Free Republic

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said in an interview that his former boss, former President Trump “doesn’t have the brains” to be a dictator, as questions arise about what a second Trump term would look like. Conservative French outlet Le Figaro asked Bolton if Trump had dictatorial tendencies in an interview published Thursday. “He hasn’t got the brains! He’s a property developer for God’s sake!” Bolton replied. Trump, the lone remaining contender for the GOP presidential nomination, met with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán earlier this month. The meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate continued his embrace of autocratic leaders...

President Biden told attendees at a Democrat fundraiser Friday that one of the reasons he opposes armed teachers is because it is not easy to “blow someone’s brains out,” FOX News reports. Biden said, “The idea we’re going to provide – the way to deal with gun safety is to provide teachers with guns in classrooms? There’s a reason why the military takes so long to train somebody. It’s not easy to pick up a rifle or a gun and blow somebody’s brains out.”

Dampwood termite worker head capsule and brain. Credit: Sean O'Donnell, Drexel UniversityNew research on dampwood termites (Zootermopsis angusticollis and A. nevdensis) shows select members of the colony will experience brain changes in anticipation of cognitive demand.In a dampwood termite colony only a select few will, quite literally, see the light. The insects are unique due to their mating flights and the adaptability of their role within the colony, which is based on the overall needs of the group. King and queen termites must leave the nest and are the only members to go outside—briefly —to partner off and tunnel into...

Today, being "birdbrained" means forgetting where you left your keys or wallet. But 66 million years ago, it may have meant the difference between life and death—and may help explain why birds are the only dinosaurs left on Earth. Research on a newly discovered bird fossil led by The University of Texas at Austin found that a unique brain shape may be why the ancestors of living birds survived the mass extinction that claimed all other known dinosaurs. "Living birds have brains more complex than any known animals except mammals," said lead investigator Christopher Torres, who conducted the research while...

One researcher thinks mollusks called chitons are more complex than they seemDo chitons have brains? What is a brain, anyway? With eight separate, flexible plates of shell held together by a skirt of muscle called a girdle, chitons look a bit like armored pebbles, ready for battle. The marine mollusks aren’t actually suited for action. They spend most of their time stuck in place, suctioned to rocks in the intertidal zone. While they’re clinging, their radula, a sort of tongue barbed with scores of sharp “teeth,” scrapes algae and other food from the surface. For chitons, that’s about as...

A new study shows some COVID-19 patients end up with damage to their brains, shedding new light on how the virus impacts the human body. "I think it is critically important that we study this population properly," said Dr. Avi Nath, the lead researcher on this study and clinical director of the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "We hope these results will help doctors understand the full spectrum of problems patients may suffer so that we can come up with better treatments." Some COVID-19 patients report non-respiratory symptoms after contracting the virus, including headaches, delirium and mental fog....

The Trump re-election campaign received harsh criticism following the release of a new T-Shirt, which some groups on the left accused of bearing similarity to a logo representing the Third Reich. Jewish American groups were among those to voice their discontent, with the ADL and far-left "Bend the Arc" accusing the Trump campaign...

A federal judge has issued an order demanding that a group of pro-life activists who were behind a series of undercover videos taken at Planned Parenthood facilities and abortion conferences are liable for more than $1.2 million in damages. U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick of the Northern District of California released an order Wednesday against individuals connected to the Center for Medical Progress. At issue was an Unfair Competition Law claim brought by Planned Parenthood and the plaintiffs California Business & Professions Code. Orrick ruled in favor of the claim, citing a jury verdict from last November that found...

San Francisco, CA – When the Center for Medical Progress released its shocking series of videos in the summer of 2015, showing undercover footage of Planned Parenthood abortionists and executives discussing their lucrative trade in body parts harvested from aborted babies, it caused a tsunami of bad publicity for the nation’s largest supplier of abortions. The sale of tissues and organs of aborted babies for profit is illegal under 42 U.S. Codes 274e and 289g-2. It was not long before a San Francisco, California, Federal Court Judge placed a gag order sealed up much of the evidence gathered during the...

Yale scientists say experiment opens new frontier in brain research 35 minutes ago Re-vitalised brains of dead pigs said to be ‘cellularly active’. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Re-vitalised brains of dead pigs said to be ‘cellularly active’. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty An experiment has breathed life into the brains of pigs four hours after death. Scientists in the US restored circulation and cellular activity in 32 pig brains obtained from a meat-packing plant. While there was no evidence of re-awakening awareness or consciousness, the re-vitalised brains were said to be “cellularly active”. The study has implications that challenge long-held assumptions about the...

