Free Republic

Editor's note: Global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science... The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease--both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6ºC (or about 1ºF) over the past century is likely. A relevant...

...This dogmatic notion, enforced with alarming severity, has also insinuated itself into every fiber of our public education system. Children today are unable to read, write, compute, or even speak at grade level---and they can't find Canada on a world map---but you can be darned sure they know whose fault global warming is. I recall, many years ago, seeing a note pinned to a friend's door from his young cousin that read, "you are the best cusen (sic) in the wrld (sic)." A very sweet, albeit poorly spelled gesture of familial affection. Of course, on that same paper, almost as...

A judge refused to declare a mistrial Tuesday in the case against a prominent University of Southern California geneticist accused of molesting the daughter of a colleague over a five-year period. Superior Court Judge Michael E. Pastor made the ruling after defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued against the introduction of e-mail exchanges between William French Anderson, known as the father of gene therapy, and his accuser. Anderson, 69, is charged with one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under age 14 and three counts of committing a lewd act upon a child. He has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors claim...

SEOUL, South Korea - Disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk went on trial Tuesday on charges of fraud and embezzlement in a scandal over faked stem cell research that undermined global hopes of dramatic new treatments for incurable diseases. Hwang was indicted last month for allegedly accepting $2.1 million in private donations based on the outcome of the falsified research and embezzling about $831,000 in private and government research funds. Hwang also was accused of buying human eggs for research, a violation of the country's bioethics law. If convicted, the 52-year-old scientist faces at least three years in prison. Hwang is...

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years. "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for...

WASHINGTON – It should be glorious to be William Gray, professor emeritus. He's the guy who predicts the number of hurricanes for the coming tropical storm season. He works on a country road leading into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University. He's mentored dozens of scientists. He's a towering figure in his profession and in person. He's loud. His laugh is gale force. He can be very charming. He's also angry. He's outraged. He recently had a shouting match with one of his former students. It went on for 45...

Scientists make water run uphill By Roland Pease BBC science correspondent Watch the drop move Physicists have made water run uphill quite literally under its own steam. The droplets propel themselves over metal sheets scored with a carefully designed array of grooves. The US scientists did the experiment to demonstrate how the random motion of water molecules in hot steam could be channelled into a directed force. But the team, writing in Physical Review Letters, believes the effect may be useful in driving coolants through overheating computer microchips. The physics at work here has been witnessed by all of us...

Prof. Yuval Ne'eman, 80, a world-acclaimed physicist, multi-talented academic, one of Israel's most prominent scientists and a right-wing ideologue, died on Wednesday at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center after suffering a stroke. Born in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1925, he was not only the initiator of the Science and Technology Ministry and twice minister but also the founder and chairman of the Israel Space Agency. His coffin is to be on view in the courtyard of the Tel Aviv University Senate Building on Thursday from noon, and a funeral ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. in the presence of...

What would happen if a world-renowned scientist and evolutionary ecologist told hundreds of his colleagues that 90 percent of the human race needed to be wiped out by exposure to Ebola or some other deadly virus? Apparently, according to a scientist who claims to have witnessed such a remarkable event one month ago, the fiend would get a standing ovation and an award. Forrest Mims III That's the story being told by Forrest Mims III, a member of the Texas Academy of Science, chairman of its environmental science section and editor of the Citizen Scientist.

No future for fusion power, says top scientist 19:00 09 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service David L Chandler Nuclear fusion will never be a practical source of electrical power, argues a prominent scientist in the journal Science. Even nuclear fusion’s staunchest advocates admit a power-producing fusion plant is still decades away at best, despite forty years of hard work and well over $20 billion spent on the research. But the new paper, personally backed by the journal’s editor, issues a strong challenge to the entire fusion programme, arguing that the whole massive endeavour is never likely to lead to anything...

WASHINGTON’S CHANGE OF HEART Ex-IISc chief gets visa to US From Shyam Bhatia DH News Service Washington: The State Department’s change of heart came after concern was expressed in several quarters, both in the US and abroad, that distinguished foreign scientists are being needlessly excluded from attending legitimate conferences, seminars and lectures in America. Professor Goverdhen Mehta will be able to travel to the US as planned after the State Department in Washington backed down and told Deccan Herald that a visa has been approved for the former Director of the Indian Institute of Science. A US State Department spokesman...

