This from the NY Times:

Which means there could be a link between a sudden increase in radiation, and rapid evolution...

The air here this time of year usually is filled with the grunts and squawks of thousands of white pelicans and their chicks. The giant birds, known as aerial acrobats, have made it their home for at least 100 years. Now their nesting grounds are quiet. The pelicans are gone. And no one really knows why. Everybody from biologists to bartenders has a theory. The 4,385-acre refuge in central North Dakota had been known as the home of the largest nesting colony of white pelicans in North America. The nearly 28,000 birds that showed up to nest here in early April took off in late May and early June, leaving their chicks and eggs behind.

Probably nothing to do with the end of the world, but when it is near, I expect the wildlife to get restless...

Yet again, bones of different species have been found in the same spot.

Our moon has a habit of always looking the same to us, because it rotates in time with Earth's rotation, and we never see the "dark side".

I don't know if the folk at this forum are reliable, but if they are, then something mighty scary is happening...

It's hardly surprising that this hasn't been more widely reported, fot it's quite scary to know that something in our solar system is undergoing a lot of change, and we don't why!

Because Saturn's clouds offer no way to gauge the planet's true spin rate, scientists instead rely on periodic bursts of long-wavelength radio energy linked to Saturn's magnetic field and, by implication, its deep interior. These bursts were detected as early as April 2003, and they show that the planet spins once every 10 hours, 45 minutes, and 45 seconds. But that's about 6 minutes slower than the rate clocked when the Voyager spacecraft called on the ringed giant in 1980 and 1981. Donald S. Gurnett (University of Iowa) says he and other members of the Cassini Radio Plasma Wave Science team have no idea why Saturn has slowed down.

Source: Sky & Telescope

link me   

This is being reported as new, but hippo remains in England have been found previously.

The article talks of the animals being buried in soft earth, then covered by glacial deposits thousands of years later. The alternative explanation would be that they were buried deep during a global cataclysm - with a pole shift explaining why it is too cold in England for hippos these days....

A five year-old German boy is unusually muscular, and can "hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do."

He has a DNA mutation:

Other folk interpret the Mayan Calendar in different ways. One of the most outspoken and prolific is Carl J. Calleman. Here's an article about the ideas of Carl and of Ian Lungold - a quite unique and non-earth-catastrophe angle:

Supposedly it will be a complete catalog of the magnetic properties of 36,000 rock samples from around the world - and it will be available to the public, courtesy of NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS)

As an indication of the growing awareness of the Mayan end date, there is a rock band in Florida who have named themselves 2012.

No commentary required!

Available from Amazon UK now (click on the above image) and USA/Australia etc later in the year.

"Talisman is a roller-coaster intellectual journey through the back streets and rat runs of history to uncover the traces in architecture and monuments of a secret religion that has shaped the world. The story takes us from Heliopolis to Luxor, Alexandria, Toulouse, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, Washington DC, New York, and finally to the global pandemonium following 9/11/2001. It is a tale filled with romance and intrigue, heroism and faith, peopled by ancient Egyptian astronomer priests, Christian Gnostics, Hermetic sages, learned Jews, Arab savants, Occitan Counts, Cathar "perfecti", Knights Templar, Renaissance magi, Rosicrucian "invisibles", Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasons."

Can't wait to read it!

And again in 2012 - more here

"... researchers revealed that they had deleted huge chunks of the genome of mice without it making any discernable difference to the animals.

The result is totally unexpected because the deleted sequences included so-called "conserved regions" thought to have important functions."

I believe that such DNA chunks are sitting there, waiting for the next influx of massive radiation. These DNA chunks are then used to create instant evolution.

There is evidence that the Rancho La Brea tar pits are a site of rapid burial and subsequent fossilization... and now we find the same for Burgess Shale.

"...the journal Nature reports the discovery of the first fossilised creature to actually be caught in the act of shedding its exoskeleton."

This cannot happen slowly, as:

"There are two main reasons why the fossil record has, until now, been reluctant to provide such evidence.

Firstly, a creature in moult has a soft body, which does not preserve easily - the conditions have to be just right. And secondly, the process of moulting is usually very quick, meaning the "window of fossil opportunity" is small.

The likelihood of capturing such an event is so astronomically small..."

This means it had to be buried rapidly and deeply because the moulting process occurs so quickly, and during the process the animal has a soft body and is easily destroyed.

Quick burials = fossils = cataclysms

New Scientist, March 27, 2004, page 16:

A study of mammoth tooth enamel and three Clovis sites (10-13K years old) show a wide variety of isotope ratios, which basically means that the large numbers of mammoth bones at each site accumulated over thousands of years. They were not all slaughtered en masse.

At another site, where all the mammoths drowned at once, the isotopes were the same. One wonders if these mammoths that drowned at once was during a global cataclysm....

A brief mention in New Scientist (17 April 2004, page 8):

"Astronomers have been puzzled by the Sun's X-ray halo since it was first detected in the 1940s... The surface of the sun is not hot enough to produce such a bright X-ray glow"

An, although the article suggests the decay of axions, they still don't know what causes the X-rays. In my mind this means they also don't know whether the amount of X-rays is prone to fluctuations.... big enough to fry us or at least mutate us!

I have previously mentioned that our DNA repair mechanisms appear to pick and choose where and when they make repairs.

According to a recent paper:

"Natural selection... acts on the very mechanisms that copy and repair DNA. It makes perfect sense that these mechanisms would be subject to selection pressures: genomes that managed to steer their mutations, even a little, would have pulled way ahead of others that were throwing darts in the dark."

"Certain types of DNA sequence seem to invite mutation and others seem to repel it. One type of mutation-attracting sequence, found in bacteria as well as in us, is "slippery" DNA. Slippery sequences comprise a series of DNA's chemical bases or "letters" repeated over and over again. "

"The mutation rate of slippery DNA can be 1000 times higher than elsewhere in the genome, so in that sense it is not random."

So... when we get a massive influx of cosmic rays, our bodies pick and choose which mutations to repair, and which to experiment with. When we have regions of the DNA that are 1000 times more likely to mutate, then the number of different mutations become less. Taken to an extreme, this means few enough mutations for a new species to arrive at the time of a cosmic ray bombardment!

Worry

"The Earth's magnetic field is showing worrying signs that it is about to reverse again. Not only has the magnetic north pole wandered by 1100 kilometres in the past 200 years, but its strength is dropping at a rate of 5 per cent a century.

This is the fastest decrease since the last reversal 730,000 years ago..."

Don't Worry

Scientists have determined that when the magnetic field of our planet drops to almost nothing during a magnetic pole shift, the sun's solar wind kicks in and replaces it.

"Their simulations show that the solar wind - the million-kilometre-an-hour stream of hydrogen and helium nuclei from the sun - wraps itself around the Earth in a way that induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere as strong as the original field."

From a layman's point of view, my question is:

"Wouldn't the solar wind already be wrapping around Earth, and already be contributing to our magnetic field?