Free Republic

As several recent military conflicts have emphasized, warfare is changing. The focus is shifting to attrition, guerilla warfare and home front terror, and as a result many militaries are working hard to become more flexible and create military forces that can rapidly adapt to any situation. It’s exactly why 3D printers are finding their way to warships for on-the-fly repairs and alterations. But a team of UK scientists and engineers from the University of Glasgow and BAE Systems are already looking much further than that. They are working on a chemical 3D printer called the Chemputer, which can grow highly...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A 68-year-old Vietnam veteran was beaten Sunday afternoon at a Jacksonville gas station after telling a clerk of the food store that he was going to vote for Donald Trump, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Charlie Daniels said he got into a profanity-laced dispute with a man who, once they were both outside near the gas pumps, pushed Daniels, punched him in the face and kicked him several times. The man left the scene in an older-model Chevrolet Suburban. Rescue personnel were called to the Shell station on Edgewood Avenue between Commonwealth Avenue and Beaver Street,...

A Psychologist Analyzes Donald Trump's Personality ...rambling psychobabble...Summary: Who, really, is Donald Trump? What’s behind the actor’s mask? I can discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost. It is as if Trump has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation. It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have discovered how a tiny yet abundant ocean organism helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Research published today in Nature Microbiology reveals how a bacterial group called ‘Pelagibacterales’ plays an important function in keeping the Earth’s atmosphere stable. The project was led by Prof Steve Giovannoni and Dr Jing Sun at Oregon State University, in collaboration with researchers from UEA among others. They showed that these tiny, hugely abundant bacteria could make the environmentally important gas, dimethyl sulfide. Researchers at UEA identified and characterised the gene that is responsible for this property. Dr...

An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe. Of the many counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, perhaps the most challenging to our notions of common sense is that particles do not have locations until they are observed. This is exactly what the standard view of quantum mechanics, often called the Copenhagen interpretation, asks us to believe. Instead of the clear-cut positions and movements of Newtonian physics, we have a cloud of probabilities described by a mathematical structure known as a...

Engineers have developed a machine with two highly dexterous arms that are capable of unscrewing even the trickiest of lids. The talents of the RE2 Robotics High Dexterous Manipulation System extend even to tying knots, opening zips, making balloon animals and cutting snowflakes out of folded paper. RE2, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said it has delivered one of its systems to the US Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Centre. The robot can be controlled either semi-autonomously, by following a series of set commands or with a remote controlled 'imitator' that causes it to mimic the actions of a human...

The two leading Republican candidates for president warn the U.S. stock market is trading at an alarming level. On Friday, Ted Cruz predicted a stock market "crash will be coming." Donald Trump calls it a "terrible time" to invest. "We're in a bubble right now," Trump says. It's a high degree of fear from a party that is normally viewed as pro-business and pro Wall Street. Trump recently told The Washington Post that America is on track for a "very massive recession."

The goal of the nebulous, sort-of-a-thing "never Trump" campaign is to do whatever is possible to stand between Donald Trump and the 1,237 delegates he needs in order to claim the Republican party's nomination on the first ballot at the convention. The informal effort has resulted in a lot more anti-Trump ads, and has benefited from the businessman's own natural inability to organize on-the-ground efforts in critical states. But the overarching idea, that the Republican base would slowly turn against Trump, doesn't seem to be paying off. In fact, a new CBS News poll suggests that Republicans are pretty comfortable...

Google owned Schaft unveils new bipedal robot at NEST2016 in Tokyo.

... Kanazawa and Li theorize that the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our ancient ancestors form the foundation for what make us happy now. "Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors’ life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today," they write. They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28. First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher...