SEOUL (Reuters) - The president of Seoul National University stripped a title from a disgraced researcher because of science fraud and called for six others to be punished who were part of the same cloning scandal, the school said on Friday. Once heralded and now scorned, scientist Hwang Woo-suk lost his title as "chair-professor." Hwang had already resigned his post at the university on December 23 when an investigation panel said in an interim report that he bore major responsibility for deliberately fabricated data in two landmark papers on embryonic stem cells. Seoul National University President Chung Un-chan said the...

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - A honeycomb cluster of cells on NASA's Stardust spacecraft captured thousands of samples of interstellar and comet dust that scientists said Thursday could give them the first definitive evidence about how the solar system formed. "Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system - a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist who worked on the Stardust mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Some of the samples collected during the seven-year,...

SEOUL, South Korea - Disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk asked his fellow South Koreans for forgiveness Thursday at his first public appearance in almost three weeks, saying he takes full responsibility for his fraudulent stem cell research. "I ask for your forgiveness," Hwang told a nationally televised press conference in Seoul. "I feel so miserable that it's difficult even to say sorry." Seoul National University, where Hwang is a professor, on Tuesday issued a final report that he fabricated landmark published claims in 2004 and 2005 to have created the world's first human embryonic stem stells from cloned embryos. "The use...

Scientist compares Moses to Hitler, calls New Testament 'sado-masochistic doctrine'Controversial scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler," calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening. Entitled "Root of All Evil?," the series features the atheist Dawkins visiting Lourdes, France, Colorado Springs, Colo., the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and a British religious school, using each of the venues to argue religion subverts reason. In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage...

On a December night in 1831, HMS Beagle, on a mission to chart the coast of South America, sailed from Plymouth, England, straight into the 21st century. Onboard was a 22-year-old amateur naturalist, Charles Darwin, the son of a prosperous country doctor, who was recruited for the voyage largely to provide company for the Beagle's aloof and moody captain, Robert FitzRoy. For the next five years, the little ship — just 90 feet long and eight yards wide — sailed up and down Argentina, through the treacherous Strait of Magellan and into the Pacific, before returning home by way of...

WASHINGTON - A U.S. scientist who toured North Korea's reactors shortly before the country agreed to abandon its nuclear program said Tuesday he believes Pyongyang is still aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons. Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was given a rare inside look at apparent plutonium production by North Korean scientists in August, one month before negotiators from six nations reached their agreement. Talks are to start Wednesday on how to implement the September deal. Based on what Hecker saw and was told during the visits, the nuclear scientist said North Korea...

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A supernova could be the "quick and dirty" explanation for what may have happened to an early North American culture, a nuclear scientist here said Thursday. Richard Firestone said at the "Clovis in the Southeast" conference that he thinks "impact regions" on mammoth tusks found in Gainey, Mich., were caused by magnetic particles rich in elements like titanium and uranium. This composition, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist said, resembles rocks that were discovered on the moon and have also been found in lunar meteorites that fell to Earth about 10,000 years ago. Firestone said that, based...

A Shia nuclear scientist said to be close to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is emerging as one of the frontrunners to become the new prime minister of Iraq. Hussain Shahristani spent a decade in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison for defying former dictator Saddam Hussein's command to turn his scientific expertise to the development of nuclear weapons. Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy, and Robert Blackwill, a Bush administration official, are still finalising the composition of the new Iraqi government. Officials say that balancing the communal, religious and ethnic groups within the new government is proving difficult and fluid, and caution that...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The world must stick with the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions and the United States needs to show leadership in limiting climate change instead of being an obstacle, a top British scientist said on Monday. Officials from 150 nations meet in Canada next month to discuss how to take the Kyoto pact beyond 2012, when its first phase ends. The pact, which came into force this year, obliges only developed nations to meet emissions targets while developing nations, including big polluters China and India, are excluded until at least 2012. "We are faced with a situation...

