"As space ages and expands, fewer and fewer galaxies will be visible to us. Even weirder, as we watch these galaxies fade, their appearance will freeze in time. No matter how long we watch ... they will never grow older or change. They will only grow dimmer as they recede from us", reports Radio Nederland.

"Light bulbs, the bright feature of Hong Kong's dramatic skyline, have made the city blind to the wonders of the universe...Astronomers say that time is running out and if nothing's done soon, Hong Kong's night sky will be starless within 10 years", reports CNN.

"Bursts of energy from the Sun on microwave radio frequencies can disrupt wireless cell communications several times a year, according to scientists who have studied records covering 40 years of such bursts.... The effect of bursts on wireless communications is dependent upon the orientation of cell antennas, with those pointing east-west more susceptible mornings and evenings than at noon."

The report will appear in the March-April issue of the journal, Radio Science - details at EurekaAlert and NewsFactor

Taliban missed a spot Penguins feel the heat London is sinking .link to=

"In the past decade, high-speed, light-sensitive cameras have allowed scientists to describe a menagerie of electrical phenomena, which bear names that would be more at home in a Tolkien novel than a physics textbook. Sprites, blue jets and associated flashes called elves, crawlers, trolls and pixies are all fleeting electrical discharges that accompany thunderstorms.

All these phenomena are hard to spot, as they last for less than a blink of an eye and are obscured from below by cloud. They can be glimpsed along storm fronts and from aeroplanes flying above the clouds." "Video images captured in Puerto Rico suggest that blue flashes of light, much like lightning, feed energy from thunderstorms up into the Earth's ionosphere - a blanket of electrically charged air some 70 kilometres above the ground."

The event "was detected on 24 video frames, each lasting 33 milliseconds each" - reports at BBC and Nature.com

"An endangered monkey has given scientists new insights into evolution. The leaf-eating douc langur, native to East and Southeast Asia, has a "duplicated" gene that started as an extra copy of a gene for a particular enzyme but mutated into a gene for another enzyme with a different purpose...because the new gene is redundant, it is free to mutate until it finds a new job...duplicate gene evolved much faster than would be expected from random change, suggesting that positive selection was at work", reports Daily Inscight.

"nearly every social phobia and panic disorder is rooted in a single stretch of about 60 genes"

"the duplication isn't being passed along according to standard patterns of heredity... (passed down through the generations virtually unchanged)...Not only does its position change along the chromosome, but its sequence is sometimes inverted or otherwise rearranged. Stranger still, those changes sometimes occur from cell to cell in the same individual, not just between parents and offspring...the duplication itself isn't being passed along. Rather, it's the tendency to duplicate that's inherited." reports Discover.

Bast comments: The evidence is accumulating. Junk DNA isn't dormant. It is a breeding ground for evolutionary change. Junk DNA keeps mutating until it becomes advantageous, then it is positively selected and becomes useful DNA. The higher the mutation rate (more cosmic ray collisions), the faster we evolve.

The universe is beige Alcoholic monkeys - just like humans Viscous mantle Concrete pyramid idea - Ian Lawton speaks

"When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.

And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier."

British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies will disclose his findings to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society on March 15. Reports here and here

This is not an original idea. Even Australian crackpot Rex Gilroy wrote about it in 1986, he undoubtedly got the idea from elsewhere. His article disappeared from the web shortly after I linked to it, but archive.org still have it cached

"In 338 B.C., Shih Tzu wrote of the presence of apparent kangaroos kept in the Imperial Zoo in Peking, and further similar reports continued in several later dynasties. Emperor Chao about this time dispatched a fleet of junks with orders to return with marsupials from the southern land of "Chui Hiao", and a Chinese book "The Classics of Shan Hai", written some time before 338 B.C., describes Australian Aboriginals and their use of the boomerang.

UPDATE: Review of Gavin Menzies's presentation

• The south pole could also be pulsing x-rays (we can't see it very well)
• Jupiter's magnetic field is the biggest thing in the solar system -- larger even than the Sun
• The 45-minute pulsations are not perfectly regular; the period drifts back and forth by a few percent. It is a natural process

In Japan, 26 million people paid to view him during a tour in the 1970s. For years after that he was a top draw at several animal theme parks in Southern California.

Back then, rumors circulated that Oliver had 47 chromosomes and represented a biological amalgam between man and ape. (Chimps have 48 chromosomes, human beings have 46). But it turns out he has the standard 48 chromosomes after all.

"A study published March 7 in Nature presents genetic evidence that humans left Africa in at least three waves of migration. It suggests that modern humans (Homo sapiens) interbred with archaic humans (Homo erectus and Neandertals) who had migrated earlier from Africa, rather than displacing them.", reports National Geographic.

Previous theories generally stated that the superior strains of human wiped out the lesser ones.

