Free Republic

How fast should a wet dog rotate its body to dry its fur? It's a question that many dog owners will have spent sleepless nights pondering. How rapidly should a wet dog oscillate its body to dry its fur? Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the...

The former head of the Federal Reserve said fiscal stimulus efforts have fallen far short of expectations, and the government now needs to get out of the way and allow businesses and markets to power the recovery. “We have to find a way to simmer down the extent of activism that is going on” with government stimulus spending “and allow the economy to heal” itself, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told a gathering held at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday. Bloomberg News Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan At this point, “we’d probably be better off...

The United States Air Force has long been the envy of the world's militaries—sleek, high-tech and lethal to all who opposed it. Now, at a clandestine military base that serves as the headquarters for the Afghanistan air war, you stare at the rows and rows of decades-old planes and wonder how those things manage to make it into the sky. A maintenance crew works on a rusting, Reagan-era B-1B bomber, its black, bird-like frame soaking in the desert sun. These days the plane has to spend 48.4 hours in the repair shop for every hour it's in the air. Even...

Snowflakes haven't cornered the market on uniqueness. Researchers report that human guts harbor viruses as unique as the people they inhabit; the viral lineup differs even between identical twins. The discovery offers a first glimpse at the previously unknown viruses and their surprisingly friendly relationships with their hosts. Microbiologists have known since the late 19th century that human intestines are a crowded and complicated place. Our bacterial denizens outnumber our cells, and many help break down foods and fight off pathogens. For the past decade, microbiologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St Louis has been mapping the gut's microbial...

Israel's military says several troops who fought in last year's devastating Gaza war will face disciplinary measures and prosecution. In a statement, Israel's chief military prosecutor said Tuesday an infantryman will be prosecuted for manslaughter for his role in the deaths of two Palestinian women reportedly holding white flags. The prosecutor also says a battalion commander was disciplined for allowing his soldiers to use a Palestinian as a human shield. Another officer was disciplined for ordering an airstrike close to a mosque. Israel launched the offensive in late 2008 to halt rocket fire. The fighting killed 1,400 Gazans, many of...

<p>Oversharing on social networks has led to an overabundance of evidence in divorce cases. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years.</p>

Do you hear that music? Sure sounds beautiful. As the Left becomes more disenchanted with Zero, folks inside the Zero White House are leaking what's going on to leftie blogs. Here is a compilation of those leaks that is appearing all over the liberal-left blogosphere. Disturbing and mesmerizing whispering that the Oval Office is the scene of stormy and romantic melodrama between POTUS and his most senior and trusted advisers. Whispering that POTUS is sleeping poorly and is much aggrieved at slights, shortfalls, interruptions. Whispering that POTUS is vulnerable to jet lag. That POTUS has returned to chain-smoking. That POTUS...

BP managing director Bob Dudley said on NBC's Meet the Press that after the failure of the "top kill" operation to stem the flow of oil in the Gulf, the aim of the next maneuver is to contain the majority of the flow.He said the operation will take four to seven days, and has a better probability of success than the top kill. The outcome should be clear by the end of this week, Dudley said. White House energy and climate change adviser Carol Browner said the administration is "prepared for the worst," which includes oil continuing to wash up...

There is a little Neanderthal in nearly all of us, according to scientists who compared the genetic makeup of humans with that of our closest ancient relatives. Most people living outside Africa can trace up to 4% of their DNA to a Neanderthal origin, a consequence of interbreeding between the two groups after the great migration from the contintent. Anthropologists have long speculated that early humans may have mated with Neanderthals, but the latest study provides the strongest evidence so far, suggesting that such encounters took place around 60,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East....

The latest target in the battle over fast food is something you shouldn't even put in your mouth. Convinced that Happy Meals and other food promotions aimed at children could make kids fat as well as happy, county officials in Silicon Valley are poised to outlaw the little toys that often come with high-calorie offerings. The proposed ban is the latest in a growing string of efforts to change the types of foods aimed at youngsters and the way they are cooked and sold. Across the nation, cities, states and school boards have taken aim at excessive sugar, salt and...

Gargantuan whales and hefty cephalopods are typically thought of as the classic marine mammoths, but they might have to make way for the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans' total biomass, according to newly released data. These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet, and researchers working on the decade-long Census of Marine Life project found one such seafloor mat off the Pacific coast of South America that is roughly the size of Greece. A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000...

Barney Frank has enemies, even 30,000 feet in the air. Flying back to Boston from LA yesterday, the congressman was assailed by a pair of ophthalmologists upset about the health care reform bill. An argument ensued that prompted some passengers to wonder if the plane might be forced to land. "No one was calming things down and people were standing up shouting," said Brooke Sexton, who was seated seven rows behind Barney. Accustomed as he is to being conservatives's favorite bad guy, Frank mostly ignored the doctors's taunts, Sexton said, but the congressman's partner, Jim Ready, did not. The problem...

Besides using the iPad in bed and on the couch, you know the reason you bought this thing was for toilet entertainment. Verdict: It's decent but distracting — and sometimes dangerous. Setup Here's half the problem. In order to get your pants down for a No. 2 session (or zipper down for No. 1, if you're a dude), you have to use both hands. That means you need to place the iPad down somewhere. Not every bathroom is constructed with enough flat surface space to safely hold an iPad while you de-pants. The back of the toilet is fine, if...

When the lights and bells went off at a slot machine at the Fortune Valley Casino, in Central City, Colo., Louise Chavez thought she had the win of a lifetime -- $42 million. Louise Chavez was told that her slot machine mistakenly spewed the money. But after the casino claimed the machine malfunctioned, all Chavez got was a few dollars, some free meals and a room for the night. Colorado gaming officials are investigating the incident, but said it could be nothing more than an unfortunate computer glitch. Chavez may not see a dime. "I put my money in there,"...

The former federal judge overseeing The SCO Group's bankruptcy said a jury decision today that Novell Inc., and not SCO, owns the copyrights to the Unix computer operating system does not end the company's litigation against others. Former U.S. District Judge Edward Cahn, the trustee for SCO's bankruptcy filed in Delaware, said the company is "deeply disappointed" in the jury's verdict in the dispute over which company owned the copyrights to Unix, which is widely used in business computing. But Cahn said SCO intends to continue its lawsuit against IBM, in which the computer giant is accused of using Unix...

Pearl Jam's band members are working to be better men. The rock group is partnering with Cascade Land Conservancy -- which works to preserve forests, parks and other natural areas -- to plant approximately 33 acres of native trees and plants around the Puget Sound. It's all in an effort to offset carbon emissions from the band's 2009 world tour. The group generated an estimated 5,474 metric tons of carbon during that 32-date run of concerts. Pearl Jam is donating $210,000 to fund the plantings, which are expected mitigate more than 7,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The greenhouse gas...

he earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. “The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply...

At a recent New Jersey Nets vs. Toronto Raptors NBA game, a halftime performance took an unexpected turn when the Raptors' mascot "ate" a cheerleader whole, then left the court. As the announcer put it, "That's... That's wrong."

Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Following Bohr's example, researchers have now confirmed that people move faster if they are reacting to another person's movements than if they are taking the lead themselves. The findings may one day inspire new therapies for patients with brain damage, the team speculates. Bohr was seemingly unhappy with the Tinseltown explanation that the good guy, who never shoots first,...

A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus , a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, " Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK ," used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote "the results...