Free Republic

GREENVILLE, South Carolina (CNN) — After speaking to an evangelical church on Sunday in this traditionally conservative South Carolina city, Sen. Barack Obama said that Republicans no longer have a firm grip on religion in political discourse. "I think its important particularly for those of us in the Democratic Party to not cede values and faith to any one party," Obama told reporters outside the Redemption World Outreach Center where he attended services. "I think that what you're seeing is a breaking down of the sharp divisions that existed maybe during the nineties, when at least in politics the perception...

Create a back-up copy of your immune system 22 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan Imagine having a spare copy of your immune system on ice, ready to replace your existing one should you fall victim to AIDS, an autoimmune disease, or have to undergo extensive chemotherapy for cancer. An Anglo-American company called Lifeforce has received permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to do just that. The firm collects 480-millilitre samples of blood from healthy individuals, extracts the white blood cells and stores them as an insurance policy against future disease. The service comes at a price,...

Conservationists say U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer's plan to designate 2.4 million acres of California mountains as wilderness ---- including areas in San Diego and Riverside counties ---- would preserve a back-country treasure for future generations. But off-road enthusiasts say Boxer's new wilderness bill would lock up that treasure forever so that only a privileged few could use it. California already has one of the nation's most extensive wilderness systems, one that covers more than 14 million acres or 13 percent of its sun-splashed lands. Local examples include the 16,000-acre Agua Tibia Wilderness just north of Palomar Mountain along the San...

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists said on Wednesday they have created a distinctive red and yellow butterfly in the laboratory by interbreeding two different species in a way similar to what they believe has occurred in nature. The laboratory hybrid is nearly identical to a wild species of butterfly in Colombia known as Heliconius heurippa. "We recreated the evolutionary steps that may have given rise to Heliconius heurippa, a hybrid butterfly species, in the lab," said Jesus Mavarez, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, Panama. Animal hybrids are thought to be very rare because they are less able...

AL ANBAR, Iraq -- Seabees and soldiers of the 9th Naval Construction Regiment (9th NCR) completed major projects that will directly aid Iraqi Security Forces in their efforts to reinforce security and maintain stability in the area. The goal was to create several security posts in Al Anbar Province. These posts would be manned entirely by the Iraqi Army and would help them to maintain law and order. Constructing these posts would be risky. Prolonged construction periods in this area might endanger construction workers. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 40 (NMCB 40) decided it would be better to build the base...

Looking forward to seeing some freeper hilarity. :)

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two...

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Hamlet's father runs a club -- not a kingdom -- and the "sweet prince" drunkenly raps a version of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy in an urban teenage take on the Shakespearean play. Brainstorming ideas for a project promoting nonviolence, the students chose a work in which almost all the main characters are dead by the time the curtain falls. But in their version, Hamlet openly discusses his troubles with his mother and friends, and his murderous uncle ends up in jail instead of dead at Hamlet's hands in a second, "rewind" ending.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Urie Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University psychologist who pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to the study of child development and helped create the federal Head Start program, has died. He was 88. Bronfenbrenner, a member of the Cornell faculty since 1948, died at his home Sunday from complications from diabetes, the school announced Monday. The Russian-born Bronfenbrenner was credited with creating the interdisciplinary field of human ecology and was widely regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in developmental psychology and child-rearing. Before Bronfenbrenner, child psychologists studied the child, sociologists examined the family, anthropologists the society, economists the...

Vet is shepherding war-dog honor By Mike McPhee Denver Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 31, 2005 A Vietnam War veteran and Denver-area native is on a mission to create a national monument in Washington, D.C., to the dogs that soldiers used in combat. John Burnam, who served two tours of duty as a war-dog handler in Vietnam during the 1960s, presented his case Wednesday to the Colorado legislature, which passed a resolution supporting his efforts. More than 4,000 dogs, mostly shepherds, were used in Vietnam for scouting, finding hidden explosives and tracking. Most died in Vietnam, with only about 250...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Yale University researchers say their study that used lasers to create remote-controlled fruit flies could lead to a better understanding of overeating and violence in humans. Using the lasers to stimulate specific brain cells, researchers say they were able to make the flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly. Even headless flies took flight when researchers stimulated the correct neurons, according to the study, published in the April 7 issue of the journal Cell. Scientists say the study could ultimately help identify the cells associated with psychiatric disorders, overeating and aggressiveness. Biologists have long known...

