Free Republic

Four worlds 133 light-years away orbiting a young star. (Jason Wang/Northwestern University) ********************************************************* A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black disk obscuring their star, 133.3 light-years away from Earth. The partial circles are their orbital motions, a time-lapse compiled from 12 years of observations. The star is HR8799, and in 2008 its...

How can high-capacity gun magazines be covered by the second amendment when they didn’t exist when the second amendment was written?6:32 PM · Aug 14, 2020·Twitter for iPad

(@brithume The author of this nonsense is a professor at the highly regarded Northwestern University.) In the early days of the pandemic, did you ever fantasize what we’d do when people could go outside again and gather together? Did you dream of a better, “post-pandemic” America? One with more hugs, more mutual care and concern for our fellow humans, having all gone through (in differing and unequal ways, but still having shared) a harrowing common experience? People are going out again, all over the United States. But it’s not to celebrate a vaccine or a debt jubilee. The first national...

Black faculty, administrators, and staff at Michigan State University are angry at the selection of a white woman as the school’s new provost. It’s a “travesty,” wrote MSU Black Faculty, Staff and Administrators Association President Eunice Foster about the hiring of Northwestern University’s Teresa Woodruff. According to the Lansing State Journal, Foster also said many in the black community consider it “unbelievable,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” “shocking,” and “appalling” in her letter to MSU President Samuel Stanley Jr. “To those of us seeking a just, inclusive, and equitable campus,” Foster wrote, “this appointment is a misjudgment of what Michigan State University…needs now,...

“There’s something about a good bomb . . . night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind.” So said William Ayers, yet another of Barack Obama’s miscreant friends. Despite the campaign’s ludicrous talking points about Obama being a mere child of eight when Ayers was planting bombs, there is no question that the relationship between Barack Obama is of long standing. Doing yeoman’s work, Stanley Kurtz has researched the Ayers/Obama connection and found that the unrepentant domestic terrorist’s tentacles run...

The Palestinian leader spoke in advance of the anticipated roll out of what US President Donald Trump is calling the “Plan of the Century” to resolve the Israeli-Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Trump Administration will allow Israel to annex portions of the West Bank and split the Gaza Strip from the West Bank so that it can be a state of its own, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday. Speaking at the Arab League summit in Tunisia, "What is coming from the US is more dangerous and serious,” he said. “The US will tell Israel, annex part of the Palestinian...

By combining two imaging techniques (visible hyperspectral imaging and x-ray fluorescence), a diverse team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new technology that gives access to medieval texts hidden in parchment re-used for ancient book-bindings, as Live Science reported. The new technology is seen by researchers as truly innovative, as it can be used to help decipher the text under the surface of other bookbinding materials. "For generations, scholars have thought this information was inaccessible, so they thought, 'Why bother?'" the study's senior researcher, Marc Walton, a senior scientist at the Northwestern University-Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific...

A Northwestern University research team has taken CSI to a whole new level: employing sophisticated scientific tools to investigate details of the materials and methods used by Roman-Egyptian artists to paint lifelike mummy portraits more than 2,000 years ago. These visages of the dead are considered to be antecedents of Western portraiture. Marc Walton and his interdisciplinary team have uncovered telling clues about the paintings' underlying surface shapes and colors. The new details, when coupled together, provide the researchers with very strong evidence as to how many of the 15 mummy portraits and panel paintings were made. Walton, a senior...

A Northwestern University doctoral student who beat cancer was one of six people shot to death over the weekend in Chicago, gunned down by a stray bullet when he walked into the middle of a gunfight just four hours after arriving in the city to start school, police and his mother said. Shane Colombo, 25, was killed Sunday in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago while on an errand to buy clothes hangers, said his mother, Tonya Colombo of Menifee, California "He was a bright, beautiful, amazing son. And he was so loving," the tearful mother told ABC News...

A nationwide manhunt is underway for a Northwestern University professor and an Oxford University employee who are wanted as suspects after a man was found fatally stabbed inside a luxury Chicago apartment, police said. On Monday, first-degree murder warrants without bail were issued for Wyndham Lathem, 42, and Andrew Warren, 56, for their alleged involvement in the death of Trenton H. James Cornell-Duranleau, Cook County court records show. The documents say Cornell-Duranleau, 26, died after being stabbed multiple times. A community alert released by the Chicago Police Department says the body was discovered on July 27. Lathem has been an...

