Free Republic

Children’s physical disabilities are all too often a reason for parents to decide to have an abortion, but sometimes parents choose life and then the miracle of modern technology takes over.That is the case for a three-year-old boy who is now hearing the world — and his father — for the first time thanks to an auditory brain stem implant.Little Grayson Clamp was born without his cochlear nerves — the nerves necessary to transmit sound form the inner ear to the brain. A cochlear implant did not work so his parents went to the next option.“They then enrolled Grayson in...

Explanation: Sharp telescopic views of magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628 show a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy. The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo. NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for the extended flare and warp...

For the first time in its 27-year history, a prestigious award for enhancing the global food supply has gone to a creator of genetically modified crops, a top scientist at Monsanto. The choice is likely to add more heat to an intense debate about the role biotechnology can play in combating world hunger. Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, will share the $250,000 World Food Prize with two other scientists who helped devise how to insert foreign genes into plants: Marc Van Montagu of Belgium and Mary-Dell Chilton of the United States. The announcement was...

Keep Calm: Bright sparks, not aliens, set this fire At first glance, lighting a fire on the International Space Station (ISS) seems like a good way to earn a Darwin Award and the opprobrium of all humanity. Yet boffins have been doing it for some time in an effort to learn more about how flames behave. Interestingly, is the answer from NASA, which today offered a look at some ISS fire experiments that have found fires lit in microgravity don't form the familiar forked tongues we see on earth, but instead dimly-glowing spheres that aren't nearly as hot to the...

One of the most exciting Cassini events in 2013 will be the unusual opportunity on July 19 to image the whole Saturn system as it is backlit by the sun. With Saturn covering the harsh light of the sun, we will be gathering unique ring science and also catching a glimpse of our very own home planet.

Explanation: How many different astronomical phenomena have come together to create the above vista? Several. First, in the foreground, is Crater Lake -- a caldera created by volcanism on planet Earth about 7,700 years ago. Next, inside the lake, is water. Although the origin of the water in the crater is melted snowfall, the origin of water on Earth more generally is unclear, but possibly related to ancient Earthly-impacts of icy bodies. Next, the green glow in the sky is airglow, light emitted by atoms high in the Earth's atmosphere as they recombine at night after being separated during the...

Explanation: Is that a cloud or an alien spaceship? It's an unusual and sometimes dangerous type of thunderstorm cloud called a supercell. Supercells may spawn damaging tornados, hail, downbursts of air, or drenching rain. Or they may just look impressive. A supercell harbors a mesocylone -- a rising column of air surrounded by drafts of falling air. Supercells could occur over many places on Earth but are particularly common in Tornado Alley of the USA. Pictured above are four time lapse sequences of a supercell rotating above and moving across Booker, Texas. Captured in the video are new clouds forming...

Explanation: What creates these long and nearly straight grooves on Mars? Dubbed linear gullies, they appear on the sides of some sandy slopes during Martian spring, have nearly constant width, extend for as long as two kilometers, and have raised banks along their sides. Unlike most water flows, they do not appear to have areas of dried debris at the downhill end. A leading hypothesis -- actually being tested here on Earth -- is that these linear gullies are caused by chunks of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice) breaking off and sliding down hills while sublimating into gas, eventually completely...

A Loch Ness tour operator issued a letter chiding a monster researcher for his negative views of the legendary sea monster. George Edwards, who operates tour boats on the Scottish lake, fired off a letter to his fellow members of the Drumnadrochit Chamber of Commerce saying an overly scientific attitude toward the famed Loch Ness Monster was bad for business. The individual who bore the brunt of the scolding, The Scotsman said Saturday, was one Adrian Shine, a veteran "Nessie" researcher whom Edwards said was turning off tourists at the Loch Ness Center. Shine was too quick to write off...

How's this for a weekend conference: Some of the smartest people in the world are gathering in New York to try to figure out how to build lifelike copies of humans ... to be eventually uploaded with the contents of a real human brain. It's the brainchild of a Russian multimillionaire, Dmitry Itskov. ... And he says he's perfectly serious, and that it could be accomplished by 2035. Crazy? The New York Times gave Itskov a front-page profile on its Sunday Business page a week and a half ago. Imagine this ... a digital copy of your brain in a...

