Free Republic

Her arm thrust out and pouting like a rapper, this is the moment that Michelle Obama showed off her dance moves during a toe-curling appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Challenged to show off her dance moves by Ms Degeneres, Mrs Obama gamely obliged and went on to pull shapes that wouldn't have shamed Rita Ora. Unfortunately for daughters Sasha and Malia, the appearance on Ellen, which airs on the 16th March, isn't the end of the 51-year-old's dancing ambitions.

Police in Akron, Ohio are working to identify a man believed to have repeatedly defecated on multiple cars and children's front yard toys in one neighborhood over the last three years.

The authors of the Lancet's centerpiece editorial said a so-called tobacco-free world -- in which fewer than 5% of adults smoke -- is "socially desirable, technically feasible and could become politically practical." .. Making tobacco use "out of sight, out of mind and out of fashion -- yet not prohibited" could be achieved only with a "turbo-charged approach," wrote a team of public health experts from Australia, Hong Kong and India. To achieve it, the United Nations, national leaders, and public- and private-sector institutions all would need to collaborate, they wrote. In addition to governments setting policies such as those...

Draft legislation aimed at boosting a flagging birth rate threatens to reduce Iranian women to “baby-making machines” and set their rights back by decades, Amnesty International warned on Wednesday. The London-based human rights group said that a first bill, which has already been approved once by parliament, would restrict access to contraception, forcing women into unsafe backstreet abortions.It said the second draft law, which is to go before parliament next month, would close many jobs to women who choose not to or are unable to have children. …

Schematic of a real-time in vitro fecal fermentation gas-sensing system. Credit: Nam Ha Microbes in the human body are estimated to outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, yet research on how they affect health is still in its infancy. A perspective article published by Cell Press on March 12th in Trends in Biotechnology presents evidence that gut microbes produce gases that may contribute to gastrointestinal diseases and could be used as biomarkers for one's state of health. As means to measure these potential biomarkers, the authors suggest two novel gas-sensing systems, one of which is an electronic gas sensor...

TEL AVIV/FRANKFURT, March 12 (Reuters) - Two years after scientists cooked up the first test tube beef hamburger, researchers in Israel are working on an even trickier recipe: the world's first lab-grown chicken. Professor Amit Gefen, a bioengineer at Tel Aviv University, has begun a year-long feasibility study into manufacturing chicken in a lab, funded by a non-profit group called the Modern Agriculture Foundation which hopes "cultured meat" will one day replace the raising of animals for slaughter. The foundation's co-founder Shir Friedman hopes to have produced "a recipe for how to culture chicken cells" by the end of the...

When I think of any kind of liquid metal form changing shape and moving around on its own accord, I can’t help but conjure up images of the T-1000 robot assassin from the movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Now scientists have made a little drop of metal that’s able to propel itself through liquid and change shape to fit through a narrow passage. Although this little drop of liquid metal is no shapeshifting Nanomorph, it does have some fascinating properties that could one day be used to develop new methods for delivering drugs through blood vessels. To make the liquid...

If you are old enough to have been listening to the radio during the late 1960's, you would have heard Bobby Goldsboro's biggest hit, 'Honey'. In fact, you would have heard it over and over again without even trying to. Honey was quite popular for a few months and still seems poignant today because of the many ways to hear it. 'Honey' aka "Honey, I miss you", is a song written by Bobby Russell. He first produced it with former Kingston Trio member Bob Shane. Russell later offered it to Bobby Goldsboro who recorded it for his 1968 album. The...

Nearly 8 million people could lose up to $24 billion a year in health insurance subsidies in a Supreme Court case threatening President Barack Obama’s law, according to a government report released Tuesday. The estimates by The Associated Press show what’s at stake in the case. Health overhaul opponents argue that subsidies are illegal in some three dozen states where the federal government took charge of running the health insurance marketplaces, or exchanges. The justices heard arguments last week, and the court’s decision is expected in late June. Tuesday’s report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that...

Kaci Hickox, the nurse who grabbed headlines for defying quarantines in New Jersey and Maine after treating Ebola patients in West Africa, is leaving the state. Hickox, a Texas native, told me in an email that she’s moving to Oregon to take a job with a large health care system. She arrived in Maine in October following a trip to Sierra Leone to care for Ebola patients, bringing the national debate over travel restrictions for health care workers returning from West Africa to Fort Kent’s doorstep. Hickox lived in the Aroostook County town during her showdown with the LePage administration,...

