Free Republic

The oldest peach pits have been found near a bus station in China, according to a new study that sheds new light on the little-known evolutionary history of the fruit. The eight fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, date back more than two and a half million years. They were found by Tao Su, associate professor at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, when road construction near his house in Kunming, capital of Yunnan in southwest China, exposed a rock outcrop from the late Pliocene. Preserved within the Pliocene layers, the fossils looked "strikingly modern," according to Su. With colleague Peter Wilf, a...

The nation's net farm income is the lowest since 2002, and with another year of low commodity prices, demand for agriculture loans is surging as farmers struggle to make ends meet. [...] Agricultural lenders say they are seeing people who had operating loans requesting larger ones, and some who had operated with cash are borrowing money. But it's unlikely the current run on loans will be anything like the farm credit crisis of the 1980s, when those who survived the significant year-to-year losses were without large debts to repay. ...

The Amish are online, onscreen, and multiplying fast. In their battle with modernity, it’s tough to say who’s winning I’ve probably visited more Amish settlements than anyone. Who would venture out to the most remote corners of Montana, Maine and South Texas if they didn’t happen to be a student of Amish culture? Perhaps a peddler of pots and pans; many Amish cooks, I have noticed, gradually gave up their cast iron for stainless steel in the past 50 years... In my 25 years exploring Amish communities, I’ve witnessed changes that would be unnoticeable to the average outsider... To the...

The Thanksgiving tale of the Pilgrims and the Indian has an astonishing, less well-known back story. The story of how the Pilgrims arrived at our shores on the Mayflower—and how a friendly Patuxet native named Squanto showed them how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer—is well-known. But Squanto’s full story is not, as National Geographic’s new Thanksgiving miniseries, “Saints & Strangers,” shows. That might be because some details of Squanto’s life are in dispute. The important ones are not, however. His story is astonishing, even raising profound questions about God’s role in American history. Every Thanksgiving we remember that,...

Walk of Shame: How Tennessee's famous high-stepping horse became the latest animal-cruelty scandal

Tufts biologists induced one species of flatworm -- G. dorotocephala, top left -- to grow heads and brains characteristic of other species of flatworm, top row, without altering genomic sequence. Examples of the outcomes can be seen in the bottom row of the image. Credit: Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University. ============================================================================================================ Biologists at Tufts University have succeeded in inducing one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics - information existing...

Red Badger's Great Giblet Gravy 1 pkg giblets from the turkey (Liver, Neck, Gizzard and Heart) 1 16oz pkg chicken livers 1 16oz pkg chicken gizzards 1 teaspoon sea salt 1 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper 2 cubes chicken bouillon 2 stalks celery, diced 2 medium yellow onions, diced 1 quart hot water (to begin) 2 cans chicken broth OR 1 can and 1 1/2 cups turkey drippings 6 hard-boiled eggs, diced 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1/2 cup COLD milk Directions: In a large pot, 4qt or similar, boil ALL the giblets, salt, pepper, bouillon, celery, onion and water for 1...

[Excerpt and link] ...Live-cattle futures for December fell 3 cents, or 2.3%, to $1.27675 a pound, after declining 3.1% over the past week on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Cattle futures for February were also limit-down, dropping 2.3% to $1.2965 a pound. Feeder-cattle futures for November fell 2.775 cents to $1.7230 a pound. Other feeder-cattle futures were limit-down... ...December lean hogs fell 3 cents, or 5.5%, to 51.80 cents a pound, a fresh six-year low...

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 18 (UPI) — A viral trend involving placing cucumbers behind cats has been deemed cruel and harmful behavior by some experts.

I had just walked through the front door when I heard those words that send chills up the spine of every man. "This is why we can't have anything nice!" It was my wife. I put the mail on the stairs while I tried to figure out if I could make it back out the front door without her hearing me. I knew I couldn't. The woman can hear what I think, for crying out loud. Now, I had to determine who did it while I was still unseen. There are always three likely culprits: 1. Me 2. The Boy...

