The most accepted theory for the comings and goings of Ice Ages has been found to be imperfect. Coral data suggests that glacial thawing (they don't dare say flooding) occurs more rapidly than the Milankovitch theory predicts

At long last proof that aspects of acupuncture work. Basically, 2000 years of acupuncturing has said that flesh grasps at the little needles. It has now been proven that it does...

This article at Nature.com presents tree ring and ice core evidence from Sweden that our planet was bombarded by cosmic rays 10,300 years ago.

There was a large increase in the amount of beryllium-10 trapped in Greenland ice cores of that period. This radioactive form of beryllium is produced when cosmic rays from space collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere.

A Russian press release tells us that that "landscape and soil changes do not occur randomly, in fact, they are strictly periodic" - there is a connection between glacial periods and cataclysms.

Possibly a poor translation, it is worth reading slowly and between the lines.

"An exploding star may have destroyed part of Earth's protective ozone layer 2 million years ago, devastating some forms of ancient marine life, according to a new theory presented at this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society."

Catastrophism is alive and kicking, as well as an acknowledgment of the dangers of cosmic rays - read this press release and watch the skies anxiously...

Also at News Factor and Nature.com

Chandra has snapped some X-Ray pics of our Galactic Centre, showing that it is overflowing with white dwarf stars, neutron stars and stellar black holes.

Full story at Yahoo

Except for the dinosaur one they keep going on about. But the 16 other mass extinction episodes appear to be a result of volcanoes and floods (symptoms of a pole shift...)

Read this excellent article (with diagrams). Author Norman MacLeod boldly states:

"it’s worth noting that the three largest extinctions of the last 250 million years took place during times of combined sea-level fall and flood-basalt eruption"

A disturbing report of how an immense asteroid, dubbed 2001 YB5, passed us by at only twice the distance of the moon. At a size of 1000ft it could have taken out a country the size of France...

According to the Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) it is orbiting our sun every 1321 days, meaning 3 more orbits from now it will pass on Nov 14, 2012. Not exactly the solstice, but perhaps the cause of a cataclysm in 2012??

More at NZ Herald and SlashDot

A team of archaeologists and scientists has discovered that Neanderthals, thought to have first appeared around 230,000 to 300,000 years ago, were capable of a sophisticated tool manufacturing process using prehistoric superglue that had to be made at a precise temperature.

This story from the Independent also dares to ask "why we are here and not them", and suggests that the only differences are physical.

Could it be that we modern humans are just physially mutated Neanderthals??

There are some pics, movies and info at NASA of this little understood event. If a Mass Coronal Ejection of enough magnitude came in the direction of Earth, it could do substantial damage.

If this kind of stuff interests you, then you should definitely visit SpaceWeather.com

This little Guardian/Observer article introduces the ideas of Joël Bertho, an architect and specialist in reconstituted stone. And they have a lot of validity. If it was possible to take a mixture up the pyramids in buckets, and then create the blocks there, then we can forget all about ramps, pulleys, ropes and so on. And it is more believable than sonic levitation.

Apparantly the authorities won't let this chap gather any more samples for comparison.

Others have previously theorised on this. There is an excellent four-part article online at Geopolymer.org, as well as a whole book on the subject.

From Nando Times

While it had long been accepted that North Americans have grown several inches on average during the 20th century, a lot more than size has changed.

The changes are apparent in the shapes and sizes of certain bones in the legs and forearms, which have changed in proportion to the rest of the body.

See a picture of a galaxy-sized shock wave that is racing outward from the center of NGC 4636 at 435 miles (700 kilometers) per second. This has come from an explosion in its galactic center with an energy equivalent to several hundred thousand supernovas. More info at NASA

The Earth-orbiting satellite BeppoSAX, the solar-spying Ulysses, and NASA's Mars Odyssey combined to detect a brief yet intense gamma ray burst.

Gamma rays are so powerful that if generated nearby, they would penetrate steel and irradiate everything to extinction. Luckily, the newly observed burst came from more than 4 billion light-years away. That's the closest gamma-ray burst ever detected, researchers said.

More at Space.com

Worried about global warming?

The US National Academy of Sciences warns that sudden, unexpected climate change - on a scale that could cause widespread drought or plunge Earth into a deep freeze - pose a more immediate danger.

Global climate change, often seen as a process stretching over thousands of years, could in fact occur abruptly and unexpectedly -- quickly pushing up temperatures by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit and wreaking havoc on human society...geological evidence indicated that such rapid climate shifts had occurred frequently in the past -- moving temperatures drastically in the space of just a few decades.

See Christian Science Monitor or Yahoo / Reuters or Stanford University

I'm not going to shift all the old stuff here - they remain at Survive 2012 - and all the new stories will be here only...

This weblog server seeems cool (and free), it doesn't promise to be around forever, which (funnily enough) is okay by me.

I'm new to this, so whatever is above will be evidence of how I do...