Free Republic

In the late 1980s in the UK, a border collie-Doberman mix began paying extreme attention to a mole on his owner’s left thigh. The 44-year-old woman noticed that the dog would sniff there for minutes on end, trying to bite it off whenever she wore shorts. The dog’s fixation wasn’t random. What the dog was smelling wasn’t just the mole, but the melanoma causing it — and its subsequent removal might just have saved the woman’s life. In this new book, author Horowitz shows how canines, whose sense of smell is anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times more acute than...

The probability of a magnitude-7 earthquake in Southern California briefly increased as much as 50-fold earlier this week, but has since been dropping back to normal, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and other quake experts. What changed things was a cluster of small quakes that began Monday near the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Seismologists believe that quake activity on one fault can lead to increased stresses on another, said Rob Graves, research seismologist based in the Pasadena USGS office. The cluster was epicentered beneath the Salton Sea, near Bombay Beach, within a handful of miles of...

Scientists are concerned that a new technique, called Crispr, is now so cheap and widely available that amateurs will start experimenting at home, or in school labs. The technique works like genetic scissors to cut away DNA code and replace it with new genes. It has been hailed as one the most significant scientific breakthroughs in recent years, with enthusiasts claiming that it could wipe out inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis and produce crops which are resistant to drought or pests. Yet there are fears that, in the wrong hands, the procedure could unleash dangerous strains of bacteria or other...

<p>The Big Fxxking Rocket is fxxking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V-the rocket used in the Apollo mission-which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.</p>

A series of quakes under the Salton Sea may be a signal that the San Andreas Fault is on the verge of buckling. For the next few days, the risk of a major earthquake along the fault is as high as 1 in 100. Which, holy crap. The United States Geological Survey has been tracking a series of earthquakes near Bombay Beach, California. This “earthquake swarm” is happening under the Salton Sea, and over 140 events have been recorded since Monday September 26. The quakes range from 1.4 to 4.3 in magnitude, and are occurring at depths between 2.5 to...

Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, continues to lead the technological revolution with Brave, an innovative concept in Internet browsers.    After blowing away the competition (read: Microsoft's Internet Explorer) with the Internet browser Firefox, Eich has come up with Brave, a nearly ad-free, lightning-fast browser that eliminates intrusive ads as well as common but unwanted tracking tack-ons.   A tech legend for his Java and Firefox contributions, Eich was betrayed by his contemporaries and forced out of business as CEO of Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, because he supported natural marriage... [less than 50%]   https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/shunned-for-supporting-traditional-marriage-former-mozilla-ceo-is-back-with  

The propensity for humans to kill one another may be hot-wired into our DNA but culture also has the power to change our behaviour, a new study has found. The research, led by José María Gómez at the Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas in Spain and published in the journal Nature, explored the human tendency to act violently towards members of our own species. This topic has been hotly debated among experts, with scores of studies questioning whether this vicious trait is an evolutionary development or the result of our cultural or social dynamics.

JAKARTA – At least 389 climbers, including 333 foreigners, might be still on a volcano near the Indonesian resort island of Bali that had erupted Tuesday afternoon, government officials said. Mount Barujari on Lombok Island, which is located east of Bali, erupted at 3 p.m. local time Tuesday, spewing volcanic ash as high as 2 km into the air. The eruption forced the Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation to raise the status of the volcano, which is located inside the caldera of bigger Mount Rinjani, to Level 2. Level 4 is the highest alert. The volcanology agency also...

As scientists continue finding evidence for life in the ocean more than 3 billion years ago, those ancient fossils pose a paradox. Organisms, including the single-celled bacteria living in the ocean at that early date, need a steady supply of phosphorus, but "it's very hard to account for this phosphorus unless it is eroding from the continents," says Aaron Satkoski, a scientist in the geoscience department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "So that makes it really hard to explain the fossils we see at this early era." Satkoski, who is first author of a new report on ocean chemistry from...

10 Population Y The Americas were the final frontier for human expansion. Most believe they were populated 15,000 years ago in one wave via the Bering land bridge. However, recent findings suggest a different story. Geneticists recently discovered DNA that closely resembles that of modern-day Australian Aboriginals and indigenous Papua New Guineans in the most unlikely of places: Amazonia. Experts have named this new founding group “Population Y.” These colonizers did not arrive via boat. They came in a separate wave across the Bering Strait. Their unique genetic signatures were similar but not identical to modern Austronesians—suggesting Population Y intermingled...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes. The observation increases the possibility that missions to Europa may be able to sample Europa’s ocean without having to drill through miles of ice. “Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system,” said Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “These plumes, if...

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND Elon Musk to reveal next step in mission to build city on Mars

Abort, Euthanize, or Get Out of Medicine Bioethics discourse aims to change the practice of medicine and the thrust of public policy — usually not for the better. As I have been noting, the field is increasingly targeting the right of doctors to refuse to perform an abortion, euthanize patients, and perform other procedures or issue prescriptions that violate their religious beliefs.A bit ago, I discussed a “consensus statement” on this issue in Practical Ethics, published by Oxford. Now, two internationally influential bioethicists — Jualian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk — join forces to advocate that society legally coerce doctors to kill. First, they deconstruct medical...

How the FDA Manipulates the Media The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals. Other institutions are following suit By Charles Seife | Scientific American October 2016 Issue The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR's reporter could and couldn't interview. “My editors are uncomfortable...

How Can We Save The Sun? Published: 23 Sep , 2016 by Fraser Cain Video Remember the movie Sunshine, where astronomers learn that the Sun is dying? So a plucky team of astronauts take a nuclear bomb to the Sun, and try to jump-start it with a massive explosion. Yeah, there’s so much wrong in that movie that I don’t know where to start. So I just won’t.Seriously, a nuclear bomb to cure a dying Sun?Here’s the thing, the Sun is actually dying. It’s just that it’s going to take about another 5 billion years to run of fuel in...

video of various sink holes of the world

It has long puzzled scientists why, after 3 billion years of nothing more complex than algae, complex animals suddenly started to appear on Earth. Now, a team of researchers has put forward some of the strongest evidence yet to support the hypothesis that high levels of oxygen in the oceans were crucial for the emergence of skeletal animals 550 million years ago. The new study is the first to distinguish between bodies of water with low and high levels of oxygen. It shows that poorly oxygenated waters did not support the complex life that evolved immediately prior to the Cambrian...

Nasa is expected to make an announcement about 'surprising activity' on Jupiter's moon, Europa, on Monday. Many speculated that Nasa could finally be announcing evidence of life beyond Earth. The space agency, however, has poured cold water over these claims, tweeting that the much anticipated announcement will not be related to aliens.

In August 1968, Soviet forces invaded their captive ally Czechoslovakia. The invasion began with an intense electronic warfare campaign against the Czech air defense network. A declassified secret US Defense Intelligence Agency report, titled “Soviet Electronic Countermeasures During Invasion of Czechoslovakia” and produced in October 1968, provided substantial detail on Soviet electronic warfare actions. It stated, “Electronic countermeasure activity was concentrated southeast and east of Prague to screen and protect Soviet air movements.” It added, “Jamming apparently was not targeted in the radio frequency range of NATO radars; the locations of chaff seeding suggests that it was not intended to...

Truth @ Carbon Dioxide (CO2): Patrick Moore After watching the 20 minute video revisit this clip which (preset to start)reveals:"How about the United Nations Inter-governmental panel on Climate Change? Unfortunately, they are totally conflicted by their own mandate. See, their brief is to focus on 'a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere'. They are not required to consider the many natural factors that affect the climate. So, if the IPCC were to find that humans were not the main cause of climate change - or...