Free Republic

Two studies may provide hope for patients with irritable bowel syndrome struggling to implement the traditional low-FODMAP diet. In the low-FODMAP diet, patients with IBS restrict their intake of certain carbohydrates (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols), before gradually reintroducing each to determine sensitivity. In the first study, participants started on the traditional low-FODMAP restriction diet, but then had different FODMAP foods reintroduced blindly. The researchers found that patients reacted to an average of two FODMAPs. The data also suggested that individual FODMAPs alone could cause symptoms—as opposed to all the FODMAPs at once. The most significant, finding however, was...

Freshman astronomy books typically include a timeline outlining the major events of the universe over the past 13.7 billion years, from the appearance of our universe to the present. Most timelines put a question mark at the very beginning to reflect the incomplete state of our knowledge about how the universe got started. We don’t know what lit the spark that launched the grand adventure of our universe, despite millennia of wondering and decades of intriguing progress. Remarkably, we know a lot about what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We have robust theories that have...

The hedge fund founded and, until recently, run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer was involved in a deal to sell a stake in a Russian oil company to a Russian oligarch who is the target of U.S. sanctions. Farallon Capital Management sold a part of its stake in Russian firm Geotech Oil Services to the Volga Group, a Luxembourg-based investment firm owned by Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko, in 2010. Four years later, in April 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would target Timchenko, Volga, and a number of companies associated with them, in a round of sanctions aimed...

snip "Scientists and government officials fired back at Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal today, saying homegrown plans he is backing to protect the state's delicate coastline could actually do more harm than good." snip "Jindal flew over Barataria Bay on this 79th day of since BP's Deepwater Horizon well exploded..."