Free Republic

As part of the VLA nascent disk and multiplicity survey (VANDAM for short), the researchers mapped the radio waves leaking out of a dense cocoon of dust about 600 light-years away that contained a whole nursery of young stars. The VANDAM survey allowed for a census of stars younger than half a million years old called Class 0 stars – mere babies in star terms – and stars a little older between 500,000 years and 1 million years, called Class 1. Combined with data on the shapes of the surrounding cloud of dust, the scientists found 45 lonely stars, 19...

A Texas teen accused of killing his twin sister has claimed that he was sleeping when he plunged a knife into her neck, prosecutors said Thursday. Benjamin Elliott, 17, of Katy, told authorities that he was stunned that he wasn’t dreaming when he woke up between 2:30 a.m. and 3 a.m. Wednesday and found himself in sister Meghan Elliot’s bedroom with a knife in her neck, news station KTRK reported. “The defendant stated after realizing he was not dreaming, he removed the knife and placed it next to the complainant, turned on the light to the bedroom and applied pressure...

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman certainly comes across as a slippery character. He didn’t inform his boss when he went to lawyers over his concerns over the Trump-Zelensky phone call, and informed the Ukraine president about an alleged plot but not his own commander in chief. And he exaggerated the importance of his position, the old resume-enhancement gambit, and was busted for it yesterday. ... Vindman previously claimed in his opening statement to be the “principal advisor to the National Security Advisor and the president on Ukraine and the other countries in my portfolio.” When asked about the claim however by...

A U.S. Army officer serving at the National Security Council twice raised concerns over the Trump administration's push to have Ukraine investigate Democrats and Joe Biden, according to testimony the official is prepared to deliver Tuesday in the House impeachment inquiry. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who served in Iraq and, later, as a diplomat, is prepared to tell House investigators that he listened to President Donald Trump's July 25 call with new Ukraine President Volodymr Zelenskiy and reported his concerns to the NSC's lead counsel. "I was concerned by the call," Vindman will say, according to prepared testimony obtained...

A MUTANT cow has been born with two heads, baffling local farmers. Video footage shows the farm animal being bottle-fed by local workers as a second identical face emerges next to the first. The calf shares two pairs of eyes and heads between one skull and was found in Brazilian town Caiponia by the farm owner's wife. The woman, Zica Soares, said: "I never imagined something like that would be born here, we are surprised. "The vet says that we need to either put the calf down or look after him until the end. "He is very bad, really weak,...

A suspect in two violent rapes in Boston a decade ago has been freed because DNA testing could not differentiate him from his identical twin brother. Dwayne McNair, 33, was freed by a judge on Tuesday after spending two years behind bars awaiting trial. He was released from an eight-count indictment that charged him with raping two young women, reports the Boston Herald. Prosecutors say the 23- and 19-year-old victims were abducted at gunpoint off city streets within days of each other in 2004, pistol-whipped, and raped. 2011 tests of DNA left at the scene couldn't distinguish between McNair's DNA...

At least 30 people were killed when suspected militants launched simultaneous attacks on military targets in southern Yemen, sources say. Two car bombs reportedly exploded at a camp in Shabwa province, killing around 20 soldiers and wounding many others. In a second assault in the area, gunmen also shot 10 soldiers in the town of Maifaa. The government is battling al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants who often target the military.

<p>AN ARGENTINE judge has blocked planned nuptials between a 22-year-old woman and her twin sister's convicted killer. Edith Casas insists Victor Cingolani did not murder her sister Johana Casas, a fashion model. He is serving a 13-year prison sentence in southern Santa Cruz province for her murder in 2010.</p>

SAN ANTONIO -- San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro was recently profiled in the New York Times, which referenced him as the next national Hispanic leader and perhaps president. "It's been a very promising response," said Castro. "It's a very flattering article." But comments he didn't make could draw some strong opinions. His mother, Rosie Castro, had strong words when asked about her memories of the Alamo, a symbol of Texas independence. "They used to take us there when we were school children," Perez told the Times. "They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up, I learned...

Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio, who will be giving the keynote address tonight, is, according to some, the next Obama. But while Obama’s radicalism may have escaped the notice of the DNC in 2004, Castro’s views are bit more transparent. Indeed, he, along with his twin, Joaquin, currently running for Congress, learned their politics on their mother’s knee and in the streets of San Antonio. Their mother, Rosie helped found a radical, anti-white, socialist Chicano party called La Raza Unida (literally “The Race United”) that sought to create a separate country—Aztlan—in the Southwest. Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/04/Julian-Castro-A-Radical-Revealed

Abortion Practitioner Loses Medical License for Killing Wrong Twin in Failed Abortion Tampa, FL -- A Florida-based abortion practitioner lost his medical license this weekend after the state medical board evaluated his license. Matthew Kachinas was supposed to do an abortion on one of the twin babies who had physical disabilities but wound up killing the other baby in the failed abortion. http://LifeNews.com/state4981.html

A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole. The galaxy, dubbed NGC 253, is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. It is also known as the Sculptor Galaxy, because it is located in the Sculptor constellation. The Sculptor Galaxy is a starbust galaxy, so-called because of very intense star formation there. Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain...

It's a classic image from every youngster's science textbook: a cutaway image of Earth's interior. The brown crust is paper-thin; the warm mantle orange, the seething liquid of the outer core yellow, and at the center the core, a ball of solid, red-hot iron. Now a new theory aims to rewrite it all by proposing the seemingly impossible: Earth has not one but two inner cores. The idea stems from an ancient, cataclysmic collision that scientists believe occurred when a Mars-sized object hit Earth about 4.45 billion years ago. The young Earth was still so hot that it was mostly...

'Angelina - bank raider' Italian cops easily caught an armed robber after being told the gun wielding raider was Angelina Jolie. Lookalike Annarita Ottonello, 29, staged a bank robbery in Genoa after running into money problems, say police. But she was quickly caught, as she tried to escape by scooter, after police circulated the news that the bank had been ro

Really? THE FACTS It is a basic tenet of human biology, taught in grade schools everywhere: Identical twins come from the same fertilized egg and, thus, share identical genetic profiles. But according to new research, though identical twins share very similar genes, identical they are not. The discovery opens a new understanding of why two people who hail from the same embryo can differ in phenotype, as biologists refer to a person’s physical manifestation. The new findings appear in the March issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, in a study conducted by scientists at the University of Alabama...

Twin strands of DNA seek each other out 11:38 28 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan Just like twins recognising and approaching each other across a crowded room, it now turns out that identical stretches of double-stranded DNA seek each other out in solution. The unexpected finding could shed new light on how DNA repairs itself, how diseases such as cancer result from the miscopying of DNA, and how genes become tweaked during evolution. Although the capacity for single complementary strands of DNA to attract each other is probably the best-known and most fundamental property of DNA, no-one knew...

Former premier Nawaz Sharif is expected to return to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia within the next three to four days, his party said today. However, it was not immediately clear whether Sharif - deposed by President Pervez Musharraf in 1999 and living in Jeddah since he was deported to Saudi Arabia after he tried to come back to Pakistan in September would return before November 26, the last date for filing nominations for the general election scheduled for January 8.

A 52-year-old Greek mother has given birth to her two grandsons, after getting legal permission to be a surrogate mother for her daughter. The woman, who was implanted with embryos from her daughter's eggs fertilised by her son-in-law, gave birth to twin boys in good health and weighing 2.5 kilograms, gynaecologist Charalambos Batakis said. In July last year a Greek court gave permission for the woman to carry out a surrogate birth because her daughter was unable to carry a pregnancy to term due to health problems. Greek law allows for surrogate mothers as long as the parties concerned reach...

LYING alongside one another, these beautiful babies look like they could have been born weeks or even months apart - in fact, they are identical twin boys, who were born with just a minute separating them. Weighing in at a tiny 1.54kg, Byron Ryman's birthweight was almost double that of his brother Lincoln's, who was just 530g when he was delivered on March 15 at the Royal Hospital for Women at Randwick in Sydney.

You can see it the next time you visit your office cafeteria or a nearby park: Whites sitting together with whites, blacks with blacks, young people with other young people. When individuals from these groups mix, it is usually because they share something else in common, such as a pastime. Sociologists call this phenomenon homophily, a somewhat grand word to describe the idea that birds of a feather flock together. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onward have observed that people seem to be drawn to others like themselves. But while the basic idea is simple, homophily has surprisingly complex causes...