Free Republic

A man in China was hospitalized after he ate a live crab that pinched his daughter, per The South China Morning Post. Months after swallowing the crustacean, he was hospitalized with severe back pain and parasitic infections. While raw crab is served in some regions of China, local government officials have recommended against it. A man in China became strangely ill months after he ate a live crab to avenge his daughter. The man, identified as 39-year-old Lu of Zhejiang, was recently seen by doctors at a hospital in Hangzhou for severe back pain about two months after he swallowed...

There was quite a stir going around a couple of weeks ago when we learned that researchers at Boston University had created (possibly inadvertently) a new strain of the novel coronavirus that caused an 80 percent mortality rate in laboratory mice. (The “normal” version of the virus only causes mild illness in mice with few deaths being recorded.) Of course, you might not have been aware of that unless you were following conservative news outlets because CNN and MSNBC barely mentioned it. This type of “gain-of-function” research is highly controversial and has been the subject of many debates since the...

It's a manic moment as male cactus bees envelop a single female. But who in this amorous scrum will emerge lucky and get to mate with her? This remarkable picture, captured by Karine Aigner, is the grand title winner in this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On one level it's quite a technical image. It required the use of a macro probe lens to get in close to the very heart of the action. "I had to spend quite a bit of time on my belly in the dirt," Karine joked.

When something this awful happens, something that affects the lives of millions of your fellow Americans, decent people step back for a moment. It's a moment that demands reverence and silence to consider what we've just seen and then the practical questions. People are suffering. How are they suffering? They don't have power. They don't have communications. How many homes were destroyed? You ask questions like that, and you try to assess what this means and the human cost of it. The one thing you don't do is immediately jump forward to score some sort of cheap and sleazy political...

George Carlin on the environment in 1992: Leave nature alone, the Planet is fine. (Warning: Strong language) “We haven’t learned how to care for one another and we’re gonna save the ******* planet?! I’m getting tired of that ****! I’m tired of ******* Earth Day! I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists; these White, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvo’s! Besides, *environmentalists don’t give a **** about the planet. *They don’t care about the planet; not in the abstract they...

As I write this, I can hear a cardinal trilling in the backyard. I don’t have to look out the open window to confirm the source of the sounds that come through it; I’ve come to recognize the songs and their singers. I know it’s the mourning dove whose cooing wakes me in the morning and the sparrow whose repetitive chirps complete the sunrise chorus. Watching birds perched on a branch or visiting a feeder imparts a certain connection to nature that little else does, and, for me at least, listening to their melodies alleviates stress. Birds are also the...

Tonga volcano spews enough water to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools into stratosphere

The COVID-19 pandemic has led people to wear face masks daily in public. Although the effectiveness of face masks against viral transmission has been extensively studied, there have been few reports on potential hygiene issues due to bacteria and fungi attached to the face masks. We aimed to (1) quantify and identify the bacteria and fungi attaching to the masks, and (2) investigate whether the mask-attached microbes could be associated with the types and usage of the masks and individual lifestyles. We surveyed 109 volunteers on their mask usage and lifestyles, and cultured bacteria and fungi from either the face-side...

NATURE IN THE YEARS OF COVID “and there will be signs in Heaven above and on the earth.…”+ + + 20201. The overabundance of cloudless, crystal clear (and contrailess) days. 2. Fewer than normal fireflies. 3. Almost no blue-stemmed wild raspberries. 4. Katydids began to holler July 25--a week ahead of normal 5. Fall webworms exploded around July 27--ahead of normal. 6. Webworms attacking mulberry and hickory (normally only black walnut) 7. Black walnuts appear much lighter than normal. 8. Warmest July/warmest month EVER in 25 years. 9. Very few Deer Flies (not a bad thing)...appeared in August not June....