Explanation: The first APOD appeared eighteen years ago today, on 1995 June 16. Although garnering only 14 pageviews on that day, we are proud to estimate that APOD has now served over one billion space-related images over the past eighteen years. That early beginning, along with a nearly unchanging format, has allowed APOD to be a consistent and familiar site on a web frequently filled with change. Many people don't know, though, that APOD is now translated daily into many major languages. We again thank our readers, astrophotographers, and NASA for their continued support, but ask that any potentially congratulatory...

Explanation: Over a five hour period last Tuesday morning, exposures captured this tantalizing view of meteor streaks and the Milky Way in dark skies above Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. During that time, astronomers had hoped to see an outburst from the gamma Delphinid meteor shower as Earth swept through the dust trail left by an unknown comet. Named for the shower's radiant point in the constellation Delphinus, a brief but strong outburst was reported in bright, moonlit skies on June 10, 1930. While no strong Delphinid meteor activity was reported since, an outburst was tentatively predicted to occur again...

Explanation: Sharpless 115 stands just north and west of Deneb, the alpha star of Cygnus the Swan in planet Earth's skies. Noted in the 1959 catalog by astronomer Stewart Sharpless (as Sh2-115) the faint but lovely emission nebula lies along the edge one of the outer Milky Way's giant molecular clouds, about 7,500 light-years away. Shining with the light of ionized atoms of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen in this Hubble palette color composite image, the nebular glow is powered by hot stars in star cluster Berkeley 90. The cluster stars are likely only 100 million years old or so and...

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona) A rolling stone gathers no moss – but on Mars it can nevertheless cloak itself in mystery. This NASA image shows the track of a boulder that rolled across the Nili Fossae region of Mars. For now it is anyone's guess what set the rock in motion. This false-colour picture (click on it for higher resolution) was posted on 7 June to the Beautiful Mars Tumblr feed, a collection of high-resolution shots from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows dark, jagged tracks left in the soil by a lumpy boulder, probably...

European Parliament – Brussels, 3 June 2013 The scope of the workshop was to make the European community aware of the "state-of-the-art" of the studies on the Fleischmann-Pons Effect (FPE) phenomenon. This effect is the appearance of excess energy when a Pd cathode is electrolyzed in heavy water. Energy densities measured during FPE are orders of magnitude larger than the maximum energy associated to any known chemical process. NetworkingThis effect was first discovered in 1989 by two electrochemists Prof. Martin Fleischmann and Dr. Stanley Pons, by loading palladium with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen). This excess energy is not associated...

Explanation: You can see four planets in this serene sunset image, created from a series of stacked digital exposures captured near dusk on May 25. The composite picture follows the trail of three of them, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury (left to right) dropping toward the western horizon, gathered close in last month's remarkable triple planetary conjunction. Similar in brightness to planet Mercury, the star Elnath (Beta Tauri) is also tracked across the scene, leaving its dotted trail still farther to the right. Of course, in the foreground are the still, shallow waters of Alikes salt lake, reflecting the striking colors...

Explanation: For the first time, the entire surface of planet Mercury has been mapped. Detailed observations of the innermost planet's surprising crust have been ongoing since the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft first passed Mercury in 2008 and began orbiting in 2011. Previously, much of the Mercury's surface was unknown as it is too far for Earth-bound telescopes to see clearly, while the Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s observed only about half. The above video is a compilation of thousands of images of Mercury rendered in exaggerated colors to better contrast different surface features. Visible on the rotating world are rays...

JPL video here

Explanation: What's happening in the NGC 3582 nebula? Bright stars and interesting molecules are forming. The complex nebula resides in the star forming region called RCW 57. Visible in this image are dense knots of dark interstellar dust, bright stars that have formed in the past few million years, fields of glowing hydrogen gas ionized by these stars, and great loops of gas expelled by dying stars. A detailed study of NGC 3582, also known as NGC 3584 and NGC 3576, uncovered at least 33 massive stars in the end stages of formation, and the clear presence of the complex...

Explanation: Where are the hottest stars in the nearest galaxies? To help find out, NASA commissioned its Earth-orbiting Swift satellite to compile a multi-image mosaic of the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy in ultraviolet light. The above image shows where recently formed stars occur in the LMC, as the most massive of these young stars shine brightly in blue and ultraviolet. In contrast, visible in an image roll-over, a more familiar view of the LMC in visible light better highlights older stars. On the upper left is one of the largest star forming regions known in the entire Local...