Free Republic

Next time you’re tempted to badmouth paint (if that’s something you’re wont to do), consider that it might someday soon be saving the lives of our troops. Researchers have developed a special kind of paint that can absorb dangerous chemicals, reports The Engineer. The special paint is a collaboration between The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (in the UK, hence the orthography) and the global paint giant AkzoNobel. The paint’s topcoat contains silica gel, which can absorb nerve gas and prevent it from getting in, say, a tank. The undercoat of the paint is designed with the optimal amount of...

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. ----------------------------------- I covered this over the weekend when Bill McKibben started wailing about the albedo going off the charts. I thought it might be soot related. The PR below and quote above is from NASA Goddard. I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented...

Sally Ride showed Generation X girls the sky’s the limit — literally. We could do anything boys could do and sometimes better. If we wanted to go into space, our gender couldn’t — and wouldn’t — stop us. If we studied hard enough and trained our brains, the glass ceiling could be shattered. Amid all the girl power that Ride taught women, one barrier the first American woman in space chose not to break was sexuality. When she died on Monday at age 61 from pancreatic cancer, it emerged that Ride had a partner. As one friend on Facebook wrote,...

According to The Generation X Report, based on the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, the demographic group born between 1961 and 1981 is even less concerned about climate issues than they were two years ago. The group is “uninformed about the causes, unconcerned about the potential dangers, and doubt it is happening,” writes Hank Campbell on the blog Science 2.0. “Even with most of the country mired in a historic drought, a spate of storms that left millions without power in the mid-Atlantic, and seemingly more frequent natural disasters, people have...

BBC News today reported that “two blind British men have had electronic retinas fitted”. Chris James, 54, and Robin Millar, 60, took part in a clinical trial coordinated by Oxford University and funded by the National Institute of Health Research. Both men have retinitis pigmentosa, a rare hereditary condition that causes gradual deterioration of the light-detecting cells in the retina, which can lead to blindness. The electronic retinas are implants containing light detectors designed to replace the lost light-detecting cells. Immediately following the procedures, when the implants were switched on, both men were able to detect light and are now...

In the first three years of the administration's of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Obama hit Americans with 106 major heavy-handed regulations costing taxpayers $46 BILLION. By contrast for the same period in Bush's first three years, there were 28 major regulations at a cost of $8.1 BILLION. The report cites a Gallup poll from earlier this year that found 46 percent of small business owners are not hiring because they are worried about new government regulations. In addition to current regulations, the report found that proposed regulations continue to generate uncertainty and could result in significant additional costs...

Picture a child of 8 or so. He wakes up and carefully makes his bed before going downstairs and emptying the dishwasher. He fixes himself a bowl of cereal and calmly eats it at the table, then clears his place, rinses the bowl and spoon, and places them both in the now-empty dishwasher. If this seems like some sort of mythical youngster from a faraway culture or a bygone age, you may be in the market for one of the parenting books smartly reviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s New Yorker. Summing up the point of both the books...

fter granting permission, my Entire Food Shelf Life Summary Article was published in the Journal of Civil Defense, Volume 43, Issue Number 2, Year 2010. The Journal of Civil Defense has an extremely wide distribution and readership including all the Congressmen in the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. Publisher's Mailing Address: The American Civil Defense Association, 11576 S. State Street, Suite 502, Draper, UT 84020 Publisher's Web Address: www.tacda.org.

I appreciated the comments of Leroy Stucky (Western Front, June 28) defending the biblical view of the beginning of mankind, the world and the universe, otherwise known as creationism. Creationism will always be a very difficult doctrine to accept, as long as people exclude the supernatural influence and presence of an almighty God who, in my opinion, started the whole process. I have never read an issue of The American Spectator magazine, but recently at the library I happened to pick up the May 2012 issue. The magazine, I found out, is very conservative, but not necessary Christian. However, included...

From the told ya so department, comes this recently presented paper at the European Geosciences Union meeting. Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C]. ------------------------------------------------ Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in: “increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).” And… “homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not...

