Free Republic

Carly Fiorina brings a Texas ranching legacy to the presidential campaign. And one Texas rancher has come forth to help. Although she’s known more as a California Republican, Fiorina was born in Austin to the Sneed family, Texans since 1839 and known for oil, cattle ranching, cotton farming and for an early 20th-century love-triangle feud and scandal. In the 1960s, she grew up spending summers with her grandparents in a historic home in Calvert, between Waco and Bryan. ~snip~ In a 2003 Houston speech, Fiorina said, “We had a little bit of cattle in our family, a little bit of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tiny, bacteria-like organisms made their home in hardened lava some 3.5 billion years ago, scientists reported on Friday in a finding that pushes the limits of when life is known to have started on Earth. The microbes, known as archaea, dug into volcanic rock to form long tubes. A team from the United States, Norway, Canada, and South Africa found evidence of the lava-burrowing archaea in 3.5 billion-year-old rock in South Africa. "Our evidence is among the oldest evidence for life found so far," said Hubert Staudigel, a research geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at...