Free Republic 2nd Qtr 2024 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $21,108
26%  
Woo hoo!! And we're now over 26%!! Thank you all very much!! God bless.

Travel (General/Chat)

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • AirAsia confirms debris from doomed plane; CEO says ‘words cannot express’ sorrow

    12/30/2014 9:15:09 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 19 replies
    Washington Post ^ | December 30 at 12:09 PM | William Wan, Daniela Deane and Brian Murphy
    Indonesia authorities said divers and sonar-equipped ships headed to the site, about 100 miles southwest of the coast of Borneo. The top goal is recovering more bodies when operations resume at first light on Wednesday — an effort that has been complicated by waves up to 10 feet high. But officials also sought the plane’s voice and flight data recorder, the so-called black box, in hopes of gaining clues on the cause of the crash. A former accident investigator, John Cox, said the recorder — if found — would likely be sent for analysis by other countries, such as the...
  • Rose Parade Officials Prepare For Near-Record Low Temperatures

    12/30/2014 9:02:01 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 19 replies
    Pasadena is expected to experience the coldest night of the season on Wednesday with temperatures around 32 degrees.
  • Virgin Atlantic VS43 emergency: Live updates as passenger plane circles Gatwick

    12/29/2014 7:27:25 AM PST · by PghBaldy · 9 replies
    UK Mirror ^ | Decemeber 29 | Sam Rkaina
    Multiple eye witnesses have claimed the problem is with the landing gear not working properly on one side. Virgin has confirmed in the last few minutes the plane is to make a 'non standard' landin
  • Battle of Lewes: England's first fight for democracy? [ AD 1264 ]

    12/29/2014 1:11:54 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 27 replies
    BBC News ^ | May 14, 2014 | Nick Tarver
    Did the Battle of Lewes, which saw King Henry III defeated 750 years ago, lead to England's first tentative steps towards representative democracy? As bloodied bodies littered the South Downs, the King hid in a priory. His father, King John, had been forced to sign Magna Carta by England's rebellious barons, now Henry had suffered even greater humiliation at their hands. His victor was Simon de Montfort, the French-born Earl of Leicester, who was fighting for the rights of England to be governed by the English. After the battle, where de Montfort's forces were outnumbered by two to one, he...
  • Buckingham Palace guards withdrawn amid fears of 'lone wolf' terror attack

    12/29/2014 12:18:32 AM PST · by Berlin_Freeper · 13 replies
    express.co.uk ^ | December 28, 201 | Anil Dawar
    Soldiers of the Queen’s Guard have been pulled back from public positions at many landmarks in response to possible threats from Islamic extremists.
  • New Lemnian Inscription

    12/28/2014 11:18:54 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 40 replies
    Rasenna Blog ^ | December 1, 2010 | rwallace
    A new Lemnian inscription was discovered recently during excavation of an ancient sanctuary at Efestia on the island of Lemnos. The inscription was incised in two lines on the upper portion of a rectangular altar measuring 50 cm. in length and 13.05 cm. in height (see photograph below). The direction of writing is boustrophedon. The upper line reads from left-to-right, the lower line from right-to-left. The inscription has 26 letters plus punctuation marks in the form of three vertically-aligned points separating words. The transcription provided below is that given by de Simone (2009). The letter âi (= palatal sibilant) is...
  • Electric Cars Worse For Health, Environment, Than Gas-Powered, Study Claims

    12/28/2014 3:28:47 AM PST · by Up Yours Marxists · 99 replies
    Inquisitr ^ | December 28, 2014 06:27 GMT | Julian Marshall, University of Minnesota
    Think electric cars are the only form of transportation that can save the world from the dangers of the gas-powered engine? A new study warns that they could actually have the opposite effect. Gannett’s Cincinnati website cites the findings of a study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences next week. In it, co-author and University of Minnesota engineering professor Julian Marshall explains the findings. “It’s kind of hard to beat gasoline [for the environment]… A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean … are not better than gasoline.” Electric cars...
  • Airbus’s Flagship Plane May Be Too Big To Be Profitable (A380 ‘Super-Jumbo’)

