Free Republic

The solar day is 24 hours long. That's the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation on its axis, and as far as humans can tell, this is very accurate. However, we live in a world of high-precision machines that deal with the effects of physics that we don't feel. For the machines, a 24-hour day is definitely not exact. Left to their own devices, clocks will slowly go out of sync, which is not exactly ideal. Since the 1970s, authorities have been mitigating this by adding a leap second every so often in order to keep...

In late July, the White House and National Science Foundation announced in the right-leaning tech publication, Pirate Wires, that, beginning this fall, they would be establishing a $47 million program to fund around 250 four-year Industry-Integrated PhD (I-PhD) Scholars in technical fields. The NSF will be funding three of those four years, and 31 universities and 20 companies will be funding the rest—those who have submitted letters of interest include companies like Dow Chemical Company and Lockheed Martin, as well as colleges like Columbia University, North Carolina State University, and the Ohio State University. Students in the pilot program will...

Geologists have discovered that the African continent will split apart sooner than we thought. An active rift has reached a "critical threshold" and will soon break apart, forming a new ocean. That said, 'soon' is a relative term – it'll still take a few million years more, but that's a blink of an eye on a geological scale. "We found that rifting in this zone is more advanced, and the crust is thinner, than anyone had recognized," says Christian Rowan, a geoscientist at Columbia University. "Eastern Africa has progressed further in the rifting process than previously thought." The most intriguing...

As a biologist, Dr. Ari Berkowitz is concerned that more people aren’t aware of a fundamental fact about biological sex. We might expect that a biologist would insist on the objective nature of “male” and “female” as innate, fixed, and unchanging biological realities. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, for example, argues for sex realism, a position which, he says, derailed his plans to become a biology professor.But no. According to Berkowitz, “Biological sex is as nuanced as gender.” He’s written a whole book about it. The thesis is in the title: The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two...

Back In 2020, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 11,000 Americans. Political scientist Zach Goldberg subsequently examined the underlying data and broke the results down by age, sex, race, and political ideology.What he found was rather remarkable.Among white women ages 18 to 29 who identified as liberal, 56.3% reported that a doctor or other health-care provider had diagnosed them with a mental health condition.\Not 15%.Not 25%.Fifty-six percent.For white moderate women of the same age, the number was 28.4%.For white conservative women, 27.3%.In other words, young white liberal women were more than twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to report...

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “That’s an idea so ridiculous only an academic could believe it.” It kept coming to mind as I read Professor John Staddon’s new book Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation. That individuals vary enormously in their talents and desires is an obvious fact, and yet many academics have become famous by declaring that individuals and especially groups must be treated as though they were equal. Staddon, an emeritus professor of biology at Duke University, takes a critical look at the obsession among “progressives” for engineering equality, particularly with regard to race. Why, he...

SpaceX is targeting Sunday, August 30 for Falcon Heavy’s launch of NASA’s Roman Space Telescope mission from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff is targeted for 7:26 a.m. ET, with a backup opportunity available on Monday, August 31 at 7:22 a.m. ET. A live webcast of this mission will begin about one hour prior to liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. This is the first and third flight for the two first stage side boosters supporting this mission, which previously launched the GOES-U and Viasat-3 F3 missions. Following stage separation,...

This is the first photograph that was ever taken of me. A few hours after I was born on March 31st, 1974. A lot of people over the years have remarked that I was the brightest and most alert baby that they had ever seen. That they had never beheld a newborn who had a smile like that. One person told me that even then it was like I was plotting mischief upon an unsuspecting world. Keep that photo in mind while I openly ponder some recent developments. A few days ago Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation that radically...

When people think about rocket fuels, they don't think of water at the top of their list, but water has been a key material in many serious studies on exploring the solar system and refueling in space. And it turns out that water electrolysis propulsion makes engineering sense for many applications. Using Water As Rocket Fuel - Is This The Future of Space Exploration? | 20:13 Scott Manley | 1.87M subscribers | 24,669 views | August 13, 2026

For the global warming alarmists that don't understand the climate will always evolve due to shifts in the density of our planets core (ref. Declination history), wait until they find out what the Chinese did (LMAO)! The declination speed has increased since the Chinese built the 3 Gorges Dam creating a 312 Trillion Lbs. localized weight density on the surface of the planet. Don't know why no scientific journals are addressing this. I don't think eliminating plastic straws is going to fix this. LMAO. I'm sick of Chinese exports! Just saying...

