Free Republic

The Supreme Court of the United States is a redoubt of decorum in a casual-Friday world. The justices still wear robes. The assembled attorneys, journalists, and interested observers still rise when the robed ones enter the chamber. Lawyers still begin their oral-argument presentations by intoning the words, “May it please the court.” But when the justices convened last November 4, they were hearing arguments about whether the “S-word” and the “F-word” can be legitimately regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In a decision handed down last week, the Court ruled 5–4 on behalf of the FCC. But the fact that...

With a name like T. rex, you'd expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient, flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus Rex To uncover these feeding habits, Witton and Portsmouth colleague Darren Naish analyzed fossils of a group of toothless pterosaurs called azhdarchids, which are muchbabies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world. A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land. Until now, paleontologists pictured the...

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” ...

@BreakingNews: BULLETIN -- WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION TO MAKE ANNOUNCEMENT IN 20 MINUTES; EXPECTED TO DECLARE PANDEMIC EMERGENCY.

Ancient humans might have used animal bones to grind fruit smoothies as well as dig up termites, a new analysis of mysterious 1 to 2 million-year-old tools suggests. Researchers discovered the bones belonging to large mammals at several sites in South Africa, and their intended use has been the subject of equal parts contention and speculation. Early 20th-century anthropologists who first uncovered the bones contended they were genuine tools and evidence for a bone-based tool culture in hominin species that predated early humans such as Paranthropus. Those interpretations fell out of fashion after researchers discovered that scavenging animals and natural...

This chart, adopted from a very interesting new survey (.pdf) of 2,164 American adults on climate policy, reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade. The survey, conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract -- but perhaps only in the abstract. Just 32 percent of Americans think global warming will harm them "a great deal" or a "a moderate amount" personally. The further we get out...

Few things are more appealing in politics than something for nothing. As Congress begins considering anti-global-warming legislation, environmentalists hold out precisely that tantalizing prospect: We can conquer global warming at virtually no cost. Here's a typical claim from the Environmental Defense Fund: "For about a dime a day (per person), we can solve climate change, invest in a clean energy future and save billions in imported oil." This sounds too good to be true, because it is. About four-fifths of the world's and America's energy comes from fossil fuels — oil, coal, natural gas — which are also the largest...

Apparently, the briefs were written by the ICR’s own James J.S. Johnson, whom FindLaw describes as a “family lawyer.” Mr. Johnson is not listed in Martindale-Hubbell (which is where you should go to read peer reviews on anyone you’re thinking of hiring as a lawyer), but he does write some crazy, crazy stuff for ICR’s website. (ICR’s local counsel in Texas seems to be the firm of Adams, Lynch & Loftin, P.C., but they do not appear to be actively involved in the litigation so far.) I should add that “family law” generally means as “divorce law,” and in general,...

The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to modern civilization. A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries yesterday published the entire DNA message -- the genome -- of an 8-year-old female Hereford living at an experimental farm in Montana. Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years, and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past...

Scientists at Harvard University have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming. The finding, published in Geophysical Research Letters, provides more evidence of the intertwining of severe weather and global warming by demonstrating a mechanism by which storms could drive climate change. Many scientists now believe that global warming, in turn, is likely to increase the severity of tropical cyclones. "Since water vapor is an important greenhouse gas, an increase of water vapor in the stratosphere would warm the Earth's surface," says David M. Romps, a research associate in Harvard's Department of...

ScienceDaily (Apr. 22, 2009) — During the summers of 2006 and 2007, an international team of researchers from China and the United States excavated a treasure trove of dinosaur skeletons from Early Cretaceous rocks in the southern part of the Gobi Desert near the ancient Silk Road city of Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China. Two of their discoveries represent new species of theropod dinosaurs. The new species are described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The papers will appear in print later this year in a special volume entitled "Recent advances in Chinese palaeontology."

ScienceDaily (Apr. 19, 2009) — New evidence gleaned from CT scans of fossils locked inside rocks may flip the order in which two kinds of four-limbed animals with backbones were known to have moved from fish to landlubber. Both extinct species, known as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, lived an estimated 360-370 million years ago in what is now Greenland. Acanthostega was thought to have been the most primitive tetrapod, that is, the first vertebrate animal to possess limbs with digits rather than fish fins. But the latest evidence from a Duke graduate student's research indicates that Ichthyostega may have been closer...

There's a new bogeyman lurking in the closet, and this one isn't imaginary. Us. One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up, while more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath (or at least a very unpleasant place to live), according to a new survey. Commissioned by Habitat Heroes and conducted by Opinion Research, the telephone survey polled a national sample of 500 American preteens—250 males and 250 females. On a sliding scale of anxieties, minority kids have it worst; 75 percent of black children...

Special Earth Day Issue  Arpil 22, 2009   UFOs and AGW The Next Ice Age Green up, Man! It's Freaking Earth Day! Saving Our Planet, One Guilt Trip at a Time A Lenin's Birthday Story As Earth Day again brings forth disciples of the religion of inanimate matter, we would do well to examine just how little we know about our world.  Doubtless a prominent theme in this Earth Day will be the great peril of global warming.  Our planet is growing warmer because of sinful man, and if government does not take drastic steps to curb our activities, then...

Sunspots could be seen by the Soho telescope in 2001 (l), but not this year (r) There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time. The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period. Last...

Last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency began implementing Obama administration policy with a “finding” that man-made global warming is a threat to human health. This finding provides the legal foundation for massive regulation of American life that would ultimately chase remaining manufacturing out of the country, sharply reduce America’s standard of living, and tumble the American economy into long term decline. The EPA and Obama are just following the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the UN is as self-interested on this issue as the oil companies — except that it tilts in the...

Fargo flooding was not due to global warming, It was a natural event aggravated by a colder winter and more snow.

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers asserting the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming. Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change on March in New York City, “We have a system [of peer reviewing scientific literature] that is truly, truly appalling.” Soon’s criticisms echoed an earlier presentation at the 2-1/2-day conference that was attended by about 700 scientists, economists, and policymakers considering the issue of “Global Warming: Was it ever really...

AMATEUR archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Scotland's oldest human settlement, dating back 14,000 years. The team dug up tools that have been shown to date from the end of the last Ice Age. It is the first time there has been proof that humans lived in Scotland during the upper paleolithic period.

WASHINGTON — Tinkering with Earth’s climate to chill runaway global warming — a radical idea once dismissed out of hand — is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president’s new science adviser said Wednesday.