A leading British scientist said on Friday the growing ferocity of hurricanes hitting the United States was very probably caused by global warming and criticised what he termed U.S. climate loonies over the issue. Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution which advises the government, made what the Independent newspaper said was a thinly disguised attack on the stance of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration. "The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming," Lawton told the newspaper in an interview. "If this makes the climate...

I can’t remember a time when I did not believe in God or Jesus Christ as a personal Savior. The creation/evolution debate was quite different, however. The subject used to be a “non-issue” for the church I attended. If anything, the predominant belief was the “gap theory,” but not much was said about the issue at all. This and my strong interest in science led to the inevitable combination of both theories, and another “theistic evolutionist” or “progressive creationist” was born. However, while studying for my Tertiary Admittance Exam (years 11 and 12), I couldn’t help but notice the religious...

PLANET-DISSOLVING DUST CLOUD IS HEADED TOWARD EARTH!Monday September 12, 2005 By MIKE FOSTER CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they've dubbed a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars -- and it's headed directly toward Earth! Discovered April 6 by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an "acid nebula" and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light -- making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014. "The good news...

When I recently suggested this disconnect publicly, I was vigorously challenged. One person recalled my use of Wilkins and charged me with quote mining. The proof, supposedly, was in Wilkins's subsequent paragraph: "Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them." In reality, however,...

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, would not elaborate about the nature of the evidence, but they said they were following up on it to see where the information took them. In late March 2004, just weeks after the deadly Madrid train bombings, British authorities launched Operation Crevis, which resulted in the arrest of eight British Muslims, ages 17 to 32, on suspicion they were planning or instigating "acts of terrorism." At the time, police sources said the suspects were linked to "possible Islamist terror."In the raids, more than 700 British police fanned out at sites in London...

PHOENIX, AZ -- (ArriveNet - May 09, 2005) -- FPSnewswire/- A record number of young scientists and inventors arrive today to compete for $3 million in scholarships and awards at the 2005 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), presented by Agilent Technologies. Representing 45 countries, regions and territories, 1,447 high school students will spend the week meeting with senior scientists, sharing ideas and presenting projects on such varied topics as alternative fuels, water quality and organic compounds to fight infection and disease. Students range in age from 13 to 20; the split between females and males is almost...

Special to LiveScience LiveScience.com Wed Apr 27,10:24 AM ET Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting. Mirror neurons In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the...

'Parlor Maid' tarnishes FBI Details of Leung-Smith spy case throw bureau's handling of investigation into question Details of Leung-Smith spy case throw bureau's handling By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER Twelve years ago, a team of U.S. counterintelligence operatives flew into frigid southern Manchuria to assess Chinese spying on American diplomats. Instead, the U.S. agents came to believe their own team was tracked by China's Ministry of State Security every step of their mission, which is still classified today. The first clue was an odd elevator encounter in remote northeast China, an FBI agent bumping into a California nuclear-weapons scientist suspected...

M.I.T. Norbert Wiener, a founder of computer science and the information age. [Review by]By CLIVE THOMPSON DARK HERO OF THE INFORMATION AGE In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. By Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. Illustrated. 423 pp. Basic Books. $27.50. TO be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. Newton had the apple and gravity. Even the lesser rock-star scientists have one shining achievement for which they're known -- such as Niels Bohr's theory of the atom. But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through,...

President Bush on Friday picked physicist Michael Griffin to lead NASA as it prepares to resume space shuttle flights and tries to meet the White House goal of sending astronauts back to the moon in the decade ahead. If confirmed by the Senate, Griffin would become the space agency's 11th administrator. Members of Congress immediately praised the president's choice, as did John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's space policy institute. "I've known Mike for a long time and have a great deal of respect for him as a kind of innovative thinker, real enthusiast full of energy," Logsdon said....

ITHACA, N.Y. - Hans Bethe, one of the last of the giants of 20th century physics, who played a pivotal role in designing the first atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for figuring out how the sun and other stars generate energy, has died at the age of 98. Bethe died Sunday at his home, Cornell University announced Monday. During World War II, he was a key figure in the building of the first atomic bomb as head of the Manhattan Project's theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, N.M. Bethe (BAY'-tuh), who fled Nazi Germany and joined the Cornell...

