Free Republic

Göbekli Tepe was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, and it's not hard to see why. Image credit: Resul Muslu/Shutterstock.com ============================================================================ Did a cataclysmic comet impact 13,000 years ago spark the rise of civilization? That's the explosive claim behind a study of carvings at the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, which researchers say encode not just a catastrophic comet strike, but the world's oldest solar calendar. Located in southern Türkiye, Göbekli Tepe is a pre-pottery Neolithic complex that is estimated to be around 12,000 years old. Analyzing an intricately carved pillar at the site, the study authors propose...

Explanation: Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Direct your gaze through this gap with binoculars or a small telescope and you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars stretch across this gorgeous interstellar scene. Spanning over...

A European professional basketball player was fatally shot and two people wounded when gunfire erupted Friday night at a packed Harlem basketball tournament, cops and witnesses said. Kinu Rochford, a standout at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, was struck twice in the head at around 10:30 p.m. at the Kingdome Basketball Tournament in the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers on Lenox Avenue, police said. Rochford, 35, who was playing in the tournament, was shot while watching between games, according to cops. Witnesses said Rochford was struck the second time when he was already on the ground bleeding. Cops have...

Dear Readers, I know many of you have been hoping for more time. So was I. Today I write with news none of us wanted to receive. Jon Rappoport passed away peacefully on the evening of Wednesday, July 8, 2026. One week ago I wrote to let you know that Jon could no longer continue his daily publishing schedule. Two days ago I shared how I intend to steward his work. I now fulfill the final responsibility Jon personally entrusted to me. Several weeks before his passing, Jon recorded the message you are about to hear and asked me to...

This video explores the spectacular remains of the Roman mines at Las Médulas, Spain. The Roman Gold Mine that Ate Mountains | 9:09 toldinstone | 21,693 views | July 10, 2026

A former Barack Obama press secretary was fired from his chief communications role in Minneapolis after allegedly stealing cash and credit cards from city employees to fuel his habit for kratom — a natural drug used to treat opioid withdrawal. Adam Fetcher, 42, was canned from his role as Chief Communications Officer (CCO) for the City of Minneapolis after just a year on the job amid a police investigation into internal workplace theft and fraud, as well as claims of substance abuse, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. Fetcher, who made nearly $200,000 a year, is accused of stealing cash and...

Explanation: The Mare Orientale, Latin for Eastern Sea, is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. The youngest of the large lunar impact basins it's very difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. Still, captured on July 7 during a period of favorable tilt, or libration of the lunar nearside, the Eastern Sea can be found at the upper right in this sharp telescopic view. In the image, the large lunar mare is extremely foreshortened and stretches along the Moon's western edge. Formed by the impact of an asteroid over 3 billion years ago and nearly 1000 kilometers...

StormWall, which involves school-bus-size satellites and a whole lot of salt, could provide an ionic ‘air bag’ for the EarthIt’s the year 2040, and the Big One—a civilization-smashing solar storm of a scale not seen since the 19th century—is on a collision course with Earth.Far out in space, where geostationary satellites orbit, a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites crack open and start dumping barium, lithium or sodium. Within minutes, sunlight transforms this material into an ionized gas shield that slows the oncoming massive blob of plasma.Down on our planet’s surface, a would-be global catastrophe—potentially knocking out entire electrical grids—is reduced to a...

1:07 VIDEO AT LINK............ SpacEx has competition!...............

A former Long Island nurse who raked in $1.5 million selling fake vaccine cards during the COVID-19 pandemic was slapped with a record-breaking $544,000 fine from the state. Ex-Amityville practitioner Julie DeVuono, 53, who pleaded guilty to forgery and money laundering back in 2023 was hit with the massive penalty for a “large-scale” scheme where she hawked the phony cards to parents of 162 school-aged kids between November 2019 and January 2022, the state Department of Health announced Thursday. “This is the largest civil penalty imposed for vaccination fraud in the Department of Health’s 125-year history,” state Health Commissioner Dr....

