Free Republic

An analysis of the personality differences between conservatives and liberals and the philosophy behind Western Civilization and how we can validate that they are true.

A bag of moon dust from NASA’s Apollo 11 mission – which a woman bought for $995 in 2015 -- sold for $1.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction this week following an intense court battle. The bag, filled with moon dust by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the moon in July 1969, had previously been misidentified and mistakenly sold at an online government auction. NASA’s attempt to retrieve the bag failed after a federal judge in December ruled it legally belonged to a Chicago-area woman who bought it two years ago. The buyer in Tuesday’s auction...

Topological effects might be hiding inside perfectly ordinary materials, waiting to reveal bizarre new particles or bolster quantum computing. Charles Kane never thought he would be cavorting with topologists. “I don't think like a mathematician,” admits Kane, a theoretical physicist who has tended to focus on tangible problems about solid materials. He is not alone. Physicists have typically paid little attention to topology — the mathematical study of shapes and their arrangement in space. But now Kane and other physicists are flocking to the field. In the past decade, they have found that topology provides unique insight into the physics...

Bill Nye: Older people need to 'die' out before climate science can advance Bill Nye specifically targeted the elderly this week as he spoke out against climate change deniers, saying that climate science will start to advance when old people start to "age out," according to a report.The "Science Guy" said that generationally, the majority of climate change deniers are older."Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It's generational," Nye told the Los Angeles Times. Nye said that he is calling them out with "due respect," acknowledging that he is "now one of them.""We're just going to have...

48 years ago today life on Earth made a visit, for the first time, to another world. On July 20 , 1969 , Neil Armstrong made a small step for a man upon the lunar surface. The last such momentous event in the history of life was 240 million years ago when animals emerged from the sea to walk upon land. Unlike that ancient walk after this giant leap mankind meekly went back to Earth to concentrate instead on other ways of redistributing income.

When it comes to sheer friendliness, few humans can match the average dog. But people with Williams syndrome may come close, their unusual genetics granting them a puppyish zeal for social interaction. Now, scientists have found that extreme friendliness in both species may share common genetic roots. A friendly condition Williams syndrome, also known as Williams-Beuren syndrome, occurs when people are missing of a chunk of DNA containing about 27 genes. The syndrome affects about one in 10,000 people, and it is associated with a suite of mental and physical traits, including bubbly, extroverted personalities, a broad forehead, full cheeks,...

Jerry Coyne, Infanticide, and the Evolution of Morality Richard Weikart July 19, 2017 In a recent blog post, already noted by Michael Egnor and Wesley Smith, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne not only argued that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, but he insisted that our increasing acceptance of these deeds is a sign of moral improvement in our society. He stated, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., legalization in some states and countries] are [sic] the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”In his book Faith Versus Fact, Coyne...

Humanity confuses its loyalties and builds a shrine for that drowned security robot Hey, fellow humans, I thought we were all on the same page here? When news broke that a security robot mall-copping its way through the Washington Harbour gave up and drowned itself, we all rightly celebrated the admittedly small victory for mankind. Because, ya know, if drones are going to take our jobs they should at least be miserably toiling their mechanical lives away. So why am I now finding out that you went and built this thing a shrine? To make matters worse, you named the...

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (DOE/NNSA) will conduct a low-altitude helicopter flight over portions of the Arlington, Va., area July 22 to measure naturally occurring background radiation. Officials from NNSA announced that the radiation assessment will cover approximately three square miles. A twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, operated by the Remote Sensing Laboratory Aerial Measuring System from Joint Base Andrews, will be equipped with radiation sensing technology. The helicopter will fly in a grid pattern over the area at 150 feet (or higher) above the ground surface, at a speed of approximately 80 miles...

When and how the first humans made their way to Australia has been an evolving story. While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa. Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years...

