Free Republic

Abstract Whole body gestational donation offers an alternative means of gestation for prospective parents who wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate. It seems plausible that some people would be prepared to consider donating their whole bodies for gestational purposes just as some people donate parts of their bodies for organ donation. We already know that pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain-dead women. There is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would not be possible. In this paper, I explore the ethics of whole-body gestational donation. I consider a number of...

New research from the Imperial College’s School of Public Health shows that “ultra-processed foods” are linked to an increased risk of developing cancer. The London researchers classified ultra-processed foods as products like carbonated drinks, cereals, mass-produced and packaged bread and pre-packaged meals. The study authors noted that such foods are typically not ingredients used in household cooking but instead are made up of “derived ingredients,” such as high fructose corn syrup or modified starch. They discovered that those who consumed convenience food items were potentially at a higher risk of developing life-threatening cancers after studying 200,000 middle-aged participants over the...

The most numerous species of bird on earth has influenced culture, religion, and even language. The History Guy remembers the forgotten historical contributions of the chicken. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.Why did the Chicken Cross the Road? Chickens and Forgotten HistoryThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered1.14M subscribers | 596,985 views | April 25, 2019

Four worlds 133 light-years away orbiting a young star. (Jason Wang/Northwestern University) ********************************************************* A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black disk obscuring their star, 133.3 light-years away from Earth. The partial circles are their orbital motions, a time-lapse compiled from 12 years of observations. The star is HR8799, and in 2008 its...

Explanation: Comet ZTF has a distinctive shape. The now bright comet visiting the inner Solar System has been showing not only a common dust tail, ion tail, and green gas coma, but also an uncommonly distinctive antitail. The antitail does not actually lead the comet -- it is just that the head of the comet is seen superposed on part of the fanned-out and trailing dust tail. The giant dirty snowball that is Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has now passed its closest to the Sun and tomorrow will pass its closest to the Earth. The main panel of the featured...

Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country. Like many other commentators, he fervently encouraged people to take the Covid “vaccine” and sympathized with measures to pressure people into doing so. Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were...

Today, Comet 96P/Machholz is at perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. At 0.128 au , which is @ 11,991,299 miles away. The same distance back in Jan 2002.

The headline comes today from Dr. Benny Peiser’s newsletter for the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s New Zero Watch project. (If you don’t subscribe to this newsletter, you should. Go to this link to sign up. As with MC, there is no charge.) This latest newsletter contains a roundup of articles from just the last couple of days reporting on the ongoing disaster of the Net Zero fantasy. In this post, I’ll just cover some of the highlights. But first, can somebody please let President Biden in on this news, or at least some of it? Even as the impossible dream...

The world of journalism and politics woke up this Friday with sad news: Sandra Carmona, a 42-year-old journalist from La Rioja, has died suddenly without any previous diagnosed disease. The professional, born in Calahorra and mother of two children, a boy and a girlwould have suffered a heart attack during the night, as reported various media. Graduated in Journalism from the University of the Basque Country, Carmona spent a large part of her career in La Rioja NewspaperPoint Radio Calahorra and Rioja Television (TVR)where she worked as an editor and news presenter since her beginnings in the profession. However, in...

Omicron, which emerged in late 2021, has since splintered into hundreds of subvariants — amounting to what's been described as a "variant soup" — and will likely keep splintering into more. "The virus has still got the capacity to evolve and it will evolve … there's no evolutionary dead-end," Professor Holmes said. "We'll definitely see more immune escape variants … but when, where and what they'll be is very hard to say." Splintering virus reflects 'immunologically complex' population While Omicron continues to dominate globally, the current spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks different depending on where you are. "We're seeing this complicated...