Are spirituality and science incompatible? It's an age-old question with no easy answers. To some, the acrimonious debate over whether to teach about the Bible in America's biology classrooms is reason enough to believe these two sides are mutually exclusive. Yet science can also be a doorway to the spiritual realm. Take Sondra Barrett, a self-described "hardcore scientist" who had no interest in spirituality but became convinced of a higher power while examining human blood cells as a UCSF cancer researcher in the 1970s. Since then, Barrett, 64, has used her microscope to photograph everything from caffeine molecules to chicken...

STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - Even before neuroscientist Zach Hall was formally given the job Tuesday to run California's $3 billion stem cell research institute, his salary came under fire. Charles Halpern, a Berkeley writer who filed a legal petition with the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine protesting some of its activities, complained that Hall's $389,004 annual paycheck to serve as interim president was too lucrative. Halpern and other institute critics complained that the institute president should be paid a salary comparable to the head of the National Institutes of Health, which is roughly $100,000 less than Hall's pay. The language...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A renowned University of Southern California gene therapy scientist accused of molesting two children over the past 20 years posted bond and was released from jail, authorities said Monday. William French Anderson, 68, was released shortly after 5 a.m. on bond, according to the county Sheriff's Department Web site. No other information was immediately released. Anderson is accused of molesting a girl he instructed in martial arts between 1997 and 2001. He has pleaded not guilty to a count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under age 14 and five counts of committing a lewd...

Death of worker at treatment plant ruled a homicide The Associated Press PATERSON, N.J. - A woman whose body was found in a tank at a water treatment plant drowned and her death has been ruled a homicide, the Passaic County prosecutor said Monday. Geetha Angara had been doing water quality tests Wednesday when she disappeared. A search found her body about 100 feet from where she was working, but her two-way radio and clipboard were found directly below the work area, which had a protective grate to prevent falls, Prosecutor James F. Avigliano said. "That was where we think...

Ernst Mayr, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist called "the Darwin of the 20th century," has died, the school said Friday. He was 100. A member of the Harvard faculty for more than half a century, Mayr was considered the world's most eminent evolutionary biologist. He almost single-handedly made the origin of species diversity the central question of evolutionary biology that it is today, Harvard said. In an interview with The Boston Globe before his 100th birthday last year, Mayr said he always had "tremendous curiosity" and balked at suggestions he stop working. "People say to me, Why don't you retire?'...

MP's wife introduced him to Saddam sympathiser, writes CAMERON SIMPSON and AARON HICKLIN GEORGE Galloway first met the shadowy figure of Fawaz Zureikat through his Palestinian wife. The fateful meeting was to propel the man who goes under the soubriquets of "Gorgeous George" and the "MP for Baghdad Central" into one of the biggest crises of his colourful career. Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, 36, a Jerusalem-born scientist who married Mr Galloway in a secret ceremony in London in February 2000, had gone to the same university in Jordan as Mr Zureikat. Mr Zureikat's name first surfaced in a letter from Mr...

OSLO, Norway -- A scientist considered the father of Iraq's nuclear program said Thursday that his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait. The invasion sparked the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad's nuclear and biological weapons program, said Jafar Dhia Jafar, the scientific head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear program," said Jafar, presenting his new Norwegian-language book, "Oppdraget", which...

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. advertisement In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian atomic scientist surrendered eight containers filled with arms-grade nuclear material to police Tuesday after keeping it in his garage for eight years, Russian media reported. Leonid Grigorov found the 14 ounces of plutonium-238 in a heap of rubbish at his laboratory near Russia's border with Kazakhstan, Itar-Tass news agency said. Interfax news agency said the lab, looted after the Soviet collapse in 1991, was eventually closed and deserted. Grigorov decided to hide the material, which could theoretically be used to make a "dirty bomb," in a box and only handed it in to local police...

