Free Republic

Summary: When did humans really begin to control fire and use it for their daily needs? Scientists discovered in the Qesem Cave, an archaeological site near present-day Rosh Ha'ayin, the earliest evidence -- dating to around 300,000 years ago -- of unequivocal repeated fire building over a continuous period. These findings help answer the question and hint that those prehistoric humans already had a highly advanced social structure and intellectual capacity.

A dog that went missing in midtown Manhattan in December was reunited with his owners on Tuesday thanks to fliers, Facebook and the kindness of plenty of strangers. Tigger, a year-old lab and pit-bull mix, was being walked by the daughter of a friend of the couple who owns him, Manny Benor and Valerie Aranov, when he broke free as they were leaving the dog run in Madison Square Park. (Benor believes she accidentally attached the leash to a key ring on Tigger's collar.) The 13-year-old chased after the pup for several blocks, but Tigger vanished — and the search...

Caleb Jacoby, the missing 16-year-old student from Brookline, was found on Thursday evening, said police. The teen, who attends the Maimonides School, is safe and well, according to a tweet from Brookline police. Jacoby disappeared on Monday afternoon and has been the subject of a wide community search aided by social media outreach. He is the son of Boston Globe OpEd columnist Jeff Jacoby.

Two Belgian university professors recently decided to submit the 10 most borrowed books at the Antwerp library to bacteriology and toxicology tests. Traces of cocaine were found on all 10 books...the scientists discovered traces of the herpes virus in the pages of the erotic tale Fifty Shades of Grey.

(UPI) -- A snorkeling instructor discovered a dead 18-foot oarfish off the coast of Catalina Island on Sunday. "It just amazed me," said Jeff Chace, director of the Catalina Island Marine Institute, adding that it took about 15 people to carry the leviathan onto shore. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery," he said. The instructor was snorkeling in 15 to 20 feet of water in Tony Bay when she stumbled upon the carcass after seeing a "half-dollar sized eye starring at her from the sandy bottom," Chace said. Chace said it is unclear how the oarfish died because there were no...

The Langevin Block, the building across from Parliament Hill that houses the Prime Minister’s Office, was evacuated Wednesday morning amid reports of a suspicious person and package in the area. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not in the building. Police also closed Wellington Street, the street in front of the Parliament Buildings, for two blocks, and taped off roads in the area. RCMP officers were questioning a man who was put into a police cruiser. A joint RCMP-Ottawa police team that deals with potentially hazardous materials was called to the scene. The Conservative government’s throne speech was to be delivered...

The canyon, found by airborne radar data, has the same characteristics of a winding river channel like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It is at least 750 kilometers (460 miles) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 800 meters (2,600 feet), on scale parts of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

chicagotribune.com Curse? Gardener didn't live to enjoy cash he found By Lisa Black Tribune reporter 6:50 AM CDT, July 4, 2013 Advertisement Click here to find out more! The death of a McHenry County man, just days before he was to collect some of the $150,000 he found in his garden, is causing some to wonder if his elderly neighbor was right all along. She said the money was cursed. Wayne Sabaj, 51, was an unemployed carpenter when he reported finding the bags of cash while picking broccoli in August 2011. He was due to enter into a settlement in...

People in the area reported a man driving erratically and yelling from a black Honda Civic with signs and stickers -- some referencing Sept. 11, 2001 -- about 3 p.m. Monday, News4’s Jackie Bensen reported. One sign read "Death to Capitalism," bicyclist Jen House told News4...... Several of what appear to be gas cans and propane canisters are visible inside the car, which prompted police to close several streets in the area and evacuate Ross Elementary School and an apartment building as a precaution, Bensen reported.

TAMPA (FOX 13) - When a Tampa woman rented a car from Enterprise, she got a hidden extra: A fully loaded snub-nosed revolver. The gun was under the driver's seat, within reaching distance of where her granddaughter had been sitting. "It could have slid out from under my seat and into the back seat, and she could have picked it up and either one of us could have got shot," Linda Ashmore exclaimed.

