Free Republic

Student-led protests over France’s struggling education system descended into chaos in Paris as fires broke out and chemical irritants were deployed. Student groups claimed 100,000 people protested in the capital, while the Interior Ministry put the nationwide turnout at around 266,000.

Our star and primary energy source that makes life on this planet possible may also be a cosmic cannibal. That's according to new research that suggests the sun may have swallowed a super-Earth planet billions of years ago in its early history. And our star may still be hiding the evidence. The scientists behind this research think that the fingerprints of this violent consumption of a planet may still exist within the solar interior. Super-Earths are common occupants of other planetary systems, and these findings can explain why the solar system lacks such a world... Yildiz and colleagues theorize that...

A grove of rare American chestnut trees that supplies restoration seedlings in West Virginia has become the focus of a dispute over massive data center development, with an Alaska political connection through major donors to gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. The American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter has warned that development around the former state tree nursery in Mason County could jeopardize trees that provide most of the nuts it collects for seedling production for the once nearly extinct tree. The chapter identified 200 American chestnuts at the site and said their loss would significantly affect its ability to supply seedlings...

Roughly seven thousand years ago, something erased the majority of men from the human gene pool. Not a plague. Not a famine. Something else entirely, and the evidence is still sitting in your own DNA. We dig into the genetic study that first uncovered this bottleneck, the mass graves across Neolithic Europe that back it up, and the invention sitting at the center of it all, one so ordinary you would never suspect it. When Our Simplest Invention Killed 95% Of All Men Alive | 22:04 The First Dawn | 17.8K subscribers | 240,685 views | August 3, 2026

The experimental pendulum saw that inspired this project is described in: Nicholas G. Blackwell, "Experimental stone-cutting with the Mycenaean pendulum saw," Antiquity 92, no. 361 (2018): 217 -- 232. doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.226 Could This Ancient Saw Explain Egypt’s Curved Stone Cuts? | 5:51 IntoTheMap | 24.6K subscribers | 70,980 views | October 2, 2026

You may know King Harold II for one thing: losing the Battle of Hastings in 1066. But is this Harold's whole story? In 2023 a remarkable coin hoard was discovered in Yorkshire, England, that shows Harold in a different light. This is the first recorded hoard of coins which can definitely be dated to the year 1066. Containing only coins struck during Harold’s brief reign of 282 days, the hoard reveals a king whose authority was recognised across England, and whose government could produce new coins with great speed. Join Elina Screen, Curator of Medieval and Modern Coin Collections at...

Explanation: How was the Saturn system imaged so clearly? Astrophotographer Tom Williams captured such exquisite details due to one night of exceptional atmospheric conditions above the United Kingdom. This means more than a cloudless sky. Pockets of air at different temperatures and densities move around and bend light as it travels through Earth’s atmosphere, distorting astronomy images. This is called “seeing.” Less atmospheric turbulence means clearer images. The astrophotographer reduced the impact of seeing with the lucky imaging technique: thousands of short-exposure images are taken very quickly with a high-speed camera and the clearest images are added up. Which object...

AI firms say simulations are being used to identify which pharmaceutical programs are worth moving forward and to assess the value of acquisition targets. As AI tools get better at flagging clinical risks, they say unexpected trial failures may become less frequent. Novartis' experimental del-desiran for a rare type of muscular dystrophy was expected to be a winner, with the Swiss company's CEO predicting annual peak sales of $5 billion. When a late-stage trial missed its goal last month, shares fell 11%, erasing $30 billion in market value. AI start-up BioinvestGPT was not surprised. In July, it ran a simulated...

xplanation: "Happy New Year!" No, wait, this is not a fireworks display. This image shows Nebula Pa 30, observed with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawai'i. It is likely the remnant of an old supernova explosion: separate historical records by Chinese, Japanese and Arabic astronomers tell of a "guest star" that appeared in the sky for 185 days in the year 1181. It is believed that this bright new point of light came from the supernova that caused the fireworks in Pa 30. Astronomers don't know exactly what happened in this unusual explosion, classified as a Type Iax supernova, but...

Human beings tend to be anthropocentric. That is, we often see ourselves as evolution's magnum opus despite the fact that, as biomass goes, we're insignificant compared to plants and other animals. For instance, scientists estimate that there are more than three trillion trees on Earth—a number that even dwarfs the amount of stars in our galaxy. And when you add the populations of the more than 380,000 other plant species, the total becomes mind-boggling. Nonetheless, many of us assume that we're the smartest, most conscious beings on Earth. But what if consciousness isn't a feature limited solely to humans—and what...

