Free Republic

JACKSON, Miss. -- Seven cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Mississippi. Health officials say the new cases are in Lamar and Jackson counties. Through Wednesday there have been four cases reported in Harrison County, two in Lamar County and one in Jackson County. Health officials say an earlier reported case in Forrest County actually was in Lamar County.

Hailed as the “Holy Grail of human evolution” by the New York Daily News, and by lead scientist John Hurom as “like finding the Lost Ark,” Ida is now officially on the road to pop-culture celebrity, being imbued with all the nonsensical notions that such creatures are typically imbued with.

Human-Ape Hybridization: A Failed Attempt to Prove Darwinism by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.* Ilya Ivanov (1870-1932) was an eminent biologist who achieved considerable success in the field of artificial insemination of horses and other animals. Called “one of the greatest authorities on artificial fecundation,”[1] he graduated from Kharkov University in 1896 and became a professor of zoology in 1907. His artificial insemination techniques were so successful that he was able to fertilize as many as 500 mares with the semen of a single stallion. Ivanov also pioneered the use of artificial insemination to produce various hybrids, including that of a zebra...

Barron's: Bjorn, what do you think will be the outcome of the negotiations to curb global warming this December? Lomborg: The participating nations will again agree to spend quite a bit of money to cut carbon emissions and again achieve virtually nothing. We already tried that twice -- in Rio in 1992, and in Kyoto in 1997. Both of these treaties failed. We will see a lot of posturing, but presumably this isn't about having a lot of environmental ministries or even presidents and prime ministers come out and claim credit for making costly commitments that we won't be able...

47 Million-Year-Old Primate Skeleton Suggests Different Precursor To Monkeys, Apes, Humans: A primate skeleton claimed to be 47 million years old could further amplify the often contentious debate between evolutionists and creationists. A prominent paleontologist says the discovery of the ancient primate fossil suggests the creature is the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans, reports The Wall Street Journal. The find bolsters the less-popular stance that humans' ape-like ancestor was a precursor to the lemur - the tarsier, a tiny, bug-eyed primate in Asia, is more commonly thought of as the precursor, the Journal reports. Dr. Philip Gingerich, the...

The biggest global health threat of this century is climate change, according to a new report prepared jointly by University College London and The Lancet. Climate change will change for the worse patterns of disease, food security, water and sanitation, and extreme weather, according to Anthony Costello, FRCPCH, of University College London and colleagues. "This is a bad diagnosis for our children and grandchildren," Dr. Costello told reporters, not only in the developing world but also in industrialized countries. The journal's editor in chief, Richard Horton, FRCP, said climate change is "an urgent threat, it is a dangerous threat, it...

Global tropical cyclone activity is at historically low energy levels — not seen since the late 1970s. Using a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short (Bell and Chelliah 2006), which has been used by Klotzbach (2006) and Emanuel (2005) (the Power Dissipation Index is analogous to ACE), and most recently in Maue (2009), simple analysis shows that 24-month running sums of global ACE or hurricane energy have plummeted to levels not seen in 30 years. --------------------------------------------- Accumulated Cyclone Energy equation; v is maximum one-minute sustained wind speed

American Psychological Association revises statement on homosexuality A publication from the American Psychological Association includes an admission that there is no "gay" gene, according to a doctor who has written about the issue on the website of National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. A. Dean Byrd, the past president of NARTH, confirmed that the statement from the American Psychological Association came in a brochure that updates what the APA has advocated for years. Specifically, in a brochure that first came out about 1998, the APA stated: "There is considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or...

Polar Bears "Dropping Like Flies" From Heat Exhaustion Hunter Jeremiah Johnson comforts a polar bear that had collapsed from heat exhaustion before he could shoot it. (Cold Bay, Alaska) Warming temperatures in polar regions are causing an increasing number of polar bears to collapse from heat exhaustion, local hunters report. Jeremiah Johnson, a local hunter who tracks and kills polar bears "because they are there" has seen three of the behemoths collapse before him in just the last month. "It just isn't sporting to shoot one of these creatures when they are suffering like this", Johnson said as he recounted...

A 250-million-year shutdown of volcanic activity which is thought to have occurred early in Earth's history may be what turned the planet into a glacier-covered snowball. It could also have helped give rise to our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Previous studies have noted that very little volcanic material has been dated to between 2.45 and 2.2 billion years ago, but it was widely assumed the gap would vanish as more samples were dated. Now an analysis of thousands of zircon minerals collected from all seven continents indicates that the gap may be real after all. Zircons provide a record of past volcanic...

The oldest known human hair belonged to a 9,000-year-old mummy disinterred from an ancient Chilean cemetery. Until now: a recent discovery pushes the record back some 200,000 years. (And the newly discovered strands received a rather less dignified burial.) While excavating in Gladysvale Cave, near Johannesburg, South Africa, a team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand discovered an ancient brown-hyena latrine. Upon inspection, hyena coprolites - fossilized dung - appeared to contain uncannily hair-like structures.

In The Bible, Rocks and Time (IVP Academic), geologists and Reformed Christians Davis Young and Ralph Stearley try to convince young-earth creationists (YECs) to abandon their position. First, they argue that the Creation account in Genesis 1 need not be understood as a historical narrative documenting the creation of the universe and its inhabitants in six normal (rotational) days. Second, they argue that the data from geology point unwaveringly to a planet of exceedingly ancient age. I particularly appreciated Young and Stearley's historical overview of church beliefs on Genesis and Creation. Their careful documentation puts to rest the claims of...

...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...