Free Republic

China is determined to block investigations of where COVID-19 came from. But worse, influential American scientists are going along with censoring any inquiry. They're declaring their "solidarity with the scientists and health professionals of China." That's a deadly problem. Conquering this virus and devising a vaccine will require unbiased research, no matter where it leads. The best weapon to fight this virus is the truth. The biggest mistake is to limit scientific inquiry and pander to China. We need scientists to be scientists, not political censors. When Australia called for a formal inquiry into the pandemic's origins, China explicitly threatened...

The story of how wild horses were tamed by ancient people has been pieced together by gene hunters. DNA evidence shows modern horses are descended from not one but several wild populations. It suggests horses were domesticated - for meat, milk or to carry loads - in more than one place. As few as 77 wild mares passed on their genes to today's modern horse breeds, from the American mustang to the Shetland pony. "We see traces of original wild populations of horses that have been incorporated into the domestic horses of today," says co-researcher Dr Peter Forster of the...

In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C. The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being...