Free Republic

I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. I feel the urgency personally. My own father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death, and I myself survived an early-stage cancer that would not have been treatable even...

Hacking a weak computer system does not equal global doomsday. The news has been full of articles recently about how we’re all going to die by 2030, 2027, or insert your year number. (The piece then quotes from an article from another source... and then continues.) For starters, we can discount the AI supervirus threat. AI doesn’t have to develop a doomsday virus, that world killing doomsday virus was already developed by the Aussie CSIRO in 2001 – who then promptly went on to tell everyone how to replicate their work. Aussie researchers stumbled across a simple genetic hack which...

Explanation: The hydrogen in your body and present in every molecule of water came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are...

This is the story of a largely forgotten disaster that struck medieval Britain between 1315 and 1319. Overshadowed by the Black Death just a generation later, it rarely gets the attention it deserves. 1315 was an extraordinarily bad year. The real problem was… things just kept getting worse. The Disaster BEFORE the Black Death | 10:34 Paul Whitewick | 267K subscribers | 12,109 views | September 13, 2026

Something About Canada's Viking Site No Longer Makes Sense | 8:45 Genefall | 3.37K subscribers | 243,818 views | September 8, 2026 Video Timestamps: 0:00: The Three Seeds That Reopened the Vinland Question 1:03: Why the Newfoundland Landscape Contradicts the Sagas 1:47: The Biological Border: Butternuts in Subarctic Peat 2:56: A Shipyard, Not a Farm: The Bog Iron Bloomery 4:10: The 993 CE Solar Storm: Pinpointing the Year 1021 5:20: The Clean Decommissioning of an Outpost 6:14: American Timber in 14th-Century Greenland Homes 7:38: The Gateway Base: Three Centuries of Silent Resource Voyages

Automatic Collision Evasion Tesla Automatic Collision Evasion feature in update 2026.27.5 Available in the US HW4 Models: S? 3 X? Y CT Automatic Collision Evasion activates Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to try to keep your vehicle safe and then continue driving. It can engage in the following situations while you are driving manually: - Scenario 1: A frontal collision is imminent and braking alone may not avoid it. - Scenario 2: Your vehicle detects that you are not sufficiently attentive to the road (for example, reaching toward the back seat), or that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) may have been unintentionally disengaged. See...

Explanation: This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Just over four years ago, Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rose before dawn to the delight of northern sky enthusiasts awake that early. Up before sunrise on July 8th, the featured photographer was able to capture in dramatic fashion one of the few comets visible to the unaided eye this century, an inner-Solar System intruder that has become known as the Great Comet of 2020. The resulting video detailed Comet NEOWISE from Italy rising over the Adriatic Sea. The featured time-lapse video combines over 240 images taken over 30 minutes. The...

[Note: Catching up for yesterday] Explanation: Bright sunlight glints as long dark shadows mark this image of the surface of the Moon. It was taken on July 20, 1969, by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on the lunar surface. Pictured is the mission's lunar module, the Eagle, and spacesuited lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin is unfurling a long sheet of foil also known as the Solar Wind Composition Experiment. Exposed facing the Sun, the foil trapped particles streaming outward in the solar wind, catching a sample of material from the Sun itself. Along with 22...

In this video, Ed Barnhart explores the rise of Etowah, its six earthen pyramids, large plaza, homes, palisade walls, and the natural resources that helped support a thriving ancient city. He also looks at the remarkable artwork and trade networks found atEtowah, including copper and ceremonial objects connected to the wider Mississippian world. From its origins and periods of growth to its decline, conflicts, and eventual encounters with Spanish explorers, Ed examines the story of one of the most fascinating ancient cities of North America. Pyramids of Georgia | 15:48 Archaeologist Ed Barnhart | 41.7K subscribers 25,598 views | September...

Three Unfinished Roman Megaprojects | 12:20 toldinstone | 648K subscribers | 13,841 views | September 12, 2026

This image of the Neptune system, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings—which have not been seen with this clarity in more than three decades—along with the planet’s inner moons. Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Naomi Rowe-Gurney (NASA-GSFC) Neptune’s tiny moons may be ancient wreckage, preserving material exposed when a catastrophic event shattered much larger icy worlds. In 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six previously unknown moons around Neptune. Five of them are tiny satellites that travel just beyond the planet’s...

