Free Republic

Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families? That's what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety and a global crew of collaborators sought to determine... (snip) In their study, Decety and his colleagues gave the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities--Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto...The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved. (snip)...

As pollution from burning fossil fuels continues to heat the atmosphere, the world's glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate. Scientists widely agree that this meltwater has been a major factor in raising global sea levels about seven inches over the 20th century. The movement of all that water is affecting the Earth's rotation, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science. "If you are melting glaciers from high latitudes--in Alaska, Greenland, or Iceland--you move mass away from the pole, toward the equator, which slows the Earth down," said Jerry Mitrovica, the study's lead author and a Harvard...

Dazzan said that when they looked at the corpus callosum of those who smoke high-strength cannabis, they found that there was a significant difference in the white matter compared to people who have never tried the drug, and people who smoke low-strength cannabis. The THC chemical acts on cannabinoid receptors which the corpus callosum contains. The team utilized two scanning methods to examine the corpus callosum in the brains of 56 patients who reportedly experienced a first episode of psychosis, and 43 healthy participants from the local community. One method required the use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) while the...

(watch video at link) ISIS has taken responsibility for the horrifying attacks in Paris that have left more than 150 dead and hundreds wounded. French President Francois Hollande is calling for the closure of his country's borders. President Barack Obama didn't condemn Islamic radicals for the attacks, but he did call them "an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians" and "an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share." Friday's deadly attacks thwarted Al Gore's long-planned Paris webcast and star-studded concert to promote climate change awareness. "Out of solidarity with the French people and the City...

With the start of the UN's Climate Summit in Paris only three weeks away, global warming alarmists are in a panic, but opinion polls show most people are not that concerned about the issue. Perhaps that is because more people are becoming aware that, despite the non-stop fright peddling by politicians and media commentators, there has been no measurable global warming for nearly 19 years. As we warned would happen over a year ago (Desperate Dash of Global Warming”), the global warming alarmists are desperately amping up their shrill warnings, in the hopes of creating support for the UN agenda..At...

LaGuardia Airport is about to be rebuilt in New York City, but by the end of the century, fish could be swimming where airplanes once parked at the terminal. That’s because sea levels in the area could rise by as much as 6 feet over the next 75 years, according to new predictions released by the state of New York. New York State environment officials announced Friday that they’re creating new sea level rise regulations that will help coastal communities build more resilient homes and other buildings that will be better able to withstand storm surges and other flooding made...

Scientists have determined that sleep is the latest thing to be racist. News of the development comes from National Journal in a lengthy article that debuted late last week. The article, which manages to reach nearly 6,000 words, cites several studies, including one conducted at the University of California, San Diego. For the five-year study, researchers hooked 164 human subjects up to a polysomnography machine (which features a brain scanner, eye trackers, breathing sensors and much else). They found that black participants and white participants experienced sleep differently. In a nutshell, the white study subjects achieved slow-wave sleep — which...

When you’re dealing with one of the most controversial debates in modern history, a little tact is in order. Or at least it should be with global warming, because contrary to popular opinion, it is not a settled science. While the majority of people in most countries believe that it’s happening, many of them don’t think that it’s being caused by human behavior. And don’t believe anyone who tells you that there is a ‘consensus’ in the scientific community. The oft-repeated statistic that claims 97% of scientists believe in man-made global warming, is a joke. That number can be tied...

This week, our beloved leader, no doubt in an effort to hide from the realities of his race-baiting policies, went to Alaska to lecture us about global warming…again. Carrying on with his usual doomsday rhetoric, President Obama warned of rising seas, more intense storms, abandoned towns, and climate refugees spread across the globe. Never mind that there has been no warming for the last nineteen years. That didn’t stop the president from making his trip as dramatic as possible as he climbed Exit Glacier in an effort to draw attention to the melting ice. At least the ice is melting...

Rose Kang describes that whenever a ceiling fan starts to spin, she vomits. After a few hours around any fan, she says, her cheeks start to swell and her head begins to pound. Yet, her experience is relatively minor. In South Korea, newspapers and a government agency report that the air blowing from an electric fan can cause death. “If you fall asleep with it going, you’ll die the next day,” says Kang, who moved from Seoul last year and now works at a hair salon in Toronto’s Koreatown. The daily newspaper in Ulsan, one of Korea’s largest cities, wrote...

GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush says that he believes human activity is contributing to climate change, and that the U.S. is obligated to do something about it. “The climate is changing; I don’t think anybody can argue it’s not. Human activity has contributed to it. I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” Bush said in an interview with Bloomberg BNA published Thursday.

Being obese could actually improve the chances of survival after a heart attack because excess fat appears to fight heart disease, a study has shown. Scientists have been puzzled as to why people classed as very overweight lived longer after a heart attack than those with a healthy Body Mass Index. However, a study of tissue collected from patients undergoing heart surgery found that fat surrounding damaged blood vessels releases chemicals that start to battle heart disease.

Sen. Whitehouse: Bring RICO Charges Against Climate Wrongthink By Walter Olson on 6.5.15 Another step toward criminalizing advocacy: writing in the Washington Post, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) urges the U.S. Department of Justice to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change, with the activities of “conservative policy” groups an apparent target of the investigation as well. A trial balloon, or perhaps an effort to prepare the ground for enforcement actions already afoot?

Benjy, the bull in Ireland who had an international campaign launched in his name after his original owner threatened to send him to the slaughterhouse due to his lack of interest in mating, appears to be exploring new options in his sanctuary home. His new owner, Wendy Valentine of the Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Frettenham, Northfolk, told the BBC “Judging by what he was trying to do the other day with one of the cows… he isn’t gay.” …

The White House is in a state of shock today after receiving word that the US is halfway to a new recession. They were so dazed, they actually blamed Man Made Global Cooling. The GDP for the first quarter was originally announced as a gain of .2%. Today that number was revised to a drop of .7%. The definition of a recession is when the GDP comes in at a negative number for two quarters in a row. That means we are officially halfway to a new recession. The delicious irony is that after Obama decided to honor our troops...

Bill Nye, who once called himself “the science guy,” took advantage of the torrential rains that hit Houston and the surrounding area to get up on the global warming – aka climate change – hobby horse. Tuesday, he tweeted, “Billion$$ in damage in Texas & Oklahoma. Still no weather-caster may utter the phrase Climate Change.” Of course meteorologists, unlike Nye, have spent their careers studying weather and its underlining causes. For a more scientifically accurate explanation of what caused the storms, read the Houston Chronicle’s excellent and fact based analysis.

How bad will the upcoming Papal encyclical on the environment be? Maybe this bad: As the world celebrates Earth Day on Wednesday, Pope Francis is planning to use one of the highest forms of papal expression — an encyclical — to promote climate action to save the planet as a moral and religious imperative. In recent weeks, Vatican officials have outlined what the document will say and are choreographing its release — perhaps as early as June — for maximum global impact beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion members. Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, who chairs a panel dealing...

Those of us, of a certain age, remember the post-World War II promise of Science. Splitting the atom would bring us virtually unlimited cheap electrical power; antibiotics and vaccine technology (a la Salk/Sabin) would eliminate the scourge of infectious disease; and elucidation of the structure of DNA would lead to a cancer cure. But 60-odd years later, we have radioactive waste; terrifying antibiotic resistant pathogens; and despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on cancer research and mapping the human genome, are no closer to that elusive cure. As to DNA, its greatest contribution has been to forensic science, which...

Dear EarthTalk: What is the best way to measure how close we are to the dreaded "point of no return" with climate change? In other words, when do we think we will have gone too far? — David Johnston, via EarthTalk.org While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return” - when no amount of cutbacks on greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming - climate scientists warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees...

San Francisco activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Super PAC Monday announced the billionaire Democrat will wage a campaign to put Republicans on the “hot seat” about climate change and spend “what it takes” for an aggressive new high-tech “war room” to track — and attack — GOP candidates in 2016. The program, based at the NextGen headquarters in the Financial District — with satellite offices in Washington, D.C., and other cities — aims to make climate change a “top tier” issue next year. It will focus its firepower on turning environmental concerns into a “wedge issue,” especially with young voters,...