Free Republic

After several years of often rancorous debate—and more back-and-forth action than a beach restoration project Idaho lawmakers finally have decided that climate change will be taught in Idaho schools. “It’s a wonderful thing for for our state and its students!” said Coeur d’Alene environmental science teacher Jamie Esler, who served on a state committee of award-winning educators, parents, and scientists that developed the K12 science standards.The science standards developed by the highly qualified committee, over painstaking months of work, maintain “integrity around the science of climate,” and will enable Idaho science teachers to fully educate their students about human-caused climate...

314 Action Wants to Elect Scientists, But Only if They're Democrats The U.S. Congress is made up mostly of professional politicians and lawyers. This comes as a surprise to precisely no one, but the sheer numbers are rather striking.According to the Congressional Research Service (PDF, Table 2), the 115th Congress consists of 168 Representatives (out of 435) who are lawyers, and the Senate has 50 lawyers (out of 100). Combined, lawyers make up nearly 41% of Congress.How many lawyers are in the U.S.? One law firm (with a nifty interactive map!) estimates roughly 1.3 million. Given that the U.S. population...

A group of feminist professors will publish a new anthology in November extolling the merits of the emerging field of “queer feminist science.” The anthology, Queer Feminist Science: A Reader, will be released on November 16, and is edited by a team of Women’s Studies professors including New York University’s Cyd Cipolla, Wake Forest University’s Kristina Gupta, South Florida University’s David A. Rubin, and Mount Holyoke College’s Angela Willey, who specifically teaches “feminist science.

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group. The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate. But it will re-open its investigation should it receive...

Let's not dance around the issue: Hurricane Harvey was a direct consequence of global warming, which in turn is a direct consequence of human activities. It's ironic that Texas (and Houston in particular) has an economy that is dominated by on oil and fossil fuels. Burning these fuels is what got us in this mess. It's also ironic that Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is now at the front of the line asking for a federal government rescue package, is a scientifically illiterate climate change denier. Maybe with cooler temperatures, we'd have had a hurricane anyway–but it would have been...

The New York Times has quietly updated its Tuesday front page article on a “sweeping” global warming report some scientists fear “would be suppressed” by the Trump administration. TheNYT reported they had obtained an unreleased draft copy of the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which is set for release in 2018. The paper claimed the NDA draft had “not yet been made public” and “concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now.” However, TheNYT published a “third order draft” of the NCA that’s been available online since January. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published the draft...

In the days, weeks, and months since Donald Trump's surprising victory, there's been endless speculation and debate about what cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election. In May, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote that the October 28 Comey Letter very likely cost Clinton the presidency. There's also evidence that sexism, both conscious and unconscious, helped tear down one of the most qualified candidates in history. And all of this is to say nothing of potential Russian interference. Well, here's a new one: Members of the astrological community believe that the exact time of Clinton's birth on October 26, 1947, may be...

Sorry, everybody. We’re just not that special. In more than five decades of scanning the heavens, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has found no sign of alien life. Yet now two American astronomers, in the scientific equivalent of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, are estimating that over the course of its history the universe has seen at least half a trillion technologically advanced species. Remember, 420 billion intelligent civilizations is the “pessimistic” estimate. But sadly—or happily, depending on your view of aliens—it doesn’t make us any less alone.

A Hartford, Conn. sociology professor labeled white people "inhuman a**holes" and endorsed the idea that first responders should have let House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and others die on a Virginia baseball field because of their race, Campus Reform reported. Trinity College's Johnny Eric Williams posted the hashtag "LetThem[expletive]Die" below an emotional message on Facebook directed at white people. On his now-locked account he wrote, "It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be 'white' will not do - put end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and...

Zeeya Merali is a freelance science writer and author of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes. Her work has appeared in Nature, Scientific American, Discover, Science, New Scientist, and on the BBC. She has also published two textbooks with National Geographic and has worked on NOVA's television series The Fabric of the Cosmos. She has a PhD in theoretical cosmology and lives in London. Artwork illustrating the concept of an alternate ‘bubble’ universe in which our universe (left) is not the only one. Some scientists think that bubble universes may pop into existence...