The laser, known as the Laser Weapons System (LaWS), may seem as though it were pulled straight from a James Bond movie, but it's entirely functional and can shoot with stunning accuracy, the U.S. Navy told CNN. The LaWS is currently deployed aboard the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport ship, in the Persian Gulf. "Operationally, it works just like a laser pointer," Lt. Cale Hughes, a LaWS officer, told CNN. "There's a chamber inside with special materials that release photons." ... The $40 million system requires a team of three to operate it and a small generator to power its...

Sergei Paylian was only 14 years old when he was horrified by the death of his young, attractive neighbor in Tbilisi, Georgia. As was the local Soviet custom at the time, her open coffin was carried through the street to the sound of music as a shocked teenage Sergei looked on, confronted for the first time with the issue of his own mortality. It sparked a lifelong obsession with aging – and how to reverse it. Now, standing in his neat Florida laboratory that looks more like a dentist’s office, the 66-year-old scientist is explaining how a lifetime of research...

The Flawed Logic of the Atheist Dr. Stuart Kauffman - "Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started is a fool or a knave." Dr. Stuart Kauffman, distinguished Origin of Life researcher, in a critique of the popular “RNA World�� hypothesis for a naturalistic origin of life writes that, “the [problem] I find most insurmountable is the one most rarely talked about: all living things seem to have a minimal complexity below which it is impossible to go…Your curiosity should be aroused…all free-living cells have at least the minimum molecular diversity of pleuromona. Your antenna should...

Results point to a single origin for modern canines and push back the timing by thousands of years. Researchers chasing the origin of modern dogs find that canines were domesticated once, between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. The results, published on 18 July in Nature Communications1, push back against a controversial 2016 study2 that suggested dogs were domesticated twice. The latest analysis also add weight to previous research that moves the timing of domestication back as far as 40,000 years ago. Everyone has their own idea about where and when dogs originated, says Krishna Veeramah, a palaeogeneticist at Stony Brook...

Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting. For decades physicists have sought signs of misbehaving particles—evidence of subtle cracks in the “Standard Model” of particle physics, the dominant theory describing the most fundamental building blocks of our universe. Although the Standard Model has proved strikingly accurate, scientists have long known some adjustments will be needed. Now, as a recent review paper in Nature documents, experimenters have started seeing suggestions of particles flouting the theory—but they’re not quite the violations theorists were looking for. The evidence...

Does Darwinism Lead to Infanticide Acceptance? The evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, writes a blog entitled, “Why Evolution is True.” One would think that by choosing that title, Coyne should restrict his discussions to questions of science that touch on questions and explanations about how and why life changes over time. But Coyne–as many Darwinists do–takes the question beyond science, and extrapolates evolutionary theory into questions of morality, philosophy, and ethics. And now, he is promoting the propriety of infanticide. From, “Should One be Allowed to Euthanize Severely Deformed or Doomed Newborns?”: If you are allowed to abort a fetus that...

I can show a brighter pink. I can show a more saturated pink. But I can't show you this pink. Not quite. (I reached out to Anish Kapoor's studio twice for comment; I didn't get any response.) Colour grading this video was a nightmare! I've got as close as I can to the real colour - Stuart gave me a small pot of the pigment to take home! - but it's just not quite there. It's not more saturated, it's not brighter, it's just... a tiny bit more pink, somehow. More about Stuart Semple and his pigments: https://www.culturehustle.com/ [that's his...

A powerful quake of magnitude 7.7 struck in the northern Pacific Ocean between the tip of the Aleutian Islands and Russia's Kamchatka, the U.S. Geological Survey said.  The quake was shallow and powerful enough to trigger a tsunami but there was no immediate advisory.

Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it. Bob: “I can can I I everything else.” Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.” To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or...

Donald Trump regrets the “bizarre mistake” of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, Sir Richard Branson has said. The British billionaire also urged the president to help phase out the ailing US coal industry. Speaking in Brooklyn on Friday, the Virgin Group founder said businesses and cities were firmly behind a transition to low-carbon energy, which made Trump’s decision to exit the Paris deal “very, very strange”. “With climate change, it’s America first and our beautiful globe last, and that seems incredibly sad,” said Branson. “I’ve got a feeling that the president is regretting what he did. Maybe...