Free Republic

I am a graphically minded person, and have struggled with a way to effectively portray the reality of our political system in America, and none of the graphic descriptions I see describe it the way I see it. I have given this much thought over the years, and I have always found this particular question puzzling: why would they have ever given us this model shown below?The only way this graph above (which is the traditional one accepted by the vast majority of Americans) makes any sense is if it were created and pushed by people who were either Communists...

Explanation: On August 15, this perseid meteor streaked through night skies over the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos at La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. The bright and colorful meteor trail was captured next to the central Milky Way, whose dark interstellar dust clouds and luminous starlight reach above the horizon. In the foreground of this tantalizing celestial scene is the 23 meter diameter mirror of the prototype Large-Sized Telescope (LST-1). LST-1 is the first telescope constructed at the northern hemisphere site of the innovative Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. With 198 hexagonal mirror segments and a large, high-efficiency, pixelized camera,...

The owner of Minocqua Brewing Co. said Monday that the Madison taproom in Wisconsin will likely shut down by the end of the year after state officials revoked the company’s alcohol permits. Channel 3000 reported that Minocqua Brewing Co. owner Kirk Bangstad said the Madison taproom is likely to shut down as the business continues fighting the state’s decision. The brewery has become known for its outspoken messaging against President Donald Trump. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR) revoked brewing permits for the company’s Minocqua and Madison locations after alleging violations involving beer transported from Illinois without the required permits...

A nor’easter is intensifying Friday as it barrels up the East Coast, expected to bring wild winds and potentially dangerous flooding to New York City and the tri-state area this weekend. Residents in New Jersey and Long Island should expect “widespread” power outages, Fox Weather warns — though the entire NYC metro region stands a chance of losing power from wind gusts as strong as 70 mph. The cyclone will also likely bring hazardous coastal flooding, according to the latest forecasts.

The moles want gold! Two nitwit nightcrawlers — including a particularly portly “mole person” — were busted Thursday for diving into a Manhattan manhole in a subterranean quest for precious metals, police and law-enforcement sources said. Cops nabbed Kevin Rodriguez, 26, and Samuel Reveron, 25 – both Venezuelan citizens – near their Queens homes in connection to a surreal pre-dawn Wednesday sewer escapade just steps from the Loews Regency New York on the Upper East Side. The strange shenanigans could end up shedding light on the motivations of mysterious “mole people” spotted popping out of sewers — as Reveron admitted...

If your blond preteen seems to be turning into a brunette, you're not imagining things. For some children, hair that starts out platinum blond gradually becomes darker and may end up dark brown, or even black, as they grow.So what causes this change?The short answer is that hair color is controlled by a complex interplay of genes, pigment-producing cells and, later in childhood, hormones. Scientists understand many of the genes involved in hair color, but they are still trying to find out why some blond children's hair darkens while others' locks remain blond for life.Latest Videos FromLive ScienceWatch full video...

According to the message of Titus Calpurnius Siculus, a Roman poet from the 3rd century CE, in ancient Rome, in the arenas of amphitheatres, bears were supposed to appear hunting for seals. The writer specifically mentions here an event during the reign of Emperor Nero (54-68 CE). The author does not specifically mention a polar bear or a bear living in a cold climate. As we know, however, only polar bears hunt seals. If this was true, it would confirm how far the Roman merchants could reach or how far they cooperated. Finally, let us not forget that the Romans...

The map of our solar system has changed. For most of history, we viewed our neighborhood as a tidy, organized place. We thought it was a simple system with eight planets orbiting a star, surrounded by a clean void. We assumed there was a clear finish line where the solar system stopped and "deep space" began. The Kuiper Belt proves that this model is wrong. The solar system does not have a hard edge. It does not just end. Instead, it fades away into the galaxy. What we once thought was empty space is actually a massive, chaotic frontier. It...

The first confirmed arm bone of a Denisovan has been discovered in southwest China, adding another piece to the puzzle of an elusive human relative... Only a handful of physical Denisovan remains have ever been knowingly recovered, including finger bones, ribs, teeth, jawbones, some skulls, and a couple of leg bones. But now, researchers in China report they have discovered the first Denisovan radius, one of the two long bones in the forearm... a site called Bianfu Cave that contains more than 60,000 bone fragments found in several layers of sediment... The vast majority of these skeletal remains belonged to...