Campus feminists whipped up a Category-5 frenzy over sexual assault allegations at a Northwestern University fraternity in February. But last week, the school's Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin was forced to muster up her best impression of "Saturday Night Live's" classic foot-in-mouther, Emily Litella. Neeeeever miiiiind. Picture Telles-Irvin squinting and grimacing sheepishly as she wrote an update on her breathless bulletin "that four female students attending an event at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house were possibly given a date-rape drug, and two of these students believed they were sexually assaulted." Before I reveal the substance of her...

They wanted it to look like Trump supporters were behind the hate crime... Two freshmen at Northwestern University were charged with vandalizing the campus church. The two Jewish students painted a Swastika and “Trump” on the church walls.... Both students admitted the vandalism in statements given to university police...

When liberals heard about swastikas painted on a campus church with the word “Trump,” they went wild. But now America just learned who was really behind the hate graffiti, and now libs are completely embarrassed. Two Jewish students were charged with the hate crime where they vandalized the campus church at Northwestern University with swastikas, making it look as if supporters of President-elect Donald Trump were responsible for the offensive graffiti. According to The Chicago Tribune, Anthony Morales, 19, and Matthew Kafker, 18 were both charged with a hate crime and vandalism after they came forward to admit to spray-painting...

<p>A Muslim chaplain flying from Chicago to Washington D.C. Friday says she was left “in tears of humiliation” after a flight attendant allegedly suggested she was a safety risk and another passenger screamed obscenities at her.</p> <p>Tahera Ahmad, an associate chaplain and director of interfaith engagement at Northwestern University in Illinois, wrote on her Facebook page that a United Airlines flight attendant refused to give her an unopened can of Diet Coke as she had requested.</p>

A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney, accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released. Alstory Simon, 64, of Ohio, claims in the lawsuit that he was the victim of unethical tactics by a team focused on freeing another man in what became a celebrated Illinois wrongful conviction case. Simon was imprisoned in 1999 after confessing to the 1982 murder of two people in a park, and spent more than 15 years behind bars before he was...

Researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence for a massive reservoir of water deep within the Earth's mantle. The reservoir, which is said to be three times the volume of the oceans on the surface, is contained within highly-pressurized rock known as ringwoodite. The scientists hope that their findings, recently published in the journal Science, can shed light on where Earth's oceans came from. THREE TIMES THE VOLUME OF THE OCEANS ON EARTH'S SURFACE The team, led by mineralogist Steven Jacobsen, used an array of 2000 seismometers to study how seismic waves generated by earthquakes move through the Earth's interior....

Northwestern University continued to stumble over diversity issues this week as Mexican students voiced disagreement with a campuswide letter that advised students not to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by engaging in racially-offensive activities, such as eating tacos and drinking tequila. The letter was sent to students via e-mail, and published in The Daily Northwestern last week. Leaders of Alianza, a Latino student group, and the Associated Student Government called on students to remember that Cinco de Mayo commemorates Mexico’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla. It is not a day to throw a sombrero-themed party, they said. “Some...

Why do parents hope their children will go on to college? Most parents I know hope that college will provide the education and training needed for a satisfying and rewarding career that will also pay the bills. As the mother of two young women – one a college freshman, the other a high school freshman who will soon be contemplating some form of higher education – this is my hope as well. And I am so very thankful that my oldest is not attending Northwestern University, where students were recently treated to a live demonstration of female orgasm:

In the continued slow suicide of Western Civilization, Northwestern University has appointed a Muslim chaplain to represent the Muslim community on campus, (make demands in favor of Islam). In the past Tahera Ahmad was a leader of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, whose website details their 16 point plan to silence the critics of Islam. The Council is also trying to curtail the sales of alcohol in their area. Did anyone at the university bother to ask Tahera if she is against Sharia Law? Of course not, that would be “offensive”.

DEVOLPING