Free Republic

THE JACKI DAILY Show! Listen live at 2PM Eastern! The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a corporate litigator, and as an Assistant Vice...

Crystal balls at the South Pole. (Photo: Eli Duke/CC BY-SA 2.0)It sounds like the premise for a riddle: At the South Pole are two crystal balls that provides unfailingly accurate information—not about the future, but about the past. This is no trick. It's just meteorology. The dual glass spheres at the South Pole are Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, orbs that capture the number of hours of direct sunlight each day, as well as its intensity.Sunshine recorders first came about in the 1850s, thanks to John Francis Campbell—the Campbell in Campbell-Stokes. Around 1853, Campbell, a Scottish author who focused on Celtic folklore, developed a desire to quantify...

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Northeastern University will create a consortium of private companies and universities to develop smart sensors and other nanomaterials, or extremely small components that are built by “nanoscale” printing processes. Northeastern President Joseph Aoun announced the plan Tuesday at the university’s Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security on its Burlington campus. The consortium will be housed there, as well as at Tufts University and University of Massachusetts Boston. Nanomaterials are crucial to the so-called “Internet of Things,” the emerging network of objects that can collect and share data. Possible commercial applications could include highly precise monitoring of premature...

@JackiDailyShow talks with Marc Morano of @ClimateDepot discusses his movie Climate Hustle @climate_hustle. https://soundcloud.com/jacki-daily/jacki-talks-with-marc-morano-about-the-movie-climate-hustle

Bernie Sanders (champion of the "downtrodden", the climate, wannabe punisher of the successful and "free stuff" Santa Claus) charted a Boeing 767 jet for his overnight trip to Rome to see fellow socialist Pope Francis. According to the Daily Mail... that requires approx 33,192 gallons of fuel for the round trip. 50 or so passengers made the trip with Bern (767 capacity is 250 or so). Comparison to me: calculations of driving patterns based on my two vehicles (one a dreaded eeeveel SUV!), my wife and I "Bern" about 25 gallons of fuel a week. Based on our total fuel...

This was originally written for Deadspin's Blood Week, but shit happens and we're running it now. A 20-pound jug of homemade explosives will take off one or both legs somewhere between the knee and hip, perhaps breaking the pelvis and shattering vertebrae as the shockwave travels up through the skeleton. After our first Marine was wounded this way—let's call him Patient Zero—he was stabilized by his squad's hospital corpsman and flown to the trauma center, a British base that abuts Camp Leatherneck, the hub for Marine operations in southwest Afghanistan. At the time I was running a forward combat aid...

In recent years, proponents of clean energy have taken heart in the falling prices of solar and wind power, hoping they will drive an energy revolution. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests otherwise: Technology-driven cost reductions in fossil fuels will lead us to continue using all the oil, gas, and coal we can, unless governments pass new taxes on carbon emissions. “If we don’t adopt new policies, we’re not going to be leaving fossil fuels in the ground,” says Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We need both a policy...

So when I first made a video showing that CrazyRussianHackers idea about using dry ice for an air conditioner was basically suicidal, I really didnt think anything would come of it. Then recently he filed a DMCA takedown of my video. This resulted in a strike against my account and me losing access to certain features. Now thats a special brand of idiot who makes a video about a suicidal way to chill the air, then files a baseless copyright takedown of the only warning about how dumb that idea is. Especially against a guy like me who has a...

Back in 2011, we wrote about a fascinating new way to heat-treat regular, cheap steel to endow it with an almost miraculous blend of characteristics. Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It's now being tested by three of the world's five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they've been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests....

Maybe this is yet another reason to say “God save the Queen”: dozens of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings, so far reserved for those who visited Buckingham Palace, have been carefully digitalized and made available for you, lucky internaut. But besides this collection of the beautiful, intricate and detailed drawings and sketches of the Italian Renaissance master, along with his notes and observations, the Royal Collection Trust has also launched an iPad application that compiles the whole 268 pages of the da Vinci notebooks. This is no coloring book, but you might enjoy trying to copy some of these! 