Collins was three months shy of seven years old when surgeons sliced open his skull and removed a third of his brain’s right hemisphere. For two years prior, a benign tumor had been growing in the back of his brain, eventually reaching the size of a golf ball. The tumor caused a series of disruptive seizures that gave him migraines and kept him from school. ... Surgeons cut out the entire right occipital lobe and half of the temporal lobe of Collins’ brain. Those lobes are important for processing the information that passes through our eyes’ optic nerves, allowing us...

She is one of the most reviled women in America today among a large swath of the population, infamous for her casual "Lamborghini" joke while discussing the harvesting of aborted unborn babies for their organs in an undercover 2015 video exposé, yet Planned Parenthood executive Mary Gatter was once a small girl in pigtails precociously gazing at the camera on a sunny day. Gatter is back in the news after a new video from the Center For Medical Progress finds her doubling down on her shockingly callous remarks of two years ago. "I did it in L.A. I'm committed to...

“It makes no difference if they are criminals, flesh peddlers, and smut dealers that are exploiting American and Ecuadorian people for profit. For Clinton, if you have enough money, anything goes. This is just another reason why her brand of corruption must not be allowed into the White House.”

In an undercover video released Wednesday, a former technician for a tissue-harvesting company details how an aborted baby was kept alive so that its heart could be harvested at a California Planned Parenthood facility, raising more legal questions about the group’s practices. Holly O’Donnell, a former blood and tissue procurement technician for the biotech startup StemExpress, also said she was asked to harvest an intact brain from the late-term, male fetus whose heart was still beating after the abortion.

The sickness spread at funerals. The Fore people, a once-isolated tribe in eastern Papua New Guinea, had a long-standing tradition of mortuary feasts — eating the dead from their own community at funerals. Men consumed the flesh of their deceased relatives, while women and children ate the brain. It was an expression of respect for the lost loved ones, but the practice wreaked havoc on the communities they left behind. That’s because a deadly molecule that lives in brains was spreading to the women who ate them, causing a horrible degenerative illness called “kuru” that at one point killed 2...

In 2013 scientists excavating a cave in South Africa found remains of Homo naledi, an extinct hominin now thought to have lived 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. Based on the cranial remains, the researchers concluded it had a small brain only about the size of an orange or your fist. Recently, they took another look at the skull fragments and found imprints left behind by the brain. The impressions suggest that despite its tiny size, Homo naledi’s brain shared a similar shape and structure with that of modern human brains, which are three times as large. “We’ve now seen that...

Following the passage of the GOP tax reform bill, a number of corporations have announced bonuses and wage increases for its employees, citing the tax cuts as the main reason. One company that handed out one-time bonuses was Home Depot. And the co-founder had some strong words for Democrats who have criticized these bonuses as “crumbs” and dismissed them as PR moves. Appearing on Fox News Saturday, Bernie Marcus took aim at Democratic leaders, telling host Neil Cavuto that derisive comments about the bonuses will come back to haunt Democrats as it paints them as elitist. “These are things that...

There's a new twist to the perennial argument about which is smarter, cats or dogs. It has to do with their brains, specifically the number of neurons in their cerebral cortex: the "little gray cells" associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior -- all considered hallmarks of intelligence. The first study to actually count the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of carnivores, including cats and dogs, has found that dogs possess significantly more of them than cats. "In this study, we were interested in comparing different species of carnivorans to see how the numbers of...

Houston has barely begun to dry out from Hurricane Harvey, and Florida faces a massive rebuilding effort after the Irma catastrophe. These two storms, among the most powerful in American history, are typical of the extreme weather events that are likely to become more common as the planet warms. So why isn’t the public heeding scientists and demanding climate action by politicians that could help deal with these destructive extremes? You can point fingers at the influence of fossil fuel companies, at misinformation from climate deniers and at political obstructionism, notably from a fragmented Republican party. But a much deeper...

The images tell a heartbreaking story: Zika’s calamitous attack on the brains of babies — as seen from the inside. With a macabre catalog of brain scans and ultrasound pictures, a new study details the devastation done to 45 Brazilian babies whose mothers were infected with Zika during pregnancy. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Radiology, is the most comprehensive collection of such images so far, and it reveals a virus that can launch assaults beyond microcephaly, the condition of unusually small heads that has become the sinister signature of Zika. Most of the babies in the study were...