Free Republic

The media is chock full with articles of scientists, environmentalists and Carbon Billionaires (Al Gore) – stating how mankind is destroying the planet with our use of fossil fuels and other contaminents. The fact that industry is causing ecological and environmental damage is without doubt, but are we really the cause of the high greenhouse gas levels, or should we be more concerned with natural causes such as melting permafrost. We also take a look at why the ex Leader of Greenpeace lied on national television regarding Arctic ice disappearance and then defended the fact that Greenpeace had released inaccurately...

For two millennia the Great Drain has carried the mineral-rich waters of Britain's only hot spring from the Roman Bath in Bath to the nearby River Avon. The drain runs for nearly half a mile under the city but although parts of it are large enough for a man to walk through, it has never been fully explored. Archaeologists will have their first opportunity to get inside the previously inaccessible sections of the Great Drain this month when engineers open it up for repairs. A stretch of drain built long after the Romans is causing the difficulties. The extension was...

After the discovery of the building that perhaps supported Nero's rotating dining room on the Palatine, excavations for Line C of Rome's subway brought to light a building that, according to the first hypotheses made by archaeologists, is thought to be Hadrian's Academy, built in 133 A.D. to host poets, rectors, philosophers, men of letters, scientists and magistrates. Hadrian, or Publius Aelius Hadrianus, ruled from 117-138 AD. He was an avid philosopher who was commonly referred to as one of the "five good emperors." Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England was built after a great war in what was then called...

AMATEUR archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Scotland's oldest human settlement, dating back 14,000 years. The team dug up tools that have been shown to date from the end of the last Ice Age. It is the first time there has been proof that humans lived in Scotland during the upper paleolithic period.

Scotland already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country -- reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north. Now the number is set to increase. The first comprehensive survey of Roman remains for 30 years will boost the total of officially recognised sites and give them greater legal protection, officials said yesterday. Traces of at least 225 Roman military camps dot the Scottish countryside from the Borders to Aberdeenshire... They can be spotted today mostly from the air, where the distinctive bank and ditch defences thrown up by the legionaries still mark the...

An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East. The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation. Although it has long been known that most of these shrines face east, some academics have questioned whether this alignment reflected a deliberate plan. Critics of astronomical...

The past of human evolution is more and more coming to light as scientists uncover a trove of fossils and genetic knowledge. But where might the future of human evolution go? There are plenty of signs that humans are still evolving. However, whether humans develop along the lines portrayed by hackneyed science fiction is doubtful. Clichés dashed An old cliché has the highly evolved humans of the future sporting large heads to hold their advanced enlarged brains, "but that's nonsense, whole nonsense," said paleontologist Peter Ward at the University of Washington at Seattle, author of "Future Evolution." "If you've ever...

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists led by Veselin Ignatov formally presented Tuesday their finds from the tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora. In October and November 2009, Ignatov's team found a burial tomb of dated back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD, located outside of the village of Karanovo, in southern Bulgaria. The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number...

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents. At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average. Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of...

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

The gardens were built when the Abbey of Cernes was transformed into a country mansion in the mid-16th century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One resident who may have been responsible for the gardens was Denzil Holles, a characterful MP who fought for the Parliamentarians but was a Royalist at heart and who occupied the house from 1642-66. The Rev John Hutchins, a local historian writing in 1774, claimed that he was told that the giant was "a modern thing" cut by Lord Holles. The National Trust, which owns the field where the giant is carved, suggests that the...

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures. Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size. But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this...

Jews had long suspected that the entrance to the real burial chamber must be here, and because of that they placed their prayer slips of paper in wall cracks on the exterior of the building at this same location... Dr. Jevin... recounted to Nachrichten aus Israel (News from Israel) how he forced himself through a narrow entrance, went down 16 steps and crawled along a 20-meters long, 60-cm high and 100-cm wide tunnel in order to finally reach a 3.5 x 3.5 meter room. The chamber, tunnel and steps were all made of the same worked stones as the building...

