Free Republic

Scientists and academics in Connecticut and across the country will head out of the labs and into the streets on Saturday — Earth Day — to confront what one organizer described as a lack of respect for science among some members of Congress and President Donald Trump."The scientific method is not a partisan issue, it's not something that should be divisive," said Harrison Hayward, a fourth-year UConn medical student organizing a Hartford rally, which will begin at noon at Mortensen Riverfront Plaza. Diane Krause, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, is heading up a New Haven event, which...

Air quality in some East Asian capitals is famously poor, with residents of Beijing taking extreme measures to avoid the health risks associated with heavy pollution. The problem has grown worse as emerging Asian economies, particularly China, have increased their use of high-sulfur coal and private automobiles. Now, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warn that East Asian pollution may be causing smog along the West Coast of the United States, as nitrogen oxides move on air currents across the Pacific Ocean.

Over 300 scientists have requested that President Trump withdraw from the Paris Agreement which is a radical climate change agenda that was put into effect under the Obama Administration according to a report from the Washington Times. Leading the charge from the scientific community against the Paris Agreement is MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen who has delivered sharp criticisms about the agreement. Mr. Lindzen challenges the climate change narrative by saying that carbon dioxide is “plant food, not poison.”

And Democrats wonder why there are so many skeptics when it comes to conclusions reached by government scientists? The inspector general for the National Science Foundation issued a report showing that at least 23 scientists applying for taxpayer-funded grants either plagiarized the text or manipulated data but were not barred from receiving grant money in the future. Washington Free Beacon: The inspector general for the National Science Foundation identified at least 23 instances of plagiarism in proposals, NSF-funded research, and agency publications in 2015 and 2016. It found at least eight instances of data manipulation and fabrication in those years....

An unusually high number of Medical and NASA scientist deaths in recent years. Alberto Behar helped prove that there had once been water on Mars. He worked on two missions to Mars and was also a robotics expert who researched how robots function in harsh environments (such as under water and inside volcanoes). The unusually high number of scientist deaths in recent years has made people question the suspicious nature of his death.

Diversity In the past days, scientists have voiced concern over many issues - gag orders for government science agencies, funding freezes, and reversing science based policies. We recognize that these changes will differently and disproportionately affect minority scientists, science advocates, and the global communities impacted by these changes in American policies. Addressing these issues is imperative in understanding how recent developments will affect all people - not simply the most privileged among us. We take seriously your concerns that for this march to be meaningful, we must centralize diversity of the march's organizers at all levels of planning. Diversity must...

Samira Asgari had been preparing for the trip for months. She had just earned her Ph.D. from a Swiss university and was ready to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, studying how a person’s genes affect our response to tuberculosis. But on Saturday morning, at Frankfurt Airport, she was intercepted by an American consulate, who stopped her from boarding her plane to Boston. “He said that it’s the U.S. government who issues the visa, and if they change their mind, the visa isn’t valid,” she says. They had indeed changed their mind. On Friday, President...

“Science Guy” Bill Nye says he will participate in the proposed March for Science in Washington, DC, but what he’d “prefer is for these [anti-science] people to come around.” If people would “just accept it we could all get to work,” Nye said.

Scientists say the world has edged closer to apocalypse in the past year amid a darkening security landscape and comments by Donald Trump. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BPA) moved the minute hand of the symbolic Doomsday Clock from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. It is the second closest it has been. BPA chief Rachel Bronson urged world leaders to "calm rather than stoke tensions that could lead to war". In a report, the BPA said President Trump's statements on climate change, expanding the US nuclear arsenal and the questioning of intelligence agencies had contributed to the...

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have grown human cells inside pig embryos, a very early step toward the goal of growing livers and other human organs in animals to transplant into people. The cells made up just a tiny part of each embryo, and the embryos were grown for only a few weeks, researchers reported Thursday. Such human-animal research has raised ethical concerns. The U.S. government suspended taxpayer funding of experiments in 2015. The new work, done in California and Spain, was paid for by private foundations. Any growing of human organs in pigs is "far away," said Juan Carlos...