Just heard this....i am the classic Apple hater but I am greatly impressed by Apple non-compliance on decryption keys... Though this may be just to ensure sales outside America...Outside the Obama/NSA zone/ FedGuv

At 25, Russ Crandall was the picture of health. In 2005, the Navy translator—fluent in Russian and Indonesian—was so fit that he was often enlisted to whip out-of-shape recruits into, well, shape. And then, out of the blue, everything changed. "I had a stroke, and my body just stopped working the way I was expecting," the force behind paleo blog The Domestic Man told Yahoo Food. “The doctors couldn’t figure out why. They were like, ‘Figure out how to write again. Figure out how to walk.’” Within six months, Crandall had relearned both—he credits the speedy recovery to his youth...

New studies show an alarming rate of the disease among women who have had abortions. Prominent abortion practitioner and promoter David Grimes bemoans that bumper stickers still warn that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, even though, he asserts, that “theory . . . was debunked long ago.” So begins Grimes’s recent piece on the Huffington Post’s blog Healthy Living. “Long ago” was, though Grimes doesn’t say so, 1997 to 2008, when there flowed a stream of “debunking” publications — largely studies that were methodologically flawed — reporting that no abortion–breast cancer (ABC) link existed. They were effective in...

<p>BOSTON – Charla Nash never served in the military. She was horribly disfigured, not in combat, but in a 2009 attack by a rampaging chimpanzee. The Pentagon, though, is watching her recovery closely.</p> <p>The U.S. military paid for Nash's full face transplant in 2011 and is underwriting her follow-up treatment at a combined cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the hope that some of the things it learns can help young, seriously disfigured soldiers returning from war.</p>

A research team from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Mayo Clinic and other institutions has identified a new class of drugs that in animal models dramatically slows the aging process—alleviating symptoms of frailty, improving cardiac function and extending a healthy lifespan. The new research was published March 9 online ahead of print by the journal Aging Cell. The scientists coined the term "senolytics" for the new class of drugs. "We view this study as a big, first step toward developing treatments that can be given safely to patients to extend healthspan or to treat age-related diseases and disorders," said TSRI...

The world’s oldest known man, Alexander Imich, born in 1903, died last June in New York. The torch will be passed to 111-year-old Sakari Momori, who comes from a country full of elderly people: Japan. The Guinness Book of World Records is investigating. That’s not really surprising. You’ve probably heard a similar story before: The Japanese have the highest life expectancy of any major country. Women on average live to 87 and men to 80 (compared to 81 years for American women and 76 for American men). The Japanese can live 75 of those years disability free and fully healthy,...

Please pray for my son. He is suffering terribly from bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, in a state of torment and fear. He is a deeply religious young man, and he believes he is possessed in some way - which I do not see in him at all. Yet he may be under attack from the outside. Please pray for his deliverance from the ills of mind and spirit, from protection against any evil spirits that might assail him. Pray that his psychiatrist and his priests may be guided to help him. We are in no danger from him -...

Will the government ever publish graphs, charts, info on where the money they get for Obammy Care is going?

Apple topped Samsung in smartphone sales for the first time since 2012, selling 74.8 million units in the fourth quarter of last year, surpassing Samsung as the No. 1 smartphone maker globally. Apple's success was driven by huge demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the U.S. and in China, according to research firm Gartner. Samsung's performance in the smartphone market deteriorated further in the fourth quarter of 2014, when it lost nearly 10 percentage points in market share," Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, wrote in a report released Tuesday. "Samsung continues to struggle to control...

According to a new court ruling A New Jersey man who was burned by a plate of hot fajitas while dining at Applebee’s can’t sue the restaurant over his injuries, according to an appellate court. Hiram Jimenez took the chain restaurant to court because he said his waitress failed to alert him that his meal was hot. After being served, the court ruling says he bowed his head to pray over the crackling plate, and some oil popped and burned his face. Jimenez says he then panicked and knocked the plate in his lap, causing more burns, none of which...