The missing 5-year-old girl who was snatched from a Cobbs Creek school Monday was found safe in Delaware County overnight. The victim was found on a playground on 69th Street by a good samaritan, wet, wearing only a T-shirt, according to Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood. "This morning around 4:40 [a.m.] a fellow on his way to work heard screams for help, he was walking, he goes over to a playground area and finds a little girl hiding underneath the jungle gym," Chitwood told NBC10's Tim Furlong. The man immediately called police. Police tell NBC10 that she told them she was...

(Reuters) - Iowa police said they have not yet identified bodies found by hunters in a wooded area on Wednesday that could be those of two girls who vanished last summer in a case that received national attention. Captain Rick Abben, chief deputy of the Black Hawk County Sheriff's Office, could not say that the bodies were those of Elizabeth Collins, 8, and Lyric Cook, 10, until they are positively identified by the State Medical Examiner's Office. But Abben said the families of the two cousins had been notified. "It's definitely not the outcome that we wanted," Abben said in...

A 100 kilometre-wide crater has been found in Greenland, the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact a billion years before any other known collision on Earth.

An oasis of liquid methane has unexpectedly been discovered amid the tropical dunes of Saturn's moon Titan, researchers say. This lake in the otherwise dry tropics of Titan hints that subterranean channels of liquid methane might feed it from below, scientists added. Titan has clouds, rain and lakes, like Earth, but these are composed of methane rather than water. However, methane lakes were seen only at Titan's poles until now — its tropics around the equator were apparently home to dune fields instead.

Odd orbits of remote objects hint at unseen world, new calculations suggest. An as yet undiscovered planet might be orbiting at the dark fringes of the solar system, according to new research.Too far out to be easily spotted by telescopes, the potential unseen planet appears to be making its presence felt by disturbing the orbits of so-called Kuiper belt objects, said Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Kuiper belt objects are small icy bodies—including some dwarf planets—that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. Once considered the ninth planet in our system, the...

A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, arrested in May last year in Germany, was found with a memory stick hidden in his underwear. Police discovered the stick contained a password-protected folder with pornographic videos inside it, but suspicious computer forensic experts thought there must be more. After weeks of analysis, they determined that one of the pornographic videos contained concealed documents detailing Al Qaeda operations and plans. The files were hidden in the video file through a process called steganography or concealed writing. The term steganography includes methods used for centuries, such as invisible ink, but now...

Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap. “The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate. “The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said. The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance...

For two days, there was one big thing missing from Justice Wadsworth’s bedroom: “Daddy Bear.” “It makes me feel like cotton candy and I’m cuddling with my dad,” the 6-year-old girl old KOMO-TV in Seattle. Justice was reunited with her best friend Thursday thanks to social media and two Washington state transportation workers. When Justice left her Sedro-Woolley, Wash., home last weekend for a trip to Idaho, she took the teddy bear. But when she got sick along Interstate 90 during the return ride, Daddy Bear apparently fell out and was accidentally left by the side of the road. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/10/daddy-bear-found-girl-reconnected-with-lost-friend/

Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town discovered in Britain.It has been unearthed beneath the Roman town of Silchester or Calleva Atrebatum near modern Reading. The Romans are often credited with bringing civilisation to Britain - including town planning. But excavations have shown evidence of an Iron Age town built on a grid and signs inhabitants had access to imported wine and olive oil. Prof Mike Fulford, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, said the people of Iron Age Silchester appear to have adopted an urbanised 'Roman' way of living, long before the Romans arrived. "It...

Weapons purchased during the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives‘ controversial “Fast and Furious” undercover investigation, which included the sale to “straw buyers” of hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles, have turned up at a dozen violent crime scenes across the Southwest, the Justice Department told a Senate committee. In a letter to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Justice Department confirmed that the illegally purchased weapons recently were found at the sites of at least 11 violent crimes.