Free Republic

This could change everything. Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate. The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up. For a bit of background on the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, it was shared between...

An explosion at a bar in the southern German city of Ansbach, near Nuremberg, has killed one person and injured several others, reports say. The cause is unclear although the city's mayor is quoted as saying it was an "explosive device". Police have sealed off the area around Eugene's Wine Bar, the Nuernberger Nachrichten newspaper reported. The incident comes amid tension following other bloody events in Germany over the past week.

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Syria's government routinely ships weapons to Lebanon's Shiite militia Hezbollah in an operation that goes well beyond sporadic smuggling, a top Israeli intelligence officer said on Tuesday. The head of the military intelligence research department, Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, told a parliamentary committee that Hezbollah's arsenal included thousands of rockets of all ranges and types, some solid-fuelled.

Terror plots accelerating, warns police chief By John Steele (Filed: 04/07/2006) Anti-terrorist police are tackling an "accelerating" number of plots by violent Muslim Jihadi extremists, according to Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer. Scotland Yard anti-terrorism branch is involved in an "unprecedented" 70 investigations, Peter Clarke the head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch and national co-ordinator for anti-terrorist investigations, warned yesterday. More than 60 people are facing trial on terrorist allegations. Two-thirds of those have been charged since last July. In one of the most sombre and detailed statements yet on the threat to Britain from Islamic extremist terrorists, Mr...

Can technological progress be brought to a halt? Despairing technological determinists like philosopher Jacques Ellul feared that technology had escaped the bonds of human control and was now, in some sense, an autonomous force. In The Technological Society (1964), Ellul declared, "Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity." So in his view technological progress is, alas, inevitable. But is that so? Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr has written a remarkably interesting history of Western...