Free Republic

A U.S. government that once famously spent $2.6 million to encourage Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly is capable of almost anything. Members of Congress often use these stories about absurd taxpayer-funded studies to make fun of the bureaucracy. Instead of just mocking silly studies, maybe they should put a stop to them.

How big ARE New York's rats? Researcher catches one-and-a-half pound rodent three times the size of a normal beast "...'I've caught rats all over the city, and I've seen the ones that I didn't catch. I think it's among the biggest that live in New York City,' said Matt Combs of Fordham University. [snip] One of the largest rats ever reported in New York City was a huge beast dubbed Master Splinter by the Twitter user that first posted a picture of it. The enormous rat was found in a Footlocker store in the Bronx in 2012, according to Twitter...

Catechism of the Catholic Church A resource for your research

John Lott: Even Liberal Academics Are Turning Pro-Gun Ownership From the left and right, people are bombarded with diametrically opposing claims on guns. But most of this bombardment isn’t coming from the National Rifle Association. Michael Bloomberg is spending far more money — hundreds of millions of dollars — trying to convince Americans that guns should be kept out of the hands of even law-abiding citizens. And yet, by double-digit margins, Americans say that they feel safer if more people in their neighborhood own guns. The answer is the same on concealed carry. Most of the media are doing their...

A scientific researcher who has been studying the Zika virus and its possible link to brain abnormalities in babies says legalized abortion hindered his research. The mosquito-borne virus, a growing concern in South America, is believed to be linked to microcephaly, a neurological disorder where a baby’s head is significantly smaller and the brain is abnormally developed, according to the Mayo Clinic. The condition is not typically fatal, but it can cause health problems throughout the baby’s life. The World Health Organization reports that the relationship between the virus and microcephaly has not been confirmed yet but is highly suspected....

Barack Obama is not really changing gun law. He can't. What he IS doing is creating more jobs for the FBI and BATF and increasing the manpower of both agencies for future use. Also, he is stirring people to anger to be able to mark those who react the most for future reference as well. Don't play the game.

This week, millions of people around the world will no doubt experience rapid mimicry-an involuntary, split-second mirroring of another person's facial expressions-as they exchange smiles over gifts, good meals and holiday traditions. This phenomenon, observed in humans and many other primates, is considered a basic building block of our ability to feel empathy. "When your companion or friend smiles, you don't know why exactly, but you immediately react with the same smile to him or her," says Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa in Italy. "It’s an extremely important phenomenon, because through this mimicry you can...

Speaking at an event for women in Los Angeles this week, Barbra Streisand complained that society is so misogynistic, even female laboratory mice are being discriminated against. "Gender discrimination drives me crazy," said the multiple Grammy and Academy award-winning actress and singer. "Women are still treated as second-class citizens when it comes to equal pay in the workplace and equal representation in Congress." [Snip] Streisand, who has made contributions toward heart disease research for nearly three decades, then spoke out about gender inequality in medical research. "Gender inequality even extends to mice in the labs," she said. "They're all male!"...

Yesterday the president of the University of Missouri resigned because student pressure and a hunger striker and some faculty in the football team all asked for the president's resignation. The University of Missouri has a long-standing history of racism. Over five years ago one of the students from UM held an open mic in Columbia, Missouri that our organization hosted. Her poem was about racism. Similarly, in our community, the University of Colorado has a long history of discrimination against people with lived experience of recovery from mental health labels. One Colorado advocate has made attempts for over 20 years...

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think… When you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the...

For years you've been telling your friends, family, co-workers and anyone who will listen that you're addicted to cheese. It's a part of every meal or snack, and you think about it constantly. According to a new study from the University of Michigan, cheese crack is a real thing. And so is your addiction. The study, published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, examines why certain foods are more addictive than others. Researchers identified addictive foods from about 500 students who completed the Yale Food Addiction Scale, designed to measure if someone has a food addiction. Pizza, unsurprisingly, came...