YOU might think Norman Packard is playing God. Or you might see him as the ultimate entrepreneur. As founder and CEO of Venice-based company ProtoLife, Packard is one of the leaders of an ambitious project that has in its sights the lofty goal of life itself. His team is attempting what no one else has done before: to create a new form of living being from non-living chemicals in the lab. Breathing the spark of life into inanimate matter was once regarded as a divine prerogative. But now several serious and well-funded research groups are working hard on doing it...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

There is one problem with such thinking: virtually no one involved with presidential politics, and virtually no economist, believes it. Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage firm of ITG/Hoenig, says that in his 30 years in the business, ''the notion that presidents create and lose jobs is the most grotesque mischaracterization of the economic backdrop'' that he has witnessed. The emphasis on jobs is likely to intensify during the campaign's final weeks, especially given that in August the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the weakest monthly job totals in a year. The news, predictably, was treated as if the...

DETROIT - Determined to counter President Bush (news - web sites)'s effort to portray him as a tax-raiser, Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) said Friday he would lower corporate taxes by 5 percent to promote job creation while eliminating tax incentives that sends work overseas. "Some may be surprised to hear a Democrat calling for lower corporate tax rates," Kerry told an audience at Wayne State University. "The fact is, I don't care about the old debates. I care about getting the job done and creating jobs here in the United States of America." Kerry, speaking to Michigan...

AN ARCHAEOLOGIST recently recreated a neolithic brew based on ingredients excavated in Perthshire. The resulting ale tasted unpleasant, but clearly those who drank it originally were not put off. Ever since, the production and consumption of alcohol has been central to Scotland?s culture. It wasn?t just home-produced brew for which Scots developed a taste. Scotland did brisk international trade exporting a wide range of goods in exchange for claret, imported from France to Leith as early as the 12th century. Subsequently, wines from Spain were landed in Dumbarton, bound for Glasgow. In the other direction, export ales were developed from...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have broken their own record for the world's fastest transistor. Their latest device, with a frequency of 509 gigahertz, is 57 gigahertz faster than their previous record holder and could find use in applications such as high-speed communications products, consumer electronics and electronic combat systems."The steady rise in the speed of bipolar transistors has relied largely on the vertical scaling of the epitaxial layer structure to reduce the carrier transit time," said Milton Feng, the Holonyak Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, whose team has been working on...

(AP) - Scientists have created a new type of "electronic paper" that may one day enable books and newspapers to show full-colour movies. Tiny dots packed in columns and rows on the paper can change colours in just one one-hundredth of a second, fast enough that a whole array of these dots could display video images, said Robert A. Hayes, a scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. But before the movies can begin, Hayes said researchers need to devise a system to control each dot's rapid changes. He said the first products are three or four years...

<p>Local scientists are working on a tissue engineering project that could one day allow doctors to repair a damaged heart with a bioengineered blood vessel or a patch of cardiac muscle.</p> <p>The National Institutes of Health has awarded $4.9 million to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's bioengineering department and the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine to test the idea in rats and other laboratory animals.</p>

<p>FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - Californians can help create more than 5,500 jobs and generate $1.38 billion in revenue each year if they shift 10 percent of their purchases to state-grown produce, according to a new study released Thursday.</p> <p>Californians can also generate about $188 million in taxes for local and state governments if 10 percent of their total purchases included state-grown fruits, vegetables and other California farm goods, according to a study funded by the Buy California Marketing Agreement.</p>