Free Republic

The Afar Rift in Ethiopia is marked by enormous gashes that signal the breakup of the African continent and the beginnings of a new ocean basin, scientists think. The fractures appear eerily similar to seafloor spreading centers, the volcanic ridges that mark the boundaries between two pieces of oceanic crust. Along the ridges, lava bubbles up and new crust is created, slowly widening the ocean basin. But a look deep beneath the Afar Rift reveals the birth announcements may be premature. "It's not as close to fully formed seafloor spreading as we thought," said Kathy Whaler, a geophysicist at the...

A 15-ton blob of congealed fat so large it's been dubbed a "fatberg" has been removed from a sewer tunnel beneath London. And just in case you're not completely grossed out yet, the fatberg — as large as a double-decker bus — was mixed with thousands of used baby wipes. (click image to enlarge)

Michael Moore: Killing Is ‘Who We Are’ As Americans By Patrick Burke December 17, 2012 (CNSNews.com) – Liberal activist-filmmaker Michael Moore says school shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. will continue – because “it’s who we are” as Americans. “I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America w/ genocide, then built it w/ slaves. The shootings will continue- it's who we are,” Moore tweeted on Sunday. Moore sent out several tweets regarding the school shooting between Friday and Sunday, at one point claiming the shooter “seemed to single out...

PHOENIXVILLE, Pa., - Fans of the 1958 horror classic "The Blob" came to Phoenixville, Pa., Friday to celebrate the movie at the theater where its most famous scene was filmed. The climax of "BlobFest" at the Colonial Theatre was a re-enactment of that scene, in which the audience runs out screaming and trying to escape The Blob, KYW-TV, Philadelphia reported. The day for the festival was chosen, of course, because it was Friday the 13th. The low-budget movie about a pulsating alien life form that grows bigger and bigger by ingesting everything in its path featured Steven McQueen in his...

A Toxic Goo rains on residents of Oakville, Washington May 8, 1997 It sounds like a bad science fiction movie, but for the little town in Washington there was nothing entertaining about the scourge that befell them in 1994. Six times it rained down from above, leaving dozens of local residents ill, and several pets and small animals dead. It all happened in Oakville, Washington, population 665. Here in Oakville, clouds fill the skies daily, bringing rain some 275 days a year. So, when it began pouring on the morning of August 7, 1994, no one was particularly concerned -...

After watching this NIST video, I feel a lot better about the benefits of having all my personal business tied together through a government-administered national internet ID program. We'll all be able to finally get rid of the frustrating inconvenience of forgetting passwords, and replace it with a totalitarian dictatorship that knows our every move. Sounds like a reasonable deal to me. Besides, when the econazi internationalist police state finally starts getting their gulag program off the ground, I sure wouldn't want the authorities to not know where to find me. And I sure wouldn't worry about the security of...

While Dodd lies about the lack of safety devices on the oilrig and tries to blame Bush for the disaster in the Gulf, at least two of Obama's greatest supporters, appear to have finally begun to turn on the Messiah, for his lack of concern and leadership.

A new shapeshifting chemical robot being developed for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Army has been unveiled by Pentagon researchers. ChemBot is a small mobile device that looks like a gelatinous blob, it can change shape to navigate through tight spaces and will be used by the army for intelligence gathering, and search and rescue missions. The chemical robot moves from place to place by way of a process called 'jamming' which causes the material to transition between semi-liquid and semi-solid states with only a slight change in volume. Jamming technology allows the scientists to make...

Beware of the blob—this time, it's for real. As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea "mucus" blob pictures). And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant. Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map). Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages...

A sample of the giant black mystery blob that Wainwright hunters discovered this month floating in the Chukchi Sea has been identified. Not bunker oil seeping from an aging, sunken ship. Not a sea monster. It looks to be a stringy batch of algae. "We got the results back from the lab today," said Ed Meggert, of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks. "It was marine algae."

It's big, it's black, it's gooey and it may be alive. Giant blobs of thick, oily biological material are floating in the Arctic Ocean's Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait, reports the Anchorage Daily News.

IT'S NOT OIL: No one in the area can recall seeing anything like it before.

A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced today. The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old. "I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance," said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif. "It's kind of record-breaking." A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). An object 12.9 billion light-years...

This image of the Himiko object is a composite and in false color. The bar at the lower right represents 10,000 light years. Credit: M. Ouchi et al. This mysterious, giant object existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. Its length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk. Besides being a great candidate for a future “Where in the Universe Challenge,” what is it? In general, objects such as this one are dubbed extended...

City officials in Lewiston, Maine, are confronting a problem straight out of a 1950s horror flick as a mysterious blob has taken over a major sewer line through the town, according to a report on WMTW.com

PORONG, Indonesia -- For nine months, a gaping hole in the ground has spit out a torrent of hot, black mud, swallowing thousands of houses outside Indonesia's second-largest city and attracting amazed geologists from around the world. Most say the flow is unstoppable, but Indonesian specialists refuse to listen, and they have recently begun carrying out a scheme straight from a Hollywood movie: dropping nearly 1,500 concrete balls into the mouth of the mud volcano. "We know lots of people think this is a crazy idea," said Satria Bijaksana, a professor and one of three geologists behind the $130 million...

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes....

52 REASONS NOT TO MOW 37 WAYS TO HELP TREES Please download with 100% cotton, rice, recycled, or scrap paper Ron Howard, director of A Beautiful Mind and many other films,made his first film at age 8.. an anti mowing film which showed the nature of mowers' attacks on lawns. Art Buchwald: People shouldn't be judged by the length of their grass. In 2003 through now, the world has seen floods, famine, fire, mudslides, hurricanes, tornados and other disasters created by the unprecedented destruction of trees around the world. Trees are nature's weather stabilizers. We need trillions of trees.. new...

A ball of gas more massive than a billion suns is hurtling like an enormous comet through the interior of a distant galaxy cluster. The massive structure is held together by mysterious dark matter, astronomers said today, but it is steadily breaking apart and becoming fuel for new stars. "This is likely a massive building block being delivered to one of the largest assembly of galaxies we know," said study team member Alexis Finoguenov of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The finding is detailed in the June 6 issue of Astrophysical Journal. Great ball of fire The gas blob...

THESE ARE THE SENATORS WHO VOTED TO GIVE SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS TO ILLEGAL ALIENS REGARDLESS OF POLITICAL PARTY, THESE POLITICIANS NEED TO BE DEFEATED IN 2006, 2008 OR 2010, WHENEVER THEY NEXT COME UP FOR OFFICE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW; THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES NEEDS TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION -- THAT IS, UNLESS THEY DO NOT MIND SHARING THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY WITH FOREIGN WORKERS WHO NEVER PAID INTO IT AND AMERICAN CITIZENS ARE BEING LEFT OUT. Grouped by Home State Alabama: Alaska: Stevens (R-AK), Yea Arizona: McCain (R-AZ), Yea Arkansas: Lincoln (D-AR), Yea Pryor (D-AR),...