Free Republic

It¹s not love, affection or even blatant self-interest that binds human societies together - it's anger, according to Swiss researchers. They made the unsettling discovery while trying to fathom what makes people cooperate. Traditional explanations, such as kinship and reciprocal altruism, rely on genetic relationships or self-interest. These work for animals, but fail for humans because people cooperate with strangers they may never meet again, and when the pay-off is not obvious. Such cooperation can be explained if punishment of freeloaders or "free-riders" - those who do not contribute to a group but benefit from it - is taken into ...

IF your home resonates to nightly snoring, it could be because your family inherited a round-shaped head. Round-headed people tend to interrupt sleep with snoring more than those with long, thin faces, says a study at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. There is now a hunt on for the "snoring genes" that influence head shape, says Dr Mark Hans, of the department of orthodontics at the university's school of dentistry. Before the study, age, sex and obesity were used to predict chronic snoring. Now his team has used the shape of a person's head as one indicator of ...

Giant waves blamed for lost tankers The disappearance of more than 200 supertankers and container ships during the past 20 years has been blamed by scientists on monster waves of up to 36 metres. A team of oceanographers at the Technical University in Berlin re-created in a tank the gigantic "one-off" seas that are capable of breaking a 180m-long ship in half. "Even in the tank the effect was awe-inspiring," said the research leader, Gunther Clauss. "The exploding wave was so powerful that it broke through the ceiling of the building in which the tank is located." Using a computerised, ...

Hunting Prince swears at pressman BY SIMON DE BRUXELLES PRINCE WILLIAM'S relations with the media are under scrutiny this morning after he was accused of swearing at a press photographer and forcing him to jump into a ditch at the Beaufort hunt. Clive Postlethwaite, 51, claims that he was forced to drop his camera and leap backwards yesterday to avoid being trampled by the Prince's horse in a lane near the Prince of Wales's Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire. Last night Colleen Harris, the Prince of Wales's press spokeswoman, made light of the incident and said that she did not think ...

Ancient traders suffered boom and bust Alexander the Great's death plunged Babylon into economic turmoil. 7 January 2002 JOHN WHITFIELD Ancient Babylonian trading markets were as volatile as our own, says an economic historian. Prices of agricultural goods in the city fluctuated hugely, and the death of Alexander the Great triggered two decades of economic instability1. Babylon's main temple employed scribes to record the city's business. They noted on clay tablets how much barley, dates, mustard, cardamom, sesame and wool one shekel of silver - just under 8.5 grams - would buy. Peter Temin, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

Heckler tossed from Kennedy fundraiser Sparks fly during stinging lecture on industrial hog farms Robert Remington National Post BANFF, ALTA. - Security guards evicted a man who attempted to shout down Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a $250-a-plate fundraising dinner Saturday night as Mr. Kennedy delivered a stinging indictment of the environmental effects of factory-like hog operations. "Ten years from now, the people of this province are going to curse the day they ever heard of this industry," Mr. Kennedy told about 700 people, including a host of Hollywood celebrities, at a fundraising gala at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. ...

Argentina on Sunday devalued its currency by nearly 29 per cent as European governments appealed for their companies to be protected from the fallout. The new "official" peso rate will be 1.40 to the US dollar - broadly in line with expectations - with the currency floating on unofficial markets from Monday. The government said its objective was to free the currency entirely in less than six months. Jorge Remes Lenicov, economy minister conceded that the International Monetary Fund had objected to the dual exchange rate plan. "I spoke with the people from the Fund . . . who said ...

The Bush administration has done a remarkable job, thus far, of counterattacking terrorists physically and psychologically. Pundits complain of imperfections, as they always will, but the administration has succeeded magnificently in a challenging military environment, while cutting through a great deal of diplomatic nonsense and received wisdom that paralyzed America during the Clinton years. President Bush has reinvigorated America's strategic will and made a useful display of our might. He and his secretary of defense out-generaled our own generals, who had become timid when not defeatist. But all of this administration's admirable successes to date fall short of addressing the ...

Bashing the male-bashers Margaret Wente Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture By Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young McGill-Queen's, 370 pages, $39.95 Here's the latest from Germaine Greer, from a recent essay published in a leading British newspaper: "God knows how many women already have no use for their men, who are all too often idle and incompetent both as wage-earners and around the house, uninterested in the children and hopeless in bed." It's her standard stuff. But why aren't people more offended? No leading paper would dare publish such a rant against women. In ...