Free Republic

When the sun came up on May 28 in the year 585 BCE, the Medes and Lydians were still at war. They had been at each other’s throats for years, and it looked like there was no end in sight for their conflict. But something extraordinary happened on the battlefield that day, which changed everything. This episode also features an interview with Dr. Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist, and scientist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

WASHINGTON — Nearly all of the Obama administration’s science staff has departed the White House since January, and the Trump administration has moved slowly to replace them. In the meantime, however, an unofficial shadow office, stocked with Obama loyalists, is quietly at work. The network, described to STAT by officials from the previous administration who are involved, is informal yet organized, allowing for a far-reaching if largely inconspicuous effort to continue advocating for the Obama science agenda. Participants have provided counsel to Democratic lawmakers and their staffs on Capitol Hill, and they have held group-wide strategy sessions much in the...

* This may be the most intact primate fossil skull ever discovered. * The fossil comes from a little-known period of primate evolutionary history. Source: Fred Spoor This is Alesi, the skull of the new extinct ape species Nyanzapithecus alesi (KNM-NP 59050). ================================================================================================================================ A group of scientists have found what may be the most intact fossilized primate skull ever discovered, and the find could shed light on the common evolutionary heritage shared by apes and humans. The lemon-sized skull was discovered in Kenya by an international team of researchers, and was dated to the middle of the Miocene era, a...

1. A breakthrough study from the Institute of Crystallography in Italy has just confirmed that the image of the man on the Shroud of Turin is composed of real blood and in fact a microscopic analysis of blood particles reveals that the blood had to come from someone undergoing torture.  This just further confirms the possible authenticity of the Shroud (see here). 2. Using a recently developed X-ray imaging technology, archaeologists were able to read the inside of a biblical scroll that was covered in ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.  The results?  The current manuscripts...

Potent, climate warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found. Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy. However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted. Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%. These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC...

The 2001 discovery of the seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus, the first known upright ape-like creatures, was yet more proof of humanity’s place among the great apes. And yet Mike Pence, then a representative and now US vice president, argues for the opposite conclusion.For him, our ideas about our ancestors have changed, proving once more that evolution was a theory, and therefore we should be free to teach other theories alongside evolution in our classrooms. How to respond? The usual answer is that we should teach students the meaning of the word “theory” as used in science – that is, a hypothesis...

KNOXVILLE (WATE) — While East Tennesseans are keeping an eye on the sky, there’s going to be plenty of action on the ground at Zoo Knoxville as the total solar eclipse passes through on August 21. There are more than 700 animals at the zoo and staff plans to observe them during the time of totality. The phenomenon is raising questions like, how will animals react when their daily routines are driven by the cycles of night and day? “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Phil Colclough, with Zoo Knoxville.

Who would want to be micro chipped? Many, apparently. Some people are begging for a micro chip to be implanted in their body – one that could do everything a smartphone can do and more.“I am so ready,” says Charlene Li. She’s a long-time author and principal analyst at the Altimeter Group. This week, science fiction came to the heartland when a small Wisconsin company announced that it would begin implanting microchips into its employee’s hands. The company had more than 50 volunteers too. The company sold the implantation to their employees as a convenience for them to ditch the...

In the opening pages of the book "Foundation", written by Isaac Azimov, he describes the beginning of the fall of the Empire. The Empire was a multi-star-system civilization of trillions of people, but it was beginning to rot. One of the key characters observes that a researcher, a pompous Lord of a planet, considered it 'scientific method' to read someone else's work, saying "Why should I travel to another planet? Someone has already written about it." The protagonist thought, "Scientific method, hell. No wonder the galaxy was going to pot." Azimov was prescient. We find ourselves in a similar time....

The Reproducibility Project, meanwhile, swelled to include more than 270 researchers working to reproduce 100 psychology experiments—and in August 2015, Nosek revealed its results. Ultimately his army of volunteers could verify the findings of only about 40 percent of the studies. Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. It became one of the biggest science stories of the year.

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...

In case you were wondering, there's no evidence that Mars hosted an alien civilization thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked a panel of planetary scientists to speculate about this possibility today (July 18), during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Space Subcommittee.

The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt's plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left's pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become.  The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought.  The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell's classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable. All totalitarianism purports to rest upon "science," and all totalitarian science slavishly...

(In this video Dr Tim Ball, a prominent climatologist and skeptic exposes the swamp of corruption in the field of climate studies. He does so in a down to earth, humorous and effective way. In addition to exposing the fraudulent "science", he also unmasks the origin and vile political motivation behind this worldwide power grab. It's a bit long but well worth your time - you will not be bored.) (PS - Dr Ball, along with Mark Steyn are being sued by the hockey puck Mann of the discredited hockey stick graph.)

Scientists have completed the first teleportation of an object from Earth to a satellite orbiting more than 300 miles away. Alas, those of you expecting Scotty to beam them up soon will be sorely disappointed - the object teleported was merely a single photon. While the experiment doesn't bring us any closer to teleporting matter, it is a huge leap forward for quantum physics. The team of Chinese researchers behind the successful teleportation came together from a number of disciplines and included quantum physicists as well as rocket scientists. In 2016, they launched a satellite called Micius, named after Chinese...

The heaviest chemical element yet known to science. Governmentium (Gv) has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second....

Christians believe humankind is God’s all-time favorite creation because He tells us so in the Bible. But leftist/socialists often known as Democrats think humans are an evil, toxic blight bent on destroying the planet through heinous activities like gassing up our cars. Boom. This is the war of the opposing worldviews going on today and it’s worldwide. It encompasses every important issue including man-caused global warming. Leftists think homo sapiens started out as a random blob of cells zapped by electricity (no word on where the cells and electricity came from without a primal source such as God) that evolved...

The epidemic of agenda-driven science by press release and falsification has reached crisis proportions.In just the past week: Duke University admitted that its researchers had falsified or fabricated data that were used to get $113 million in EPA grants – and advance the agency’s air pollution and “environmental justice” programs. A New England Journal of Medicine article and editorial claimed the same pollutants kill people – but blatantly ignored multiple studies demonstrating that there is no significant, evidence-based relationship between fine particulates and human illness or mortality.In an even more outrageous case, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science’s...

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths. March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science". But that was so three months ago. Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready...

Presented at World Federation of Scientists, Erice, Sicily, 20 August 2015 This is a version of the talk I gave about uncertainty in the global average air temperature record at the 48th Conference of the World Federation Scientists on “Planetary Emergences and Other Events,” at Erice, Sicily, in August of 2015. It was a very interesting conference and, as an aside, for me the take home message was that the short-term emergency is Islamic violence while the long-term emergency is some large-scale bolide coming down. Please, however, do not distract conversation into these topics. Abstract: I had a longer abstract,...