Free Republic

The words “female” and “woman” were more closely associated with arts and humanities occupations and with the home, while “male” and “man” were closer to maths and engineering professions. And the AI system was more likely to associate European American names with pleasant words such as “gift” or “happy”, while African American names were more commonly associated with unpleasant words.

It’s Easter, a time when Christians the world over commemorate the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of their Lord and Savior. However, it isn’t just Christians, but anyone and everyone who regularly reaps the incalculable benefits of Western civilization that should be grateful for the fact that Jesus of Nazareth walked among us. In virtually every conceivable way, Jesus, courtesy of the legions of disciples that He spawned throughout the centuries, has made the world that we take for granted. Though it will doubtless come as an enormous shock to such Christophobic atheists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their ilk,...

As fate would have it, Hillary Clinton spoke at last month's Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards for Advancing Women in Peace and Security, where she emphasized the importance of peace, of women and of women in peace. "When women participate in peacekeeping and peacemaking we are all safer and more secure," said Clinton, who boasted of "evidence-based" research that backs up this claim. And she's right. Including women in the peacemaking process is often a valuable way of securing peace in war-torn countries. But she also got in what was seen as a partisan shot at the Trump administration. At one...

Three senior House Democrats asked U.S. teachers Monday to destroy a book written by climate scientists challenging the environmentalist view of global warming. The Democrats were responding to a campaign by the conservative Heartland Institute copies of the 2015 book, “Why Climate Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to about 200,000 science teachers. Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott of the Committee on Education, Raúl M. Grijalva of the Committee on Natural Resources, and Eddie Bernice Johnson of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology all issued a statement telling teachers to trash the book. “Public school classrooms are no place for anti-science...

An expensive solar road project in Idaho can’t even power a microwave most days, according to the project’s energy data. The Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways project generated an average of 0.62 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day since it began publicly posting power data in late March. To put that in perspective, the average microwave or blow drier consumes about 1 kWh per day. On March 29th, the solar road panels generated 0.26 kWh, or less electricity than a single plasma television consumes. On March 31st, the panels generated 1.06 kWh, enough to barely power a single microwave. The panels...

Harvard University chemists have invented a new kind of “bionic” leaf that uses bacteria, sunlight, water, and air to make fertilizer right in the soil where crops are grown. It could make possible a future low-cost commercial fertilizer for poorer countries in the emerging world... Fertilizer created from sunlight + water + carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the air For the new “bionic leaf,” Nocera’s team has designed a system in which bacteria use hydrogen from the water split by the artificial leaf plus carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make a bioplastic that the bacteria store inside themselves as...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's scientific integrity watchdog is reviewing whether EPA chief Scott Pruitt violated the agency's policies when he said in a television interview he does not believe carbon dioxide is driving global climate change, according to an email seen by Reuters on Friday. Lawyers for environmental group the Sierra Club had asked the EPA's Office of Inspector General to check whether Pruitt violated policy when he told a CNBC interviewer on March 9, "I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see." The EPA Inspector General's office responded to the...

Is it possible to freeze Vodka?

In this episode, my guest John Beechy and I will continue with our discussion on "The Things that Matter Most" by addressing truth and its transformative power as it is associated with Jesus Christ who claimed to be "the way, the truth, and the life." We will also shed some light on how organized religions have deviated from this concept, distinguish relative truth from absolute truth, and explore how science has reacted to, and/or compliments biblical truth. There are many thought provoking points to consider, and we want you to join us for this episode of "Making Sense with Rob...

Researchers have successfully used spinach leaves to build functioning human heart tissue, complete with veins that can transport blood. To tackle a chronic shortage of donor organs, scientists have been working on growing various tissues and even whole organs in the lab. But culturing a bunch of cells is only part of the solution - they simply won't thrive without a constant blood supply. It's notoriously difficult to build a working network of fine blood vessels (also called vasculature), especially when you get down to capillaries, which are only 5 to 10 micrometres wide. Blood vessels transport the oxygen and...

Scientists have made a discovery that could lead to a revolutionary drug that actually reverses ageing. The drug could help damaged DNA to miraculously repair and even protect Nasa astronauts on Mars by protecting them from solar radiation. A team of researchers developed the drug after discovering a key signalling process in DNA repair and cell ageing. During trials on mice, the team found that the drug directly repaired DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. 'The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice after just one week of treatment,' said lead author Professor...

Don’t believe a word you read, including this. However if you are a cheese-head and have cut it out for health reasons – because it’s “bad for you” - I have good news: As it turns out, not only is cheese not bad for you, it may in fact be good for you! The research from University College Dublin has concluded that people who eat a lot of cheese are thinner than those who don’t, and it doesn’t actually raise cholesterol levels…They found that the people who consumed the most dairy had lower BMIs, lower body fat percentages, smaller waists...

Christopher de Bellaigue stresses how, over the centuries, many Muslim leaders have been paragons of enlightenmentChristopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation. As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And we’d better understand it, because it’s an...

NASA on Thursday released pictures of Pan, one of Saturn's many moons, and its distinctive shape is drawing comparisons to flying saucers and stuffed pasta. The images of the moon come courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and reveal the UFO-like form of the tiny satellite, which has an average radius of just 8.8 miles. Cassini's Twitter account tweeted a gif showing the raw images. ... According to NASA's website, Pan's strange shape comes from what is called an equatorial ridge, a characteristic it shares with one of its sister moons, Atlas. The ridge has formed over the course of Pan's...

In the first episode of Humans+, Motherboard dives into the world of future prosthetics, and the people working on closing the gap between man and machine. We follow Melissa Loomis, an amputee from Ohio, who had experimental nerve reversal surgery and is going to Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab to test out its latest Modular Prosthetic Limb, a cutting-edge bionic arm funded in part by DARPA. Neuro-interfacing machinery is a game changer in terms rehabilitating patients, but what possibilities do these advancements open for the future?

Here is the best (and weirdest) example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. The set-up is that Bill Nye, an engineer by training, and a proponent of science, is defending climate science on Tucker's show. The first weird thing is that Bill Nye starts by talking about cognitive dissonance being the only reason that anyone would be skeptical of global warming. But he seems to not understand the concept of cognitive dissonance because he believes only the other side could be experiencing it. The nature of cognitive dissonance is that you don't know you're in it when you're in...

A doorway to 200,000 years ago. It's no secret that Siberia's permafrost has been on thin ice lately. Conditions are varying so much that huge holes are appearing out of nowhere, and, in some places, tundra is quite literally bubbling underneath people's feet. But new research has revealed that one of the biggest craters in the region, known by the local Yakutian people as the 'doorway to the underworld', is growing so rapidly that it's uncovering long-buried forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records. Known as the Batagaika crater, it's what's officially called a 'megaslump' or...

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon. From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies. "The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results."...

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the announcement of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Her creation left a lasting impact on both the public and the field of developmental biology, experts say. Although Dolly was born in July 1996, Researchers announced Dolly's existence on Feb. 22, 1997. The delay in the announcement was due to the time needed to amass sufficient data on the project, check the data, write and get the manuscript published, said Bruce Whitelaw, the head of the Division of Developmental Biology at the Roslin Institute. Dolly died in February 2003,...

Owning a cat won't make you mentally ill, study says Although you may hold suspicions about your neighbor who feeds the local stray cats, new research has found no link between owning a feline and exhibiting psychotic symptoms. The University College London findings cast doubt on previous research, which suggested that people who grew up with cats are at a higher risk of mental illness. “The message for cat owners is clear: there is no evidence that cats pose a risk to children’s mental health,” Dr. Francesca Solmi, the study’s lead author, said in a news release. “In our study,...