Inflation expectations, as well as median one-year ahead expected growth in the costs of several commodities (food, housing, medical, college education) are all at or near their lowest levels since the start of the survey in June 2013. Median earnings growth and household spending growth expectations decreased sharply from the prior month. Median expected spending growth is more than a percentage point below its June 2015 level and has reached a new series low.

(IMAGES/SCREENSHOTS ARE AVAILABLE AT THE LINK. COULDN'T POST THEM HERE) Well, Todd Nickerson the pedophile has responded to the “right wing vile” backlash he got for coming out to the world as someone who’s sexually attracted to children. Sorry I’m not sorry. If you’re sexually attracted to children, you’re a sick bastard. And not one for whom I have much, shall we say “tolerance”? He called me out by name..ish: Then there’s Alex Crowder’s lunacy by way of Alex Jones: No, Salon.com, I Don’t Need to ‘Understand’ the Plight of Pedophiles. Again, the implication in the very title is that...

he past few days, the Internet has been filled with commentary on whether the National Science Foundation should have paid for my study on duck genitalia, and 88.7 percent of respondents to a Fox news online poll agreed that studying duck genitalia is wasteful government spending. The commentary supporting and decrying the study continues to grow. As the lead investigator in this research, I would like to weigh in on the controversy and offer some insights into the process of research funding by the NSF. My research on bird genitalia was originally funded in 2005, during the Bush administration. Thus...

Finding ways to create clean drinking water where there is none is a field of constant innovation. Desalination, the process of filtering seawater to make it fit for human use, is perhaps the most common and researchers around the globe are on a quest to bring cost-effective and portable desalination technology to rural areas where it is desperately needed. So it’s exciting news that researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt have developed a promising new method that can turn salt water into fresh water in just a few minutes. The new Egyptian method relies on salt-attracting membranes and vaporizing heat...

On the Five in a discussion about Planned Parenthood harvesting fetal tissue, organs and cadavers for profit and/or research Geraldo Rivera is arguing with Greg Gutfeld about uses for the physical remains that PP takes during abortions.

In the wake of the recent undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress, which has exposed Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal parts for the purpose of research, microbiologist Nathalia Holt wrote “The Case for Fetal-Cell Research,” published last week in the New York Times. In the essay, Holt clearly expresses her uneasiness about harvesting organs from aborted fetuses. And unlike Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, Holt openly acknowledges that harvesting human fetal organs is part of widespread and lucrative business. “There are profits to be made by such middlemen in what critics call...

Maybe the undercover investigation conducted by the Center for Medical Progress needed to happen so people could see and hear the gruesomeness of Planned ParenthoodÂ’s harvesting and sale of fetal body parts. Maybe it was too easy to ignore without video-taped evidence in plain, gory language. Maybe it is not enough to be outraged at abortion on its face because, I donÂ’t know, killing is somehow worse if body parts are sold.But anyone who has followed the Human Genome Project, cloning, genetic, evolution, and stem cell research knows that the use of fetal and embryonic body parts and tissues...

The Obama administration is getting grief from a pro-life group for approving an experiment using the remains of the bodies of unborn children victimized in abortion for research continues in U.S. laboratories. Scott Fischbach, the director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life uncovered the information showing a clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration uses brain tissue from aborted unborn babies to treat macular degeneration. StemCells Inc. will inject fetal brain stem cells into the eyes of up to 16 patients to study the cells’ effect on vision. In its press release announcing the clinical trial, StemCells Inc....

Pediatric neurosurgeon and GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson says this week that Planned Parenthood’s claim that obtaining fetal tissue from abortions is important for medical and scientific research is “spurious.” “There’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue,” Carson said on Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File. “[I]t’s been over-promised what the benefits of fetal research would be. And very much under-delivered.” Yet, the promise of medical research was the defense given for the discussion by Planned Parenthood’s senior medical director, seen in an investigative video, describing how to abort a baby in such a way that allows...