Free Republic

Driving the highway between Loving and Carlsbad on May 19, Jackie Onsurez noticed something unusual rising above an oilfield site operated by NGL Energy Partners. As he got closer, he realized the 70-foot plume was not smoke but a geyser of toxic oil field wastewater — known as produced water — erupting from a pipe. Onsurez, an engineer and member of New Mexico’s State Emergency Response Commission, immediately began calling NGL, 911, the New Mexico Environment Department and local officials. A roughneck arrived moments later and tried unsuccessfully to stop the spray. “The only people with protective gear were the...

Explanation: The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual. The galaxy up top is NGC 3660, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy in that it has several bright blue spiral arms and a central bar of stars, dust, and gas. Captured by chance in the featured deep and colorful image, surprisingly, is SN 2026cff, a supernova found just to the right of the central bar. Farther in the distance is the bottom galaxy, known informally as Burçin’s galaxy, but formally cataloged as LEDA 1000714. The center of this galaxy appears...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It’s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth’s warming builds. Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44.4 degrees Celsius) reading in two Arizona communities on Friday that smashed the highest March temperature...

Google Deepmind's new framework AlphaProof Nexus has autonomously solved nine out of 353 open Erdős problems it attempted, including two questions that had gone unanswered for 56 years. The system also proved 44 out of 492 open conjectures from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), settled a 15-year-old question about Hilbert functions in algebraic geometry, and improved a known bound in convex optimization. Inference costs ran just a few hundred dollars per problem, according to the research paper. Unlike (potentially) pure natural-language approaches such as OpenAI's recent solution, the underlying language model in AlphaProof Nexus—in this case Gemini 3.1...

Two New York Democrats running in a hotly contested congressional primary pledged federal funding for “Drag Story Hour” — as records show city and state taxpayers have paid nearly $700,000 to boost the program. Incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman and his opponent, former city Comptroller Brad Lander, both told an LGBTQ Democratic club that they support dishing out federal money to subsidize the program, which invited drag queens into schools to read to young children. “Unfortunately, the Majority does not allow funding from Members of Congress to support LGBTQIA+ programming,” Goldman wrote in on a questionnaire from the Jim Owles LGBT...

New York is strong-arming 18 industrial-scale solar power plants into rural communities across the state despite strong opposition from locals. Schuylerville farmer Alexandra Fasulo had just settled into the idyllic acreage she purchased in 2023 when Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bulldozers came roaring in, poised to thrash 1,800 acres of protected grassland to build a 100-megawatt-capacity solar energy complex in nearby Fort Edward, NY. Worried that chemical runoff and contamination may affect her farm, Fasulo attended a town meeting last fall to voice concerns to developers and state authorities. “We were like serfs coming before a king. It was so much...

Explanation: What are these strange space globs? Situated in rich star fields and glowing hydrogen gas, these opaque clouds of interstellar dust and gas are so large they might be able to form stars. Their home is known as IC 2944, a bright stellar nursery located about 7,600 light years away toward the constellation of the Centaur (Centaurus). The largest of these dark globules, first spotted by A. D. Thackeray in 1950 using a telescope in South Africa, is likely two separate but overlapping clouds, each more than one light-year wide. Along with other data, the featured Hubble palette image...

A film buff found a lost 1968 British TV movie about vampires that sparked a legend it was so terrifying it was marked for destruction, a preservation group announced. “No Such Thing as a Vampire” — one of six episodes from the short-lived 1960s BBC anthology series “Late Night Horror” — has been missing for more than half a century after it scarred viewers and caused an uproar that prompted the network to not only kill the show. But what is now believed to be the last surviving copy of the gory movie was recently discovered by English film-buff and...

A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs...

The effort comes as a new outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola continues to spread in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) announced it is urgently producing its candidate vaccine, ChAdOx1 BDBV, which could enter human clinical trials in as little as two to three months if animal testing succeeds. The Bundibugyo Ebolavirus is one of the less common but still highly lethal strains of Ebola. Unlike the more frequently seen Zaire strain, there are currently no licensed vaccines or specific treatments approved for Bundibugyo virus disease. The WHO and local authorities have described the...

Explanation: What's that passing in front of the Sun? It looks like a moon, but it can't be Earth's Moon, because it isn't round. It's the Martian moon Phobos. The featured video was taken from the surface of Mars in 2022 by the Perseverance rover. Phobos, at 11.5 kilometers across, is 150 times smaller than Luna (our moon) in diameter, but also 50 times closer to its parent planet. In fact, Phobos is so close to Mars that it is expected to break up and crash into Mars within the next 50 million years. In the near term, the low...

"The evidence for water vapor plumes on Europa isn’t as strong as we first understood it,"

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...