Camila Castello, 34, and Akahi Ricardo, 36, are what is known as “Breatharians” - they eat just three times a week, and only ever a piece of fruit or some vegetable broth at a time. “Humans can easily be without food, as long as they are the connected to the energy that exists in all things and through breathing,” The couple met in 2005 and first discovered Breatharianism in 2008. They eventually transitioned from vegetarians, to raw vegans, to fruitarians and finally to Breatharians.

The Independent Television Service (ITVS)--a federally funded film-making company, whose existence is mandated by federal law and which received more than $86 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the last five fiscal years on record—has produced a pro-sex-change documentary entitled “Real Boy.” The Public Broadcasting Service will broadcast the documentary on June 19. PBS itself has received more than $235 million from CPB over the last five fiscal years on record (2011 through 2015), according to CPB’s 990 forms. The ITVS documentary “Real Boy” tells the story of how a young woman--whose now-divorced parents named her Rachael--becomes Bennett,...

‘Binary and absolute differences’ are ‘exploitative’ A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press. Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark...

If there’s one thing we can say about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s unlike any other world leader we’ve seen to date. The problem, however, is that his differences fail to set him apart in a positive manner. Almost daily, Trump tweets about the “biased media,” “fake news,” or a world leader who has suddenly done something so terrible that he must take to Twitter to publicly berate them. Notice, however, that it’s always someone else with the problem. It’s never him. However, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School seems to think...

"Closer to 'Doomsday' Than Any Year Since '59" screams the headline in the Huffington Post. The story, and many others like it, point to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' famous "Doomsday Clock," which is supposed to be a reliable indicator of the risk the world faces of a nuclear war. The clock shows how many minutes there are until midnight, which was supposed to mean nuclear annihilation. This year, the group moved it to 2.5 minutes to midnight, 30 seconds closer than it was last year. When the Doomsday Clock launched in 1947, the initial setting was seven minutes...

Scientists say the world has edged closer to apocalypse in the past year amid a darkening security landscape and comments by Donald Trump. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BPA) moved the minute hand of the symbolic Doomsday Clock from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. It is the second closest it has been. BPA chief Rachel Bronson urged world leaders to "calm rather than stoke tensions that could lead to war". In a report, the BPA said President Trump's statements on climate change, expanding the US nuclear arsenal and the questioning of intelligence agencies had contributed to the...

‘Gold standard’ study’s striking findings: children of heterosexual parents happier, healthier The most scientifically credible studies show that children of heterosexual parents fare better on numerous indicators of personal well-being than children of homosexual parents. Authored by Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the study was published in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research. Children of lesbian mothers are nearly 12 times (≅ 1200%) as likely to say they were sexually touched by a parent or adult as those raised in intact biological families. Asked if they had ever been raped, 31...

As part of its January 2017 issue exploring our evolving understandings and definitions of gender, National Geographic is featuring nine-year-old transgender rights activist Avery Jackson on its cover—the first time a trans person has made the cover of the magazine. Jackson rose to stardom last year when she began documenting her transition with “Avery Chats,” a series of YouTube videos describing how she came to understand her identity at such a young age and eventually came out to her parents as trans. “When I was born, doctors said I was a boy, but I knew in my heart I was...

Large-scale forest fires started by prehistoric hunter-gatherers are probably the reason why Europe is not more densely forested. The finding -- by an international team, including climate researcher Professor Jed Kaplan of the University of Lausanne and archaeologist Professor Jan Kolen of Leiden University -- was published Nov. 30 in the journal PLOS ONE. Deliberate or negligent This research has generated new insights on the role of hunters in the formation of the landscape. It may be that during the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers deliberately lit forest fires in an attempt to...

Dirk Notz calculates that for every person who drives a car 1,000 miles or takes a round-trip flight from New York to London, three square meters (about 32 square feet) of sea ice vanishes from the Arctic. Researchers have long documented that human-fueled carbon dioxide emissions contribute to the overall warming of the planet — and, by extension, accelerate the diminishing of sea ice in the Arctic each year. But in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Notz and a colleague detail the complex set of calculations that allowed them to estimate how much Arctic sea ice melts...