang has gone home to Mom’s basement. But a few females who have nowhere to go have succumbed to the boredom of their “arduous” life and found a novel way to spice things up. “What to do?” they ask themselves. Then one of the less attractive females pipes up and says, “Hey let’s take off our tops and run around demanding something!” “Great idea, I’ve been wanting to catch the eye...

Way too many college campuses are turning out people who spend their time trying to draw some meaning from their poor education. They believed Obama’s lies and thought that just attending college would be their ticket to a career. Now that graduation time is here again this year’s crop of under educated dimwits is learning how wrong they were. They have spent their college years studying things like Peruvian folk dancing and now they are shocked that no one wants to hire them because their degree is useless. Some of these misguided children have turned to a new type of...

More secular confusion about the moon’s former magnetic field by D. Russell Humphreys A recent paper by Clèment Suavet et al.1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that uniformitarian scientists, who assume the world is billions of years old, are still very puzzled about the moon’s magnetic field. They don’t understand why it was formerly strong but now doesn’t exist, and how it could exist in the first place.2 The moon’s magnetic data fit creation science theories very well. Suavet and his colleagues have carefully analyzed the magnetism of two basalt samples brought from the moon...

<p>At this time of year, the last thing anyone wants to think about is paying more taxes. But there's one tax I'm in favor of - and you should be, too, if you care about your health and the health of the planet: a sin tax on meat, cheese and other animal-based foods.</p>

Already, we have the greatest video of the 2016 presidential election cycle. Rick Santorum -- And have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? -- was down in the home office of American Sedition for one of those mock "summits" designed to lift the wallets of terrified caucasian separatists. A lady got up in the audience, opened her mouth to speak, and huge bats flew out. Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this Communist dictator destroy my country? Y'all know what he is and I know what he is. I want him out of the...

- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower. The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to “modify their behavior.” “Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world,” an EPA grant to the University of Tulsa reads. “Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests.” -

WASHINGTON – The United States has laid out a battle plan to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul in an April-to-May time frame, using some 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops who currently are being trained, a highly unusual disclosure that one intelligence source told WND is “pure lunacy.”

A week ago we explained that yet another conspiracy theory, one involving virtually every geopolitical hotzone, from Saudi Arabia, to Russia, the United States, Qatar, Syria, ISIS, and Ukraine, has become fact when our speculation from last September, namely that the plunge in oil was an choreographed move between the US and the Saudis (even if Kerry realized - we hope - that it meant a recession for the US energy producing states and a collapse in the only vibrant US industry of the past decade: shale), one seeking to dislodge Russian control over the Syrian government and to facilitate...

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color. We have major concerns about social theory courses in which...

America – He’s Your President for Goodness Sake! There was a time not so long ago when Americans, regardless of their political stripes, rallied round their president. Once elected, the man who won the White House was no longer viewed as a republican or democrat, but the President of the United States. The oath of office was taken, the wagons were circled around the country’s borders and it was America versus the rest of the world with the president of all the people at the helm. Suddenly President Barack Obama, with the potential to become an exceptional president has...

It’s official: the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an order declining a request for an en banc hearing in a case involving four students in at a California high school who were sent home for wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. The full slate of Ninth Circuit judges has thus agreed with a lower district court and with a trio of appellate judges that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif. could censor students who wanted to wear flag-emblazoned shirts. The federal appeals court issued its denial of an en banc hearing...

Crazy publicity stunt or stroke of daring genius? We're not sure, but it got our attention. The man pictured above is Alex Bellini, a professional adventurer and motivational speaker who plans to live alone on a melting iceberg off the coast of Greenland for one year, to emphasize the urgent need for climate change action.

Racial disparities tend to exist where one doesn't expect them. Situations provoke them to appear, and — if we're willing — we take notice and act. For decades, social justice advocates have referenced the racial disparity in citations and arrests for marijuana. liberal blah, blah . . Ending the war on marijuana won't end racial disparity in Oregon, but it would diminish it. Criminalizing marijuana allows racial inequality to fester. We can't reduce racial disparity where we don't know it exists, nor when we lack practical solutions. In the case of marijuana arrests, we have both. Isn't it responsible and...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office isn’t the only federal authority that has taken a stance against the name of the Washington Redskins. A federal judge in Maryland issued a ruling last week that purposely did not contain the team’s name, which has been described as an offensive slur against Native Americans. U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte, who is presiding over a lawsuit that former New York Giants linebacker Barrett Green brought against the Redskins, issued a 21-page ruling with this footnote on the first page: “Pro Football’s team is popularly known as the Washington ‘Redskins,’ but the Court...