Free Republic

Over the past couple of years, I have had several posts here expressing skepticism about whether electric vehicles (EVs) were really the wave of the future. Most recently, I had a post on December 17 noting the rapid decline of EV sales in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2025, following the expiration of certain tax credits on September 30. Overall, my take has been that the EV market has been propped up by government subsidies and benefits and, like all businesses dependent on government handouts, would likely shrink drastically (if not completely disappear) without them. For a different...

In a remarkable twist that bridges ancient ambition with cutting-edge science, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have achieved what medieval alchemists only dreamed of: turning lead into gold. While attempting to recreate conditions moments after the Big Bang, researchers on the ALICE experiment in Switzerland inadvertently produced minuscule quantities of the precious metal, marking an unexpected breakthrough in particle physics. The Accidental Discovery The extraordinary transformation occurred during experiments where beams of lead nuclei were fired at each other at velocities approaching the speed of light. While the primary goal was to study the primordial state of the...

Every year from mid- to late February, the setting sun hits Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall along the eastern edge of the soaring El Capitan at just the right angle, creating the illusion that the 1,575-foot waterfall is on fire. This Yosemite National Park phenomenon, aka “firefall,” is ultra-popular, and this year is expected to be even more crowded. For the first time since 2021, park reservations are not required to visit Yosemite during firefall. The past 12 months have been tumultuous for the National Park Service, with a 43-day government shutdown, changing free-entry days, and price increases. Now, its rangers will...

Explanation: A mere 56 million light-years distant toward the southern constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is an enormous barred spiral galaxy about 200,000 light-years in diameter. That's twice the size of our own barred spiral Milky Way. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals stunning details of this magnificent spiral in infrared light. Webb's field of view stretches about 60,000 light-years across NGC 1365, exploring the galaxy's core and bright newborn star clusters. The intricate network of dusty filaments and bubbles is created by young stars along spiral arms winding from the galaxy's central bar....

Many people who successfully lost weight on Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonist drugs are having trouble weaning themselves off the injectables, according to the BBC, because the hunger for food comes roaring back with a vengeance — and hence the pounds start creeping up again, hinting that patients are likely to develop life-long dependencies on the substances. “For the first 38 years of my life, I was overweight — now I’m six stone (38kg) [83 pounds] lighter,” Tanya Hall, a Wegovy user who can’t get off the drug, told the news organization. “Therefore, there’s part of me that feels like...

An international team of researchers has found the DNA of Y. pestis in a 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep from the fortified Bronze Age settlement of Arkaim, in the southern Ural Mountains in present-day Russia, which marks the first confirmed case of a Bronze Age plague infection in a non-human host. It proves that livestock played a role in prehistoric plague dynamics.The sheep was associated with the Sintashta-Petrovka cultural complex, which was known for its sophisticated metallurgy, horse riding, and large, mobile herds. Genetic studies indicate that the bacterium found in the sheep belongs to the Late Neolithic–Bronze Age plague lineage that...

Brusselstown Ring lies within the Baltinglass hillfort cluster, a landscape of up to 13 large hilltop enclosures that shows nearly continuous activity from the Early Neolithic through the Bronze Age. What is singular about Brusselstown, however, is its extraordinary scale and layout. Two widely spaced ramparts surround the site, with the outer boundary encompassing not only the main hillfort but also the nearby Neolithic enclosure at Spinas Hill 1. Enclosures extending across more than one hill are rare in Ireland and Britain and are very uncommon even in later Iron Age Europe.Airborne and topographical surveys identified more than 600 subtle...

More than 7,000 artifacts, including clay seal impressions, clay tokens, figurines, and cylinder seals, have been uncovered at Tapeh Tyalineh, a 5,000-year-old site on the Mereg River in western Iran, according to The Greek Reporter. The objects were found in the remnants of mudbrick structures and in trash pits. Shokouh Khosravi of the University of Kurdistan said that the artifacts would have been used to mark jars, seal doors, and keep track of goods such as grain, oil, and possibly wine. The more than 200 designs on the artifacts are similar to those seen on seal impressions from other Early...

As I was typing in a contribution to Free Republic and ready to hit the Enter Key, it all disappeared. Yep all that I had typed had simply disappeared. No warning message, nothing. Has it happened to anyone else? Then it hit me,

Explanation: The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. The featured picture, an attempt to show how Io would appear in the "true colors" perceptible to the average human eye, was taken in 1999 July by the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Io's colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate rock. The unusual surface of Io is kept very young by its system of active volcanoes. The intense tidal gravity of Jupiter stretches Io and damps wobbles caused by Jupiter's other Galilean moons. The resulting friction greatly heats Io's interior, causing molten rock to...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for abolishing ICE during a gushing interview on ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday. The socialist mayor told the hosts he doesn’t see federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents doing anything to help public safety. “I am in support of abolishing ICE. What we see is an entity that has no interest in fulfilling its stated reason to exist,” Mamdani said. Mamdani claimed deportation raids would “rip” the Big Apple apart. “We are talking about people whose crimes simply seems to be being in New York City and if they make good on this threat and would...

