Free Republic

The liberal media are currently up in arms over President Trump’s labeling of the investigation into Russian hacking and the 2016 presidential campaign as a “witch hunt.” All three broadcast networks led their Thursday evening newscasts with Trump’s use of the phrase, with NBC’s Lester Holt describing Trump as “lashing out.”The liberal media are currently up in arms over President Trump’s labeling of the investigation into Russian hacking and the 2016 presidential campaign as a “witch hunt.” All three broadcast networks led their Thursday evening newscasts with Trump’s use of the phrase, with NBC’s Lester Holt describing Trump as “lashing...

No local research project has ever grabbed the attention of northwestern Pennsylvanians quite like John Kanzius’ Noninvasive Radiowave Cancer Device. The late Millcreek Township inventor’s cancer-killing machine has been featured in local news stories for more than 10 years. It was even the focus of reports on the CBS news program “60 Minutes.” The device works by emitting radio waves that heat and destroy cancer cells that have either been treated with chemotherapy or targeted with tiny pieces of metal called nanoparticles. It had been proven to kill cancerous cells and tumors in pigs and smaller animals without harming the...

The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post. The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from...

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- For Marine Corps aviators, hydraulics are critical part of performing all the heavy lifting required during aircraft operations. Marine Cpl. Habtamu Sharew and Lance Cpl. Juan Herreragonzalez know that better than anyone. The two are hydraulic mechanics from Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 29 in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They work specifically on the hydraulics systems. Not long ago, they entered their idea for streamlining hydraulic line maintenance into the 2016 Marine Corps Logistic Innovation Challenge. Out of more than 300 entries, theirs was chosen as one of 18 to move to the next step. That brought...

The Obama administration has dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all federally funded scientists to get permission from patients before using their cells, blood, tissue or DNA for research. The proposal was eliminated from the final revision of the Common Rule, which was published in the Federal Register Wednesday. The rule is a complex set of regulations designed to make sure federally funded research on human subjects is conducted ethically. The revision to the regulations, set to go into effect in 2018, marks the first time the rule has been updated in 26 years. The initial proposal that...

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

While eating at a restaurant in west central Pennsylvania on 10/27/2016 I noticed a man reading a large pile of newspaper clippings. Having subscribed to a clipping service years ago, it was obvious the neatly cut and folded news articles had come from such a service. The man was a Democrat in some capacity, based on a brief interaction, that was displeased with the amount of free advertising that Trump had received.

There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers. That's massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like

Unfortunately it took a scandalous retraction three years later to admit it as the study's authors originally reported that the results indicated that conservatives had psychotic personality traits and liberals had traits associated with high social desirability.  This much-touted research study in fact revealed just the opposite: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was...

Announcing the Net Data Directory Posted on June 02, 2016 by Rebekah Heacock Jones Filed under: Internet Monitor The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is delighted to announce the launch of the Net Data Directory, a free, publicly available, searchable database of different sources of data about the Internet. The directory is intended to make finding useful quantitative data about a broad range of Internet-related topics—broadband, cybersecurity, freedom of expression, and more—easier for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the public. "A large number of organizations are producing data about all different facets of the Internet," said Fernando Bermejo, Berkman Center...

This past June, American academia went into an uproar over Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget in Wisconsin,....Specifically,any professor in the system—tenured or not—could be dismissed or laid off by the 18-member Board of Regents using maddeningly vague criteria:“when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance,curtailment,modification or redirection.”This,when combined with the faculty’s diminished role in governing the university—and thus determining such things as which programs should continue, be curtailed, or get modified—basically meant that these regents—16 of whom were appointed by Walker—could fire anyone,at any time, for any reason.[SNIP]Professors do not want...

[SNIP]The diminution of the Big Idea isn’t easy to accept,even for those willing to concede that there are major problems in their field.An ego depletion optimist might acknowledge that psychology studies tend to be too small to demonstrate a real effect,or that scientists like to futz around with their statistics until the answers come out right.(None of this implies deliberate fraud;just that sloppy standards prevail.)Still,the optimist would say,it seems unlikely that such mistakes would propagate so thoroughly throughout a single literature,and that so many noisy,spurious results could line up quite so perfectly.If all these successes came about by random chance,then...

A U.S. government that once famously spent $2.6 million to encourage Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly is capable of almost anything. Members of Congress often use these stories about absurd taxpayer-funded studies to make fun of the bureaucracy. Instead of just mocking silly studies, maybe they should put a stop to them.

How big ARE New York's rats? Researcher catches one-and-a-half pound rodent three times the size of a normal beast "...'I've caught rats all over the city, and I've seen the ones that I didn't catch. I think it's among the biggest that live in New York City,' said Matt Combs of Fordham University. [snip] One of the largest rats ever reported in New York City was a huge beast dubbed Master Splinter by the Twitter user that first posted a picture of it. The enormous rat was found in a Footlocker store in the Bronx in 2012, according to Twitter...