Sorry, kids—scientists have not discovered the first known bubblegum-blowing sea creature. But they have found the only known corals to eat adult jellyfish, a new study says. Opening wide--yes, that's a mouth--a mushroom coral ingests a roughly 4-and-a-half-inch-wide (12-centimeter) moon jellyfish (pictured) in the Red Sea in March 2009. And this coral wasn't alone. The study, led by scientists from Israel's Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University, witnessed other corals dining on the jellyfish. Marine ecologist Jennifer Smith, who wasn't part of the study, agreed the find was unique, though she's "not entirely surprised." Mushroom corals, which have soft bodies,...

CLICK HERE FOR THE WHOLE PAMPHLET ...Big Government has spent $79 billion on the climate industry, 3000 times more than Big Oil. Leading climate scientists won’t debate in public and won’t provide their data. What do they hide? When faced with freedom-of-information requests they say they’ve “lost” the original global temperature records. Thousands of scientists are rising in protest against the scare campaign. Meanwhile $126 billion turned over in carbon markets in 2008 and bankers get set to make billions. Twenty pages of concise commentary and cartoons: The short synopsis of how we paid to find a crisis. The...

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed by enthusiastic admirers from the astronomer's body in 1737, 95 years after his death, while his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. One of the fingers was recovered soon after,...

Appearing in the Nov. 27, 2009, issue (Vol. 284, No. 48) of JBCA key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors. Now, in a study appearing in this week's JBC, researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet: generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water. Many researchers believe that RNA was one of the first biological molecules present, before DNA and proteins; however, there has been little success in recreating the formation on...

Inventor Raphial Morgado has been invited as a guest speaker a the Oregon chapter of SAE to discuss and demonstrate his Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) engine. Also working on building 5.5-inch versions to demonstrate this 40x power-to-weight ratio engine.Inventor Raphial Morgado has been invited as a guest speaker a the Oregon chapter of SAE to discuss and demonstrate his Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) engine. Also working on building 5.5-inch versions to demonstrate this 40x power-to-weight ratio engine. We've got several updates to report on Angel Lab's Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) engine -- the internal combustion engine with multiple firings in...

Now, findings from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital shed light on the neural basis of memory defects in Down syndrome and suggest a new strategy for treating the defects with medication. The study, which was conducted in mice, is the first to show that boosting norepinephrine signaling in the brains of mice genetically engineered to mimic Down syndrome improves their cognition. Norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter that nerve cells use to communicate...

High definition, the final frontier. Where nerds can boldly go where no moviegoer has gone before. With the Blu-ray release of the "Star Trek" movie prequel, these brave fans can obsess over the film's tiny details, including whether or not a very famous robot had a cameo that nobody noticed.

My heroine of the week is Amanda Baillieu, editor of architects’ trade journal Building Design. She noticed that when Environment Secretary Hillary Benn gave a talk at the Royal Institute of British Architects the other day on the looming peril of ManBearPig, hardly anyone bothered to turn up. In an extremely brave editorial entitled “Is Global Warming Hot Air?” she speculated that the reason may have been because even architects are getting tired of listening to hysterical drivel about impending eco-doom and the so-called “consensus” on Anthropogenic Global Warming. In fact, you’d be forgiven for not knowing there is a...

A radiation-resistant version of NRAM carbon-nanotube-based memory, developed jointly by Lockheed Martin and Nantero, was tested on a recent Space Shuttle mission. The NRAM was incorporated by NASA into special autonomous testing configurations installed into a carrier at the aft end of the payload bay. It was launched into space as part of STS-125, the May 2009 mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis that successfully serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. The project was managed by Dan Powell, Chief Nanotechnologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

President Dmitry Medvedev says Russia will prioritize the development of nuclear energy, especially the use of nuclear technology in spacecraft. Medvedev made the announcement Thursday during his annual address to the Federal Assembly. This was not the first time that Russia has suggested the development of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Anatoly Perminov, the head of Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, said last month that the agency has planned to develop spacecraft with a megawatt-class nuclear power set.

Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip. It’s ironic, then, that the search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.

