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Almost 100 years after the great Swedish migration to North America, dialect researchers from Gothenburg are heading across the Atlantic in hopes of learning more about the evolution of the Swedish language, The Local’s Karen Holst explains. Wild myths that solve the mysterious birth of language and its dispersal often include floods, catastrophes or punishment by the gods. In Hindu stories it was a tree being humbled, in North American Indian folklore it was a great flood, in east Africa it was starvation-induced madness, in the Amazon it was stolen hummingbird eggs and in aboriginal Australia it was a goddess’...

A team of researchers at Lund University in southern Sweden have managed to develop nerve cells from human skin cells without using stem cells - a development described as an ethical and medical breakthrough. "This fundamentally changes how we look at mature cells and their capacity. Previously a skin cell was thought to always remain a skin cell, but we have shown that it can be any cell," said Malin Parmar, the Lund University researcher leading the study, to The Local on Tuesday. The new technique works by reprogramming connective tissue cells, so-called human fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, opening...

SNIPPET: "The death rate can be as high as 60 percent for people with underlying medical problems, and some 250,000 Americans die of severe sepsis annually. A clinical trial of a new device to treat severe sepsis – the leading cause of death in hospital intensive care units – is under way at University Medical Center. "This study is important because sepsis is a life-threatening illness, and it's increased every year in the past 20 years despite all our advances in medicine," said Dr. Harold Szerlip, professor in the University of Arizona Department of Medicine and UA principal investigator of...

FDA announces review of birth control pills over serious blood clot risks by Peter J. Smith Wed Jun 01 5:32 PM EST WASHINGTON, D.C., June 1, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Federal drug regulators are now reviewing studies that say some modern birth control pills may pose a serious risk of clots to women who take them. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Tuesday that they were conducting a safety review of birth control products containing drospirenone, a synthetic female sex hormone or progestin. German pharmaceutical maker Bayer’s oral contraceptives Yaz, Yasmine, Safyral, Beyaz, and their generics are part...

Return to the Article May 29, 2011The Sad Consequences of 'Shacking Up'Trevor Thomas GA_googleFillSlot("AT_300_250_bottom"); Recently that Hollywood scholar Cameron Diaz gave us an illustration of the secular/godless worldview on marriage: "I do [think marriage is dead]. I think we have to make our own rules. I don't think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don't suit our world any longer." The current generation in America is shunning marriage for cohabitation at an unprecedented rate. According to the 2010 edition of the State of Our Unions report by the National Marriage Project at the...

Search || Home » News Pro-Life Groups Unite In Pepsi Boycott Cogforlife@aol.com2011-05-25 For Immediate Release May 25, 2011 Pro-Life Groups Call for Pepsi Boycott over Aborted Fetal Cell Lines (Largo, FL) Scores of prolife groups are calling for a public boycott of food giant, PepsiCo due to their partnership with Senomyx, a biotech company using aborted fetal cells in the research and development of artificial flavor enhancers. Pepsi is funding the research and development – and paying royalties to Senomyx which uses HEK-293 (human embryonic kidney cells) to produce flavor enhancers for Pepsi beverages. Senomyx boasts they have over 800,000...

Obama Administration Seeks to Test Anthrax Vaccine in Children Friday, 06 May 2011 Whose children will be sacrificed in an illegal and unethical experiment in the name of Biodefense Preparedness? According to BioPrepWatch.com , the Obama administration is seeking to obtain a green light to conduct an anthrax vaccine safety experiment  on US children.  The stated rationale for such a trial, articulated by Dr. Nicole Lurie, US Dept. of Health and Human Services,  is that there are no data about the safety of exposing children to the anthrax vaccine. And if an emergency arises, a trial "would present an...

Australian ethicist working at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics claims that humanity has a “moral obligation” to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society, with the obvious implication that the less intelligent “surplus” embryos should simply be destroyed. Professor Julian Savulescu of Melbourne made the statement while commenting on an economic modeling research paper by Oxford University ethicists Andres Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, who claim that a rise in humanity’s IQ would result in a reduction in poverty, welfare dependency, crowding of jails, school dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, and...

A surge in Satanism fuelled by the internet has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists, the Roman Catholic Church has warned. The web has made it easier than ever before to access information on Devil-worshipping and the occult, experts said. Exorcism is the subject of a six-day conference being held this week at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome, which is under the Vatican's authority. "The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism," said Carlo Climati, a member of the university who specialises in the dangers posed to...

