Free Republic

...The president and his allies have decided that man-made carbon dioxide is a witch's brew that's killing the planet, and they think that just because the cap-and-trade cure stings doesn't mean we shouldn't have to swallow it. Their solution is embodied in the Henry A. Waxman-Edward J. Markey global warming legislation...Its proponents call it "back to the future." They're not kidding, either........you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO2 emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America's to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO2 level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that...

If only William Jennings Bryan had known Francis Collins. Maybe Bryan, who died just five days after leading the prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial, might have lived longer. Although he won the case, his sudden death suggests the proceedings, during which he was savaged by the press, may have taken a toll. And who knows? We might never have argued at all about whether evolution should be taught in public schools had Collins been around. Timing. If Collins is not familiar, he should be. He is the physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of...

Galapagos: Showcase for Creation by John D. Morris, Ph.D.* This year evolutionists are celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book The Origin of Species. In preparation for this celebration, last December ICR sent Dr. Steve Austin to the Santa Cruz River Valley in southern Argentina to follow up on Darwin's trip on the Beagle. On board, Darwin read Charles Lyell's new book on uniformitarianism, advocating that today's "uniform" processes had dramatically sculptured the earth over long ages, accomplishing much geologic work.The Santa Cruz River was the Beagle's first major stop, and thus...

A single tribe of around 200 people which crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago is responsible for the existence of the entire human race outside Africa, a new study has found. Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world. While there are 14 ancestral populations in Africa itself, just one seems to have survived outside of the continent, the Daily...

Paleontologists say a 75-million-year-old turtle fossil uncovered in southern Utah has a clutch of eggs inside, making it the first prehistoric pregnant turtle found in the United States. At least three eggs are visible from the outside of the fossil, and ...studying images taken from a CT scan in search of others inside. the turtle was probably about a week from laying her eggs ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md - Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth. Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice...

http://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics/team-sequenced-proteins-t-rex-now-sequences-hadrosaur?emc=el&m=380314&l=9&v=1771019082

Conclusion: So the next time someone tells you that it “strains credulity” to think that more than a few pieces of “junk DNA” could be functional in the cell — that the data only point to the lack of design and suboptimality — remind them of the rod cell nuclei of the humble mouse...

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...