Free Republic

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.SNIPLow-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

The new president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center said he expects a cure for cancer will be found on his watch. If not, he said, he'll consider his tenure a failure. “And I will not fail,” said Dr. Ronald DePinho, who moved to Houston in September from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston. SNIP The plain-spoken DePinho, who talks of “kicking cancer's butt,” said new technologies are the key to “putting cancer in the history books.” “The opportunity has never been greater to truly end this dreaded disease,” he said during a...

Investment in new aeroplane technologies is the key to the UK maintaining its status as an aerospace leader, according to a report. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said the country's research and development spending has "flat-lined" since the 2008 financial crisis. It said that made the UK's position vulnerable to China, India and Brazil. It urged the creation of a research centre to test ideas such as pilot-free planes and solar-powered flight. "The UK aerospace sector already employs over 100,000 people around the country and is worth over £29bn a year to our economy, but we need to take...

Recent survey and focus group research conducted in Ohio and California by Public Opinion Strategies and Fairbank, Maslin, Maulin, Metz & Associates reveals that “Solyndra” is a scandal known mainly to news junkies — and that many Americans remain committed to clean energy investments.Just 11 percent of 650 Ohio voters surveyed after Solyndra declared bankruptcy said they had heard “a great deal” about the issue. Another 16 percent said they had heard “a little,” but couldn’t cite any meaningful specifics. As might be expected, voters in California focus groups were slightly more aware of the issue.Ohio voters were also twice...

A source within the Obama campaign has told Mediaite, that in just the first day, the user-generated research tool has been nothing short of an enormous success. “In less than 24 hours we’ve had over 100,000 people sign up at the website, which indicates significant interest from supporters.” While the volume of conservative critiques speaks to the intensity of the opposition’s feelings towards the Obama administration, at the very least this digital effort did it’s job bit perhaps instilling a little fear in the GOP campaign efforts. It’s not difficult to imagine social media staffers at the RNC scratching their...

Study finds inflammation may be part of the solution, not the problemIncreased low-grade inflammation in the body resulting from obesity is widely viewed as contributing to type 2 diabetes. Going against this long-held belief, researchers from Children's Hospital Boston report that two proteins activated by inflammation are actually crucial for maintaining good blood sugar levels – and that boosting the activity of these proteins can normalize blood sugar in severely obese and diabetic mice. The research, led by Umut Ozcan, MD, in the Division of Endocrinology at Children's, is reported in the October issue of Nature Medicine, published online September...

Inside the Beltway, George Will is considered quite a columnist. That sure doesn't carry over when he ventures north of I-495.Why is he writing nonsense like this about Chris Christie? Taxing the rich is popular, but Christie told New Jersey: “If I let my foot off their throat on the millionaire’s tax, they’re coming after you with the gas tax.” That is, the 24-cent increase in the tax the Legislature can’t get past him. Does this guy ever do any research at all?  The Democrats have not tried to get a 24-cent-a-gallon gas tax through the Legislature.  The bill in question, A-2718, was...

New research demonstrates that a diet based around plants, nuts and high-fiber grains lowered "bad" cholesterol more than a low-saturated-fat diet that was also vegetarian, meaning that one's dietary changes could be an alternative to statin medications for many people saving persons from some devastating side effects of the medications. After six months, people on the low-saturated-fat diet saw a drop in LDL cholesterol of 8 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), on average, according to findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (excerpted)

Doctors have treated only three leukemia patients, but the sensational results from a single shot could be one of the most significant advances in cancer research in decades. And it almost never happened. In the research published Wednesday, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania say the treatment made the most common type of leukemia completely disappear in two of the patients and reduced it by 70 percent in the third. In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later it is still gone

In preliminary research that's been dubbed "remarkable," "dramatic" and "sensational," doctors made the most common type of leukemia disappear in two patients, and reduced cancer cells by 70 percent in a third.

Perhaps you caught the story that the National Institutes of Health sponsored a project to study the size of gay men’s packages. That might be the most egregious of the bizarre NIH funding examples turned up by a recent budget review conducted by the Traditional Values Coalition — but it’s by no means the only one.TVC reports millions of dollars have gone to projects that can only be described as obvious. Since 2008, for example, $472,286 went to a project to study noise exposure on the New York City subway (yep, it’s noisy!). More than $360,000 contributed to a study...

A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife. The £1.9 million project involved 57 researchers who conducted over 40 separate studies in 20 countries representing a diverse range of cultures. The studies (both analytical and empirical) conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife, and that both theology and atheism are reasoned responses to what is a basic impulse of the human mind. The researchers point out that the project was not setting out to prove the...

An extreme eight-week diet of 600 calories a day can reverse Type 2 diabetes in people newly diagnosed with the disease, says a Diabetologia study. The 11 participants in the study were all diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes within the previous four years. Newcastle University researchers found the low-calorie diet reduced fat levels in the pancreas and liver, which helped insulin production return to normal. Three months after the end of the diet, when participants had returned to eating normally and received advice on healthy eating and portion size, most no longer suffered from the condition.

Ran across this Web Site: http://vintageaerial.com/

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...