    12/28/2014 9:50:25 AM PST · by Olog-hai · 35 replies
    Manchester Guardian via Business Insider ^ | Dec. 28, 2014, 10:38 AM | Karl West
    Tom Enders stared at the phone on his desk as it began to ring. The Airbus boss had been expecting a call to his office in Toulouse. It was Tim Clark, chief executive of Dubai-based airline Emirates, the biggest buyer of the planemaker’s A380 “superjumbo”. Clark was angry. He wanted to know why Airbus finance director Harald Wilhelm had just raised the prospect of the death of the A380. The aircraft cost $25 billion (£16 billion) to develop, but it has struggled to chalk up the large orders Airbus had envisioned, at $440 million each. So far, it has just...
  • Chaos in the Alps as massive snowfall traps 15,000 cars(gore-bull warming alert!!)

    12/28/2014 7:28:35 AM PST · by rktman · 24 replies
    telegraph.co.uk ^ | 12/27/2014 | Harriet Alexander
    Skiers trying to make their way to and from French Alps resorts were plunged into chaos on Saturday night as 15,000 cars were trapped on the roads and emergency overnight centres were set up to shelter trapped tourists. Across the Savoie region, thousands of people were trapped in their cars, snowed in their chalets or stranded at airports as long-awaited snow finally dumped on the Alps - several feet, in some places.
  • Fatal Wrecks On The Rise In Kansas

    12/27/2014 4:08:37 PM PST · by BenLurkin · 22 replies
    State transportation officials say that it is too early to start drawing any conclusions on the connection between higher speed limits and the increased number of accidents.
  • Archaeologists Discover 13,800-Year-Old Underwater Site at Haida Gwaii

    12/27/2014 9:47:30 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 33 replies
    Indian Country ^ | Thursday, December 18, 2014 | Alex Jacobs
    An archaeological discovery from this past September could put the earliest inhabitation in Canada at around 13,800 years ago, reported CBC News. Right now it's all on sonar images captured by an underwater robotic vehicle. Archaeologist Quentin Mackie from the University of Victoria (UVIC) and his team returned from a research trip to the Haida Gwaii archipelago in August, where they used an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to scan the sea floor in search of evidence of ancient human inhabitation. His team has been looking for proof of the earliest human presence in North America for decades, and what they...
  • The Economists Who Studied All-You-Can-Eat Buffets

    12/27/2014 7:00:57 AM PST · by C19fan · 51 replies
    The Atlantic ^ | December 27, 2014 | Bourree Lam
    When I was a kid, the paradox of choice didn't occur to me. I wasn't yet overwhelmed by the "tyranny" of too many options, nor stressed with decision making if more options were presented to me. That might be why I fell in love with buffets. Not only were they reserved for special family occasions (like the holidays or a birthday)—I could eat chicken nuggets beside slices of cantaloupe, or mac and cheese beside jello salad. Buffets are now big businesses, particularly in Las Vegas. The buffets in Vegas are no longer the dollar bargains they once were in the...
  • A Pint-Size Polar Predator

    12/26/2014 7:25:45 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 23 replies
    Discover ^ | Wednesday, December 10, 2014 | Gemma Tarlach
    Nanuqsaurus hoglundi was the big little dinosaur find that nearly got left behind. Classified in a March study, the hobbit T. rex, barely two-thirds the size of its more famous relative, roamed the Arctic some 70 million years ago. It's the only tyrannosaur ever found outside temperate latitudes, rewriting our understanding of the animals' diversity... In 2006, Fiorillo's team was above the Arctic Circle, on Alaska's North Slope. The polar season for fieldwork is brief, and they were busy excavating horned dinosaurs. But they also noticed a few interesting-looking, basketball-size rocks lying around the site. Fiorillo set them aside, thinking...
  • Oldest Horned Dinosaur in North American Discovered

    12/26/2014 7:25:41 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 14 replies
    Paleontologists working in southern Montana unearthed a 3-inch beaked skull with pointed cheeks, which they believe is the oldest definitive evidence of a horned dinosaur in North America. Though small, the skull helps fill gaps in the evolutionary history of horned creatures on this continent... Fossil remains of horned dinosaurs, called neoceratopsian, have been found throughout North America, but the fossil record of these creatures is incredibly limited further back in time. That's been a hang-up for paleontologists because the late Early Cretaceous period (roughly 113 to 105 million years ago) was a time of important diversification for horned dinosaurs....
  • Exotic weapons buried in field could have arrived in Wales by long-distance sea travel [Europe]

