Free Republic

In 1982/83 America graduated roughly 16,000 physicians. This number has barely budged since. In 2015 America graduated just 18,705 physicians—that is, 17% more. During the same period, America’s total population (not including the 11.1 million illegal immigrants) increased by 39%, from 231.7 million in 1982, to 322 million today. In a closed system, we would have expected to see the physician-patient ratio deteriorate over the last few decades—but that’s not what we’ve seen. Instead, we have more physicians than ever before. The reason? Immigration. According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 17% of America’s 12.4 million healthcare professionals...

On August 21, for the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse will cut through the entire continental United States. It’s going to be awesome. If you’re in the bull’s eye center of the moon’s shadow known as the totality — the sky will go dark for a few minutes in the middle of the day, stars will appear, birds will become confused and start chirping their nighttime songs. And it’s all because of a cosmic coincidence: From the Earth, both the moon and sun appear to be roughly the same size. Most of the country will see...

Well, well, it seems the “T” in LGBT has finally produced a line that even committed liberals are unwilling—or at least, not yet willing—to cross. For liberal columnist Leonard Pitts, a “genderless” child is the “proverbial bridge too far.” Of course, given the sad, sick, rotten fruit of modern liberalism, Mr. Pitts’ conclusion on genderless children raises the question: Why would any devoted liberal of the 21st century be taken aback by an “enlightened” parent who refuses to recognize the clear gender of his or her newborn child? Touting his rock-solid liberal credentials, in his recent piece, Mr. Pitts points...

Shortly after his election in 2008, Barack Obama set out on an apology tour decrying the sins of America’s past and the era of American Exceptionalism appeared to be over. Friday on radio, Glenn and the guys talked about just how refreshing it was to hear President Trump step up to the plate and knock one out of the park for the western way of life and for freedom. “We haven’t heard that, you know, ‘hey, we are worth standing up for.’ This is a choice that people made and sacrificed to be able to have freedom. And here’s Poland...

The real reason for Illinois' collapsing financial situation is being withheld from its citizens. According to the latest Natural News health blog, "When a single state in America must now pay over half a billion dollars per month just to barely keep up with what it owes the medical system, you know something has gone terribly wrong and the system is unsustainable." "Illinois is being bankrupted by Big Pharma," continues Natural News publisher Mike Adams who is an advocate of Natural Medicine and healing practices not acceptable to the Federal Drug Administration, “because Americans are being held captive by the...

The year: 2019. The mission: Send combat forces into space to save the world from potential Star Wars. The crew to get the job done: the United States Space Corps. A Congressional committee is proposing that the US armed forces add a new military branch that would, quite literally, send soldiers out of this world. The crew of real-life Buzz Lightyears is described in the National Defense Authorization Act, which is now headed to the full House for a vote. There isn't usually anything extraordinary about the NDAA, which every year lays out military spending. But this time, the House...

If we built farms in space, they'd look nothing like the vast wheat fields of Kansas. But they just might look something like urban farms being used today—modular closed-loop hydroponic farms, actually. These compact, efficient grow houses could be the life-giving answer to keeping astronauts fed, a solution The Martian's Mark Watney could only dream of. The idea is less science fiction than you might think, too. Freight Farms, based in Boston, is trying to revolutionize the global food system with its Leafy Green Machines. These shipping containers filled with racks of planted crops, grow lights, and environmental control systems...

Hampton Creek, a plant-based food startup headquartered in San Francisco, recently announced that it will be moving into the lab-grown meat industry, and plans to have its clean meat products on shelves as soon as 2018. According to Spanish tech site ABC.es, Hampton Creek is considering using 3D printing to realize this goal. Since its founding in 2011 by Josh Balk and Joshua Tetrick (the company’s current CEO), Hampton Creek has gained a lot of attention for its plant-based food products—both good and bad. On the good side, the company has been recognized as a unicorn startup and has done...

On Thursday's New Day on CNN, during a discussion of President Donald Trump's speech in Poland, CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour at one point hinted that those who are "denying climate science" are similar to those who used to think the planets and sun revolve around the Earth as she recalled Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Accord. After recounting that Trump had praised former Polish president Lech Walesa and recalled his anti-communist activities from the 1980s, Amanpour noted that Trump had also mentioned the Polish scientist Copernicus and his contributions to astronomy: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) On Copernicus...

There are good reasons not to confine the discussion to academic journals. In the latest issue of National Review, John McWhorter has a challenging and thought-provoking essay about the topic of race and IQ — specifically, about whether that topic should even be up for discussion in liberal-arts classrooms and in the media, as opposed to in scientific journals. He suggests not, as there is nothing to gain from discussing it. I read McWhorter’s essay with special interest because I have violated the norm he proposes. I have written about race and IQ on numerous occasions — and for a...

