Free Republic

If students continue to have free choice of career direction, science careers will be gender-differentiated. This is one of the conclusions of an article in the November issue of Science Insights, an on-line newsletter from the National Association of Scholars. The article, written by the newsletter's editor, continues: The data reported here and elsewhere suggest that (such) gender-differentiating outcomes are likely to ensue if intellectually talented adolescents and young adults are allowed to choose freely how they would like to develop. (Editor's note: Because of the article's importance, and its obvious interest to UniSci readers, it is reprinted here, with ...

The Taliban is waging a media war against the United States, using gruesome footage of mutilated bodies and orphaned children aired around the clock by Qatar's Al-Jazeera satellite channel. Since the US-led bombing of Afghanistan began nearly four weeks ago, Arab and Muslim viewers have been exposed to saturation coverage of the effects of the strikes on the country's hapless population. "The Arab world's CNN" - as Al-Jazeera is called - has broadcast footage of charred copies of the Quran among ruins in Kandahar and heart-rending pictures of children in a Kabul hospital numbed by the pain from the burns ...

Pakistan has handed over three retired nuclear scientists accused of having links with terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to US authorities for investigations, media reports here said on Tuesday. Among those handed over is Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, Pakistan's retired top nuclear scientist. Mahmood, along with two of his retired colleagues - former chief engineer of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) Abdul Majeed, and former PAEC scientist Mirza Yousaf - have been handed over to a joint team of FBI and CIA officials for further investigations, the Pakistan Observer daily reported. Quoting credible diplomatic and official sources, the paper said Mahmood ...

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. —George Orwell, 1946 Another reaction to the events… has been to ignore them altogether and to burrow deeper into academic Marxism, concentrate on the more esoteric critiques of American society and capitalism, and chart new approaches toward their delegitimation. —Paul Hollander, 1995 A new species of political activist has been born with a spirit that is reminiscent of the paradoxical idealism of the 1960s. —Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, July 2001 The accolades ...

CHAPEL HILL – Many people think beer tastes bad all the time, while others, who enjoy the alcoholic malt beverage, believe it turns "skunky" only when it isn’t handled properly. Now chemists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say they have figured out precisely what goes wrong with beer to give it that offensive "light-struck" flavor. "Historically, beer has been stored in brown or green bottles to protect hop-derived compounds from light in a process we call photodegradation," said Dr. Malcolm D. Forbes, professor of chemistry. "Hops help flavor beer, inhibit bacterial growth and are largely responsible ...

A large number of Islamic religious schools, or madrassas, established all over the country in the last five to seven years have turned into a breeding ground for religious fanaticism instead of providing education based on Quranic studies, say intelligence reports gathered by the home ministry. Intelligence gathered by the ministry in recent years says these madrassas are flush with funds from Arab states. Following the recent ban on the Students' Islamic Movement of India, the government has decided to come down heavily on these Islamic religious schools. Delhi police officials who have interrogated SIMI activists say funds for the ...

There is a human drama being lived around the Pakistani city of Qetta, capital of the state of Baluchistan, one hundred kilometers south of the frontier. As frightened Afghan citizens pour into the refugee camp, journalists are kept away by a stringent bureaucracy and Rocambolesque-style police actions. The Pakistani authorities claim that the area is an unsafe tribal area, and as such, visits to the frontier area should be limited to groups of five or six journalists, without the right to film or take pictures: security reasons. The journalists who circulate in Qetta may only do so with a police ...

Subscribers to a mailing list originating from the Qoqaz terrorist recruiting website was "cracked" by an anonymous hacker who posted the list of 500 names on a Swiss usenet site. Included in the list is one of the suspected hijackers and the name of a suspected mastermind behind the hijackings.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A French radio station reported on Saturday that one of the militants arrested in Belgium this week was suspected of planning to attack the U.S. embassy in Paris. Belgian authorities declined to comment on the report by Europe 1 radio, but Brussels public prosecutor's office said one of those arrested in Belgium was Tunisian and had been charged with intent to destroy a building with explosives. In Paris, a French judicial source told Reuters that investigators probing the risk of attacks on U.S. interests in France were interested in the suspect. The French probe began before Tuesday's ...

It is feared that european aid and relief workers may be used as hostages against a foreign strike. Eight workers from an aid organization called Shelter Now were retained in the last few weeks on dubious charges of spreading Christianity. It is feared that more such detainees are being held for effective use against a retailiatory strike.

