Free Republic

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we...

A Republican lawmaker wants answers from the Department of Agriculture about taxpayer-funded research experiments at a Maryland facility that have allegedly led to the deaths of hundreds of cats and kittens. Citing documents reviewed by his office, Michigan Republican Mike Bishop described a decades-old research project at the USDA's Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, in which hundreds of kittens are bred, fed meat that is infected with Toxoplasma, and later killed and discarded by "incineration." In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue dated Monday, Bishop wrote that he was "shocked to hear that the USDA, the very...

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.” - Donald Rumsfeld Trenton McKinley of Mobile, Alabama, suffered severe brain trauma from a freak dune buggy accident in March. Doctors told his parents he was braindead. They said that if he survived he’d be in a vegetative state. So they signed the organ donation papers. After days of being brain dead,...

The experimental research combined two types of stem cells and created a viable embryo – which the team say would provide an unlimited stock for medical research. The created embryos would also be used for medical treatment testing and help shed light on one of the biggest infertility enigmas - why embryos fail to implant in the womb. However critics say it is a huge step towards human cloning. The researchers believe the wonder creation could see mice being cloned in three years time, and humans two decades later.

Of Mice and Men - Pondering the Strange Loss of Faith in an Age of Science Msgr. Charles Pope • May 2, 2018 • One of the more perplexing claims of the growing number of agnostics and atheists among us is that there is no evidence of an intelligent creator of the universe. Clearly, the created universe manifests intelligibility and order from the farthest reaches of outer space down to our small planet and further down into the “inner space” of cells, atoms, and molecules. Science affirms the existence of a creator by uncovering the inner order and intelligibility...

The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science. Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C., according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28 years old. According to the website News2Share.com, Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are...

"Meridani Planum is located on the equator due east of the giant canyons of Valles Marineris. It is a subsection region inside Arabia Terra, the largest of the transition zones between the lower elevation vast plains of the northern hemisphere and the higher elevation crater southern highlands."

Around the world, billions of consumers voluntarily consume fossil fuels to live safe, comfortable, prosperous lives. Tens of thousands of entities and tens of millions of employees provide oil, natural gas, coal, and electricity to them. As such, plentiful, affordable, reliable energy is a global good with moral and enrichment implications—is, has been, will be. Strange, then, that climate-change alarmists/activists are suing the largest, most profitable energy companies by using local “nuisance” ordinances to claim damages related to global warming. In California, for example, San Francisco, Oakland and other cities have sued BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch...

The series of space rock flybys begins at 10:29 UTC Sunday as asteroid 2013 US3, travelling at a respectable 7.69 km/s (27,646 kph) with a diameter of between 160-360 meters whizzes past us. For comparison, the Eiffel Tower measures 324 meters from ground to tip. Next up are asteroids 2018 GO4 and 2018 GY1, which are expected to scream past us at 12:34 and 18:20 UTC respectively. Asteroid 2018 GO4 measures approximately 30-68 meters (between three and six school buses in diameter) and has a brisk pace of 8.57 km/s. Meanwhile, 2018 GY1, on the other hand, won’t be hanging...

Aa Astronomers are celebrating a massive data release that offers them the richest ever map of the Milky Way. The information comes from ESA's GAIA space telescope, which has surveyed almost two billion stars in our galaxy. They now have very precise data on billions of stars around our galaxy that will make for decades of analysis. It gives them the possibility to research the history of our galaxy and postulate what might happen in the future, too.Astronomer François Mignard was one of the founding fathers of the GAIA mission. So why does this data release make such a difference...

Settled Science: A new study published in a peer-reviewed journal finds that climate models exaggerate the global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%. If these findings hold true, it's huge news. No wonder the mainstream press is ignoring it. In the study, authors Nic Lewis and Judith Curry looked at actual temperature records and compared them with climate change computer models. What they found is that the planet has shown itself to be far less sensitive to increases in CO2 than the climate models say. As a result, they say, the planet will warm less than the...