Norsk Titanium has become a huge source of pride for people in Plattsburgh. It's a Norwegian aerospace company that makes airplane parts using high-tech, industrial, 3-D printing machines. The plant opened last year, and recently Norsk delivered its first federally approved parts for Boeing commercial airplanes. The 3-D printing technology is at the cutting edge in the aerospace industry. Business leaders have called this the next industrial revolution. We visited the company's research and testing facility to see how it works. The 3-D printers looked like long, supersized computer towers. A mechanical arm with little torches on the end shot...

Terahertz technology enabled via graphene could boost the capacity of future data networks, according to researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Andrei Vorobiev, pictured, senior researcher, said: “One of graphene’s special features is that electrons move much faster than in most semiconductors used today. Thanks to this, we can access the high frequencies that constitute the terahertz range. Data communication then has the potential of becoming up to ten times faster and can transmit much larger amounts of data than is currently possible.” Researchers at Chalmers have shown that graphene based transistor devices could receive and convert terahertz...

While most Americans are gathering with family and community this weekend to celebrate the most exceptional country in the history of the world, Mr. Hope and Change is halfway around the world talking doom and gloom — and criticizing his successor.   Barack Obama visited Indonesia this weekend, and in a series of appearances, attacked love of country and the policies of Donald Trump. The Guardian reports:The former US president said some countries had adopted “an aggressive kind of nationalism” and “increased resentment of minority groups”, in a speech in Indonesia on Saturday that could be seen as a commentary...

As many of you know I have lived in Sandy Hook, CT for about 20 years. Newtown (the Connecticut town that Sandy Hook is part of) has its institutions, including Fairfield Hills, the former mental institution and $30 million albatross, our giant American flag in the center of Main St., and the rooster weathervane atop the Congregational church that Revolutionary War soldiers used for target practice. It later became the town symbol according to legend. We also have the deli and coffee shop owned for decades by my friend of 20 years Agnes (not her real name). Agnes is known...

Between 2013 and 2014, using IEA data, global demand for energy grew by 2,000 terawatt hours. Let’s figure out how many wind turbines we’d need to build to meet this growing demand—we’ll ignore the fact that “environmentalists” would like us to simultaneously replace existing generating capacity. Given that a standard two-megawatt wind turbine can produce 0.005 terawatt hours per year, we’d need to build some 350,000 wind turbines to meet this demand. That’s 50% more turbines than we’ve build since the year 2000. And it gets worse: at a standard density of 1 megawatt per 50 acres of land, we’d...

Innovations in the technology of 3D printing and scanning have been tremendous. The hype that was already being created in 3D printing is huge and the R&D is happening to fulfil the expectations in different parts of the world. Though the technology erupted in 1980’s, 3D printing for healthcare has been getting familiar in the last decade. Let us see how, across all areas, 3D printing of healthcare can have a bigger impact in coming years. Bio-printing Whenever the words “3D printing in healthcare” are uttered, most people will ask, “is it possible to 3D print an organ like heart...

This past week the U.S. Geological Survey sent out an email alert warning of a 6.8 magnitude earthquake near Santa Barbara, California. A 6.8 magnitude is considered a "strong" quake and likely to cause moderate to severe damage to poorly constructed buildings. The fact that the alert was for an event that occurred in 1925 caused many to question the timeliness of the USGS warning. USGS Director Suzette Kimball acknowledged that "while the specific utility of this particular alert was low, we shouldn't discount the progress our Agency has made in the way of early warnings. The fact that we...

Nanotechnologists from Rice University and China's Tianjin University have used 3-D laser printing to fabricate centimeter-sized objects of atomically thin graphene. The research could yield industrially useful quantities of bulk graphene and is described online in a new study in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. "This study is a first of its kind," said Rice chemist James Tour, co-corresponding author of the paper. "We have shown how to make 3-D graphene foams from nongraphene starting materials, and the method lends itself to being scaled to graphene foams for additive manufacturing applications with pore-size control." Graphene, one of the...

One company sees 3D print technology evolving into a product lineup of affordable and scalable printers, with the “blade server” concept for volume manufacturing where printers on a rack will scale up or down to meet customers’ needs. Discussions of additive manufacturing invariably turn to prototyping for a good reason: economics. While it may make sense from a cost perspective to 3D print functional new parts with plastic or metal during the design process, additive manufacturing (AM) techniques cease where mass production begins. Few manufacturers are discussing replacing traditional production methods for parts with AM techniques, as it would simply...

As reported recently in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF), CREOL and the University of Texas have developed a graphene-based transistor that could one day lead to super-fast and super energy-efficient computers. By super-fast we mean a thousand times faster and by super energy-efficient we mean it will only use a hundredth of the power. Right now, the world of electronics relies on silicon-based transistors to power its devices. And while their invention made it possible for devices to be reduced to smaller sizes as the transistors allowed the flow of...