Want to make a planet that can sustain carbon-based life? Don’t park it in orbit around a sunlike star. “For the long term, the sun may not be the best star,” says Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, coauthor of a paper reporting a new model about the suitability of planets for life. Smaller, cooler stars called orange dwarf stars might be the most hospitable, he says.

WASHINGTON — America's once clear dominance in space is eroding as other nations, including China, Iran and North Korea, step up their activities, a panel of experts told the House subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics Thursday. "Others are catching up fast," said Marty Hauser, vice president for Washington operations at the Space Foundation, an advocacy organization headquarters in Colorado Springs. "Of particular note over the past decade is the emergence of China's human spaceflight capabilities."

LIBERIA, Costa Rica — Franklin Chang Diaz has great aspirations for his rocket: a mail-carrier for outer space, a garbage truck for orbital debris and, the ultimate goal, a shuttle to Mars. The Costa Rica-born physicist speaks nonchalantly about the day humankind will have moved entirely to outer space, while our precious Earth becomes “a protected park.” “Our great grandchildren will always be able to come back [to Earth] from wherever they happen to live and see where their ancestors and culture came from,” said the former NASA astronaut who is now president and CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket...

Joubert/Photo Researchers, Inc A neuron in the brain. Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of...

Its inventors are comparing it to the Star Trek phaser: a way of exploiting an on-off 'switch' in nematodes that paralyzes them when they're exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off. But when exposed to ordinary light, they become unparalyzed and wake up. It's the first time that photoswitching has been demonstrated in a living animal. The report describes the development and successful testing of a photoswitch composed of the light-sensitive material, dithienylethene. The scientists grew the transparent, pinhead-sized worms - C. elegans - and fed them dithienylethene. When...

Yesterday, Nov. 18th, something exploded in the atmosphere above the western United States. Witnesses in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho say the fireball "turned night into day" and issued shock waves that "shook the ground" when it exploded just after midnight Mountain Standard Time. The fireball was so bright it actually turned the sky noontime blue

Scientists from the University of Granada have used two new techniques, capillary electrophoresis and high resolution liquid chromatography, to enable them to identify and quantify a great part of the phenolic compounds in such foods. These compounds have a chemopreventive effect in humans and a great influence on the stability of oxidation levels of food. UGR News Scientists at the University of Granada have identified and characterized for the first time different antioxidant compounds from foods such as olive oil, honey, walnuts and a medicinal herb called Teucrium polium. They have used two new techniques, capillary electrophoresis and high resolution...

Scientists have shown off an effect not unlike that of the "phasers" in the show Star Trek - but it only works on tiny worms called nematodes. They used a special molecule that, when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, changes its shape. When the worms were fed this molecule and then exposed to UV light, they exhibited paralysis. But when the worms were again exposed to visible light, they regained their ability to move. The work is published in Journal of the American Chemical Society. The authors claim the research could have therapeutic applications. The phaser is a fictional invention...

Clocks are clocks are clocks – or so you may think. However, some clocks are astronomical both literally and metaphorically. Here is a great selection of astronomical clocks of Europe.

The Coming Climate Dictatorship Posted 11/12/2009 07:43 PM ET Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works...

To put the X-Flex bombproof wallpaper to the test, we substituted a wrecking ball for an explosion. With no wallpaper, test walls crumbled on the first hit. With X-Flex on the backside, we literally could not bring the walls down. The material stretched to contain brick fragments trying to blast into the room and bounced right back. —Theodore Gray

Women have a lower carbon footprint than men but are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming, according to the United Nations’ State of World Population report. Women drive and fly much less than men and purchase fewer carbonintensive goods. The research found that women in industrialised countries were more likely to buy ecologically friendly and organic foods, were more likely to recycle rubbish and more interested in efficient energy use. The report quoted a US research finding that women responded more positively than men to advertising for products that companies claimed were less detrimental to the environment....

It's a solid doomsday prediction that in about 5 billion years the dying sun will expand as a bloated red giant and engulf the Earth. But imagine if in just a few weeks the middle-aged sun suddenly ballooned out to the orbit of Saturn and immediately vaporized Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system! And, even before this happened, imagine that every morning you awoke the sun was ever more sweltering until it began evaporating the oceans, spontaneously starting forests ablaze, and melting asphalt! This sounds like the stuff of a far-out science fiction movie. But...