BERN, Switzerland - Prosecutors on Wednesday opened an investigation into two Swiss citizens suspected of illegally exporting nuclear-bomb-making technology to Libya, a spokesman for the prosecutors office said. The spokesman, Hansjuerg Mark Wiedmer, declined to identify the suspects. But one investigative source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said one was Swiss engineer Urs Tinner, who was arrested in Germany last week. The Swiss agency that polices adherence to international sanctions disclosed in February that it had opened an investigation to determine whether Tinner had broken Swiss law by making precision parts in Malaysia that were destined for Libya. He is...

The Iraqi physicist who ran his country's uranium enrichment program says that Saddam Hussein continued to fund efforts to develop nuclear weapons right up until the U.S. invasion in March 2003. ... In an interview with WABC Radio's John Gambling, the Iraqi centrifuge scientist said he was ordered to keep his nuclear bombmaking research concealed from U.N. weapons inspectors.

WASHINGTON — On most days now, Mahdi Obeidi rides his new mountain bike, plays with his grandkids and works on getting a U.S. patent for technology he originally developed to build a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein. Obeidi, who headed Hussein's uranium enrichment program until it was shut down in 1991, is the only Iraqi weapons scientist that the CIA is known to have brought to the United States after the invasion last year. The CIA also flew eight of his family members here in August 2003 and secretly set them up in three adjoining apartments in a leafy Virginia...

Irish, Scots and Welsh not Celts - scientists September 09 2004 at 08:15PM Dublin - Celtic nations like Ireland and Scotland have more in common with the Portuguese and Spanish than with "Celts" - the name commonly used for a group of people from ancient Alpine Europe, scientists say. "There is a received wisdom that the origin of the people of these islands lie in invasions or migrations... but the affinities don't point eastwards to a shared origin," said Daniel Bradley, co-author of a genetic study into Celtic origins. Early historians believed the Celts - thought to have come from...

Former Iraqi Oil Minister Surrenders 16 minutes ago By NIKO PRICE, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s former oil minister, a trusted adviser who earlier oversaw Iraq (news - web sites)'s top-secret missile programs, has surrendered to U.S.-led forces, the U.S. Central Command said Tuesday. AP Photo (AP Video) Latest news: · U.S. Soldiers Fire at Iraqi Protesters AP - 6 minutes ago · Former Iraqi Oil Minister Surrenders AP - 16 minutes ago · Last Soldier Missing in Iraq Found Dead AP - 27 minutes ago Special Coverage   Amer Mohammed Rashid, known...

Saddam Hussein gave up all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the scientist who headed his nuclear program, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, said in a BBC interview on Wednesday. "There was no capability. There was no chemical or biological or any what are called weapons of mass destruction," said Jaffar in what BBC television called his first-ever broadcast interview. Speaking in Paris, where he now lives, Jaffar - who ran Saddam's nuclear program for 25 years - said there was "no development" of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons "at any time after 1991"....

Scientist: DNA Disputes Russian Tsar Remains July 14, 2004 — An American scientific team has disputed what was thought to be the definitive identification of the remains of the Russian royal family, executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, London's Daily Telegraph said Monday. The Russian government in 1998 identified bones found in a common grave in Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, as belonging to Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra and three of their daughters. Tsar Nicholis And Family “ Calling us names, as Dr. Gill has done, will not help their fatally flawed position." ” The Russian authorities said then that the identification...

Seattle Doctor Specializes In Near-Death Experiences The NBC 10 Investigators tracked down a doctor in Seattle whose research may come closer to anyone else to answering the question, is there life after death? Dr. Melvin Morse is a pediatrician who used to think that people who were interested in near-death experiences just wanted to be on television talk shows. But something happened to one of his patients that changed his opinion. Now he believes the evidence points to something after life. Most scientists will explain that near-death experiences are caused by the lack of oxygen in the brain in the...

A disturbing story in the March 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so...

      Drama at Russian research station North Pole-32 marked Russia's return to polar research Russia is preparing to launch an operation to rescue a group of scientists, after the sinking of their North Pole research base. The 12 researchers were unhurt, but equipment and supplies disappeared into freezing waters as an ice floe beneath the base collapsed late on Wednesday. Efforts to drop emergency clothes and food have so far been hampered by strong winds. North Pole-32 marked Russia's return to polar research after a 12-year absence. Russia was forced to suspend Arctic missions in 1991 when an...