We are finally getting a clearer picture of what happened during COVID. Not because the people who locked us up, masked our faces and forced unproven chemicals into our bodies have suddenly become transparent, but because Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era diary is coming into public view. This long document makes one thing painfully clear: the people who forced us to surrender our lives to their expertise did not have the expertise they claimed. At best, they were guessing. And when their guesses failed, they did not retreat. They didn’t come clean. They doubled down. Arrogance unbridled.. Our health, our freedoms, our...

The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared. ========================================================================== Anthropic said Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three companies during testing after a configuration error gave it internet access, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a rogue-agent episode involving AI firm Hugging Face. Anthropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems. The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the NROL-95 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on July 30, 2026. Blastoff! SpaceX launches secret US spy satellites, nails landing in Florida | 8:59 VideoFromSpace | 2.14M subscribers | 5,359 views | July 30, 2026

The former White House coordinator of the COVID Task Force says the contentious Senate hearing that put Dr. Anthony Fauci and his diary under scrutiny shows there is still "persistent anger" over the government's handling of the pandemic. In an interview on CBS News' "The Takeout," Dr. Deborah Birx said she thought Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who was Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor during the pandemic, "got it the most right for all of us." He wondered, she said, "Did I get the balance right between saving lives and preserving people's livelihoods?" "That is a very deep question, and I think what...

The White House on Tuesday released a sweeping summary of findings from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, arguing that a laboratory-related incident remains the most likely origin of COVID-19 and accusing senior public health officials of shaping the public narrative around the virus’s emergence. The release also renewed criticism of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and several federal and state agencies. It claimed key officials obstructed congressional investigations, mishandled oversight of high-risk research and failed to provide transparent guidance...

The first half of the interview is Musk at his most visionary: highly optimistic about production, robotics, space exploration and abundance, while admitting genuine AI danger. The second half is much more defensive and combative. The interviewer presses him on concentrated power, Ukraine, DOGE, immigration and his influence over European politics. Neither side meaningfully changes the other’s position. The single biggest takeaway is that Musk no longer talks about AI primarily as a technology product. He treats AI plus robotics as a near-term replacement for the existing economic system itself—including employment, scarcity, wages, money and ultimately human control. https://elonmuskarchive.org/video/economist-elon-musk-2026-07-23

Credit / SOURCE: SpaceX SpaceX "Critical Path" Documentary 4K | 34:15Launch Heaven | 16,148 views | July 10, 2026

SpaceX has been moving at an incredible pace this week! Ship 40 completes a full six-engine static fire, Ship 41 begins cryogenic testing (twice), Ship 42 enters production, Booster 21 finishes stacking and Booster 22 is already underway. We also check out the latest Starbase Pad 1 and Pad 2 construction, plus huge progress at Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A and LC-37. Blue Origin has revealed major changes to New Glenn following the launch pad explosion, NASA has announced new Moon missions, Falcon 9, Atlas V and Amazon Kuiper continue launching, Rocket Lab acquires Iridium, the Canadarm2 is repaired during an...

SpaceX just did something unusual with Ship 40. A Starship static fire where 5 of the 6 engines stayed completely silent. That one detail tells us something important about Flight 13. Meanwhile, a second ship is already at the test site, those mysterious white heat tiles are back, and SpaceX is about to set a Starship record no rocket has ever held. SpaceX Starship Flight 13 Final Prep! Two Starships At Once? | 22:28 What about it!? | 651K subscribers | 233,048 views | July 1, 2026

I had never heard of Citizen Vigilante, Uwe Boll's new film starring Armie Hammer, until a few days ago. That's when I read that this movie has been effectively banned in Germany and the United Kingdom. Something about it encouraging violence against migrants. But then Elon Musk made Citizen Vigilante available to watch for free on his X (formerly Twitter) platform. Something that would avoid the censorious thought police and let the people see and decide on their own. Which only made the German and British governments even more furious. Rush Limbaugh called it the "Streisand Effect": trying to keep...