The AI industry is growing at a fierce pace, but so is skepticism about where it will lead, with some worried about data centers sucking up power and jobs being replaced with computers. Capitalizing on those fears, socialist wacko Bernie Sanders has proposed the “American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” — which has grabbed headlines for claiming it will raise $7 billion and distribute thousands of dollars to every American. It’s a pie-in-the sky scheme, doomed from the start. Not least because it would force all major AI companies to hand 50% of their equity over to the federal government!...

At the beginning of April, I did a little roundup of the current waste-disposal difficulties renewables were facing, both in solar and in the wind industry. The solar nightmare is incoming... By 2050, the estimated total boundary area required for 1.5 million wind turbines is expected to reach 3.1 to 4.6 million square kilometers - the combined size of India and Argentina. The obvious question regarding this transition—with its towering turbine skeletons, virtually indestructible composite blades, and billions of solar panels—is this: Just where will all this metal, silicon and concrete be buried?

Trillionaire Elon Musk aims to have rockets blast off from Earth before the end of 2026, sending the first materials to the moon and Mars to start building colonies. The world’s first trillionaire is then planning to send robots to prepare the infrastructure needed for humans to survive. Musk said recently he has shifted Space X’s focus as it is closer and “much faster to complete a moon city,” with a timeline of getting it established in the next 10 years. However, he is optimistic he can also start sending material to the red planet within seven years too. This...

More late-stage diagnoses add to higher cancer mortality burden for menKey Takeaways: -Men have a significantly higher likelihood of late-stage cancer diagnosis across 20 different tumor types. -The largest disparities involved tongue, thyroid, and salivary gland cancers. -The reasons for the disparity appear to be multifactorial, involving biological, social, and cultural determinants. Men had a higher likelihood than women for late-stage diagnosis of 20 different types of cancer, data from a national registry network showed. The analysis of 30 nonreproductive organ cancers showed men had higher odds ratios for regional or distant metastasis at diagnosis in two-thirds of the cancer...

Explanation: This Cosmic Bat wishes you a happy Summerween! This mid-year celebration of Halloween transcends hemispheres, even though summer in the Northern hemisphere is winter in the South. Contrary to its eery aura, the Cosmic Bat Nebula (LDN 43), not to be confused with the Bat Nebula (NGC 6995), is a vibrant birthplace for stars. A bit of young starlight peeks through the dense clouds of gas and dust that make up the Cosmic Bat’s 12 lightyear wingspan. The ultraviolet light from the young stars energizes the nebula’s hydrogen gas, causing it to glow an ominous red. The jet of...

Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out. Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night. Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can...

The near-Earth Object 2009 FD, as seen by the ESO's Very Large Telescope (Image Credit: ESO) Every year, more than 5,000 tons of material with cosmic origins lands on Earth’s surface, with as much as 15,000 tons of this “space dust” making its way into the atmosphere but vaporizing during reentry. The resulting rain of micrometeorites that reaches our planet consists mostly of tiny objects anywhere from 30 to 200 micrometers in size, based on past studies. But what are the origins of these large volumes of material that accumulate over time as they shower the Earth throughout the year?...

In the fevered corners of the internet where men — primarily white — gather to "optimise" every little detail of their bodies, there is a belief that even the brain can be beaten into shape to make men seem more attractive. Here, cortisol affects "facial fat redistribution", dopamine affects "eye contact quality", serotonin affects "resting expression", and acetylcholine affects “intelligence in social contexts".

Explanation: Sometimes we can all use a little help from a friend. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory needs a boost to stay in orbit after almost 22 years of service. This video shows an artist's visualization of the Swift Boost Mission: The Katalyst's LINK spacecraft was launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on July 3 and it is now en route to rendezvous with Swift and boost it to a higher orbit over the course of the next several months. This type of maneuver has never been attempted before. If successful, it will be the technology demonstration of...

If they were visible to the naked eye, these structures would be huge in the sky. Image Credit: UCLan/Stellarium ========================================================================= The cosmological principle states that, on the largest scales, the universe is uniform and isotropic. In other words, it should look broadly the same no matter where you are or which direction you look. You would not expect to find a single enormous structure in one particular region of the sky. Finding two in relatively close proximity is even more surprising. Five years ago, researchers discovered the Giant Arc, a vast crescent of galaxies stretching 3.3 billion light years across...