Augustus, ancient Rome's first emperor, placed a gilded monument called the Milliarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, in the Roman Forum in 20 BC to mark the symbolic starting point for all roads in the sprawling empire. These roads indeed were the backbone of the world's first continental-scale transportation system. Now, researchers ‌have conducted a detailed structural analysis of the empire's road network, spanning roughly 190,000 miles (300,000 km) of routes crisscrossing Europe, the Middle East and North Africa... The researchers also documented a correlation in many regions between the old Roman roads and modern highways... Some roads were very ⁠durable,...

Explanation: Have you ever seen a complete auroral oval? You can't see one from the ground because it makes too large a circle around one of Earth's magnetic poles. But spacecraft high above the Earth can see them. The featured video from ESA and CAS's robotic SMILE spacecraft shows not only a full auroral oval, but using ultraviolet light, one that occurred during the day. The time-lapse covers about an hour in late July and shows visually how variable and turbulent auroras really are. The points of light on the sides are distant stars that appear to move only because...

In central Libya, the endless flat desert of the Sahara gives way to something unexpected: a jet-black ocean of frozen rock. Covering more than 40,000 square kilometers, Al Haruj is one of the largest volcanic fields in Africa, shaped over millions of years by repeated eruptions. Hundreds of extinct cinder cones and ancient fissure vents rise from its sun-baked plateau, where dark basalt flows meet the shifting sands. In this documentary, we explore the volcanic history of this remote landscape and how vast lava flows reshaped the Sahara, leaving behind one of North Africa's most desolate and striking geological monuments....

Explanation: A deep image of the Sombrero galaxy reveals surprises. M104 is named the Sombrero galaxy because, on shorter exposures, it looks like a hat. A key defining feature of this huge galaxy is a dark brim of dust that circles the disk galaxy's center. A much longer exposure, however, brings up a hairy past where a bright, hazy halo is revealed that extends well past the central disk and contains many unresolved stars. Surprisingly, in this stellar haze, structures can be seen that include a diagonal ring. These structures and tidal streams provide fresh evidence that M104 had a...

A Moscow drone slammed into Kyiv’s key Northern Bridge on Sunday, leading to a fiery explosion during a visit from Germany’s top official — as Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly preparing a mass military mobilization. Dramatic footage from the Ukrainian capital showed a Russian drone crashing into the busy span during morning traffic, with a large fireball erupting from the explosion. Cars could be seen rushing through the blast area to get to the other side as fire and black smoke overtook one side of the bridge. Miraculously, only two people were injured in the incident, Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy...

Boulder, Colorado, has spent decades wearing a nickname most towns would take as an insult: “The People's Republic of Boulder.” It’s a college town of roughly 100,000 people, where the politics climb about as high as … the elevation. But now Boulder wants to export its “Rocky Mountain High,” and it’s headed to the Supreme Court. At stake before SCOTUS is whether that town gets to set energy policy for the rest of America. That’s the real question in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, no matter how carefully supporters dress it up. In 2018, the City...

The fortified hilltop settlement of Spišský Štvrtok is one of the most significant sites of the earlier prehistory of central Europe. It dates to the transitional period between the Early and the Middle Bronze Age with a cultural affiliation to the Otomani-Füzesabony culture, c. 1700–1500 b.c. The village of Spišský Štvrtok (located in an area called Spišská Nová Ves, which is also a town) is situated on an oblong hill adjacent to a valley in the undulated country of eastern Slovakia at Myšia Hôrka in the Carpathian Basin. The hill rises very steeply on the western side and more gradually...

['Civ sez: I call this one the ADHD house sleuth video.] Man Finds Secret Passage In His 500 Year Old Home's Library | 5:01 Zenger | 19.7K subscribers | 2,164,200 views | October 28, 2021

Explanation: Yes, but can your rainbow do this? After the remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over the Jersey Shore, New Jersey, USA in 2018, the Sun came out in one direction but something quite unusual appeared in the opposite direction: a hall of rainbows. Over the course of the next half hour, to the delight of the photographer and his daughter, vibrant supernumerary rainbows faded in and out, with at least five captured in this featured single shot. Supernumerary rainbows only form when falling water droplets are all nearly the same size and typically less than a millimeter across. Then,...

Pubs are fertile ground for tall tales, with many claiming to be the oldest pub in England. What Is the Oldest Pub in England? | 7:58 | Historic England | 30.9K subscribers | 203,944 views | October 1, 2026