You don’t need to know any math to understand why the Millennium Prize breakthrough matters. It’s proof of AI’s accelerating and terrifying progress. Why should we care that AI is suddenly insanely good at math? It’s a question that I’ve been asking mathematicians and AI researchers for months, and especially this week, when OpenAI published a solution to one of the notoriously complex Millennium Prize Problems. And it’s the one math question I can answer without breaking into a cold sweat. Math is many things to many people: beautiful, elegant, nightmare fuel. Over the past year, it has also become...

They’re declaring war on Ozempic! In a completely jaw-dropping moment at the recent Democratic Socialists of America-backed Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, an unhinged radical made the outlandish claim that GLP-1 drugs are “fascist” because they “genocide fat people.” “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic, not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people,” proclaimed Atlanta activist Da’Shaun L. Harrison. The extremist claimed the drugs, like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro — which were developed to treat diabetes are credited with lowering the risk of...

Fishing and boating on a Staten Island lake that was polluted by human waste has finally been closed by authorities, one week after The Post reported that officials had done nothing about the “open secret” for decades. The Parks Department told The Post in a statement Friday evening that “out of an abundance of caution, fishing and boating will be suspended in Clove Lakes Park while we await water testing results.” The Post spoke to boat rental workers earlier in the day who said that boat rentals had been open all week. The workers informed The Post that parkgoers continued...

Dia Dhaoibh, a chairde! Thanks for joining me for another video. I really enjoyed exploring Slane, co. Meath this month and finding a few spots there. Please as always leave any feedback or suggestions I love to hear from ye all. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as féachaint, agus slán go fóill. Exploring Medieval Slane-Finding a Hidden Hermitage, Castles & Church Ruins. | 34:44 Jane Ní hEaghra | 6K subscribers | 205,353 views | September 2, 2026

Explanation: Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, the Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel's spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies,...

The New Jersey hairdresser accused of hiring a hitman she met on Tinder to murder her ex-boyfriend and his teenage daughter was indicted Wednesday in connection with the contract killing plot. Jaclyn Diiorio, 28, faces two counts of using interstate commerce facilities in an attempt to commission a murder-for-hire, according to the Department of Justice Diiorio used her cell phone and tried to pay a confidential informant to kill her ex-boyfriend — a Philadelphia Police officer, Matthew O’Hanlon — and his 19-year-old daughter, a federal indictment filed Sept. 3 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania...

They’re getting a helping hand. The Russian Orthodox Church sent fragments of a medieval prince’s hand to soldiers in the frontlines as a means to raise morale and provide “spiritual strength” to end the war. The church, which backs Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, said it dispatched a fragment of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy’s sword hand to soldiers in the occupied region of Donetsk. The Moscow ⁠Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church said sending the prince’s remains served as a symbol to allow the so-called “holy commander” to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Moscow’s invading army. “A fragment of the...

A group of Cuban doctors claim they were effectively sold into slavery by their country’s regime and are asking for $129 million in damages in a lawsuit. The legal filing says 3,500 doctors were sent to Brazil between 2013 and 2018 and claims the Cuban regime earned more than $2.3 billion for their services but paid them “a small fraction” — less than 10 percent — of their earnings. The doctors, now living in the US, claim that when dispatched abroad they were never informed 90 percent of their wages would go to the Cuban government. They also say that...

Explanation: What does this image look like to you? Many see a giraffe facing right, with neck stretched high and long legs mid-stride (but some may see a squirrel instead). The featured image shows LDN 1295, also called the Giraffe Nebula, in the constellation of the mythical queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia). It is an object in the Lynds Catalogue of Dark Nebulas, compiled in 1962 by American astronomer Beverly Lynds, a pioneer for women in astronomy and astrophysics. Dark nebulas are interstellar clouds of dust and gas that block the visible light of the stars behind them. These nebulas are...