Science & Technology

In the August 1920 edition of Oil and Gas News, an excited reporter wrote about a region that “is attracting much attention due to the good [oil] wells that are being brought in.” Oil had been discovered on the Bertha Hickman farm in Oklahoma, a discovery that started the industrial…

July 5 marks the anniversary of the first successful cloning of a mammal. Dolly, the well known clone sheep, was born to a surrogate ewe this day in 1996. Adult stem cells were taken from a ewe, then cultured in a lab using microscopic needles, in a method first used…

“The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it is delaying a major provision in the [ObamaCare] health care overhaul, putting off until 2015 a requirement that many employers offer health insurance”—a date after the 2014 congressional elections—Fox News reports. This political move illustrates (among other things) that ObamaCare is creating a…

[caption id="attachment_9894" align="alignright" width="300"] Image: Wikimedia Commons[/caption] On Thursday, the British Geological Survey (BGS) released a report estimating that 1,329 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas exists in the Bowland shale beneath central Britain. According to the BGS, in the United States, roughly 10 percent of a shale gas…

Regarding Barack Obama’s speech yesterday on so-called “climate change,” the Washington Post asks, “Is Obama waging a ‘war on coal’?”—and answers, “To a large extent, the answer is yes,” in that he is seeking to expand costly regulations of coal-fired plants. But it’s worse than that. Among other things, Obama…

Relative freedom and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Texas continue creating business opportunities and attracting capital investment from around the world. Austria’s largest steel company, Voestalpine, has signed a lease to build a $716 million iron-ore pellet plant in Corpus Christi, Texas. CEO Wolfgang Eder stated, “It would have been impossible…

Stem cell research holds enormous promise for human health care, and scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) recently advanced that potential dramatically. Melissa Healy reports for the Los Angeles Times: For the first time, scientists have created human embryos that are genetic copies of living people and used…

On Monday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that the technically recoverable shale gas resources throughout the world increased 10 percent from the 2011 estimate. This rise is a consequence of increased geological knowledge combined with the wondrous technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Of the forty-one countries within…

The little girl who swore she was “never going to quit, never, never,” now has a fighting chance to live. Ten-year-old Sarah Murnaghan previously had been put on the bottom of the list to receive an adult lung (the only type likely to become available) because the Department of Health…

At a recent press conference, President Obama declared, Quality care is not something that should be a privilege. It should be a right. In the greatest country on earth, we’ve got to make sure that every single person that needs health care can get it. The proper purpose of government,…