Ruth A. Hartman, an accomplished local sheep breeder known locally and nationally as an original member of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, has died in Reading Hospital of injuries suffered over the weekend after her SUV struck a deer in Oley Township. - See more at: http://www.readingeagle.com/news/article/champion-sheep-breeder-from-limekiln-remains-critical-after-weekend-accident#sthash.ih8zyVSB.dpuf

A British tree thought to be up to 5,000 years old has started to change sex, a "rare and unusual" phenomenon not fully understood by scientists, a botanist said Monday. The Fortingall Yew, in Perthshire, central Scotland has for hundreds of years been recorded as male, but has recently begun sprouting berries, suggesting that at least part of the tree is changing gender. "It's a rare occurence ... rare and unusual and not fully understood," said Max Coleman of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, who spotted the berries. "It's thought that there's a shift in the balance of hormone-like compounds that...

The crack appears like a miniature Grand Canyon up close. (Photo: Randy Becker/Facebook) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A dramatic crack has suddenly formed in the foothills of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains that measures an impressive 750 yards long and 50 yards wide. It was discovered recently by surprised backcountry hunters who travel frequently to the area in search of game. First reported by SNS Outfitter & Guides, a hunting company, on their Facebook page, the mammoth chasm appeared over the course of just a couple of weeks. It's an impressive example of just how quickly very large geological events can occur under the right...

Every summer while preparing for long weekends at our family cabin in the north woods of Minnesota, we'd face the same dilemmas. What food should we bring? Is SPF 50 sunscreen enough protection? And, most importantly, which mosquito repellent should we buy? If we picked the wrong kind, we'd be opening ourselves up to evenings of constant swatting by the campfire and nights of uncontrollable itching. Protection from the unofficial state bird, the mosquito, was not something to take lightly. However, while itchy limbs might be annoying, Minnesotans don't have much to worry about from mosquitoes, except for the occasional...

Beagles named Hercules, at left, and Tiangou are the world’s first gene-edited dogs. =============================================================================================================================== Man’s best friend is now his newest genetic engineering project. Scientists in China say they are the first to use gene editing to produce customized dogs. They created a beagle with double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a gene called myostatin. The dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications,” Liangxue Lai, a researcher with the Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said in an...

Rather than let the herds drown or starve, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game opened the season on Thursday, giving hunters the go-ahead to start harvesting herds found on drifting ice floes in waters adjacent to Nunivak and Nelson islands.

A couple of days ago, there was a quite successful thread here entitled Top Physicist Freeman Dyson: Obama 'Took the Wrong Side' on Climate Change. As an admirer and follower of Professor Dyson, I enjoyed it greatly, and posted several items on it. That thread got me interested in Dyson once again, and in looking for Dyson material I found this remarkable lecture on YouTube. I believe it is worth anyone's time to listen to in its entirety. At a little more than an hour in length, it is a bit long for one sitting, but I am sure most...

An Oregon farmer won the annual 42nd Half Moon Bay pumpkin weigh-off on Monday, when his gourd clocked in at just shy of a ton. Steve Daletas' pumpkin weighed 1,969 pounds, which means he'll take home about $11,000 and his wife will get to remodel their kitchen in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, he joked, downplaying the role he had in his big win. "Maybe we were in the right spot," Daletas said, noting that Oregon isn't suffering from the severe drought that California has over the last four years. "I feel good." Ron and Karen Root from Citrus Heights, California who...

The United States is home to the most obese population in the Americas, Asia and Europe, has the fattest kids by a wide margin and is tops in poor health for teenagers, according to the latest measure of well-being from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In its "How's Life 2015?" report released Tuesday, the United States is also among the nations with underperforming students and second in murders and assaults. But the U.S. shines when it comes to personal wealth and even the number of rooms in our homes, said the organization that charts the personal and economic...

Hip college students and grown folks alike are scratching their clover-laden heads wondering who got the idea to walk around with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden sprouting from their tresses. “I think this comes more from Western culture,” one student told the Times. “It’s fun, but I guess it’s also about protecting the environment, to show that you care about nature,” a peddler of the green headgear offered (which is interesting considering the country is one of the biggest polluters of out planet). But probably the best explanation came from a 24-year-old medical student, who best sums up how the...