Free Republic

The week’s crypto crash has hit an astonishing round number, Bloomberg points out: it’s now lost more than $1 trillion — that’s trillion with “t,” a staggering sum — in value since late last year. Bitcoin alone lost more than 12 percent of its value on Friday and dropped to its lowest level since July of 2021, bottoming out at a wretched $34,000 at press time. That means that since a peak in November, it’s lost more than 45 percent of its value. Other coins have lost the same, if not more, value in the same time period. Bloomberg reports...

Modern Science’s Broken BargainIt’s up to us to ensure progress serves our ends. The founding manifesto of the modern scientific enterprise—Vannevar Bush’s 1945 classic Science: The Endless Frontier—laid down a promise: that federalizing the academic sciences would protect the universities as bastions of free inquiry and curiosity-driven research. Without such support, Bush argued, the academic sciences would be captured and enslaved by government and corporate political interests. That argument was persuasive to the political authorities of the time. Now, seven decades later, that promise stands broken. Science’s “endless frontier” has become Big Science, a self-aggrandizing cartel organized around the aggressive...

Australian researchers have discovered that negative capacitance could lower the energy used in electronics and computing, which represents 8 percent of global electricity demand. The researchers at four universities within the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) applied negative capacitance to make topological transistors switch at lower voltage, potentially reducing energy losses by a factor of 10 or more.These very promising results are reported this week at the prestigious International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. And while challenges remain to making a working benchtop device, the work is covered in a patent application.What are transistors?A...

Repeated immunization with antigen causes systemic autoimmunity in mice otherwise not prone to spontaneous autoimmune diseases. --- Systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host's immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization with antigen, to the levels that surpass system's self-organized criticality.

A woman suspects she’s being tracked after noticing a number of weird messages on her phone. TikTok user @angel.edge95 shared her theory in a post that has since received 2.5 million likes. “I think I’m being tracked,” she said. “The more I post about it, it seems like it’s happening to a lot of people. I don’t know if I’m in danger.” The user explained that she flew from her Texas home to Maine, and shortly after arriving at the airport, she received an odd message. Her phone detected an “unknown accessory” near her, presumably an Apple AirTag. She was...

More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid InterventionsThe great body of evidence (comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant to this analysis) shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths. These restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies. Nearly all governments have attempted compulsory measures to control the virus, but no government can claim success. The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school...

A COMPARISON OF OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT REPORTS SUGGEST THE FULLY VACCINATED ARE DEVELOPING AIDS VIDEO: https://prepareforchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/TheVaxxed.mp4?_=1

Is the Age of the Living, Self-Replicating Robot at Hand? No. Stem cells naturally reproduce themselves. The researchers working with frog stem cells merely found, via algorithms, one configuration that works betterRecently, the sci-fi dream of self-replicating robots has been in the news, thanks to the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. A recent experiment with frog cells was hailed by news outlets as disparate as CNN (“World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say”) and Daily Wire (“American Universities Create First ‘Self-Replicating Living Robots’”). And it was also...

The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland. In a paper published today in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018.

On a winter morning in 2013, a meteor the size of a four-story building screamed across the country, exploding near the city of Chelyabinsk and injuring more than 1,600 people amid widespread property damage. The chunk of rock and iron, which was 60 feet across, served as a violent reminder that Earth, bombarded daily with tons of space-going debris, periodically intersects with large planet killers—and a significant portion of those remain undocumented. After years of study and discussion, NASA is ready to launch its first effort to spare Earth the kind of calamity that extinguished the dinosaurs, crashing a space...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it is aware of reports that unauthorized emails from a legitimate FBI address were sent to thousands of organizations. "The FBI and CISA are aware of the incident this morning involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account," the FBI said in a statement Saturday. "This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time. The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue. We continue to encourage the public to be cautious of unknown senders and urge you to report suspicious activity...

President Donald J. Trump has revealed dominating plans to compete with the radical left media with the formation of Trump Media & Technology Group. Trump Media & Technology Group, which is chaired by President Trump, has merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp. to become a publicly listed company with a potential valuation of up to $1.7 billion, a Wednesday press release from TMTG states. The media company intends to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America,”...