Science in Poland reports that cinnabar has been recovered from graves in a Scythian cemetery in southern Ukraine. Known as the Chervony Mayak cemetery, the site was in use from the second century B.C. to the mid-third century A.D. More than 175 graves in the cemetery have been excavated to date. Lumps of cinnabar, a toxic mercury sulphide with an intense red color, were found in three of these burials by a team of researchers led by Oleksandr Symonenko of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The lumps have now been analyzed by Beata Polit of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University...

A stone fragment bearing ancient carvings in Hittite style and one of the world’s earliest writing systems, cuneiform, has been uncovered in a cave deep in the Moravian Karst. The discovery of this mysterious ancient cuneiform script in Central Europe has puzzled archaeologists and raised questions about possible cultural links between Anatolia and prehistoric Europe.The artifact, found during a recent reanalysis of excavated sediment in Kateřinská Cave, Czech Republic, shares material and stylistic traits with earlier fragments uncovered in 2021. Experts say the thickness, composition, and carvings of all the pieces suggest they were once part of the same object....

For the first time, most people diagnosed with cancer are expected to live at least five years beyond their diagnosis—a dramatic improvement from previous decades. The improvements detailed in the organization’s Cancer Statistics 2026 report, recently published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, highlight significant progress in cancer survival rates in the United States. “Seven in 10 people now survive their cancer five years or more, up from only half in the mid-70s,” Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director at the American Cancer Society (ACS), said in a press statement. She credited decades of cancer research that have provided doctors...

Explanation: What powers this unusual nebula? CTB 1 is the expanding gas shell that was left when a massive star toward the constellation of Cassiopeia exploded about 10,000 years ago. The star likely detonated when it ran out of elements, near its core, that could create stabilizing pressure with nuclear fusion. The resulting supernova remnant, nicknamed the Medulla Nebula for its brain-like shape, still glows in visible light because of the heat generated by its collision with confining interstellar gas. Why the nebula also glows in X-ray light, though, remains a topic of research. One hypothesis holds that an energetic...

Here in the U.S., the second Trump administration has largely pulled the plug on the suite of crazy energy policies marching under the banner of “fighting climate change.” But the same is not true in many other advanced-economy countries, for example Germany, Australia and the UK. Consider the UK. In the 2024 election the voters gave a large parliamentary majority to the left-wing Labour Party. The resulting government has doubled down on the policies of Net Zero, fossil fuel suppression, and generating energy from “renewables.” Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent...

Can men get pregnant? Years ago, such a question would have been an insult to the intelligence of anyone above the age of 8. And yet, Dr. Nisha Verma, a senior advisor to the nonprofit Physicians for Reproductive Health, attempted a rhetorical bob-and-weave when asked about it by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) at a congressional hearing on abortion pills Wednesday. “I take care of people with many identities,” Verma said before expressing a hestitation about where Hawley was going with his line of questioning. “The goal is just to establish a biological reality,” Hawley said. “You just said a moment...

Rogue planets -- worlds that drift through space alone without a star -- largely remain a mystery to scientists. Now, astronomers have for the first time confirmed the existence of one of these starless worlds by pinpointing its distance and mass -- a rogue planet roughly the size of Saturn nearly 10,000 light-years from Earth.Planets are typically found bound to one or more stars. However, in 2000, astronomers detected the first signs of a "rogue planet" -- a free-floating world that orbited no star. Then, in 2024, researchers detected an object distorting the light from a distant star, simultaneously from...

Hunting with poison arrows has been pushed back to 60,000 years ago, according to a Live Science report. Sven Isaksson of Stockholm University and his colleagues detected traces of poison in residues on five quartz arrowheads recovered from South Africa’s Umhlatuzana rock shelter, which was excavated in 1985. The toxin, called buphandrine, would have weakened prey, thus reducing the length of time and amount of energy expended on the hunt. The toxin epibuphanisine was detected on just one of the arrowheads, but both toxins had probably been applied to all of the weapons, Isaksson said. They may have even been...

According to a statement released by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, people living some 5,000 years ago in the Babitonga Bay area on the southern coast of Brazil hunted whales. An international team of researchers led by Krista McGrath and André Colonese of the Autonomous University of Barcelona analyzed whale bones and bone tools recovered from sambaquis, or shell mounds, in Babitonga Bay. These artifacts are now housed at the Archaeological Museum of Sambaqui of Joinville. The researchers identified the remains of southern right whales, humpback whales, blue whales, sei whales, sperm whales, and dolphins in the collection. Many of...