Princeton, N.J. -- In a study that combines philosophy and neuroscience, researchers have begun to explain how emotional reactions and logical thinking interact in moral decision-making. Princeton University researchers reported in the Sept. 14 issue of Science that they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze brain activity in people who were asked to ponder a range of moral dilemmas. The results suggest that, while people regularly reach the same conclusions when faced with uncomfortable moral choices, their answers often do not grow out of the reasoned application of general moral principles. Instead, they draw on emotional reactions, particularly ...

A defining difference between man and non-human primates has been found in the circuitry of brain cells involved in language, according to researchers at the Medical College of Georgia. Their findings belie the notion that the primary difference between man, monkey and chimpanzee is the size of the brain and opens up a new area of study that may explain man's capacity for complex communication, they say. They also say this circuitry may be what goes awry in still unexplained conditions that affect language, such as schizophrenia, autism and even epilepsy. "Language is something that makes us different from other ...

A bunch of sea urchins have turned up in the Cretaceous, millions of years after they were believed to have gone extinct. Their reappearance, reported in the current issue of Paleobiology, casts doubt on the existence of a mass extinction and by implication that of several others. This is going to shake up the paleo world for a while, says paleontologist Lisa Park of the University of Akron in Ohio. Scattered among the five major crises in the history of life--such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction 65 million years ago that marked the end of the dinosaurs--are a half ...

Neither increases in government subsidies to corn-based ethanol fuel nor hikes in the price of petroleum can overcome what one Cornell University agricultural scientist calls a fundamental input-yield problem: It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces. At a time when ethanol-gasoline mixtures (gasohol) are touted as the American answer to fossil fuel shortages by corn producers, food processors and some lawmakers, Cornell's David Pimentel takes a longer range view. "Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning," says ...

They may be the mirror of your soul, but your eyes are also a built-in passport. Everyone's intricate iris pattern is unique, an analysis of more than 2 million eye images now reveals, offering mathematical support for security systems - soon to be tested in London's Heathrow airport - that could provide personal identification in the blink of an eye. Using an algorithm that converts the intricate pattern of furrows and ridges in the coloured ring of the human eye into a 2000-bit barcode, mathematicians John Daugman and Cathryn Downing of the University of Cambridge, UK, have carried out the ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - With angry words and apparent determination, three researchers told a meeting of scientists Tuesday they are unswayed by stories of medical risk or by ethical objections and will soon try to clone human beings. ``I believe we have enough information to proceed with human cloning,'' Brigitte Boisselier told a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. ``I don't believe working with animal cloning will give us much more information. I think we have enough.'' Boisselier, the director of Clonaid, a human cloning company, hinted that such experiments were already under way. When asked for details, she only ...

Despite its importance in countless Frankenstein movies, most scientists consider the life-giving properties of lightning to be more theatrical than actual. But for bacteria at least, bolts from the blue might just be instrumental in evolution.Rather than wait for a stormy night, Pascal Simonet and colleagues at the University of Lyon in France have used a laboratory lightning generator to show that bacteria in soil can be shocked into incorporating foreign DNA into their genomes. Simonet believes that lightning strikes could play a significant role in bacterial evolution by increasing the frequency of gene swapping, or horizontal gene transfer (HGT). ...

A team of California researchers may rewrite environmental textbooks after uncovering evidence that a saltwater marsh is a source of potentially hazardous fecal bacteria that is contaminating the swimming and surfing waters of one of the Golden State's most popular beaches. The team's conclusions, which contradict accepted environmental science theory that wetlands should purify contaminants flowing into the ocean, are reported in the June 15 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. The research shows that bacteria generated in Talbert Marsh, a man-made saltwater marsh near Huntington ...

Oppressed by Evolution BY MATT CARTMILL As far as we can tell, all of earth's living things are descended from a distant common ancestor that lived more than 3 billion years ago. This is an important discovery, but it's not exactly news. Biologists started putting forward the idea of evolution back in the 1700s, and thanks to Darwin's unifying theory of natural selection, it's been the accepted wisdom in biology for more than a hundred years. So you might think that by now everyone would have gotten used to the idea that we are blood kin to all other organisms, ...

For a transition to occur from the pre-biological world of 4 billion years ago to the world we know today, amino acids--the building blocks of proteins in all living systems--had to link into chainlike molecules. Now Robert Hazen and Timothy Filley of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Glenn Goodfriend of George Washington University have discovered what may be a key step in this process -- a step that has baffled researchers for more than a half a century. Their work, supported by NASA's Astrobiology Institute and the Carnegie Institution, is reported in today's issue of ...