The answer to the question of whose curveball breaks harder — that of the Yankees' A.J. Burnett or the Phillies' Cole Hamels — may be neither. Zhong-Lin Lu, professor of cognitive neuroscience at USC, along with colleagues from USC and American University, developed a simple visual demo that suggests a curveball's break is, at least in part, a trick of the eye. Their demo won the Best Visual Illusion of the Year prize at the Vision Sciences meeting earlier this year. Try it here:The break of the curveball 2009 First prize A related press release is here. The curveball's effect...

While the debate continues over whether Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old South African track sensation who blew away the field and took the gold in the women's 800-meter in Berlin in August, is a man or a woman, we soon must confront an even more complex issue: Are elite athlete humans or androids? International Association of Athletics Federations will decide Semenya's fate later this week as it announces the result of her gender test. Semenya will no longer be able to compete as a female if the association rules that a hormonal imbalance resulting from alleged intersexuality offers her an unfair...

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form. The image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies. When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. The detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the galaxy's bulge in...

ROSEBURG, Ore. -- Mount Mazama's catastrophic volcanic eruption created Crater Lake over 7,600 years ago. But it also created a sort of time capsule for Oregon scientists. Now researchers from the Umpqua National Forest and the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology are digging in. This Passport in Time project actually started last summer, but was put on hold after the Williams Creek fire broke out in July. Now dozens of volunteers and researchers are back to unearth Oregon's history. These archaeologists spend hours sifting and digging, all in hopes of finding something ancient. "We're looking for artifacts that will demonstrate...

CLEVELAND — Slow and worry-free, it’s doubtful Mary came unglued after finding out she is actually a “he.” After all, Mary doesn’t have many stressors in her, uh, his life. “She’s very deliberate … she keeps a careful pace,” Cleveland Metroparks Zoo spokesman Tom O’Konowitz said Tuesday after word went out that zoo officials and handlers had mistakenly believed for 50-plus years that the massive land tortoise was a female. A routine physical exam earlier in the month revealed the tortoise was in fact a male. “This is definitely a first for us,” O’Konowitz said. “It came as something of...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SiEm2akhrc

The bubbling, roiling surface of the sun has been imaged in unprecedented detail, shedding light on the processes at work on the solar surface. Images of transient dark spots, the sun's seemingly granulated texture and moving packets of gas were snapped by the SUNRISE balloon-borne telescope. SUNRISE, the largest solar telescope ever to have left Earth was launched from the ESRANGE Space Centre in Kiruna, northern Sweden, on June 8. The 6-ton telescope is dangling from a gigantic helium balloon with a diameter of 427 feet (130 meters). After launch, SUNRISE reached a cruising altitude of 37 km above the...

A study by researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King's College London has found that depression is as much of a risk factor for mortality as smoking. Utilising a unique link between a survey of over 60,000 people and a comprehensive mortality database, the researchers found that over the four years following the survey, the mortality risk was increased to a similar extent in people who were depressed as in people who were smokers...

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too. Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla. "Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status...

Scientists have uncovered heart disease in 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, suggesting the risk factors behind it are not just modern in nature. Heart disease is often ascribed to modern risk factors, such as smoking, unhealthy diets rich in saturated fats, salt and processed sugars, or sedentary lifestyles. But then cardiologists touring the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo during a medical conference last year noticed the nameplate of the pharoah Merenptah, who ruled from 1213 B.C. to 1203 B.C. It read that when Merenptah died at roughly age 60, he was afflicted with atherosclerosis, or thickening of the arteries due...

With all the unsettling animal news that crosses our desks, we're always pleased to be able to share a bit of good news. Our colleague Jim Tankersley reports from New Orleans on the progress that's been made on behalf of the no-longer-endangered brown pelican. Here's an excerpt: Federal officials announced today that they are removing the brown pelican from the endangered species list, capping a century-long recovery that started under President Theodore Roosevelt. The brown pelican is an avian fixture in Southern California and along the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida, where Roosevelt established the first national wildlife...