Free Republic

India has reported surprisingly robust economic growth, ending 2023 on a high note and providing a boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi just weeks before an election that could give him a third term in office. Gross domestic product (GDP) in the world’s fastest growing major economy surged 8.4% in the final three months of 2023 compared with a year prior, up from growth of 7.6% in the June-to-September period, the country’s statistics office said Thursday. The latest increase was much stronger than analysts expected and means India’s economy “ended last year with a bang,” Thamashi De Silva, assistant India...

Farmington, N.M. has the fastest-rising housing costs in the United States, according to a new report from the National Association of Realtors scanning home prices across the nation. Communities in Florida and North Carolina took up seven of the top 10 metro areas with the fastest-growing home prices, with the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton area coming in second. The report found that prices for single-family homes increased in nearly 90 percent of all metro areas, with the median price increasing by 4 percent from the same time last year to $378,700. The report looked at changes in housing prices in 186 metropolitan...

Pagan cultists in Los Angeles are defying the CDC with a new indoor mask mandate, even if you are vaccinated. The CDC tells us that those of us who are vaccinated are in almost no danger of contracting the China Flu, and if we do catch it, the chances of it blowing up into something serious or fatal are almost nil. Therefore, the CDC revoked its mask recommendations for the vaccinated. What’s more, for more than a year, we’ve watched states such as North Dakota, Florida, and Texas choose not to force their citizens to wear masks, and the per...

(CNN)The fastest-growing black hole in the universe is 34 billion times the mass of our sun and feasts on a meal the equivalent of our sun each day, according to a new study. This massive, hungry black hole was first identified and studied by researchers in May 2018. Previously, they believed it consumed the mass equivalent to our sun every two days. Now, they have a better understanding of this monster black hole and its gluttonous behavior. The study published Wednesday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The black hole is known as J2157 and exists...

What happens when a new technology is so precise that it operates on a scale beyond our characterization capabilities? For example, the lasers used at INRS produce ultrashort pulses in the femtosecond range (10-15 s), which is far too short to visualize. Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image, says INRS professor and ultrafast imaging specialist Jinyang Liang. He and his colleagues, led by Caltech's Lihong Wang, have developed what they call T-CUP: the world's fastest camera, capable of capturing 10 trillion (1013) frames per second (Fig. 1). This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze...

DEC. 20, 2016 — Utah’s population crossed the 3.0 million mark as it became the nation’s fastest-growing state over the last year. Its population increased 2.0 percent to 3.1 million from July 1, 2015, to July 1, 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau national and state population estimates released today. “States in the South and West continued to lead in population growth,” said Ben Bolender, Chief of the Population Estimates Branch. “In 2016, 37.9 percent of the nation’s population lived in the South and 23.7 percent lived in the West.” Following Utah, Nevada (2.0 percent), Idaho (1.8 percent), Florida (1.8...

A surge in atmospheric CO2 saw levels of greenhouse gases reach record levels in 2013, according to new figures. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 2012 and 2013 grew at their fastest rate since 1984. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says that it highlights the need for a global climate treaty. But the UK's energy secretary Ed Davey said that any such agreement might not contain legally binding emissions cuts, as has been previously envisaged. The WMO's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin doesn't measure emissions from power station smokestacks but instead records how much of the warming gases remain...

When it comes to resale value, electric vehicles don’t hold their charge. Electric cars lead our list of the cars and trucks that lose their value faster than average. Also ranking poorly are some big-ticket luxury cars, and, not surprisingly, older, lame-duck vehicles that are late in their product life cycle and about to be replaced. On a list of predicted residual values for 2013 models produced by ALG Inc., the bottom three examples are the battery powered Nissan Leaf; the Lincoln MKS, a more upscale, expensive cousin to the Ford Taurus; and the Mercedes-Benz CL Class, a two-door version...

A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

London, England (AHN) - Britain will out on Thursday the world's fastest car capable of zooming at 1,050 miles per hour. The Bloodhound SSC, designed by Richard Noble, is 42 feet long, 9 feet high and weighs 6.4 tons. Andy Green, a Royal Air Force pilot, will drive the vehicle. Noble and Green hold the world land speed title for their 766 MPH drive of the ThrustSSC, which accelerated to 600 mph upon start in 16 seconds, becoming the first vehicle to breach the sound barrier. A Eurojet EJ200 and a Falcon hybrid rocket power Bloodhound SSC. The Eurojet could...

There were over 20,000 competitors in Sunday's Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco. And 24-year-old Arien O'Connell, a fifth-grade teacher from New York City, ran the fastest time of any of the women. But she didn't win. It doesn't get much simpler than a footrace. All it takes is a starting line, a finish line and a clock. You fire the gun and the first person to the end of the course is the winner. However, as the marathon officials said to O'Connell - not so fast. While O'Connell had the greatest run of her life and covered the course...

A Swiss company has created the world's fastest ever road vehicle - a 340mph bullet-shaped cross between a motorbike and a car.

On Sept. 13, 2007, the Shelby SuperCars' Ultimate Aero became the fastest production car in the world. The event took place on a temporarily closed, two-lane stretch of public highway in Washington State. In accordance with Guinness World Records' strict policies, the car had to drive down the highway, turn around, and make a second pass in the opposite direction within one hour. The Ultimate Aero posted 257.41 mph on the first pass and 254.88 mph on the second for an average of 256.18 mph. Official data were collected via a GPS tracking system from Austrian data acquisition company Dewetron....

US women getting HIV fastest in world July 09 2004 at 10:57AM By Michael Mathes Bangkok - The burden of HIV is shifting to the female population in the United States at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world amid a bombardment of cultural messages that "sex is cool", the United Nations warned on Friday. Changing sexual behaviour and pressure on women to have sex without condoms has contributed to the proportion of women among Americans with HIV and Aids rising from 20 to 25 percent, the United Nations Development Fund for Women said. Unifem said the trend...

BLUFFDALE -- Linux Networx Inc., already the proud parent of the world's third-fastest supercomputer, on Thursday boasted it is building an even more powerful system for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The $10 million contract calls for delivery next month to the New Mexico lab's Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation of what will be one of the largest Linux-based clusters -- a supercomputer melding 2,816 AMD Opteron processors -- and among the fastest Linux Intel-based supercomputers in the world. Dubbed "Lightning," Los Alamos' newest mega-brain will come with a theoretical performance of 11.26 teraflops (Tflops), or 11.26 trillion calculations...

Japanese supercomputer takes world's fastest title from US A new Japanese supercomputer has taken the title of world's fastest away from the US. The NEC Earth Simulator processes data five times faster than its closest competitor. It works at a speed of 35,600 gigaflops compared to its closest rival, IBM's ASCI White, which runs at a speed of 7,226 gigaflops. A gigaflop equals a billion mathematical operations per second. The NEC Earth Simulator is as large as four tennis courts and creates a "virtual planet Earth" to predict climate patterns. Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer science professor, leads...