Free Republic

The Polish Armed Forces are mourning the loss of Brigadier General Adam Marczak, the Chief of Staff of the EU Althea Operation Command in Mons, who passed away on Tuesday, March 26, 2024. The announcement was made via Twitter by the Operational Command of the Armed Forces. In a statement, the term “unexpected death” was used to describe the passing of General Marczak, indicating that his demise occurred due to natural causes during his off-duty hours.

Feb 12 (Reuters) - A preliminary analysis concluded that Russia hit Kyiv last week with the hypersonic Zircon missile, its first use in the nearly two-year-old war, the head of a Kyiv research institute said on Monday, presenting a new challenge to Ukraine's air defences. Oleksandr Ruvin, director of the Kyiv Scientific-Research Institute for Forensic Examinations, said on his Telegram channel that his institute completed a preliminary analysis of missile fragments from a Russian attack on Feb. 7. He included a video of alleged missile wreckage showing specific markings. "In this case, we see elements that are characteristic of the...

Full Title: President Putin says five men killed in huge explosion in northern Russia that caused sudden radiation spike died trying to create a weapon that ‘has no equal in the world’ Russian President Vladimir Putin has told widows of the five scientists who died in a nuclear explosion earlier this year that their husbands were working on 'the most advanced and unmatched technical' weaponry. Putin's comments came during a ceremony of state decorations at the Kremlin today where he awarded the deceased employees of Russia's state nuclear company with the Order of Courage, posthumously.

A kilometer-size asteroid slammed into Earth about 800,000 years ago with so much force that it scattered debris across a 10th of our planet's surface. Yet its impact crater remains undiscovered. Now, glassy remains believed to have come from the strike suggest the asteroid hit southeast Asia as our close ancestors walked the Earth... Aaron Cavosie, an astrobiologist and geochemist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and his colleagues examined the chemical composition of three tektites from Thailand. They searched for evidence of reidite, a rare mineral formed only by extreme pressures and temperatures, like those of an asteroid impact....

Early Earth Likely Had Continents, Was Habitable, According To New StudyA surprising new study by an international team of researchers has concluded Earth's continents most likely were in place soon after the planet was formed, overturning a long-held theory that the early planet was either moon-like or dominated by oceans. Artist's conception of the early magma ocean. (Image courtesy of NASA) The team came to the conclusion following an analysis of a rare metal element known as hafnium in ancient minerals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia, thought to be among the oldest rocks on Earth. Hafnium is found...

Isotope geochemistryEarly water on Earth Geologists have long thought that Earth’s first 500 million years were as hot as Hades, dubbing this time frame the Hadean. The high temperatures would have prevented liquid water from condensing on the surface. But new findings on zircon grains, Earth’s oldest known terrestrial materials, suggest that the Hadean might have hosted liquid water. Recovered from the metamorphosed sediments of the Jack Hills in western Australia, the zircon grains are dated to be more than 4 billion years old and are the only geological evidence available to provide insight into the first 500 million years...

Could this be a forerunner of Zircon? This model of an experimental hypersonic missile was displayed in 2016 by TsIAM. (Photo: Vladimir Karnozov) While addressing the Russian Federal Assembly on February 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin touched on the Zircon, describing it as “a hypersonic missile able to accelerate to about Mach 9.” The Russian president said this is “yet another innovation, work on which proceeds successfully and shall be completed on schedule.” It has a firing range of “over one thousand kilometers” (540 nm) and “is able to destroy both sea-going and land targets,” he added. Notably, Putin’s figures...

A chunk of Earth that could be 4.1 billion years old and is described as the planet's "oldest rock," may have been found and dug up on the Moon by Apollo astronauts, according to a new study. The possible relic was discovered and dug up in 1971 and scientists believe that it was sent off Earth, thanks to a powerful impact, possibly an asteroid or a comet. After colliding with the Moon (which at the time was three times closer to the Earth than it is now), it mixed with other lunar surface materials. "It is an extraordinary find that helps paint...

Russell Mapes, a graduate student from Grass Valley, Calif., ...explains that these sediments of eastern origin were washed down from a highland area that formed in the Cretaceous Period, between 65 million and 145 million years ago, when the South American and African tectonic plates separated and passed each other. That highland tilted the river's flow westward, sending sediment as old as 2 billion years toward the center of the continent. A relatively low ridge, called the Purus Arch, which still exists, rose in the middle of the continent, running north and south, dividing the Amazon's flow - eastward toward...