The Briefing Tesla spends $0 of its budget on advertising, but instead spends a dramatic amount on research and development (R&D) Tesla’s Spending Per Car Sold vs. Other Automakers It’s often said that word of mouth is the best form of advertising. In the case of Tesla and their rapid ascent to the top of the global automobile business, this might be true. After all, the electric vehicle company somehow manages to spend $0 on advertising year after year, despite the fact that marketing is typically a significant expense line item for most other auto manufacturers. On the flip side,...

3 part interview with Charles Hoskinson. excerpt from Part 3:A number of lawmakers likely write off crypto as just a right-wing techno-libertarian fantasy. How you might appeal to policymakers on the left like Elizabeth Warren and Janet Yellen, who have often publicly criticized cryptocurrencies from a variety of angles? The philosophical issue that I think is very difficult for people in certain areas of the left. If you are of the belief that everything needs to be controlled by a regulator, a bureaucracy, or the heavy hand of government, you're always going to be uncomfortable with a technology that says...

Get It Off Me Researchers at Caltech have opened the doors to hell and allowed a creepy robot that can walk on two spindly feet and even fly to enter our world. The terrifying biped, called LEONARD (LEgs ONboARD drone), or LEO for short, is basicically the bottom half of a humanoid robot strapped to a flying drone. The researchers’ goal wasn’t to come up with the next mass-marketable invention, but to test new ways of locomotion for robots meant to complete dangerous jobs and explore hard-to-reach places. Did we mention it can skateboard and slackline as well?

Facebook is down, and not in a minor way. The Big Tech mammoth is down worldwide in a way in which they will not be able to easily recover as the DNS A and AAA records have been deleted. Technically speaking, facebook.com is now for sale. They’re not alone. Instagram, WhatsApp, and others have also been affected in the same way. It’s clearly a coordinated attack on a massive scale, though it’s unclear how it was pulled off. We’re not talking about a simple DDoS attack. This is catastrophic and would have required high-level access to certain protocols that one...

I’m the founder of MeWe, the ad-free social network with data privacy and no content amplification or newsfeed manipulation. MeWe competes directly with Facebook. On June 27, 2019, I wrote an op-ed in this newspaper headlined “I Compete With Facebook, and It’s No Monopoly.” I’ve changed my mind. MeWe continues to succeed, albeit on a modest scale. Two years ago the platform had five million users and no revenue. Today it has nearly 20 million users and is breaking even with millions of dollars in revenue. Yet despite MeWe’s growth, Facebook’s troubling actions over the last two years have caused...

GM announced that it has issued a recall on every single Chevy Bolt made to date due to the battery fire risk. The move comes after two previous recalls, which were aimed at specific models. The Bolt was first recalled in November after five cars that hadn’t been in crashes caught fire. After investigating the problem further, Chevy recalled a second batch in July. The problem was traced to two manufacturing defects that could occur simultaneously. The defects—a torn anode tab and a folded separator—created conditions that could lead to a short in affected cells. So far, the company has...

Biometrics in future of vaccine passports Any kind of document, especially a passport, needs to be built on a foundation that allows it to operate across borders and jurisdictions. Biometrics could be the easiest and fastest path to get started. It can add convenience and security, while identifying a person’s vaccination status easily. Modern biometric solutions have many different modalities at their disposal, from fingerprints and face to voice and iris recognition. The biometric modalities most likely to be used for vaccine passports, however, are anticipated to be face or voice recognition, as these can easily be performed on an...

The COVID-19 pandemic remains a global public health threat after 1 year of overwhelming disruption and loss. Overcoming the challenges to end the pandemic is accentuated by the recognition that SARS-CoV-2 can undergo rapid antigenic variation that may lower vaccine effectiveness in preventing new cases and progression to severe disease. Our findings show that most COVID-19 patients induce a wide-ranging immune defense against SARS-CoV-2 infection, encompassing antibodies and memory B cells recognizing both the RBD and other regions of the spike, broadly-specific and polyfunctional CD4+ T cells, and polyfunctional CD8+ T cells. The immune response to natural infection is likely...