Free Republic

Almost every day now, there is another headline warning about the collapsing birth rate across the developed world, and along with it, another think piece attempting to diagnose why younger generations seem increasingly reluctant to build families. This week, new figures out of England and Wales showed that the number of babies being born has fallen to the lowest level since 1977, with couples delaying parenthood until their thirties or deciding against children altogether. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.39 children per woman, the lowest level ever recorded. The explanations offered for this phenomenon tend to revolve around economics,...

Is it free woolly? Scientists were flabbergasted after discovering that the mammoth backbones that had been housed in an Alaskan museum for 70 years actually belonged to a whale, per a study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science. This archaeological case of mistaken identity began way back in the 1950s, when archaeologist Otto Geist happened upon some bones while traveling through the Alaskan interior, roughly 10 miles North of Fairbanks in a region formerly known as Beringia, The Smithsonian Magazine reported. He assumed the remnants, a pair of growth plates, belonged to the plush pachyderm mammoth based on their...

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me. It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer's. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn't know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her. The rest of the time, she was...

President Donald Trump has announced that the White House is investigating the mysterious deaths and disappearances of eleven officials connected by their work on secret space and nuclear technology. The disappearance of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William “Neil” McCasland has intensified scrutiny over a growing number of cases involving scientists and officials tied to sensitive U.S. defense and research programs. The total number is now at least 11 individuals after new links to the suspicious death of anti-gravity scientist Amy Eskridge emerged. McCasland, 68, vanished from his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on Feb. 27 under unusual circumstances. According to...

A scientist experimenting with anti-gravity tech was found dead at 34 after warning that her life could be in danger, marking another mysterious case of deaths and disappearances in recent years. Amy Eskridge was just 34 years old when she allegedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in Huntsville, Alabama on June 11, 2022. However, neither the police nor the medical examiners have publicly released any details of an investigation ever taking place. Before her death, she was openly researching and trying to develop anti-gravity technology, a way to control or cancel out gravity, which could revolutionize space...

<p>So now, it seems, China will commit troops to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Congo. While not a grand scale — just 175 engineers and 43 medics will be deployed — the contribution marks China's biggest overseas operation since the U.N. effort in Cambodia a decade ago.</p>

It’s a good thing that the Biden administration corruptly shut down the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Communist China from spying on us, manipulating us and robbing us blind to avoid offending anyone… like Beijing. “We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the “China Initiative” fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns.” Goodbye China Initiative and U.S. National Security. At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked...

A married mom who vanished last year may be tied to a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances of US scientists and military officials with access to potentially sensitive information, according to a report. Melissa Casias, who worked with her husband as an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory [LANL] — famous for developing nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project — has not been seen since she dropped lunch off for her daughter in New Mexico last summer. She is one of four high-clearance people who have died or gone missing since June 2025 with connections to UFO-linked retired...

Yunqing Jian, 33, first entered the country on a fraudulently obtained F1 student visa, the FBI says Fusarium graminearum creates "head blight," a disease of wheat, barley, maize and rice, and "is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year," according to the Department of Justice. It is also toxic to humans, and can cause vomiting, liver damage and "reproductive defects in humans and livestock." The affidavit, which said Jian has been attempting to smuggle the pathogen into the U.S. since she began post-doctoral studies funded by China in 2022, also accuses Jian of asking a third...

She is a star of American science. A Stanford chair. A NASA collaborator. A role model for a generation of young researchers. But a chilling congressional investigation has found that celebrated geologist Wendy Mao quietly helped advance China's nuclear and hypersonic weapons programs – while working inside the heart of America's taxpayer funded research system. Mao, 49, is one of the most influential figures in materials science. She serves as Chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University, one of the most prestigious science posts in the country. Her pioneering work on how diamonds behave under...

MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was killed in a shooting at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts Monday night, the school confirmed. Loureiro, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was 47 years old. A Brookline police spokesperson said officers responded to a call for gunshots at an apartment on Gibbs Street at about 8:30 p.m. "A victim was located who had been shot multiple times," Brookline police deputy superintendent Paul Campbell told WBZ-TV. Loureiro was taken by ambulance to a Boston hospital, where he died Tuesday morning. No other information about the shooting was immediately released and authorities did not...

(Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a new strategy in the quest to harness fusion to produce electricity: combining two existing methods of managing plasma to allow greater overall flexibility. The PPPL team’s new dual approach brings together electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) methods with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), marking the first time a simulation showing how they can be used together could facilitate greater control of plasma during fusion reactions. In simple terms, fusion produces energy by replicating the natural processes occurring on the surface of...

The Obama administration has lifted longtime restrictions on Libyans attending flight schools in the United States and training here in nuclear science, according to a final amendment of the ban recently approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The AI models were prone to safety failures and discrimination, a new study found. Robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are not safe for general use, according to a new study. Researchers from the United Kingdom and United States evaluated how AI-driven robots behave when they are able to access people’s personal data, including their race, gender, disability status, nationality, and religion. For their study, which was published in International Journal of Social Robots, they ran tests on how the AI models behind popular chatbots – including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral AI – would...

We have to start counting from 1 again... ======================================================== Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas. * By analyzing 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, researchers from Aalto University in Finland found discrepancies among these independent population counts and other population data gathered between 1975 and 2010. * Such underreporting could have consequences in terms of resource allocation within a country, but other experts remain skeptical that decades of population counting could be off...

A groundbreaking study reveals that human activities have pushed Earth's biosphere to a critical tipping point, threatening the planet's ability to sustain life and prompting urgent calls for immediate global action. The integrity of Earth’s biosphere is under unprecedented threat, according to a recent study that sheds light on the planet’s declining ability to maintain ecological balance. Conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and BOKU University in Vienna, the research highlights critical challenges facing the plant kingdom’s capacity to regulate essential ecosystem functions. The study, published in the journal One Earth, examines the energy flows derived...

The annual clock of the seasons – winter, spring, summer, autumn – is often taken as a given. But our new study in Nature, using a new approach for observing seasonal growth cycles from satellites, shows that this notion is far too simple. We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth's land-based ecosystems. This reveals "hotspots" of seasonal asynchrony around the world – regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations. .....

China’s Ministry of State Security Directed the Theft of COVID-19 Research and the Exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server Vulnerabilities, Known Publicly as the Indiscriminate ‘HAFNIUM’ Intrusion CampaignThe Justice Department announced today that Xu Zewei (徐泽伟), 33, of the People’s Republic of China was arrested on July 3 in Italy at the request of the United States. Xu and his co-defendant, PRC national Zhang Yu (张宇), 44, are charged in a nine-count indictment, unsealed today in the Southern District of Texas, for their involvement in computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including the indiscriminate HAFNIUM computer intrusion campaign that...

Thousands of enraged Iranians burned the US flag and chanted “death to America” and “Israel” Saturday as the Islamic Republic buried the head of its armed forces and other top commanders who were killed during the 12-day war. The caskets of about 60 corpses, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s chief Generals Hossein Salami and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, were marched through the streets of downtown Tehran for the first public funerals since President Trump helped broker a June 23 cease-fire between the two Middle Eastern countries. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” the crowds screamed as flags of both countries...

The Trump administration has secretly launched an intensive vetting process for hundreds of foreign scientists brought into the United States from "countries of concern" like China, using visas procured with the help of the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies, officials told Just the News. The review involving intelligence and security agencies began weeks ago over concerns prior administrations did not adequately vet the backgrounds of scientists or their ties to actors like China's military or its Communist Party. But the initiative has taken on additional urgency after three Chinese scientists were arrested in the last month...