In 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter (written largely by Leó Szilárd) to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The pressing concern was that Nazi Germany might be conducting research to create atomic bombs, and the letter suggested that the United States should begin researching the possibility itself. This was the impetus for the Manhattan project, which culminated in the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. Socorro, New Mexico, a little more than an hour’s drive south of Albuquerque, is one of the meeting places for those who plan to visit the Trinity Site. Socorro,...

This week, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a "proposed" rule updating what Doctors and Hospitals will be paid under ObamaCare. The Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) ushers-in changes to the "Physician Quality Reporting System," and makes changes to the "Physician Value-Based Payment Modifier." Considering that Obama and Democrats in Congress cut $500 Billion from Medicare, I would love to hear Physicians weigh-in on this "proposed rule." Under the MPFS, a relative value is assigned to each of more than 7,000 types of services to capture the amount of work, the direct and indirect (overhead) practice expenses,...

The House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved a resolution that urges President Obama to resist any international attempts to regulate the Internet. The United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will meet in Dubai this December and initiatives that will put the Internet under greater government control are expected to be up for vote. The committee-approved resolution, introduced by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), is intended to show the international community that the United States is united behind an open and innovative Internet, free from government control. But the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), the ITU meeting that will...

Thank God for air conditioning. I mean it. I'm not being casual about Whom to thank. I thank the everlasting Creator who imparted his universal wisdom into a series of inventions and ideas until a misguided therapy for malaria gave us the means to create ice. God bless! And then some Luddite, glacier-chopping Ice King quashed John Gorrie's idea in order to save his own fortunes, and we sweated for 50 more years. I hope Hell's thermostat got an upgrade of 50,000 extra degrees just for Mr. Tudor's arrival. Air Conditioning is a miracle of civilization but it's not a...

How to make a PVC Water Hand Pump to use when you have no power April 8th, 2011 | Author: Lady Apprentice Today we will learn how to create a PVC hand pump to get the water from your well when you have no power and how it all works. I have a few plans to show you on how to make them, which we will get to later, but first let’s understand how a PVC hand pump would work, or most any pump for that matter. If you look at the picture below you can see for yourself how...

The Virginian Pilot, my local paper has receives national attention recently. Its editor decided that a black mob attacking a pair of his reporters was not news. When the story finally surfaced, the Pilot’s editorial judgment was … questioned … exposed … revealed for the sorry mix of bad judgment mixed with political correctness for which the paper is notorious. As you may have heard, the Mid-Atlantic area has been hit by some pretty strong wind and thunderstorms recently which left millions without power and dozens dead. Meanwhile summer temperatures between 90 and 100 degrees are forcing people from their...

alas, to statist ends... As many of you are likely aware, the 1970 Plymouth Superbird was a special 'aero' version of the popular Plymouth Roadrunner created as a NASCAR homologation special (the company was required to build a minimum of 500 cars in a street version of any specific model to qualify in NASCAR as a 'production car'). Similar to the aerodynamically-advanced 1968 Dodge Charger 500 and further-evolved 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona, Plymouth's 1970 Superbird was intended not only to hit 200mph on NASCAR Superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega, but was also an attempt to lure King Richard Petty back (from Ford) to...

The massive western wildfires could have been avoided with intelligent forest management and less hysteria from the greens. As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive. This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to...

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. ------------------------ (Lake Eyre region in South Australia.) ------------------------ A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks: "The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come. “'Temperatures could increase up to...

1. Put this in your "God is really, really smart. Humans? Not so much." file. Within just the last few years, farmers all over the U.S. have noticed a strange and completely heretofore unseen incidence of SULFUR deficiency in crops. Odd. Why would sulfur deficiency issues suddenly appear where they had never been seen before? It turns out that the sulfur in the diesel burned by the tractors would aerosolize in the exhaust, and then precipitate and FERTILIZE the ground at planting and harvest as the tractor effectively covered the entire field. When the tyrannical government removed pretty much all...