Free Republic

Re-posting in compliance with FR rules (we regret the error) Last time I posted with the title lifted from the URL as opposed to the Daily Mail's posted article, which is QUITE long. Got busted. Excerpt follows: "The teenage gunman who killed two people and injured seven others at a school in St. Louis has been named as a former student, it was revealed tonight. Orlando Harris, 19, was dressed entirely in black when he entered his former high school on Monday morning - shooting dead a female teacher and a teenage girl before being killed by police. He burst...

TRENTON, S.C. - A 60-year-old man who strangled his girlfriend died of a heart attack while burying her body in their South Carolina backyard, investigators said. Deputies found Joseph Anthony McKinnon's body Saturday after neighbors called and reported an unconscious man in a yard in Trenton, the Edgefield County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. As they investigated McKinnon’s death, deputies found a body wrapped in trash bags in a freshly dug hole and determined it was his girlfriend, Patricia Ruth Dent, 65, investigators said. An autopsy on Dent determined she had been strangled and neighbors told officers they saw...

Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note—one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new sonification—that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound—is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year. In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before...

CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, and other corporate media outlets we checked today have effectively halted coverage of the Waukesha massacre and suspect Darrell Brooks. Their frontpages have zero mentions of either on them as of Thursday, a mere four days after the alleged vehicular murder of six people happened. They ARE covering a vehicular murder story, though. As I Tweeted:

John, who lived in the north of England, decided to go golfing in Scotland with his buddy, Shawn. So they loaded up John's minivan and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard. So they pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night. ‘I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed,' she explained, 'and I'm afraid the neighbours will talk if I let you stay in my house.' 'Don't...

The claims made by Russian media that NASA Astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor had a nervous breakdown and damaged a Russian spacecraft to get home are not credible, Kathy Lueders, who is leading NASA's human spaceflight program, said at a press conference on Friday. Russia's TASS recently published a story, citing an unnamed source in the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, that claimed Aunon-Chancellor had an emotional breakdown in space and she made a microfracture in the Russian spacecraft to return early during a mission in 2018. "Absolutely," Lueders said when asked whether NASA will defend its astronaut. "Our NASA crews perform their...

A farmer has been pulled to safety from a 60ft (18m) sinkhole which "swallowed" him and the quad bike he was riding. The ground opened up as he rode across a field at Bowesfield Farm in Stank, south Cumbria, on Thursday. The man, in his seventies, was then airlifted to hospital for treatment to chest and back injuries. "The ground just fell away with the weight of the bike on that particular spot and he was swallowed up into the sinkhole", he said.

For all its vast emptiness, the universe is humming with activity in the form of gravitational waves. Produced by extreme astrophysical phenomena, these reverberations ripple forth and shake the fabric of space-time, like the clang of a cosmic bell. Now researchers have detected a signal from what may be the most massive black hole merger yet observed in gravitational waves. The product of the merger is the first clear detection of an “intermediate-mass” black hole, with a mass between 100 and 1,000 times that of the sun. They detected the signal, which they have labeled GW190521, on May 21, 2019,...

A Russian TV crew flying over the Siberian tundra this summer spotted a massive crater 30 meters (100 feet) deep and 20 meters wide -- striking in its size, symmetry and the explosive force of nature that it must have taken to have created it. Scientists are not sure exactly how the huge hole, which is at least the ninth spotted in the region since 2013, formed. Initial theories floated when the first crater was discovered near an oil and gas field in the Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia included a meteorite impact, a UFO landing and the collapse of...

(CNN)The fastest-growing black hole in the universe is 34 billion times the mass of our sun and feasts on a meal the equivalent of our sun each day, according to a new study. This massive, hungry black hole was first identified and studied by researchers in May 2018. Previously, they believed it consumed the mass equivalent to our sun every two days. Now, they have a better understanding of this monster black hole and its gluttonous behavior. The study published Wednesday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The black hole is known as J2157 and exists...

