Free Republic

Hubble Ultra Deep Field It’s possible that the universe isn’t uniform past what we can see, and conditions are wildly different from place to place, says Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll. “That possibility is the cosmological multiverse. We don’t know if there is a multiverse in this sense, but since we can’t actually see one way or another, it’s wise to keep an open mind.” “Astronomers estimate that the observable universe — a bubble 14 billion light-years in radius, which represents how far we have been able to see since its beginning — contains at least two trillion galaxies and...

Beyond Meat’s sales have fizzled rather than sizzled after fast-food trials of its product had customers asking, “Where’s the beef?” McDonald’s is the latest fast-food giant to complete a trial of a Beyond Meat plant-based product (the McPlant burger). JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Ken Goldman released a market research note that indicated the product was being broadly discontinued in the U.S. last Thursday. The two companies signed a three-year global distribution deal in 2021. Mr. Goldman, who spoke with employees at 25 McDonald’s locations, wrote that “Not surprisingly, the reason sometimes being cited is that the product did not...

(Reuters) -Beyond Meat Inc lowered its forecast for 2022 revenue on Thursday and said it would cut several jobs at a time when demand for its plant-based products is fizzling out in the United States. Analysts have said alternative meat makers should improve their products' taste to attract consumers as a few restaurants including McDonald's Corp have ended U.S. tests of their plant-based menu items without confirming a broader launch. "The company is announcing a reduction-in-force affecting approximately 4% of its global workforce," Beyond Meat said in a statement.

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. BBBY, -26.80% shares sank 17.1% in Thursday premarket trading after the retailer reported fiscal second-quarter profit and sales that missed expectations and gave guidance below Street consensus. Net loss totaled $73.2 million, or 72 cents per share, after net income of $217.9 million, or $1.75 per share, last year. Adjusted EPS of 4 cents was well below the FactSet consensus for 52 cents. Sales of $1.985 billion was down from $2.688 billion in 2020 and below the Factset consensus for $2.059 billion. Comparable sales fell 1%, which the company attributed to a decline in August...

Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physicsQuantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense. “The first thing I thought...

Image of the Day: Galaxies Beyond Comprehension (and Seven-Trillion Dwarfs!)   ESA’s Herschel space telescope has discovered that previously unseen distant galaxies are responsible for a cosmic fog of infrared radiation. The galaxies are some of the faintest and furthest objects seen by Herschel, and open a new window on the birth of stars in the early Universe. Astronomers estimate that their are billions and billions of galaxies in the observable universe (as well as some seven trillion dwarf galaxies) . Here's the breakout of the visible universe within 14 billion light years: Superclusters in the visible universe =...

Author and Huffington Post co-founder Ariana Huffington said that the tremendous anger in the United States today is not a product of just the right or the left, and that neither political party stands to benefit from it. Huffington, speaking in a panel of authors and journalists on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, said people are sensing doom, and that this frustration can threaten American stability. "It's beyond left and right anger. No party can claim that it really is going to ultimately benefit them because it's very unpredictable and potentially very dangerous for our political stability,"

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it. Last spring, the Senate majority leader was looking ahead to a tough reelection fight. Polls showed that the voters back home in Nevada who sent him to Washington four times had tired of him. Republican Party fundraisers had all but declared him their No. 1 target for defeat. Taking them on would be expensive, and he wasn't drawing nearly enough cash from contributors inside Nevada. So Reid did what politicians in his position do: He picked up the phone. The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking...

(IsraelNN.com) A media watch organization says that the primary state-funded news program of the Netherlands engaged in anti-Israel distortion and manipulation of the news from the Middle East during the IDF's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The media fans the flames of anti-Semitism, the group concludes in a report released this week. According to analysts from the European media watchdog organization Israel Facts Group, a leading Dutch prime-time TV news program, NOS Journaal, "omits and distorts the facts and manipulates the opinion of the Dutch The monitors checked the NOS reporting against the TV station's own journalistic code. public beyond...

Sometimes the line to get into the Imax theater at the American Museum of Natural History seems long enough to stretch all the way out to other planets. Now it does. This weekend “Beyond,” a one-year exhibition of more than 30 large-format photographs of Earth’s planetary neighbors, opens in the museum’s Imax Gallery, a corridor by the theater that is also a pathway to the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Michael Benson, a writer, photographer and filmmaker, created the stunning series of pictures from the enormous archives of images taken over the years by robotic explorers of the solar...

Two private-sector groups have submitted proposals to develop the Trans-Texas Corridor-69, a 600-mile thoroughfare that may wind around Lufkin and Nacogdoches one day. The bid process is part of the effort to create a public-private partnership that the Texas Department of Transportation says would speed the construction of "one of the state's priority transportation projects." Trans-Texas Corridor-69, if and when it is built, is expected to connect with Interstate 69, which will stretch from Canada to Mexico. The proposed Texas corridor would start in South Texas and pass Houston, Lufkin and Nacogdoches before hitting Texarkana and/or breaking off into Louisiana....

