Free Republic

Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Wednesday that the White House is still pushing for a so-called assault weapons ban to pass Congress, even though the measure is on life support after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this week it will not be part of a base bill Democrats plan to introduce next month. Mr. Biden, who has been President Obama’s point man on the issue since December’s shooting rampage in Connecticut, said the ban that took effect in 1994 and lapsed in 2004 was declared dead several times, and that he was told then it couldn’t possibly pass....

.....clever bird uses bread to fish, guess he ran out of salmon eggs.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBuPiC3ArL8

The Oldest Map With The Word 'America' On It Was Just Found Between Two Geometry Books The Daily Telegraph Jul. 3, 2012, 7:44 PM A version of a 500-year-old world map that was the first to mention the name "America" has been discovered in a German university library. Experts did not even know about the existence of a fifth copy of the map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller until it showed up a few days ago, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich said. The discovery is much smaller and thought to have been made after the 1507 original version, which Germany...

The Vatican newspaper reported Tuesday that 29 previously unpublished homilies said to be the work of one of the most important and prolific early church fathers have been discovered in a German library. The 3rd Century theologian Origen of Alexandria is considered to have played a critical role in the development of Christian thought. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a theologian, dedicated two of his 2007 weekly church teaching sessions to the importance of Origen's life and work. Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said that despite Origen's importance, few of his original texts remain in part because he was condemned by the...

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere. The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability. There are many sources of the gas around the world, some natural and some man-made, such as landfill waste disposal sites...

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?Wrong!While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway...

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the official rabbi of the Western Wall in Jerusalem visited the tombs of Eleazar and Itamar in Awarta on Wednesday. The graves of many Biblical figures are located in Awarta such as Eleazar and Itamar who are the sons of Aaron the High Priest as well as Pinchas, and the 70 Elders. Rabbi Rabinovitch reported finding the tombs vandalized and desecrated. Rabbi Rabinovitch's visit was conducted under the auspices of Civil Administration head Brigadier General Motti Almoz and other IDF personnel. The rabbi called upon the proper authorities to renovate the sites. Awarta is today an Arab...

Study finds that faults beneath the Salton Sea ruptured during Colorado River floods and may have triggered large earthquakes on the southern San Andreas FaultSouthern California's Salton Sea, once a large natural lake fed by the Colorado River, may play an important role in the earthquake cycle of the southern San Andreas Fault and may have triggered large earthquakes in the past. Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Nevada, Reno, discovered new faults in the Salton Sea near the southern end of the San Andreas Fault. By examining...

Word of 'Asherah' was nearly edited out of the Bible, researcher concludes God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar. In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshipped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence because of the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and...

Dr. Richard Freund to be featured in a National Geographic Channel film; public invited to preview on Wednesday. Spend a little time with Dr. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford, and you might be convinced that the lost city of Atlantis is buried deep within a swamp in southern Spain. Freund, who directs the university's Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, worked with a team of Spanish, American and Canadian scientists to examine a muddy swamp in Spain that was first noted as a possible location for Atlantis by a German scientist looking at satellite photos in 2003. Freund's 2009...

Ancient sea scorpions included the largest and arguably most frightening bug-like creatures known to have lived on Earth, but despite their fearsome claws, these giants might actually have been creampuffs, scientists think.

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species.The ancient humans have been dubbed "Denisovans" after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found. There is also evidence that this population was widespread in Eurasia. A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species - perhaps around 50,000 years ago. An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.

The following is a new release distributed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The advocacy group has issued previous travel advisories directed especially to Muslims in the United States and others concernd about security practices imposed by the Transportation Security Administration at airports throughout the country. Full text follows: The Secondary Screening Process After the primary screening process, you might be selected for additional secondary screening for alarm resolution, anomaly resolution, at random, or because of bulky clothing. * If you are selected for secondary screening because of an alarm or an anomaly in an AIT, you may receive an...

Enlarge Image Buried gem. Researchers have uncovered "fossil virus" inside the zebra finch genome. Credit: Peripitus/Wikimedia The hepatitis B virus and its ilk have been around for a long, long time. A newly uncovered "viral fossil" buried deep in the genome of the zebra finch indicates that the hepatitis B family of viruses—known as hepadnaviruses—originated at least 19 million years ago. Together with recent findings on other viruses, the work suggests that all viruses may be much older than thought. No one knows exactly where or when viruses originated. They don't leave fossils, so scientists have begun scouring the...

The ancient Egyptian toolboxes didn’t have precise, sophisticated measuring instruments like we have today … or did they? Christopher Dunn examines that question in his new book, “Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs.” Dunn has made nine trips to Egypt since 1986, and each time he’s amazed at the precision of the columns, tunnels and statues. He brushes aside conventional thinking, and suggests the ancient Egyptians used highly refined tools and mega-machines. “There’s more going on here than meets the eye,” he said. A manufacturing engineer by trade, Dunn works as human resources...

Genetic investigators say the partnership between people and the ancestors of today's donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago. The findings, reported today by an international research team in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paint a surprising picture of what small, isolated groups of people were able to accomplish when confronted with unpredictable storms and expanding desert. "It says those early people were quite innovative, more so than many people...

Scientists have discovered what is believed to be one of the world's oldest doodles - an ancient scrawl carved onto a rock by a caveman 4,500 years ago. Cambridge University experts believe the crudely etched circles are the Neolithic version of a modern office worker's scribbles on a post-it note. The 6.6in (17cm) chunk of sandstone was discovered by an amateur archaeologist from the bottom of a deep quarry in Over, Cambs., during a university fun day.

London, England (CNN) -- Heads hacked off, a bite from a lion, tiger or bear, massive muscles on massive men -- all clues that an ancient cemetery uncovered in northern England is the final resting place of gladiators, scientists have announced after seven years of investigations....

Greek Style Architecture Found in the Ancient Achaemenid City Achaemenid city of Istakhr in Fars Province Tehran , 25 June 2008: Archaeologists have used geological surveys in the south of Iran to reveal rectangular formations inspired by Greek architecture dating to the Sassanid era. Archeologists have said that the structures located in Fars Province are part of the urban planning of the ancient Achaemenid city of Istakhr during the Sassanid period (226-651 CE). The design is loaned from Hippodamus style of urban planning during a series of armed conflicts with Persias great rival to the west, the Roman Empire, said...

Massimo Osanna, head of archaeology at Basilica University, said that the team working at Torre Satriano near Potenza in what was once Magna Graecia had unearthed a sloping roof with red and black decorations, with "masculine" and "feminine" components inscribed with detailed directions on how they slotted together. Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome, said that the discovery was "the clearest example yet found of mason's marks of the time. It looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way"" he told The Times. Professor Osanna suggested...