Helium Retention in Zircons Demonstrates a Young Earth BY VERNON R. CUPPS, PH.D. * | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2018 Zircons are tiny crystals of zirconium silicate (ZrSiO4) that originate in igneous rock, which forms when volcanic magma cools. It’s a very stable mineral that melts at 2550°C. Zircon is harder than quartz and almost as hard as diamond. Because of these characteristics, zircon is the mineral most frequently used in various radioisotope dating methods for dating rocks assumed to be at least a few hundred million years old. Its ability to retain impurities within its crystal lattice is very important...

Russia has tested a new hypersonic anti-ship missile that can travel a blistering 6,138 miles an hour, or 1.7 miles a second. The missile, known as Zircon, will attack ships at sea and land-based targets. It is in all likelihood unstoppable by modern air defenses. CNBC reports that Russia has tested the Zircon anti-ship missile five times, with the latest test occuring on December 10. The December test hit a top speed of Mach 8, or 6,138 miles an hour. CNBC quoted two anonymous U.S. government officials with direct knowledge of an intelligence report on the test. The latest test...

Russian cutting-edge hypersonic missile 3M22 of the 3K22 Zircon system is in the development trials. The Project 11442 (NATO reporting name: Kirov-class) Pyotr Veliky nuclear-powered missile cruiser will carry the type following its upgrade, a shipbuilding industry source told TASS on Friday. According to rumors, the Indo-Russian BrahMos II hypersonic cruise missile (pictured here at Defexpo 2014) is the export variant of the Russian 3M22 Zircon missile. "The Pyotr Veliky cruiser will start its repairs in the third or fourth quarter of 2019. Its repairs and upgrade are planned to be complete in late 2022, with the ship to be...

Potters at Maya cities on the Caribbean side of Central America fused volcanic ash with local limestone to form household and ceremonial pottery, because the ash made their ceramics easier to fire. The distinctive recipe was a hallmark of the Late Classic Period from A.D. 600 to 900, Ford said. With thousands of people living in cities such as El Pilar and Tikal, the Mayan potters burned through several tons of volcanic ash every year, Ford has estimated. But no one can figure out where the ash came from. The mystery begins with the fact that there just aren't any...

A tiny 4.4-billion-year-old crystal has been confirmed as the oldest fragment of Earth's crust. The zircon was found in sandstone in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia. Scientists dated the crystal by studying its uranium and lead atoms. The former decays into the latter very slowly over time and can be used like a clock. The finding has been reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Its implication is that Earth had formed a solid crust much sooner after its formation 4.6 billion years ago than was previously thought, and very quickly following the great collision with a Mars-sized body...

Evidence of Earth's first continents — 4.3-billion-year-old "diamonds" — are actually just fragments of polishing grit, a new study finds. In 2007, an international team first reported discovering the tiny gems, which hid in pockets inside zircon crystals from Western Australia's Jack Hills, in the journal Nature. But it turns out that the gems weren't actually diamonds, but polishing paste, smushed into hairs'-width cracks when the zircons were prepared for laboratory tests, according to a study published online in the Feb. 1, 2014, edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge. For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world's deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years... In this case, the water moved rapidly through bedrock gorge, carving away the base...

Diamonds tell story of Earth's beginning By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 12:01am BST 22/08/2007 Diamonds really are forever, according to a study that has found tiny examples of the gems that date from near the birth of the Earth. Tiny diamonds discovered inside crystals of zircon Over four billion years old, the diamonds are the oldest identified fragments of the Earth’s crust and were discovered in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia, suggesting they were created only 300 million years after the planet itself was born from the dust and debris encircling our Sun some 4.5 billion...

The accepted timeframe for the beginnings of life on Earth is now being questioned by a Curtin University of Technology led team of scientists, after finding a key indicator to the earliest life forms in diamonds from Jack Hills in Western Australia... The Curtin led team's discovery of very high concentrations of carbon 12, or "light carbon" within these crystals is remarkable as it is a feature usually associated with organic life... Evidence for ancient life stretches back in time to at least 3.5 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled organisms that did not require oxygen. The discovery...