Free Republic

The same civilization that produced the scientific method, actuarial science, and data-driven medicine now treats the act of noticing statistical trends as a moral failing — provided those trends involve race. Welcome to the cognitive dissonance Olympics, where your lying eyes are always the problem, and the scoreboard is considered hate speech. Pattern recognition is not a political act. It is how your brain keeps you alive. Doctors diagnose disease with it. Generals anticipate attacks through it. Every competent investor in the history of capital markets has made money using it. Information theory research estimates that human senses gather roughly...

Before Michelangelo, before Leonardo, there was Giotto. Step back into the 14th century to discover the life and legacy of Giotto di Bondone, the man hailed by history as the "Father of European Painting." In this documentary, we explore how a humble shepherd boy from Vespignano shattered the flat, symbolic traditions of Byzantine art to breathe real human emotion, three-dimensional space, and dramatic narrative into the world of the living. Using our analysis model, we decode Giotto's revolutionary "Divine Spark"—from his legendary discovery by Cimabue to the breathtaking frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel that serve as the "visual vernacular" of...

The papyrus, which contains 133 lines of preserved text, is the longest Greek papyrus ever uncovered in the Judean Desert, although for decades it had been misclassified as a Nabatean text and practically lost in the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA)...Upon translation, the team that Cotton Paltiel put together realized the papyrus preserves an incredible snapshot into the Roman legal system and life between two Jewish revolts against the Romans: the Diaspora Revolt (c. 115–117 CE) and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt (c. 132–136 CE). The papyrus, which pertains to a legal case brought before a Roman court, contains the...

Sports researcher Alfonso Mañas of the University of California, Berkeley, examined an illustration of a third-century a.d. Roman mosaic discovered in 1860 in Reims, France, by archaeologist Jean Charles Loriquet, according to a Live Science report. Most of the mosaic was destroyed by bombing during World War I, but Loriquet's illustration of the artifact survived in his book, which was published in 1862. Mañas said that the surviving fragment of the mosaic, housed in the Saint-Remi History Museum, closely matches the drawing, which shows animals, hunters, and gladiators. He thinks that one figure in particular, previously identified as a paegniarius,...

New radiocarbon dates for Mohenjo-Daro obtained by archaeologists at the Sindh Directorate General of Antiquities & Archaeology indicate that the city on the banks of the Indus River in southwestern Pakistan was occupied as early as 2700 to 2600 B.C., about two hundred years earlier than previously thought, according to an IFL Science report. The site is known for its burnt-brick structures spread over some 590 acres, where at least 40,000 people are thought to have lived. Evidence for a system of water infrastructure, including baths, wells, and sewage pits, has been found among the city ruins. Samples for the...

SummarySterile fly release The U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a new facility at an old Air Force base near Edinburg, Texas, that will disperse sterile screwworm flies into the community. Sterile insect technique Scientists breed sterile male flies using gamma or X-ray radiation, then release them into the wild. These males mate with female screwworm flies, preventing the females from producing offspring. Screwworm threat Screwworm larvae infest open wounds on animals, like livestock and pets, and can kill the animal within 10 days if left untreated. These pests can be devastating to the cattle industry, which has already faced shortages....

Explanation: Nope, that is not an alien spaceship landing on the Moon! This is an image of the International Space Station (ISS) as it begins to transit in front of the Moon. The ISS is in low-Earth orbit (LEO) where it wizzes around the Earth every 90 minutes. Orbiting the Earth 16 times per day for 25 years, the ISS has photobombed many familiar celestial objects including Venus, Mars, Saturn, and the Sun. Thousands of experiments led by researchers from over one hundred countries have been conducted on the ISS. Growing protein crystals in low gravity was one of the...

...the Aurum Tolosanum never reached Rome. At least not in its entirety, since the silver was received, but not the gold. During its transfer to Massilia (Marseille), where it was to be shipped, it was stolen by a band of bandits who also made sure not to leave witnesses by murdering the cohort in charge of its custody. The operation was flawless; so much so that speculations about the authorship soon circulated. Who knew the caravan's itinerary and had the ability to organize a group of thieves large enough to eliminate the guards and take four hundred and fifty wagons?All...

I spent the past couple of days attending the International Conference on Climate Change, put on by the Heartland Institute in Washington. There was a good deal of material that will be of interest to readers. A major issue addressed by multiple presenters goes under the heading “What is the proof?”, and in particular what is the proof that there is some kind of climate “crisis” coming our way. You will not be surprised to learn that for most every claim of the climate cabal, the proof is lacking. The most interesting presentation on this subject came from John Clauser....

The polybolos has long been a legendary weapon of Roman military might, both in the sense that it could inflict tremendous damage and that it may never have existed. But archaeologists and engineers from the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli and the University of Bologna have identified ancient artillery holes that they believe correspond to shots from the device, according to a Diario AS report.The polybolos, literally "multiple thrower," was a chain-driven freestanding catapult that fired metal-tipped bolts from a magazine in quick-repeating succession, automatically, according to a description by Philo of Byzantium, a Greek engineer living in the third...