"There are regions of the world, like the Middle East and Portugal, where some fossils look as if they could have been some kind of mix between archaic and modern people," said Rebecca Cann, a geneticist at the University of Hawaii.

This supports my idea that with each global cataclysm, species split into sub-species, which re-combine in the long term. Current humans are a combination of neanderthals, angels, giants, watchers, Atlanteans, gods, nephilim and whatever other nicknames our earlier sub-species had.

T. Rex couldn't run like in Jurassic Park Meditation observed in monks No more taxi drivers! Fractals predict earthquakes Mysterious earthquake lights

• St. Andrews golf course is a tsunami deposit
• Over the past 2,000 years, tsunamis have officially killed 462,597 people in the Pacific region

Caral, Peru, had 6 pyramids. The largest of these mounds, "Piramide Mayor," is 60-feet high and 450-by-500 feet at the base, and they have been carbon-dated at 2627 B.C. - which is the same time as when King Djoser was building the Egypt's first pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.

"Dr. Ruth Shady believes Caral was a sacred city and administrative center for a civilization that built 17 other sites, most still buried in the Supe Valley and on the nearby Pacific coast."

Visit TimeSpinner, worldnews.com or read a BBC documentary transcipt

MSNBC reports that two sets of researchers have come to the same conclusion - there is a giant planet or failed star in a 4-6 million year orbit around the Sun, 800 times further away than Pluto. When the Space Infrared Telescope Facility is launched next year it might be able to spot it.

"Some theorists have proposed that the gravitational effect of a massive unseen object in a distant orbit — nicknamed “Nemesis” or the “Death Star” — could set off periodic cometary storms, which would increase the chances of a catastrophic impact with Earth."

"Using the Chandra X-ray Observatory his team took the most detailed images ever of Jupiter at X-ray wavelengths, and they discovered an auroral "hot spot" that periodically spews out high-energy pulses every 45 minutes.

The origin of this X-ray heartbeat has left theorists scrambling to determine its cause."

"A pulsating hot spot of X-rays has been discovered in the polar regions of Jupiter's upper atmosphere by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Previous theories cannot explain either the pulsations or the location of the hot spot, prompting scientists to search for a new process to produce Jupiter's X-rays."

"One possibility is that heavy ions among the particles flowing out from the Sun as the solar wind are captured in the outer regions of Jupiter's magnetic field, then accelerated and directed toward its magnetic pole. Once captured, the ions would bounce back and forth in the magnetic field from pole to pole in an oscillating motion that might explain the pulsations."

Read on at Chandra & Sky and Telescope

An instrument on NASA's Mars 2001 Odyssey spacecraft has estimated the amount of cosmic rays hitting Mars - so they can determine how unsafe it might be if humans ever land there. Mars has less atmosphere than Earth, and therefore less protection from cosmic rays

Mars - Rems per Year On Earth we typically receive 0.05 rems per year. radiation workers have a safety limit or 5 rems per year. Astronauts in space receive roughly 75 rems per year, although a solar flare could deliver 4,000 rems to the skin and 200 rems to internal organs in a single deadly dose. On Mars a human would receive between 10 & 20 rems per year.

Mars - Hits per Cell Nucleus The estimated average number of times per year each cell nucleus in a human there would be hit by a high-energy cosmic ray particle. On Mars it is between 2 & 8 hits per cell nucleus per year.

Researchers from the University of Chicago report that about 25 percent of genes mutate in advantageous ways.

"These papers directly conflict with the "neutral theory," which has dominated genetic research since the 1960s. According to the neutral theory, many small genetic changes randomly occur, but the vast majority simply don't matter. Fewer than one percent make enough of a difference that they are either embraced or expunged by natural selection.

By comparing variation within the human genome and divergence from our ape ancestors, the researchers determined that about 35 percent of the accumulated changes were "good."

It means one advantageous substitution has entered the human genome every two centuries since humans separated from monkeys 30 million years ago."

By my reckoning, this could also be a set of 50 mutations occuring at 10,000 year intervals.

Extra: Duplicate monkey DNA evolves

The November 2001 through January 2002 is the hottest winter on record in the United States - 4.3 degrees F above the average temperatures.

January 2002 was the warmest on record globally, 1.24 degrees F. above normal.

Scientists report that Antarctica is becoming too hot for the penguins. All from Earthfiles

Is Europe about to freeze? One of the odd possibilities that could emerge from global warming is that much of Europe, robbed of the ocean current patterns that help keep it warm, could rather abruptly enter a deep freeze and have a climate that more closely resembles Alaska than the modest temperatures it now enjoys.

NASA have made the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. Preview images and links to full resolution versions—up to 21,600 pixels across—are here

Chandra observations of quasar PKS 1127-145, revealed an X-ray jet that extends over a length of at least a million light years.The source is a super-massive black hole.