Free Republic

Dozens of anti-pipeline and oilsands activists gathered Saturday in downtown Calgary as part of a nation-wide protest focusing on climate change. The peaceful gathering in Calgary, held inside the Plus—15 walkway between the headquarters of Enbridge and TransCanada Corp., was part of the Defend Our Climate protest that took place in 130 communities across Canada. Originally about 300 people were slated to participate in the Calgary protest, but due to a snow storm only about 50 showed up.

Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Some even believe that colonizing new planets is man’s best hope for the future. The popular idea is that we’ll eventually need some fresh, unexploited new worlds to inhabit -a real-world Pandora. In an earlier Galaxy post we wrote that Stephen Hawking, world-celebrated expert on the cosmological theories of gravity and black holes who held Issac Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University until his recent retirement, believes that traveling into space is the only way humans will be able to survive in the long-term, while warning about the potential...

A recent flap in a Berkeley high school reveals what a farce “fairness” can be. Because this is ultra-liberal Berkeley, perhaps we should not be surprised that a proposal has been made to eliminate four jobs as science teachers and use the money saved for programs to help low achievers. In Berkeley, as in many other communities across the country, black and Latino students are not performing as well as Asian and white students. In fact, the racial gap in academic achievement at Berkeley High School is the highest in California — no doubt a special source of embarrassment in...

Turn off that Wi-Fi network — it's disturbing our chakras. That's what many residents of Glastonbury, a lovely medieval town turned New Age hub in southwestern England, are demanding the local government do. Ever since the town's free municipal wireless broadband network went online in May, people have been complaining of, as an online petition puts it, "headaches, dizziness, nausea, severe tiredness, brain fog, disorientation and loss of appetite, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, loss of creativity" — all ailments an examining physician would find it difficult to prove or disprove.

[The author] takes the perspective of alien explorers arriving on earth - their geologists study the layers of rock, using the many clues to piece together its history over several billion years... Dr Zalasiewicz said: "From the perspective of 100 million years in the future – a geologist's view – the reign of humans on Earth would seem very short: we would almost certainly have died out long before then. What footprint will we leave in the rocks? What would have become of our great cities, our roads and tunnels, our cars, our plastic cups in the far distant future?...

AIRLINES are desperate. With jet fuel over $4 per gallon and still climbing, American, United and other major carriers are raising fares, cutting flights, trimming fleets and laying off pilots. They're also ordering fuel-efficient Boeing 787s and Airbus A350XWBs — the new generation of plastic planes. These new aircraft promise 20-percent-lower fuel consumption. Replacing heavier traditional aluminum alloys, 50 percent of their skins, panels and load-bearing structures are comprised of lighter, stiffer carbon-fiber-reinforced-plastic (CFRP) composites. Then add the latest, most fuel-efficient engine technology. Sounds good. But beneath these advantages danger lurks — novel maintenance challenges for which neither airlines nor...