Abstract The asteroid belt contains less than a thousandth of Earth's mass and is radially segregated, with S-types dominating the inner belt and C-types the outer belt. It is generally assumed that the belt formed with far more mass and was later strongly depleted. We show that the present-day asteroid belt is consistent with having formed empty, without any planetesimals between Mars and Jupiter's present-day orbits. This is consistent with models in which drifting dust is concentrated into an isolated annulus of terrestrial planetesimals. Gravitational scattering during terrestrial planet formation causes radial spreading, transporting planetesimals from inside 1 to 1.5...

At an event at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., that was closed to the press, agency head Scott Pruitt touted the new policy as a way to increase transparency and enable the public to double-check research underpinning environmental regulations. The rule would require the agency to use only studies in which the underlying data are available for public scrutiny when formulating new “significant” regulations, which typically are regulations estimated to impose costs of $100 million or more. Specifically, the proposed rule says that EPA is seeking transparency for “the dose response data and models that underlie what we are calling...

The dominant explanation of the formation of star and galaxy clusters is flawed and misrepresents the nature of time, a team of Brazilian researchers claim, in a new study that uses simulations to explain a long-standing paradox in a process called ‘violent relaxation’. Clusters of stars and galaxies are tight groups of celestial bodies shackled together by gravity. Star clusters contain up to one million stars with a common origin and are up to 30 light-years across, while collections of galaxies are among the largest structures in the Universe, composed of up to 1000 galaxies with a mass of a...

EarthNow is a new company looking to provide satellite imagery and live video in virtually real-time. Its unsettling pitch describes a network of satellites that can see any corner of the globe and provide live video with a latency of about a second. And a look at the startup’s top investors gives a lot of confidence that this thing is happening. On Wednesday, EarthNow announced that it will emerge from the Intellectual Ventures ISF Incubator to become a full-scale commercial business. Its first round of investors is comprised of a small group of complimentary powerhouses: AirBus, the SoftBank Group, Bill...

COLORADO SPRINGS — Future private space stations may be sponsored by major corporations, which prompted a spirited discussion during a panel on the future of low Earth orbit at the 34th Space Symposium here. “I don’t want the Taco Bell International Space Station,” said Erin MacDonald, modeling and simulation engineer for Engility’s Space and Mission Systems Group. “I think it goes against what the public perceives the space station is supposed to be like.” While the International Space Station is unlikely to be rebranded by Taco Bell or any other corporation, if a new commercial space station is “paid for...

Golden Rice was declared safe for consumption by Canada recently. This has huge implications for the rest of the world, where Golden Rice can be vital resource in tackling vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition.Genetically modified (GM) crops are engineered to display traits that are otherwise absent or subdued in natural crops. For example, gene modification results in crops that are highly resistant to diseases and more accustomed to extreme weather conditions. Sometimes, these crops also contain increased nutritional value.Golden Rice, also known as Provitamin A Biofortified Rice Event GR2E, has strikingly higher levels of Provitamin A than other commercially available...

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a stunning collection of images of the circumstellar discs that surround young stars. The images were captured with the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) instrument on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. We’ve been looking at images of circumstellar disks for quite some time, but this collection reveals the fascinating variety of shapes an sizes that these disks can take.

The first large-scale, national study of transgender children, including some as young as 3, is poised to expand thanks to a five-year, $1 million grant awarded Thursday by the National Science Foundation to the professor leading the project. University of Washington psychologist Kristina Olson, 36, was named winner of the NSF’s annual Alan T. Waterman Award, the government’s highest honor for scientists still in the early phases of their careers. The NSF said the choice was unanimous, and noted that pediatricians are already using her findings to raise awareness about gender diversity.

The Earth has a second magnetic field, one generated by ocean currents. Researchers know little about it, but images captured by satellites show this invisible force generated by the world’s salty oceans in perfect detail. ... ESA released a video detailing the changes in the Earth’s magnetic field over a 24-hour period... ...“It’s a really tiny magnetic field. It’s about 2-2.5 nanotesla at satellite altitude, which is about 20,000 times weaker than the Earth’s global magnetic field.”... Oceans may have a small contribution to the magnetic field that protects the planet from harmful cosmic rays, but it remains to be...