The quest was a noble one: To develop, and help bring to market, new energy technologies that are better for the environment, provide greater system reliability and lower system costs, while furnishing “tangible benefits to electric utility customers.” Well, electric utility customers, you’ve shelled out $700 million for this noble effort since 1996, and what have you gotten? Precious little that could be even loosely interpreted as “tangible benefits,” concludes a report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. TENUOUS CONNECTIONS Meet the state’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, built into your electric bill as a “public goods” charge. It has...

Admittedly, the Egyptian uprising, the nullification of Obamacare and the ongoing ramifications of "Snowpocolypse 2011" could render the controversy about an MTV original program insignificant by comparison. After all, MTV is only out to destroy an entire generation. No big deal. Every adult - not just parents - should take the time to learn about the MTV show "Skins," a new "teen drama" that the Parents Television Council (PTC) has deemed "the most dangerous show on TV." Be careful when you go hunting for information about "Skins" lest your spouse conclude you've developed an interest in child pornography. The publicity...

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference? The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there is a reason for that. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but...

The Harvard School of Public Health has released a new site called The Firearms Research Digest. The site has six years’ (2003-2008) worth of summarized research from social science, medical, criminology, and public health journals. It’s available at http://www.firearmsresearch.org The site will eventually be expanded to include research from 1988 to the present. You can do a simple keyword search for you can search by topics (a few dozen), year of research, or publication (there’s a huge list of publications available.) I did a search for storage and got 47 results, which were divided into sublistings including topics, keyword, and...

David Suzuki said, "Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism."  His observation is proven right every single day. I remember when I first learned that lesson at my mother's knee.  It was November 1959, and the first major food scare I can remember was set off by a report by the secretary of HEW, who, just before that Thanksgiving, warned that cranberries were "contaminated" with a weed-killer called aminotriazole. Without paying much attention to the fine print of the reports about the chemical, consumers shunned cranberries, which remained...

Which do you think is less expensive, not to mention preferable: a cure for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes, or caring for people with these diseases? Wouldn't it be better medical and public policy to direct more resources toward finding a cure for diseases that cost a lot to treat than to rely on a government insurance program, such as Obamacare, which seeks mainly to help pay the bills for people after they become ill? Isn't the answer obvious? Apparently not to many politicians trapped in an old paradigm that focuses too much on hospitals, doctors and medicines and too...

Latest on Embryonic Stem Cell Research Battles Court to Hear Lawsuit on Obama's Embryonic Stem Cell Funds http://LifeNews.com/bio-3223 Bill to Expand Obama's Embryonic Stem Cell Funds Appears Dead http://LifeNews.com/bio-3222

Direct Conversion May Make Embryonic Stem Cell Research Obsolete New York, NY -- Scientists made a major step towards making embryonic stem cell research obsolete when they used direct reprogramming to convert adult stem cells to an embryonic-like state. Now direct conversion is moving the ball forward. The process of direct conversion involves changing one kind of specialized stem cell into another kind -- and it eliminates the need for controversial embryonic stem cells, which some scientists promote because they can change into most any kind of cells. http://LifeNews.com/bio-3220

One possibility that Dr. Harer ruled out is that of a chariot accident. "If he fell from a speeding chariot going at top speed you would have what we call a tumbling injury -- he'd go head over heels. He would break his neck. His back. His arms, legs. It wouldn't gouge a chunk out of his chest." Instead, at his Toronto lecture, Harer brought up another, more exotic possibility -- that Tut was killed by a hippo. It's not as far out an idea as it sounds, hippos are aggressive, quick and territorial animals, and there is an artefact...

In a letter sent Friday to the leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the deans of American medical schools, chief executives of U.S. hospitals and heads of organizations with names like the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the American Society of Human Genetics said that federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research “is essential” if scientists are to succeed in turning the cells into usable treatments. “The therapeutic potential of human embryonic stem cells is remarkable and could well prove to be one of the most significant paradigm-shifting advances in the history of...

Hi Free Republic, this is my first post here. I came to Free Republic to seek your opinions in a survey about foreign countries. Would you care to take it? http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CBQ7HJZ