    12/26/2014 3:10:14 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 18 replies
    Culture24 ^ | Wednesday, December 24, 2014 | Ben Miller
    Archaeologists investigating a 2.5-kilogram hoard of sword blades, scabbards and knives found by a metal detectorist in January 2013 say the plough-disturbed artefacts could have been delivered to Wales by sea from southern England or northern France. Two blade fragments, a scabbard fitting, a multi-edged knife and six copper ingot fragments were discovered by Adrian Young a few metres apart from each other in the corner of a field in Marloes and St Brides . The Coroner for Pembrokeshire has now officially declared the hoard treasure, with archaeologists at National Museum Wales dating it to between 2,800 and 3,000 years...
  • Scientists discover oldest stone tool ever found in Turkey

    12/26/2014 3:05:13 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 19 replies
    Royal Holloway, U of London ^ | Tuesday, December 23, 2014 | unattributed
    Scientists have discovered the oldest recorded stone tool ever to be found in Turkey, revealing that humans passed through the gateway from Asia to Europe much earlier than previously thought, approximately 1.2 million years ago. According to research published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, the chance find of a humanly-worked quartzite flake, in ancient deposits of the river Gediz, in western Turkey, provides a major new insight into when and how early humans dispersed out of Africa and Asia. Researchers from Royal Holloway, together with an international team from the UK, Turkey and the Netherlands, used high-precision equipment to...
  • Geologist Speculates on Disappearance of Sanxingdui

    12/26/2014 2:58:09 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 6 replies
    Archaeology Magazine ^ | Christmas, Thursday, December 25, 2014 | editor
    Niannian Fan, a river sciences researcher at Tsinghua University in Chengdu, China, presented new thoughts on the disappearance of the Sanxingdui culture from a walled city on the banks of China's Minjiang River some 3,000 years ago, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "The current explanations for why it disappeared are war and flood, but both are not very convincing," Fan told Live Science. In the 1980s, scientists found two pits of broken Bronze Age jades, elephant tusks, and bronze sculptures. Similar artifacts have been found nearby at another ancient city known as Jinsha. Did the people...
  • Human Ancestors Were Consuming Alcohol 10 Million Years Ago

    12/25/2014 4:40:58 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 83 replies
    Discover 'blogs ^ | December 1, 2014 | Carl Engelking
    Using the tools of paleogenetics, scientists have recently traced the evolutionary history of an enzyme that helps us metabolize ethanol, the principal type of alcohol found in adult beverages. Scientists believe early human ancestors evolved their ethanol-digesting ability about 10 million years ago to fortify their diet as they shifted from a tree-based lifestyle to a more ground-based lifestyle... To help narrow that range, researchers studied the genetic evolution of alcohol-metabolizing enzyme ADH4, which has been present in primates, in one form or another, for at least 70 million years. Using genetic sequences from 28 different mammals, including 17 primates,...
  • Exploration into why a rich Temple-building civilization died out on Malta

    12/24/2014 6:25:33 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 31 replies
    Ancient Origins ^ | December 25, 2014 | Mark Miller
    The ancient Temple People civilization of Malta did not suffer invasions, widespread disease or famine, past research has shown. Why their culture died is a mystery. A large team of researchers is carrying out studies to determine why the Temple People’s civilization on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo ended. The Temple People had an incredibly rich culture with unique art, stone temples and structures, huge burial sites and advanced agriculture going back to 4000 BC and ending around 2900 BC. The stone structures on the island are among the oldest free-standing stone structures in history, Malta Today says...
  • Why does this pilot award passengers a bottle of wine after a long flight?

    12/24/2014 12:33:18 PM PST · by wastedyears · 12 replies
    Fortune.com ^ | 12-24-2014 | Dinah Eng
    Why does this pilot award passengers a bottle of wine after a long flight?