The governor's race is becoming a referendum on the Trans-Texas Corridor toll road. Republican incumbent Gov. Rick Perry supports the TTC that would parallel Interstate 35 from Laredo to Oklahoma. However, it could gobble up 81,000 acres of rural land according to the Texas Department of Transportation. Also, a large chunk of the land used would be in North Texas. Lance Haynes, a Republican, said he wonders if his family's 68 acres in rural Collin County might be covered in concrete in the near future. The land lies within the path where the state could route the TTC and he's...

SAN FRANCISCO Extending beyond the skullduggery that pried loose people's private phone records, Hewlett-Packard Co. investigators hunting for a boardroom leak shadowed the company's directors and tried to install snooping software on at least one reporter's computer, according to published reports. While the additional surveillance reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal may provoke more indignation about HP's probe, the tactics aren't likely to shift the focus of the inquiries into whether the company and its investigators broke any laws in their quest to identify the boardroom leaker. Authorities and politicians remain primarily concerned about the...

Rice: Iran a Menace Beyond Nuclear Issue Wednesday March 29, 2006 1:31 AM By ANNE GEARAN AP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday that Iran was a menace for reasons other than its alleged drive to build a nuclear bomb and that the U.S. and its allies have ``a number of tools'' if Tehran does not change its ways. ``I think there's no doubt that Iran is the single biggest threat from a state that we face,'' Rice told a Senate panel. She claimed strong international backing for the U.S. position that Iran...

Beyond Bar Codes: Tuning up plastic radio labels Peter Weiss Electronic labels made from plastic semiconductors can now pick up and respond to radio signals at a frequency suitable for use on products. At an electronics conference in San Francisco this week, two European industrial-research teams described plastic radiofrequency-identification (RFID) prototypes with those advanced capabilities. Although silicon-based RFID tags are already in wide use—for instance, in so-called smart cards used to pay mass-transit fares—the new developments bring closer the prospect of RFID tags becoming as common as bar codes, or perhaps even more so, the researchers say. Besides labeling consumer...

QUINCY, Mass. It may be the sign a Massachusetts man was praying for. After Dennis Thomson lost his 20-year-old son in a car crash, the Boston-area man prayed for a message that his son was all right. Now, Thomson's prayer may have been answered. His son's picture is on a Red Sox billboard that recently went up near Fenway Park. The son, also named Dennis Thomson, is shown with two other men. They're celebrating a home run by outfielder Trot Nixon that won a 2003 playoff game against the Yankees. Thomson was killed a year later by an alleged drunken...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29, 2005 – The threat that led to the global war on terror began festering long before Sept. 11, 2001, and will continue to rage as long as al Qaeda and other like organizations keep spreading their ideology, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, from U.S. Central Command, said. Kimmitt, CENTCOM's deputy director for plans and strategy, said the terrorist threat extends well beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. "And that problem set does not go away if we were victorious tomorrow in either Iraq or Afghanistan," he said Nov. 28 at the Heritage Foundation here. A large network of terrorist...

WASHINGTON - Dozens of political donors are reaching beyond the grave to support candidates and parties, setting up their estates to continue giving campaign money long after their deaths, a study released Friday found. Presidential and congressional candidates and political parties have collected just over $1.3 million from at least 100 deceased donors since 1991, according to the Halloween-themed "From Coffins to Coffers" report by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. Political parties are the biggest recipients. National Democratic Party committees have received at least $644,000, while Republican Party committees have taken in roughly $588,000, the nonpartisan watchdog group's...

Imagine a future in which terrorists seize an embassy and police can send in a remote-controlled insect outfitted with a microscopic video camera that reveals where the gunmen are hiding and what kind of weapons they hold. Or a time when adventure travelers fly to the moon to spend a week at a space colony under the glittering lunar skies--in the way they now visit Antarctica or the North Slope of Alaska. Or a U.S. constitutional convention where delegates draft a new governing document that allows the rest of the world a say in American decision-making. Sound far-fetched? Over 1,000...

Armed Forces stretched beyond limit By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent (Filed: 15/06/2005) A damning report on the Armed Forces' ability to go on operations has concluded that more than a third of the military are experiencing serious weaknesses. The National Audit Office says today that there is a potential crisis facing the military with so many troops deployed in operations overseas and a possible brigade-size operation in Afghanistan next year. The Government's commitments abroad have used up a vast amount of equipment and led to serious curtailment of training, the Whitehall spending watchdog says. Under the Ministry of Defence traffic...