THE JACKI DAILY Show! Listen live at 2PM Eastern! The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a corporate litigator, and as an Assistant Vice...

In an unprecedented move, a US judge has given a group of 21 youths permission to sue the federal government for threatening their future health and security by failing to take sufficient action against climate change, despite being aware of the risks. "This decision is one of the most significant in our nation’s history," said the kids' attorney, Philip Gregory. "The Court gave America’s youth a fair opportunity to be heard ... The next step is for the Court to order our government to cease jeopardising the climate system for present and future generations." The lawsuit was brought before Oregon...

Boxer Unhinged: You berate anyone who disagrees with you as immoral and corrupt Rob is our resident Catholic, so I defer to him on matters of Catholic doctrine. But from the looks of things I know a lot more about it than self-identified Catholic Barbara Boxer - whose real religion appears to be global warming. Or should I say, the massively expanded and empowered government we’ll get if only people stop questioning the left-wing orthodoxy on things like global warming, which demands that all debate stop immediately and that government be given whatever it wants so it can do something,...

All sophisticated life on the planet Earth may owe its existence to one freakish event. At first glance, a tree could not be more different from the caterpillars that eat its leaves, the mushrooms sprouting from its bark, the grass growing by its trunk, or the humans canoodling under its shade. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Zoom in closely, and you will see that these organisms are all surprisingly similar at a microscopic level. Specifically, they all consist of cells that share the same basic architecture. These cells contain a central nucleus—a command center that is stuffed with DNA and...

The enviro-critical movement is now almost unanimous in the opinion that environmentalism is a project of certain wealthy elites. This is no secret. The controlling minds of giant philanthropic trusts and major multinational corporations are required by law to make public their contributions to green NGOs, and they usually comply. One could compile a list of 500 extremely wealthy individuals, from Prince Albert to Tom Steyer, who have publically plunged into the green pond. This is not a milieu where one finds radical levellers. These people are obviously not “leftists.” Calling actual socialists “reds” is fair comment. Calling neo-fascists masquerading...

It might be time to rethink fertility treatment. Here’s the scoop: scientists at Northwestern University 3D printed a functional ovary out of Jello-like material and living cells. When implanted into mice that had their ovaries removed, the moms regained their monthly cycle and gave birth to healthy pups. The scientists presented their results last week at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Boston. Although the study was done in mice, “we developed this implant with downstream human applications in mind,” says lead author Dr. Monica Laronda in a press release. If successful in humans, the prosthetic would be able to...

THE JACKI DAILY Show! Listen live at 2PM Eastern! Now playing also on station KWEL in Midland-Odessa! The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as...

Spacex and NASA just launched the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module. As a precursor to larger space habitat systems, Bigelow said BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module) could "change the entire dynamic for human habitation" in space. He hopes to have a pair of private space BA330 stations ready for launch by 2020. Companies- even countries - are clamoring to put their own experiments inside the empty BEAM, Bigelow said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. If everything goes well, that next commercial step could happen in perhaps six months. Compared to their volume-mass ratio, expandable modules offer more...

Adding graphene to solar cells makes them generate power from rain. Solar power has been on a continuous rise over the past decade. Rooftop solar is arguably the most common renewable energy source for home use, and solar power plants are arguably the biggest renewable energy large scale generators. But, regardless of all this, there is still something that limits solar power generation, and that is weather. In order for solar cells to produce electricity, there has to be sun. Rain is sometimes welcome (preferably at night), to clean up dust and soil articles that could limit the efficiency of...

Veterans earned their VA health care when they signed the dotted line to serve our country. So when American Legion Commander Dale Barnett saw that a commission that is top-heavy with private hospital executives was trying to dismantle it, he had to be blunt. “I don’t understand how commissions paid by the federal government are able to break ranks, create an unapproved report and try to advance self-serving agendas while operating as congressional appointees,” Barnett said. He's talking about the congressionally-mandated Commission on Care, an entity dominated by private hospital executives and Koch Brothers-affiliated "policy experts." The commission's charge under...