Speaking at the National Press Club Wednesday, outgoing Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced a new “scientific integrity” policy for an agency recently wracked by concerns about how an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump will treat employees who worked on climate change and other sensitive energy-related issues. “It’s part of establishing the environment that allows scientist to do their work, to stay with us, and to recruit new people,” Moniz said in announcing the new policy. Moniz, a physicist, gave an example of his own role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. “Seven of our laboratories were providing near real-time...

If all of Greenland's ice melted, it would raise sea level ~23 ft. That's enough to put coastlines throughout the world under water. pic.twitter.com/0C5fpTRhdl — NASA Climate (@NASAClimate) December 13, 2016 The tweet above is from @NASAClimate, a real official account from the real government organization that shoots rockets. (By the way, serious question: does anyone know why NASA does this instead of NOAA?) If all of Greenland's ice melted, it would raise sea level ~23 ft. That's enough to put coastlines throughout the world under water. As a bald statement, it sounds fairly reasonable. I wouldn't disbelieve it if...

The radiation expert who discovered the poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko "committed suicide" by stabbing himself repeatedly with two knives months after a trip to Russia, a coroner ruled. Matthew Puncher, 46, bled to death at his home after receiving multiple stab wounds across his body from two kitchen knives, an inquest heard. A pathologist said he could not completely exclude the possibility that someone else had been involved in the death of the father, but came to the conclusion that the injuries were self-inflicted.

Dead and dying are two very different things. If a person is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, their loved ones don't rush to write an obituary and plan a funeral. Likewise, species aren't declared extinct until they actually are. In a viral article entitled "Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)," however, writer Rowan Jacobsen proclaimed ― inaccurately and, we can only hope, hyperbolically ― that Earth's largest living structure is dead and gone.

U.S. QUESTIONS EGYPT ON WMD, MISSILES WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has again launched an examination of Egypt's missile and weapons of mass destruction programs. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton held talks over the weekend in Cairo with Egyptian leaders on a range of what U.S. officials termed were sensitive subjects. They said the issues included Egypt's WMD and missile programs and Cairo's cooperation with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea. "All of the testimony and evidence found in Iraq have shown significant Egyptian involvement in Iraq's missile and WMD programs," a U.S. official said. "The issue has...

Scientists to Trump: Human-caused climate change is real — and don’t mess with the hard-won Paris Agreement. That’s the message of a new letter co-drafted by a prominent Bay Area climate scientist and signed by 375 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, biologist E.O. Wilson and 30 Nobel Prize winners.

SNIPPET: "Midway through the trial, two jurors were excused after they told the judge that a man in the visitor's gallery made a hand motion as if he were firing a gun at them and mouthed an obscenity. One of the jurors told the judge he was "really freaked out" by the incident and another said he could not remain impartial "anything anyone makes what I view as a death threat." The guilty verdict on all counts means that at sentencing the judge could order Siddiqui spend the rest of her life in a federal prison."

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from Belgium and the U.S. has identified the active site of an iron-containing catalyst that has raised hopes for designing a practically useful catalyst that might make converting methane to methanol a possibility. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their efforts, what they discovered and why they believe their findings may lead to a practical way to convert methane to a more efficient energy resource. Jay Labinger, with the California Institute of Technology offers a News & Views piece outlining the work done by the team in the same journal issue....

Since the mid-1970s, modern physics has rested on the knowledge of four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Now scientists are on the verge of discovering a fifth force of nature, which could change the field of physics forever. According to a recent paper published by University of California physicists in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, what physicists thought was a new particle of matter could be a new force altogether.

A new study reveals that genetic manipulation of mice, rats, cows and pigs has increased threefold since 2004. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of tests conducted using genetically modified animals in Germany nearly tripled, according to reports by Funke Mediengruppe, citing a study by research group Testbiotech, which investigates the “consequences of genetic engineering”. In total nearly 950,000 animals, mainly mice and rats, were genetically tested in 2013 alone — one third of all animals on which scientific testing was conducted during that year in Germany. …