Harrisburg’s finance director has been suspended after a neighbor snapped a photo of him gardening in the nude and called police to complain. Bruce Weber is suspended pending the outcome of a police investigation. The neighbor, ShaVonne Moon, posted a photo Friday on Facebook of her naked neighbor, bent over, pulling weeds in his backyard garden on Boas Street . She complained on her social media post that she’s “sick of it,” and had to keep her young sons away from her home’s windows and backyard to avoid seeing the naked man outside. Weber confirmed Sunday that it was him...

A Black Hole Relic from the Big Bang –“May Exist in Our Solar System” Posted on May 4, 2020 in Science  A bowling-ball sized primordial black hole, a relic of the Big Bang, may exist in our Solar system that could be detected according to theoretical physicist Edward Witten, at the Institute for Advanced Study, who has been compared to Issac Newton and Einstein.In a paper posted September, 2019 to arXiv, physicists James Unwin, University of Illinois at Chicago and Jakub Scholtz at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, showed that the likelihood of our Sun capturing a...

Unusual weather patterns in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica have caused a drastic reduction in ozone depletion, leaving the ozone with the smallest hole seen since its discovery in 1982, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The government agencies said that the hole had shrunk to 3.9 million square miles for the remainder of September and October, according to satellite data. The peak in the hole was 6.3 million square miles, observed on Sept. 8. During normal weather conditions, the hole is usually around 8 million square miles during this time of year.

The first image of a black hole has been captured by astronomers, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects. The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws break down.

The hole in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station was spotted on Aug. 30. The crew discovered a leak that was creating a slight loss of pressure and plugged the hole with epoxy and gauze. Prokopyev said at a news conference the cavity started from the capsule's interior and "it's up to the investigative organs to judge when that hole was made." The astronauts' quick identification and repair of the hole demonstrated "the crew was ready for any developments," he said. The hole didn't pose a danger to Prokopyev and crewmates Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA and Alexander Gerst...

Several days ago it was reported that astronauts found a hole in the Russian segment of the International Space Station that was leaking air. One of the astronauts plugged the hole with his own finger before sealing the hole with a nylon ribbon to stabilise pressure on board the ISS. The hole posed no threat to the crew, but it had to be fixed. According to updated information, the 2-millimeter (0.08-inch) hole appeared in the spaceship when the Soyuz was being built. Reportedly, an employee made a mistake, but it was decided to fix the problem with the help of...

A small sinkhole has begun to form on the north lawn of the White House this past week, and a reporter has been tracking its progression. “This week I’ve been observing a sinkhole on the @WhiteHouse North Lawn, just outside the press briefing room, growing larger by the day,” Voice of America reporter Steve Herman posted to Twitter on Tuesday. A second sinkhole has formed right next to it. The joke that Washington is a swamp has been widely shared among residents and those around the country, especially as it was used in the 2016 presidential campaign. However, the nation's...

Dense Star Clusters Could be the Places Where Black Hole Mergers are Common Article written: 12 Apr , 2018 by Matt Williams In February of 2016, scientists working for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) made history when they announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. Not only did this discovery confirm a century-old prediction made by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary black holes – which merged to produce the signal in the first place.And now, an international team led by MIT astrophysicist Carl Rodriguez has produced a study that suggests that ...

Gravitational waves have opened up new ways to test the properties of black holes — and Einstein’s theory of gravity along with them.We all dream the same dream, here in theoretical physics. We dream of the day when one of our equations will be plotted against data and fit spot on. It’s rare for this dream to come true. Even if it does, some don’t live to see it. Take, for example, Albert Einstein, who passed away in 1955, 60 years before his equations’ most stunning consequence was confirmed: Space-time has periodic ripples — gravitational waves — that can carry...

In 1987, countries of the world agreed to the Montreal Protocol, a treaty designed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, responsible for destroying ozone in the stratosphere. The protocol has worked as intended in reducing these substances, and early healing of the ozone “hole” over Antarctica has been subsequently hailed by scientists. But the study by Ball and his colleagues focused instead on the lower latitudes where the vast majority of humans live. There, the scientists found a relatively small but hard-to-explain decline of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends from...