Found at a new website that is either run by Dr. Carl Johan Calleman or just supports/sells his ideas:
Jeremy wrote: "So you're saying mankind is going to become enlightened in 2012 and there will be no more suffering, starvation, sickness, lonliness, evil and war?"
Reply: Correct. Note however, we concur with Calleman's finding that the ending of the calendar is actually October 28, 2011. 2012 will certainly be a time period of adjustment to these sweeping changes.
I figure the date being 1 year ahead of the most common understanding will allow his followers to take magic mushrooms for a year and pretend that they have evolved to a higher level of light-being something... before the real end comes along.
The Creek tribe don't want any more digging to occur (ancestors are buried there), so they purchased ground-penetrating radar.
...just beneath the plow zone atop that largest of Etowah's mounds, radar and other remote sensing instruments have revealed the foundations of three, perhaps four, previously unknown buildings — including one massive square structure 54 feet on a side — that appears to have been the ruler's residence.
Because the mounds were built one hand-carried basket of earth at a time, they rose slowly from the surrounding river plain. As a result, the buildings atop the largest found — which sprawl across an acre of real estate — were probably constructed late in Etowah's history, probably between 1325 and 1375.
"These structures are huge," says King. "This is clearly a much more complex place than we imagined."
Embedded in the heart of a supernova remnant 10,000 light-years away is a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy.
At first glance, the object looks like a densely packed stellar corpse known as a neutron star surrounded by a bubble of ejected stellar material, exactly what would be expected in the wake of a supernova explosion.
However, a closer 24.5-hour examination with the European Space Agency's XMM Newton X-ray satellite reveals that the energetic X-ray emissions of the blue, point-like object cycles every 6.7 hours — tens of thousands of times longer than expected for a freshly created neutron star.
One explanation for the neutron star's strange behavior is that it might be a magnetar, an exotic subclass of highly magnetized neutron stars. Of the dozen or so magnetars that are known, however, most usually spin several times per minute — much faster than 1E.[1E161348-5055]
Police & military robots will patrol Korean streets within the next 5 years.
"Patrol bots will guard the streets at night, and even chase criminals, while horse-shaped combat bots will augment the country's fighting force. In both cases, the bots will communicate via Korea's vast mobile network."
Amazingly, RoboCop, and all the problems highlighted in the movies, could be reality real soon!
...late December, scientists noticed that thousands of rare sea birds called red phalaropes were suddenly being seen on land in Northern California. These birds usually spend most of their time flying over the ocean and only land in the Arctic, where they breed. But now these rare birds are being spotted by bird watchers in San Francisco.
A two-legged robot that walks at record-breaking speed has been developed by researchers from Germany and Scotland.
"RunBot" is the fastest robot on two legs – for its size. At 30 centimetres high, it can walk at a speedy 3.5 leg-lengths per second. This beats the previous record holder – MIT's "Spring Flamingo" – which is four times as tall but manages just 1.4 leg-lengths per second.
Scientists Sequence Complete Genome of Woolly Mammoth
That they have managed to do this, and I guess the possibly of the species being resurrected, is the news. For the how & why of it all, follow the link below.
It is called 21.12.2012 Prophecy - End of the world, and it is long. Looks like more New Age mumbo jumbo to me, for example:
A string of incoherent spatial shells forms a linear flow of time in between in the same way that a string of incoherent time shells forms an uninterrupted flow of space in between. The shells are lined one within the other in all different directions of space and time thus gradually building up an uninterrupted density of space on a larger scale. A string of spatial shells is opposed by an equal and opposite string of time shells, which are their corresponding motions. Such motions of the spatial shells are building up the larger spatial shells (light speed difference) opposed by a correspondingly larger motions. The polynomial reaction of every finite manifestation is infinite....
Mendel's laws underlie almost all of genetics. They state, for example, that it is the combination of dominant and recessive genes inherited from the parents that dictates an offspring's characteristics.
In the main, this is true, but examples of inherited traits are being discovered that deviate from this rule. These "epigenetic" effects are caused not by genes themselves, but by inherited factors that affect gene expression in later generations. The latest such effect, described by a team led by Minoo Rassoulzadegan at Sophia Antipolis University in Nice, France, shows that RNA, as well as DNA, can carry information from one generation to another - a clear violation of the cherished notion of Mendelian inheritance.
Basically, mice that inherited dominant spotted tail genes had spotted tails, but some with normal tail genes had spotted tails - something that cannot happen according to DNA & gene inheritance laws. So it looks like that RNA can and does have some effect.
At the tale end of an article explaining why we are safe from GRBs:
"It seems that the very nature of the Milky Way precludes these dangerous explosions from going off in our galaxy, let alone anywhere near enough to obliterate us."
Comes the names of some scientists who believe we should be fearful of gamma-ray bursts:
Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and Brian Thomas of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas - who warned of the dangers of GRBs - are not convinced that our galaxy is safe. Thomas points out that the Milky Way could merge with or swallow smaller, metal-poor galaxies suitable for GRBs.
Also, a study by Armen Atoyan of the University of Montreal in Canada and his colleagues, due to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, claims that a source of gamma rays in our galaxy, about 40,000 light years away, is a remnant of a GRB that went off about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Luckily it wasn't pointed at us, says Atoyan. "If he is right, it provides a counter argument," says Melott.
Stanek, however, argues that the source seen by Atoyan is more likely the leftovers of an unusually energetic supernova.
Merging with another galaxy, that might take a few years... but if a GRB (or unusually energetic supernova for that matter) has happened in our backyard, it can certainly happen again... at a moment's notice
The Good news is that one day we'll know the truth, but for now we just have to wait...
...the president of the European Association of Archaeologists said on Friday that he had visited the 700-foot (213-meter) hill and saw no evidence that it was human-made.
Speaking at a press conference in Sarajevo, Anthony Harding told reporters the pyramid-shaped hill was a natural phenomenon.
"My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues is what we saw was entirely geological in nature," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.
If (as I believe) there will be a global cataclysm one day in the future, and if (as I believe) it will involve every kind of natural disaster imaginable - earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions etc...
So if THAT happens, I suggest being as far away from nuclear reactors as possible, for they will not be able to withstand a cataclysm, and surviving the aftermath will be hard enough without dealing with your own local Chernobyl as well. A quick glance at the map should give you an idea of the safest regions (hint: Australia).
A new candidate for "local space nasty that can cause us damage in 2012" has emerged:
The density creates such high pressure at the core that quarks sometimes could be squeezed out of their usually tight groupings, and become free. This liberation, called quark deconfinement, would turn a normal neutron star into a “quark star.”
Astronomers have already found a few objects that they theorize may be quark stars.
But Rachid Ouyed, an astrophysicist at the University of Calgary in Canada, and a group of colleagues also propose that their formation could release massive amounts of energy, producing a type of implosion they call a “quark nova.” That, they add, may help explain certain hitherto mysterious cosmic blasts.
“Quark stars are the only place we would expect to see quarks ranging free in nature,” said Ouyed. His group plans to present findings of their theoretical studies June 5 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary.
Most likely to become quark stars are fast-spinning neutron stars with masses between 1.5 and 1.8 times that of our sun, they calculated. Thus one in every hundred known neutron stars could actually be a quark star.
Quark stars probably look like normal neutron stars except they don’t emit certain radio waves, the researchers argue. This peculiarity has already been noted in a class of neutron stars described as “radio-quiet,” about seven of which are known. Thus, these may be quark stars, the scientists say.
And so, is there a local candidate. