Free Republic

New research shows nearly 40 percent of cancers are preventable.Lia Hasier’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2022 was disorienting. She was not unhealthy before it, as she regularly prioritized exercise and healthy eating. So she became curious about what she might have been doing wrong and how she could prevent a recurrence. The 48-year-old mother of two now avoids all added sugar, chips away at exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, does daily gratitude journaling, and continues to learn about the ways her body works at the cellular level to prevent cancer. “There’s always room to make changes, but not all at one...

Enough with the sarcasm—seriously, what are the actual obstacles keeping fusion energy inside lab experiments? Staff inspect the interior of the chamber and diagnostic equipment at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. =================================================================================== Fusion is always “x years away,” or so goes the old joke. I tried (unsuccessfully) to find where this saying even came from. For what it’s worth, one researcher’s testimonial dates back to the 1960s, whereas another 1986 conference panel mentioned something similar. Both accounts say fusion power is 50 and between 25 and 30 years away, respectively, so that adds up to around...

The battery retained 76 percent capacity after 500 consecutive six-minute charging cycles. Charging an electric vehicle fast without degrading the battery has been one of the harder problems in battery research. A team at Adelaide University says it has a way through it. Six minutes. That is how long it took their new battery cell to reach 85 percent charge, while delivering an energy density of 240.4 watt-hours per kilogram. The result comes from a team led by Professor Shi-Zhang Qiao, an ARC Industry Laureate Fellow in the University’s School of Chemical Engineering, working alongside researchers from Imperial College London....

Fire officials have released a clear and haunting view of what damage could look like if the toxic Garden Grove tank explodes, with its temperature increasing with each passing hour. OCFA Division Chief Nick Freeman said Friday that blast zones would be divided into severe, moderate, and light blast zones in a radius around the tank. The most severe blast zone will cause “severe structural damage and significant harm,” while the moderate zone will see structural damage and some harm. The lightest zone will see just some structural damage. In addition, an oblong circle above the tank is divided into...

Explanation: After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the largest globular star clusters now known to roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though Messier originally described it as a nebula without stars, this stunning Hubble image resolves stars across the cluster's central 40 light-years. Its population of stars numbers close to 150,000, concentrated within a total diameter of around 175 light-years. About 55,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Aquarius, this ancient denizen of the Milky...

I'm not an astronaut. NASA has never asked me to be a part of Mission Control. I'm no expert. I fully admit all of this! So I guess it's unsurprising that I thought there was only, you know, one way to the moon, namely: You go to the moon and then you come back. Like, Earth ---> Moon, then Moon ---> Earth. I kinda figured that was all there was to it! But apparently, as Space.com reports, it's a little more complicated than that: A lot of time and effort goes into planning routes for space missions. Researchers look for...

OpenAI says its AI model solved a famous 80-year-old maths problem that puzzled experts for decades, marking a major breakthrough in AI-powered research and reasoning.The artificial intelligence boom is real. Sectors like healthcare, IT, education and many others are rapidly moving towards AI adoption. Now mathematicians have also acknowledged how AI is proving its mettle. OpenAI announced on Wednesday that one of its reasoning models has solved a famous maths problem that humans could not solve in 80 years. Notably, the maths problem, known as the ‘planet unit distance’, was initially proposed in 1946 by legendary mathematician Paul Erdős. Since...

As scientists study Earth's oceans, they come across some intriguing mysteries. Among them are some of the strangest deep-sea discoveries, including a "golden orb" measuring about 4 inches in diameter in the Gulf of Alaska in 2023. Referred to as a "yellow hat" by one of the videographers at the time, researchers were stumped about what it could be; coral, an egg casing, or a dead sponge attachment were some of the initial guesses. Since then, they've been able to determine that it's dead cell remains from a huge deep-sea anemone. The golden specimen was found about 2 miles beneath...

Mexican Coke tastes different than American Coke; after all, it’s sweetened using cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until 2011, when a paper published in the journal Obesity found that Mexican Coke contained no cane sugar. Instead, the authors found plenty of glucose and fructose, which are the main ingredients in high-fructose corn syrup.

A new study found that when you lose your virginity may impact how well you age later in life, including outcomes like frailty and misery in older adulthood. “Our findings suggest that the timing of first sexual intercourse may be connected to aging through multiple psychological, behavioral and disease-related pathways,” first author Kaixian Wang said in a press release. They found that those with genetic signals tied to earlier loss of virginity tended to have less favorable aging-related outcomes, including higher frailty and poorer longevity-related measures. SNIP “Frailty index, miserableness, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appeared...