The Pyrenees mountain range has divided Spain and France for centuries, with Spain on the south side, and France on the north. But why is there one strange little blob of Spain over on the French side? I visited the historic enclave of Llivia and discovered the spectacularly pedantic reason behind its existence...How A Spectacular Piece Of Pedantry Created An International EnclaveThe Tim Traveller | 306K subscribers | 427,474 views | January 25, 2022

This video explores why the Romans invented astrology, and how they give it the basic form it still has today.Did the Romans think that the Planets were Gods?toldinstone | 333K subscribers | 27K views | 2 weeks ago

Explanation: Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Over the eons, many globular clusters were destroyed by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center. Surviving relics are older than any Earth fossil, older than any other structures in our Galaxy, and limit the universe itself in raw age. There are few, if any, young globular clusters left in our Milky Way Galaxy because conditions are not ripe for more to form....

This artist’s rendition shows one probe bending from applied pressure, causing a fracture in the solid electrolyte, which is filling with lithium. On the right, the probe is not pressing against the electrolyte and the lithium plates on the ceramic surface, as desired. Credit: Cube3D ******************************************************************************* New lithium metal batteries with solid electrolytes are lightweight, inflammable, pack a lot of energy, and can be recharged very quickly, but they have been slow to develop due to mysterious short circuiting and failure. Now, researchers at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory say they have solved the mystery. It comes down...

While two names are cited repeatedly as top candidates for Artemis 2, a four-person moon mission, no official confirmation will come until at least late spring. A portion of the far side of the Moon looms large just beyond the Orion spacecraft in this image taken on the sixth day of the Artemis 1 mission by a camera on the tip of one of Orion’s solar arrays. (Image credit: NASA) ************************************************************************************* NASA will soon name the astronauts on its first crewed moon mission since 1972. Artemis 2 is the next flight after the agency's uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, which launched...

Flight LogFlight 41 Sol 689 Date Jan. 27, 2023 Horizontal Distance 183 m ~600 ft Max. Altitude 10 m ~33 ft Max. Groundspeed 3 m/s ~6.7 mph Duration 109.1 seconds Route of Flight Airfield BetaFlights 41 (as of 1/27/23)Distance Flown 8,191 meters (~26,875 ft)Highest Altitude 14 meters (~46 ft)Fastest Ground Speed 5.50 m/s (12.3 mph)Flight Time ~67.7 minutes (4,060 seconds)Raw Images (Sol 689)

Distant Galaxy The image of the most distant galaxy, GHZ2/GLASS-z12. (NASA/ESA/CSA/T. Treu, UCLA/NAOJ/T. Bakx, Nagoya U) A galaxy whose light has traveled nearly 13.5 billion years to reach us has just been confirmed as the earliest galaxy found to date. By studying the oxygen content of the galaxy with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have precisely dated it to just 367 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the first lights in the Universe were still switching on and starting to propagate freely through space. The result confirms observations made by JWST, and offers new information...

...not everyone agrees that this is a new finding, with some experts noting that other research has already found that silver currency was being used during the Middle Bronze Age in this region...Eshel and her colleagues also attempted to determine the origins of the silver in the hoards by studying their chemical impurities and isotopes — variations in the number of neutrons in the nuclei of particular elements, which change over time at known rates due to radiation.The analysis revealed signs of a widespread transition between sources in about 1200 B.C., possibly from silver mined in Anatolia — now Turkey...

...a number of residential buildings, along with workshops and pigeon towers..., according to a ministry statement, which noted that this is the "first complete residential city" from the Roman Empire era found in east Luxor. A variety of artifacts were also uncovered, including pottery, bells, grinding tools (often used for food preparation), and Roman coins made of copper and bronze...Susanna McFadden, a professor of art history at the University of Hong Kong who specializes in Greco-Roman art, called the finds "exciting news." She is curious to learn how the team determined that the remains dated to the second and third...

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft at an asteroid. Credit: NASA NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will add another asteroid encounter to its 4-billion-mile journey. On November 1, 2023, Lucy will get a close-up view of a small main-belt asteroid to conduct an engineering test of the spacecraft’s innovative asteroid-tracking navigation system. The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, Lucy was not scheduled to get a close-up view of any asteroids until 2025, when it will...