How do math skills compare around the world?This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks participating countries and economies by the average mathematics scores of 15-year-old students in the most recent PISA 2025 study, published in September 2026.PISA assesses students in mathematics, reading, and science. Its mathematics assessment goes beyond memorizing formulas or procedures, measuring whether students can apply mathematical knowledge and reasoning to real-world problems.More than 760,000 students took part in PISA 2025 across 91 countries and economies, representing roughly 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.China in this ranking represents the participating jurisdictions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Uzbekistan is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal health advisers on Wednesday endorsed a blood test designed to spot signs of various cancers in apparently healthy people while warning that it’s far from clear how well the technology works. Grail Inc.’s Galleri test doesn’t diagnose cancer but instead, with a single blood draw, looks for a signal that someone may have one of a long list of tumors. Those who receive a positive result need additional care to tell if they’re really sick. The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel voted 7-2, with one abstention, that the DNA-based test offers more potential benefits than...

Explanation: The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer). From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion expanded into space, it created a growing shell...

Deep in the Sahara desert lie hundreds of phenomenal stone circles known as corbeilles. Dating back over 6,500 years, these monuments hold clues to prehistoric rituals, ancient cattle sacrifices, and the communities that once thrived in what is now barren desert. In this video, I dig deeper into the Messak Plateau, investigate what archaeologists found inside these stone structures, and uncover why they were potentially built. Now, the joke in archaeology is that when you don't know what a structure is, you just call it ritual. All right, stop. That's all. The 6,500-Year-Old Stone Circles of the Sahara | 10:17...

Why did the world's most powerful empire almost never use archers in battle? The Romans had access to bows. They trained archers. Yet they refused to make them central to their military strategy -- even as enemies surrounded them with arrows. It wasn't ignorance or cowardice. It was a deliberate choice rooted in Roman military philosophy, engineering, and culture. The Romans built their empire on heavy infantry, disciplined formations, and controlled violence. Archers -- with their unpredictability, distance, and dependence on open terrain -- threatened everything Rome's military system was designed to achieve. In this video, we uncover why the...

Fauci was kind enough (and stupid enough) to write his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a diary. He wrote this on a government-owned computer, making Fauci's inner musings the public's business. And the release of those more than 1,100 pages of his spectacularly narcissistic, self-congratulatory braggadocio will almost certainly have future historians asking one simple question: Why wasn't this guy in jail? It's been less than two months since that diary was made public, and researchers are still pulling astonishing nuggets of damning information out of it. Reason.com's Zach Weissmueller has taken a very deep dive into the diary's...

For years, we've been asking whether artificial intelligence can write like us, draw like us, code like us, or eventually replace us. Anthropic just gave us a more interesting question: Can AI notice something in nature that human scientists have been staring past?On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI had identified what researchers believe is previously unrecognized biological system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system contains a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Anthropic calls it ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases.From Anthropic:Today, we’re sharing...

Kent Weeks explores the tomb of Ramses the greats 100 children in the valley of the kings. Ancient Egypts Largest Tomb: KV5 (DOCUMENTARY) | 48:59 History Documentary Archives | 2.78K subscribers | 2,087 views | February 29, 2024

WASHINGTON – For most of Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on protecting women's sports, not a single Democratic senator was in attendance. The only two Democrats to show up at all were ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Both of them left within the first hour of the hearing and Klobuchar never spoke. The Democrats also did not host a single witness for the hearing. Durbin's devoted much of his opening testimony to dismissing the issue of trans athletes in women's sports, bringing up issues like affordability, getting cell phones out of the hands of...

Researchers have begun drilling into a mysterious, boat-shaped formation in the mountains of eastern Turkey, hoping an underground robot will unearth the answer to one of biblical history’s biggest mysteries. Members of the Noah’s Ark Scans expedition believe the Durupinar formation, located in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat, could mark the final resting place of the vessel described in Genesis. “Good morning from the outer rims of Noah’s ark,” the project’s marketing and fundraising director, divisive Christian activist Lauren Witzke, wrote in a Tuesday update. “Core drilling has begun and the big bang evolutionists are already in damage control mode,”...

It was a rather dreary October afternoon in 2011 when I turned to my computer to watch a rough cut of Jefferson’s Secret Bible, a documentary for the Smithsonian cable television channel. I was the Under Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the film was about the conservation of a precious artifact, a book known as the “Jefferson Bible” that would soon go on display at the National Museum of American History. After his retirement to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson had carefully cut out selected passages from Greek, Latin, French and English versions of the Bible, then pasted them in four...