The mystery of how Egypt’s pyramids survived thousands of years of earthquakes may partly come down to smart engineering, according to a new study that examined how the Great Pyramid of Giza responds to seismic vibrations. Researchers found that the Pyramid of Khufu has a natural vibration frequency that differs sharply from the surrounding ground, helping reduce the risk of dangerous resonance during earthquakes. The study, led by Mohamed ELGabry and published in Scientific Reports, analyzed ambient seismic noise recorded inside the 4,600-year-old pyramid. Researchers said the findings may explain why the structure has survived centuries of earthquakes with little...

Ancient DNA extracted from human remains in Peru shows that long-distance migration along the Pacific coast began centuries before the Inca Empire expanded into the region. A study published in Nature Communications traces this movement to at least the 13th century, offering new insight into how coastal communities formed and connected long before any imperial force arrived. Jacob L. Bongers, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, analyzed genome-wide data from 21 individuals buried in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru. The results show that early inhabitants carried genetic ancestry from populations living about...

Explanation: This cosmic snapshot covers a field of view over twice as wide as the full Moon within the boundaries of the high-flying constellation Cygnus. Made using astronomical narrowband filters, the image highlights the bright edge of a ring-like nebula traced by the glow of ionized hydrogen and oxygen gas. Embedded in the region's expanse of interstellar clouds, the complex, glowing arcs are sections of shells of material swept up by the wind from Wolf-Rayet star WR 134, the brightest star near image center. Distance estimates put WR 134 about 6,000 light-years away, making this telescopic frame over 100 light-years...

OK - I got one yanked a while back - still not perfectly clear on what things will get something you post pulled, but I think the last one had something to do with a title not matching source title?

The Pegasus team from the Aris student space initiative has generated a stable detonation wave with its engine. Robin Wyss / Aris Space ========================================================================= Students in Switzerland have recently tested an experimental rocket engine that is capable of generating 20,000 detonation waves per second, the same propulsion concept explored by NASA and Japanese researchers for future space missions. The so-called rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) is powered by propane and liquid oxygen. It was built by the Pegasus team, a student project within the ARIS (Academic Space Initiative Switzerland) at ETH Zurich. The third-year students spent nearly a year developing...

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA/J. Pollard Image Processing: D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) =============================================================================== In A Nutshell A 37-member international team produced the most precise direct measurement of the Hubble constant ever recorded, with just 1.1 percent uncertainty. By linking a dozen different cosmic distance measurement methods into a single “Distance Network,” they confirmed the universe is currently expanding at about 73.5 kilometers per second per 3.26 million light-years. That rate conflicts with what the Big Bang’s ancient afterglow predicts by more than seven times the margin of error, a gap that makes a simple measurement mistake increasingly implausible. Resolving...

A mutant super pig population has spiraled out of control — thanks to their inherited, rapid reproductive cycles — in the ghost towns of a nuclear fallout zone in Japan, according to reports and researchers. The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, spurred by a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, forced roughly 164,000 people to flee from their homes to escape the radiation zone. Amid the chaos, domestic pigs escaped into abandoned farmland and began interbreeding with indigenous feral boars — creating a mutant pig population with alarming genes, Popular Science reported. Researchers from Fukushima and Hirosaki Universities discovered...

Explanation: This big beautiful spiral shines in X-ray light. It is about 20 times larger than our Galaxy. It belongs to Abell 2029, a galaxy cluster one billion light-years away. (To see only the galaxies, hover your cursor over the image, or follow this link.) Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe that are supported by gravity. Abell 2029 is formed by thousands of galaxies, surrounded by a huge cloud of hot gas and the equivalent of hundreds of trillions times the mass of the Sun in dark matter. The spiral is made of gas, mostly hydrogen and...

At 0.016 seconds after the atomic detonation, the fireball was already hundreds of meters wide. The tiny squares to the left and right in this image are billboards 200 meters from the center of the explosion. Los Alamos National Laboratory.Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto...

A UN body of researchers that puts together possible climate scenarios announced last week that one extreme scenario it put forward back in 2011 is no longer plausible. As Roger Pielke Jr. from AEI puts it, the climate apocalypse is no longer around the corner.The climate apocalypse isn’t around the corner after all. That’s the upshot of a recent report from the international panel that supplies official “scenarios” to researchers, governments and banks. It turns out that the most extreme assumptions about the future — the doomsaying predictions embodied in the worst-case scenario known as RCP8.5 — are “implausible.”...The substance...