Last night was a devastating defeat for Marco Rubio, whose big losses in the Super Tuesday II primaries caused him to drop out of the Republican race. But the scale of the disaster is even bigger when we look at the amount of money Rubio and the Republican establishment spent in the past weeks to try to stop Trump. It shows that Trump is winning while spending incredibly little on any sort of advertising. Other candidates, like Rubio, went aggressive on advertising, only to have their efforts rebuffed by voters. According to ad-buying data from SMG Delta, posted by Mark...

Hours before votes were due to be counted in the second “Super Tuesday” wave of US primary elections, Ohio election officials reported a surge in Republican support as Donald Trump’s popularity prompts thousands of Democrats and unaffiliated voters to switch their affiliation at the polling booth. In Ohio’s heavily Democratic Mahoning County, election board officials said in several precincts they had seen more Republican ballots cast than there were registered Republicans in the area, forcing them to send out additional Republican ballots to 60 of the county’s 212 precincts. “Twice as many Republicans are voting in this primary than we’d...

With its ideas of particles zipping in and out of existence, quantum mechanics is probably the kookiest-sounding theory in science. And our understanding of it is little helped by the mysterious "probability fields" most physicists say dictate the zipping. But a more intuitive picture may lie beneath. As new research demonstrates, beneath the shroud of probability, particles can in fact be viewed as behaving like billiard balls rolling along a table - although in surreal fashion. The result helps resurrect an 80-year-old picture of quantum mechanics, and provides one of the most stirring demonstrations yet of an effect Einstein called...

Belief in moral-watching, all-knowing, punitive gods might have helped human societies grow far beyond small, close-knit groups, a new study shows. Researchers who ran an experiment with a total of 591 people in eight different small-scale societies around the world found that people who believed their deity of choice knew about their misdeeds and would punish them were more likely to play fairly in a game where money was on the line. The findings, described in the journal Nature, hint at the integral role that certain religious beliefs may have played in the dramatic expansion of human societies.

Physicists in China have sustained hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees for 102 seconds, beating Germany's recent record (which was just a quarter of a second). SUSTAINING THE HEAT Barely a week after Germany's latest Stellerator reactor was able to sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second at 80 million degrees Celsius, news from China indicated that Germany might now have new competition on the block. Chinese physicists have announced that their own nuclear fusion reactor, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced and sustained hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius for...

In a breakthrough in quantum physics, scientists were able to create the phenomenon of quantum entanglement macroscopically using large magnets at room temperature. ... scientists working at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory revealed that they were able to create quantum entanglement at a macroscopic level at room temperature on a semiconductor chip, using atomic nuclei and the application of relatively small magnetic fields. Their breakthrough, which is published in Science Advances, is not only significant in what they accomplished but also how they accomplished it. In quantum physics, the creation of entanglement in particles larger and...

No matter how many regulations are put in place, drones are cheap enough now that frequent misuse is becoming the norm. There's no good way of dealing with a dangerous drone: you can jam its radios to force it to autoland, or maybe try using an even bigger drone to capture it inside a giant net. In either of these cases, however, you run the risk of having the drone go completely out of control, which is even more dangerous. Or, you can be like the Dutch National Police, and train eagles to take down drones for you.

Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links - not space-time - constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. ... A field is a highly entangled system. Different parts of it are mutually correlated: A random fluctuation of the field in one place will be matched by a random fluctuation in another. ("Parts" here refers both to regions of space and to spans of time.) Even a perfect vacuum, which is defined as the absence of particles, will still have quantum fields. And these fields are always vibrating. Space looks empty because the vibrations cancel each...

Land covers 196.9 million square miles of the planet, which is broken up into 196 countries that are home to 7.125 billion people. With so much land available on Earth you would think people are spread out evenly throughout the world - but a stunning new map reveals that isn't the case. An entrepreneur used data from Nasa to understand where most of the world's population resides and found half of us are crammed into just one percent of the world.

CES has only officially been open for like 5 minutes, and already we've found something too awesome not to share immediately: a cooking robot from a startup called Sereneti that can handle everything for you, from cooking to stirring to adding ingredients at the right time.