Free Republic

The ABENICS active ball joint gear allows for extremely precise, high-torque movementYamagata University At its core, this system developed at Yamagata University in Japan uses a "simple" cross-spherical gear paired with a monopole gear to control pitch, roll, and yaw. Essentially, the same full range of movement you'd see in a rotator cuff (the shoulder) of a human. With clever gearing, coupling, and sliding motions, the ABENICS gear is extremely precise in its movements. By adding a second monopole gear and differentials in tandem, connected to a ball joint, this system becomes even more robust. Operators are able to achieve...

A newly discovered geoglyph on the Nazca Pama. Image credit: Sakai et al. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) has helped identify over 300 previously unknown ‘Nazca Lines’ geoglyphs, according to newly published findings. Discovered over a six-month period, the total number of images located using the new process nearly matches the 430 previously known Nazca Lines geoglyphs found more than 80 years ago. The discoveries, reported by a research team led by Masato Sakai from Yamagata University in Japan, are helping unravel the possible meaning of these ancient artworks, some of which are 2,000 years old, and point to the likely...

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.” The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has...

Media Propaganda and Lies Used to Blame Georgia Heartbeat Law…Again! Atlanta, GA — Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three children, learned she was pregnant in the fall of 2022. Candi had several health conditions (high blood pressure, lupus, and diabetes) that needed to be carefully managed by a qualified obstetrician throughout her pregnancy. Unfortunately, Candi reportedly fell prey to fear and trusted a website that provides mail-order abortion pills instead. In 2022, when Candi ordered the drugs from Aid Access, the international organization was using an unregulated distributor in India to ship the pills. It wasn’t until a year...

RAVENNA, Ohio -- A local Ohio elections board says the county sheriff's department will not be used for election security following a social media post by the sheriff saying people with Kamala Harris yard signs should have their addresses recorded so that immigrants can be sent to live with them if the Democratic vice president wins the November election. In a statement on the Portage County Democrats' Facebook page, county board of elections chair Randi Clites said members voted 3-1 Friday to remove the sheriff's department from providing security during in-person absentee voting. Clites cited public comments indicating “perceived intimidation...

Shares of Intel jumped 3% Friday as The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper, and Asa Fitch reported that Qualcomm has approached Intel about acquiring it for perhaps as much as $90 billion, citing multiple unnamed sources. The “massive” deal, as the authors put it, is financially daunting, as Qualcomm has just $13 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet against $13 billion of long-term debt. Even a mostly stock exchange would require some large debt raise. Intel, moreover, already has $19 billion of net long-term debt. The deal is much larger than Qualcomm’s attempted acquisition of...

If you search “women’s experiences at Planned Parenthood” on Google, you will find mostly positive news articles about Planned Parenthood (with the majority on Planned Parenthood’s website), and stories about “harrowing” pregnancy experiences states that protect preborn children from abortion. However, a look at the Google reviews of individual Planned Parenthood facilities provides an interesting perspective… and tells a far different story. Though strictly anecdotal, these reviews highlight the allegations of former Planned Parenthood patients — that many women have suffered from medical negligence, coercion, and a lack of maternal health services at Planned Parenthood facilities across the country. The...

I have been happily using Kaspersky anti-virus software to protect my computer for years. It never caused me any problems. Other softwares, notably NORTON, allowed a virus to infect my computer years ago, and could not be removed by home measures. So the BIDEN administration has decided that Kaspersky is too much of a risk by a hostile foreign government to continue to operate in the U.S. and now the company has to close shop in the U.S. and fire all its employees. I haven't shopped for a new anti-virus software for years. Which ones should I look at? I...

In LibreOffice Calc, if I have two fields I wish to compare to within a plus-minus value, and then if the spread between the two numbers is too great, both will, say, flash red, how do I do that?

Good morning folks. Last night I went to get on Youtube to check a couple of things. In addition, there were a few articles posted here that linked to Youtube. When I did, however, Youtube (on a Windows 10 computer) would not play or even pre-screen any videos. None, nada. I tried to disable all my extensions and adblockers. Nothing worked. I check other browsers such as Edge and Palemoon, even basic Chromium, and all of those worked fine. I finally had to uninstall Brave, completely wipe all their data from my computer, then reinstall it. Afterwards it worked fine....