Gardners beware -- the invasive Amynthas agrestis, also known as the Asian jumping worm, could be wiggling around a garden near you. These worms are known for their insatiable appetite and ability to jump a foot in the air. Yes, you read that right. "True to their name, they jump and thrash immediately when handled, behaving more like a threatened snake than a worm, sometimes even breaking and shedding their tail when caught," said the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) in a report. As if that's not disconcerting enough, the worms "are extremely active, aggressive, and have voracious...

width =65% The California two-spot octopus displaying its blue eyespot. (Judit Pungor/UC Berkeley) Squishy cephalopods never cease to amaze with their clever features, including brained arms, color-shifting camouflage, escape artistry, and puzzle-solving skills. New analyses of squid, octopus, and cuttlefish (coleoid) genetics reveal their genomes are just as deliciously weird as the animals themselves. The cephalopod genome "is incredibly churned up," says developmental biologist Caroline Albertin, who led one of two new studies identifying strange twists in these cephalopods' genetic histories. In a massive effort, Albertin and colleagues sequenced three soft-bodied cephalopod genomes: the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) –...

Are we to presume that woke corporations, like Disney, teachers' unions, “progressive” academics, corporate media, and chic Hollywood have once and for all settled the long and contentious nature-nurture debate? Seems so. No one is born a certain way, say nurturers. The next time a gay guy or Admiral (Rachel née Richard) Levine tells you that “he was born that way,” tell him that the enlightened elite have changed the rules. Spread the word to any purple-haired, nose-pierced, tattooed LGBTQIA+ you happen to know. The push by self-professed incredibly smart, sophisticated, and science-dedicated progressives to sexualize kids -- starting at...

..Soviet soldier feeding polar bear in the 1950s Taken in Chukchi Peninsula, Soviet Union, an area known for being painfully cold. The negative 40 degree temperatures can take down a polar bear and its children, starving and freezing them if they don't get enough to eat. At the time the soldiers had an abundance of tin cans of condensed milk. They would cut open the tin and feed the condensed milk to the bears.Seagull Trying To Save His Friend From A Bald Eagle.A woman went camping 30 years ago and heard strange noises in the middle of the night so...

Confronted by an army of tiny, slanted pillars of frozen sand, carved by the harsh winds on the shores of Lake Michigan, nature photographer Joshua Nowicki knew he had spotted something extraordinary. The marketing photographer, who snaps landscapes for a living, heads down to the lake almost every night in search of opportunity. This particular December evening in 2021, Nowicki stopped by Tiscornia Park Beach in St. Joseph to photograph spectacular ice starting to accumulate on the lighthouse pier, but he found something far stranger. “Waiting for sunset, I was walking along the beach and happened upon them,” Nowicki told...

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Yet more earthquakes have struck near South Carolina's capital city, the ninth and tenth in a series of rumblings that have caused geologists to wonder how long the convulsions might last, or if they could possibly portend future, more serious seismic activity. Early Wednesday, a 2.6-magnitude earthquake struck near Elgin, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Columbia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was measured at a depth of 0.5 kilometers, officials said. About 7 hours later, another earthquake hit the area, this one with a magnitude of 1.5, according to officials. That area, a...

You probably didn’t hear this in medical school, but the next time you write a prescription, maybe you can make it for “nature.” Pediatrician Robert Zarr, MD, MPH, founded Park Rx America and is its medical director. The nonprofit’s official mission is to decrease the burden of chronic disease, increase health and happiness, and foster environmental stewardship, by virtue of prescribing nature during the routine delivery of healthcare by a diverse group of healthcare professionals. [ Watch: Video: Timeline for Residents and Fellows ] The website has a plethora of free, downloadable resources for those professionals—pediatricians appear to be the...

Amazing..I think.

What if I told you The Lancet, Nature, and other so-called “scientific” journals were the most powerful tools used by the powers-that-be to propagate a multitude of Covid-19 lies and send the entire planet towards economic collapse? What if I also told you much of what these journals have published over the last year have killed countless people. You’d probably think I was giving them too much credit. After all, who reads scientific journals?But when we look at the effects of their various lies, we see that their influence on our lives was far greater than most realize even if...

If this year has taught us anything, it’s that the world is full of surprises, and nature can throw anything at us at any given moment. From fires to hurricanes, we’ve truly seen it all. However, we don’t often stop and think about how crazy nature is on a day to day basis. Here are some photos of crazy things that people stumbled upon that show us the breathtaking power of nature.

A federal judge has ruled that California's 32-year-old assault weapons ban is unconstitutional -- and that the state cannot limit civilian access to weapons he considered to be "fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles."