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“How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” insisted teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction!” Many people say that we’re destroying the Earth. It all sounds so scary. But I’ve been a consumer reporter for years, and I’ve covered so many scares: plague, famine, overpopulation, SARS, West Nile virus, bird flu, radiation from cellphones, flesh-eating bacteria, killer bees, etc. The list of terrible things that were going to get us is very long. Yet we live longer than ever. Now I’m told global warming is...

Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed for a sense of urgency Tuesday as he launched a new commission that aims to accelerate and expand ways the world can prepare for climate change. “Without urgent adaptation action, we risk undermining food, energy and water security for decades to come,” Ban told guests as the Global Commission on Adaptation got underway in The Hague. The commission’s mandate is to encourage the development of measures to manage the effects of climate change through technology, planning and investment. Ban is leading the group with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and World Bank CEO Kristalina...

Peterson's "12 Rules for Life," the album. Cut #8 "Tell the Truth or at Least Don't Lie."

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all RINOs doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And your hair don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Hillary and Paul Ryan And...

<p>In the hearts of evolutionary biologists, mountains occupy a special place. It’s not just their physical majesty: mountains also have an unmatched power to drive human evolution. Starting tens of thousands of years ago, people moved to high altitudes, and there they experienced natural selection that has reworked their biology.“This is the most extreme example in humans that you can find,” said Rasmus Nielsen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.</p>

As their next film, Joel and Ethan Coen will put their spin on "True Grit," the iconic Western that won an Oscar.Not a traditional remake, the Paramount film will be more faithful to the Charles Portis book than the 1969 pic, also distributed by Par.Portis' novel is about a 14-year-old girl who, along with an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman, tracks her father's killer in hostile Indian territory.But while the original film was a showcase for Wayne, the Coens' version will tell the tale from the girl's p.o.v.Pic will be their first period Oater.Project reteams the brothers with Scott...

Fish Studies Answer Flood Question by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the Bible, the world before Noah’s Flood, including the oceans, must have been idyllic. That was destroyed by the year-long global deluge, during which the earth’s land mass broke into continents, massive amounts of sediment were deposited and then partially eroded, and new and perhaps deeper oceans became more salty from continental runoff. If this historical picture is accurate, then at least one area of confusion needs to be addressed: How did “saltwater fish” live through all that?...

For years researchers have puzzled over whether adaptation plays a major role in human evolution or whether most changes are due to neutral, random selection of genes and traits. Geneticists at Stanford now have laid this question to rest. Their results, scheduled to be published Jan. 16 online in Public Library of Science Genetics, show adaptation-the process by which organisms change to better fit their environment-is indeed a large part of human genomic evolution. "Others have looked for the signal of widespread adaptation and couldn't find it. Now we've used a lot more data and did a lot of work...

Mass-market adaptations make Great Books go bad. Or so conventional wisdom would have it. But every so often, plundering and pillaging a canonical text for the sake of entertainment gives it the kiss of life. Take “Beowulf” and “Paradise Lost.” The unpalatable truth is that both originals are now virtually unreadable. “Beowulf” is written in Old English, an inflected Germanic tongue that looks a lot less like our language than one would hope. As for Milton’s epic, it’s in “normal” English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read...

Temperatures are rising on Earth, which is heating up the debate over global warming and the future of our planet, but what may be needed most to combat global warming is a greater focus on adapting to our changing planet, says a team of science policy experts writing in this week's Nature magazine. While many consider it taboo, adaptation to global climate change needs to be recognized as just as important as "mitigation," or cutting back, of greenhouse gases humans pump into Earth's atmosphere. The science policy experts, writing in the Feb. 8, 2007 issue of Nature, say adapting to...

Good Letter... Newspapers simply won't publish letters to the editor which they either deem politically incorrect (read below) or which does not agree with the philosophy they're pushing on the public. This woman wrote a great letter to the editor that should have been published  but with your help it will get published via cyberspace! New Immigrants From: "David LaBonte" My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the OC Register which, of course, was not printed. So, I decided to "print" it myself by sending it out on the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so...

LAWRENCE, Kan.(AP) - There's a new creature crawling around Kansas. Herpetologists have confirmed that the Mediterranean gecko is taking up residence in the state, spreading north from the southeast United States over the past decade. "We knew it got as far as Norman, Oklahoma, in the early 1990s," said Joe Collins, University of Kansas herpetologist. "Well, it's here." And one is now on display at the Prairie Park Nature Center in Lawrence, feeding on crickets. "Ours has been hiding under rocks in its cage since we got him," said Marty Birrell, the center's director. "They are nocturnal, so we don't...

When President Bush addressed the Class of '05 at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he challenged them to be "champions of change," to cut through "established ways of thinking." Think outside the box and be innovative, he told them: "Pursue possibilities others tell you do not exist." He accompanied the challenge with a warning. "The opponents of change are many, and its champions are few, but the champions of change are the ones who make history. Be champions, and you will make America safer for your children and your grandchildren, and you'll add to the character of our nation."...

Boulder, CO, Apr. 4 (UPI) -- UPI's Climate was reminded the other day there is a broad spectrum of interpretations of the science behind global climate change. Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and the author of an excellent science Web log called Prometheus, took to task a recent column on adapting to warming, saying, "You equate 'climate skeptics' with those who support adaptation. Most climate skeptics do not support adaptation because it would mean admitting that there is a problem needing to be adapted to in the first place." ......

The Dominion Post newspaper in New Zealand publishes an occasional science column Unfortunately I can’t find a recent column by one Bob Brockie on line and don't have the hard copy. Anyway Bob Brockie described certain snakes in Queensland Australia who have developed smaller mouths. These apparently have been developed because the poisonous toads in Queensland were part of the snake’s diet and thus unsurprisingly the snakes ended up being poisoned. I suspect Darwin would have concluded that the snakes would therefore die out.Survival of the fittest. Apparently not. The snakes have jumped up the evolutionary ladder and have grown...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Debunking a Lie: Foreign Investment In China Accelerating Political Reform? He Qinglian Special to The Epoch Times Sep 01, 2004 Two boys walk past a billboard in Shanghai, 11 February 2004. Foreign direct investment in China rose 13.6 percent in January from a year earlier, but whether it has had any impact on China's political reform is another story. (LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images) Foreign investors have influenced China in many ways. They have brought into China advanced management systems, and have increased employment. But some are negative, and these negative effects of foreign investment are, at their root, caused by the...

Dietary restriction is known to increase lifespan in organisms ranging from yeast to mammals, presumably, in the words of Mair et al. (2003), "by slowing the accumulation of aging-related damage."  In stark contrast, however, their studies of Drosophila (the common fruit fly) indicate that "dietary restriction extends lifespan entirely by reducing the short-term risk of death."  So powerful is this phenomenon, in fact, they report that only "two days after the application of dietary restriction at any age for the first time, previously fully fed flies are no more likely to die than flies of the same age that have...

Whatever it Takes: Redlegs and Riflemen December 2003 By Maj. Peter K. Bacon "Shoot, move and communicate." This three-part catch phrase is the key to tactical success in combat operations. Combined with the five elements of accurate predicted fire, they form the basis of the tactical and technical training of every junior leader in Field Artillery. The officer's basic course and career course, as well as the basic noncommissioned officer's course and advanced course, drill leaders in the understanding of these skills and their practice by professional soldiers. The majority of field training addresses tactical and technical problems related...

Loss of evolved resistance to cadmium pollution in worm following a major habitat cleanup | By Stuart Blackman Foundry Cove on the Hudson River was one of the most heavily metal-polluted areas in the world. Between 1953 and 1979, a battery factory released approximately 53 tons of cadmium (Cd) and nickel hydride waste into the cove, resulting in sediment Cd concentrations as high as 10,000 ppm. The cove's commonest invertebrate, Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri, an oligochaete worm, evolved resistance to the Cd, and its central position in the food web is thought to promote the transfer of the metal through the ecosystem....