Wind River’s new Debian-based server and edge Linux distribution was born out of a need to create a CentOS replacement that would remove Red Hat from the equation.Wind River, the Alameda-based software company that once upon a time was part of Intel, on Tuesday announced eLxr Pro, a commercial Linux offering tailored for enterprise use.In a way, this release represents something of a new chapter in the brouhaha that started in 2020 and which resulted in several new Linux distributions after Red Hat ended support for CentOS, the community clone of its commercial operating system.This time, however, the new distro...

Ah, THE FUTURE!It is weirdly starting to look like the past, no?While the Green grifters are busy making sure people's lives get less comfortable and more expensive every day, as the things that once made a "standard of living" worth attaining are stripped away piece by piece......some of the wealthiest in the EAT THE BUGS crowd have the wherewithal to take a different approach by virtue of their place in the economic food chain - at the pinnacle.Not relegated to gluing themselves to the floors of Porsche showrooms or flinging tomato soup at old masterpieces, these are the big thinkers,...

@skscartoon For the US, for the world, Trump must win. [cartoon]

Need advice on an iphone update fix.

A little earlier this evening I was sitting at my computer reading something when suddenly a program I had never heard of suddenly popped up on my screen. It seemed to be an antivirus, and since I've had Kaspersky Free for years (and been very satisfied with it) I didn't need a new antivirus. So I attempted to remove it. I thought I did. I didn't. After "removing" the new unwanted antivirus program I noticed my Kaspersky shorcut icon had disappeared. Oops! I clicked on the new one again and sure enough it still worked, so I attempted to create...

Scientists have for the first time observed quantum entanglement — a state in which particles intermingle, losing their individuality so they can no longer be described separately — between quarks. The feat, achieved at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, could open the door to further probes of quantum information in particles at high energies. Entanglement has been measured in particles such as electrons and photons for decades, but it is a delicate phenomenon and easiest to measure in low-energy, or ‘quiet’, environments, such as in the ultracold refrigerators that house quantum computers. Particle collisions, such as those between...

r. Daniel Sun’s research at the University of Cincinnati focuses on using magnetic nanoparticles to deliver drugs directly to the inner ear, aiming to provide a groundbreaking, minimally invasive treatment for hearing loss. (Daniel Sun, MD.) Credit: UC Health ================================================================================ NIH-funded research explores magnetic nanoparticles for noninvasive, targeted treatment of hearing loss. For medications to be effective, they require an efficient delivery system to reach the specific areas of the body where they can make an impact. Unfortunately, creating such a system has been a significant challenge for hearing loss treatments. Now, Dr. Daniel Sun from the University of Cincinnati...

Do you swipe in to your office building to meet your in-person mandate, but leave as soon as possible? There’s a word for your covert strategy: “coffee badging.” It is where you show up to the office long enough for a coffee or a meeting expressly to fulfill in-office mandates — while primarily continuing to work from home whenever you can. This new workplace lingo was popularized by videoconferencing company Owl Labs. The company defined it as “showing face at the office and then leaving.” In its 2023 report of 2,000 full-time U.S. workers, 58% of hybrid employees said they...

A research team from the University of Bonn has succeeded for the first time in using light stimuli to stop life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia in mouse hearts. Furthermore, as shown in computer simulations at Johns Hopkins University, this technique could also be used successfully for human hearts. The study opens up a whole new approach to the development of implantable optical defibrillators, in which the strong electrical impulses of conventional defibrillators are replaced by gentler, pain-free light impulses. The Journal of Clinical Investigation has now published the results. Ventricular fibrillation! When the heart muscle races and no longer contracts in an...

Italian special forces divers have recovered potentially crucial video equipment from the wreck of Mike Lynch’s superyacht, which could explain how it sank. Seven people, including the British tech tycoon and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died when the Bayesian sank in severe weather off the coast of Sicily last month. The divers, from an Italian navy unit equivalent to Britain’s Special Boat Service, recovered video surveillance systems, computers and hard drives that will be sent to specialised labs, a source close to the investigation told Reuters. It is hoped that, if the equipment was recovered intact, it may help investigators...