Close, but no Obama. Former President Joe Biden spotted a familiar face on stage during his portrait unveiling at Syracuse University School of Law Tuesday and demanded the man join him at the podium in an awkward exchange. “I always want to turn around to one guy and say … ‘Barack, what are you doing?’” Biden joked during the event at his alma mater. The 83-year-old former president was referring to Jeffrey Scruggs, who is black and the chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees, and apparently reminds Biden of the 44th president, Barack Obama. Biden awkwardly put the spotlight...

According to a report in The Korea Herald, Jeong Choong-won of Seoul National University and an international team of researchers conducted a genetic study of 78 individuals buried in 44 tombs in South Korea's Imdang-Joyeong burial complex, which was in use during the Three Kingdoms period between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. The scientists detected evidence of close-kin marriages and family-based sacrificial burials among the occupants of the burials. Most of the tombs in the complex consist of a main burial chamber and a secondary chamber. In at least 20 of the main chambers, the researchers found evidence of...

Explanation: Why does Comet R3 (PanSTARRS) have a wispy tail? The newest bright member of the inner Solar System, Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) is already extending an impressive stream of glowing gas. This tail starts from an unseen central nucleus of dirty ice that is likely a few kilometers across. The nucleus is warmed by the Sun and emits a cloud of neutral gas into a coma that glows light green. Nuclear gas ionized by energetic sunlight is pushed away from the Sun by the solar wind into an ion tail that glows light blue. The wispy nature of the...

According to a statement released by the University of Tübingen, evidence of quarrying some 220,000 years ago has been discovered at the Jojosi site in eastern South Africa by a team of researchers led by Manuel Will of the University of Tübingen. It had been previously thought that early modern humans found stones for making tools incidentally as they looked for food. Team member Gunther Möller reassembled more than 350 rock fragments recovered from the site into "refits," or stones that had been broken apart by knapping. "With these 3D puzzles, we were able to see precisely where and how...

A new analysis of turtle shell fragments unearthed at the Paleolithic site of Neumark-Nord in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt suggests Neanderthals regularly hunted the diminutive European pond turtle. A team led by archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser from the Institute for Ancient Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz analyzed 92 turtle shell fragments from the site dating back 125,000 years, and found evidence that the turtles had been butchered and their shells cleaned. The team suspects Neanderthals did not eat the turtles, which grow to be no longer than eight inches and weigh around two pounds. "Pond turtles have a comparatively...

Amid a rebranding campaign by climate activists to shift emphasis toward “extreme weather,” they turned to Thomas Karl, Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, for assistance. They needed him to manufacture the “science” to back up their claim that extreme weather events were becoming more frequent and severe. Karl did not disappoint them. He produced a report that backed up everything that they claimed was happening. The centerpiece of the report was a graph that John Clauser recently brought to everyone’s attention at the 16th International Conference on Climate Change. This graph (see below), which is supposed to provide...

The vile street takeovers afflicting Los Angeles are getting more and more violent, police say, and they expect things will only get worse heading into the summer. Los Angeles cops swarmed more than 90 street takeovers already far in 2026, making at least 79 arrests, impounding 114 race cars, grabbing four stolen vehicles and seizing four firearms. At least five people were shot at LA county street takeovers this past weekend alone. Cops say the illegal gatherings are getting more and more bloody — and with warmer weather coming, things will only get worse. “There’s robberies, rapes, shootings, murders, stabbings,”...

According to a statement released by the University of Liège, a 2,000-year-old fragment of papyrus recovered from the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo preserves 30 previously unknown verses written by Empedocles of Agrigentum, a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C. The work of Empedocles had been known only through quotes recorded by later authors, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch. Papyrologist Nathan Carlig of the University of Liège realized that the papyrus fragment, labeled P. Fouad inv. 218, was an unknown fragment of Physica, a poem written by Empedocles. These verses concern...

A new study of southern Norway's Raknehaugen mound conducted by Lars Gustavsen of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research suggests that it does not contain a burial and may have been built in response to a landslide, according to a Phys.org report. "I actually discovered the landslide scar more or less by accident," Gustavsen said. "While investigating the visibility of the mound using LiDAR data, it suddenly appeared in one of the visualizations I was using to analyze the landscape," he said. When the mound was excavated in 1869 and 1870, no central burial mound was found. Excavations in...

The Trump administration will celebrate the groundbreaking of a controversial new natural gas pipeline in New York City on Tuesday — with the project set to run off the coast of the city to boost the region’s energy supply. President Trump strongly backs the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline and used his influence to persuade Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to approve the permits allowing the project to proceed, despite fierce opposition from anti-fossil fuel environmentalists. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Secretary Lee Zeldin will attend the event at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, hosted by Williams...