Free Republic

John Staddon, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, brings unusual precision to a subject that has long been governed more by social convention than by rigorous inquiry in his work, Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation (Academica Press, 2026). His background in experimental psychology and quantitative methods equips him to examine the empirical literature on group differences with a dispassion rarely found in this field. The result is a book that challenges, on both philosophical and empirical grounds, the dominant egalitarian framework shaping contemporary debates on race and inequality.That framework rests substantially on John Rawls, whose...

Proclamation evangelism, a core missional strategy in Christian theology, invites people into a relationship with Jesus Christ via the public declaration of the gospel. Advocates of this strategy cite the Great Commission of Jesus as the scriptural mandate for Christian witness on a global scale: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.’1 Proclamation evangelists prioritize ‘kerygma’, or the verbal proclamation of the gospel, over other methods as the primary means of fulfilling...

Explanation: What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 seconds during 2025, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these images were then aligned and combined to create the featured keogram, with January at the top, December at the bottom, and the middle of the night running vertically just left of center. What do we see? Most obviously, the daytime sky is mostly blue, while the nighttime sky is mostly black. The twelve...

The Health Ministry announced on Sunday that it has received a report of another person suspected of having Ebola after returning from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The man, who returned to Israel two days ago, sought medical treatment after developing a fever, headache, and diarrhea. The ministry stressed that the case remains only a suspected one at this stage. Officials said the required series of laboratory tests is already underway, with results expected in the coming days. The patient is being treated in isolation in accordance with protocols for highly contagious infectious diseases. He has been transferred to...

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have revealed the colorful secret of the Pink Planet, the coldest object of its type ever directly observed. A team of astronomers led by Northwestern University has revealed their findings in a recent paper published in The Astronomical Journal, finally describing the rose-colored haze covering the planetary-mass companion GJ504b, thanks to JWST data. For over a decade, researchers have speculated that atmospheric salt clouds may create the pink planet’s strange hue, but this is the first concrete evidence for the hypothesis. The Pink Planet Since its discovery in 2013,...

Explanation: Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the...

The Cyprus Mail reports that an ancient ceramic vessel has been reclaimed from an online auction and returned to Cyprus after a year-long investigation. Cypriot officials who monitor online activity determined that the vase was in the hands of a collector in Canada, who eventually agreed to repatriate it. Researchers from Cyprus' Department of Antiquities determined that the engraved, black-polished hemispherical bowl dates to about 1900 B.C. For more on the archaeology of Cyprus, go to "In the Time of the Copper Kings."

Via NBC, we're about to see a whole lot more of outer space than we've ever witnessed before: After nearly two decades of development, $4.3 billion and the labor of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is less than three months from launch. From a point roughly 1 million miles from Earth, the telescope is expected to survey the cosmos, capturing panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. With this observatory, NASA hopes to unravel the secrets of dark matter and dark energy and discover thousands of planets beyond our solar...

Haaretz reports that two 1,700-year-old marble busts have been discovered in a wine-collection pit at a winepress dated to the Roman and Byzantine periods in northern Israel. One of the busts is inscribed in Greek with the name "Lycurgus," perhaps referring to the legendary founder of Sparta, or a statesman and orator who lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. Archaeologists Eliran Oren and Michael Solotskin of the Israel Antiquities Authority said that sculptures may have been buried in the pit to hide them during an invasion. "In the Roman period, statues of this kind were displayed both in...

Archaeologists uncovered the earliest known evidence of cereal harvesting in the Canary Islands, according to a report in La Brújula Verde. The discovery was made at the C008 cave complex at the Roque Bentayga rock formation on Gran Canaria. The site was likely used as a granary, for plant processing, and, later, as a burial ground by the ancient Canarians, a people of Amazigh, or Berber, origin, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Excavations within the caves yielded over 200 lithic artifacts. Microscopic analyses of wear patterns on some of the objects, particularly a small basalt knife, determined that...

I'm not smart enough to analyze this correctly, but most of my house is operating low voltage items . . . TV's, lap tops and a ton of smaller lights and stuff that all have those little black boxes for plugs.

Some of the highest-paying jobs in the Roman world mirrored modern careers: doctor, lawyer, famous actor. Others - like charioteer and exhibition gladiator - were a bit less familiar. The Best-Paying Jobs in Ancient Rome | 6:41 toldinstone | 633K subscribers | 286,466 views | January 21, 2022 Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 0:36 Laborers 1:05 Craftsmen 1:31 Soldiers 2:13 Lawyers 2:49 Doctors 3:33 Teachers 3:59 Actors 4:26 Gladiators 4:48 Charioteers 5:12 Landed Aristocrats 6:07 Conclusion

A major meat supplier is shuttering two US plant locations, and experts say it’s bad news for carnivores. JBS USA, a meat-processing company that supplies Costco and BJ’s, as well as grocers such as Food Lion, Weis Markets, WinCo, and Stop & Shop, announced this week that it is closing its operations in Philadelphia and Memphis, eliminating a total of 2,000 jobs. “These decisions are never easy because they directly affect our team members and the communities where we operate,” said Wesley Batista Filho, CEO of JBS USA. “We are deeply grateful to the team members at these facilities for...

Explanation: Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one...

I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it. Chomskyan generative grammar -- X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program -- was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar -- frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" -- were doing better...

High-Level Overview: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is hitting severe physical, economic, and social constraints. Tech giants have committed trillions of dollars to construct massive hyperscale data centers, but nearly half of the projects scheduled to open in the United States this year have already been delayed or canceled. The briefing investigates how the friction between digital ambition and physical realities—ranging from severe power grid bottlenecks to intense local community pushback—is halting the global AI buildout. The Creator's Main Argument: The primary thesis of the video is that the explosive, unconstrained AI data center boom is hitting a...

Its scene was sketched by the Italian artist Battista Franco Veneziano before 1530; the sketch is currently housed at the Städel Museum in Germany.The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US also has a 16th-century sketch of the sarcophagus, attributed to an unknown artist.In 1882, it was included in the book Ancient Marbles in Great Britain by Adolf Michaelis.In 2010, an anonymous visitor posted a picture of the object in the Blenheim grounds to TripAdvisor with the Blenheim Palace, "a flower bed that looks like a Roman lenos sarcophagus". A lenos sarcophagus is one that is shaped like a bathtub...The...

For two decades, the Spanish town of Numantia defied the might of the Roman Republic. Numantia: Ancient Rome's Vietnam | 10:03 toldinstone | 633K subscribers | 56,715 views | June 12, 2026

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner's scandal-plagued rise is causing rifts within the Democratic Party, and several Democratic strategists who spoke to Fox News Digital warned of the long-term implications of the party embracing him. "Anyone paying attention to the intersection of culture and politics knows that my party pushed #MeToo well beyond the bounds of common sense long before Graham Platner's rise," Michael LaRosa, former press secretary to first lady Jill Biden, said about whether the #MeToo movement rings hollow within the party now that top Democrats have rallied behind Platner. "But the reflexive partisan instinct to circle the...

According to a statement released by the University of York, analysis of grape seeds recovered from mud at the bottom of wells carved into the rock at the Etruscan and Roman site of Cetamura del Chianti suggests that vintners there cloned vines that produced white berries. Oya Inanli of the University of York said that a majority of the seeds in the study were dated to between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300 and belonged to this single variety of grape. After the Romans conquered central Italy, new varieties of grapes were introduced to the site. The study also showed that...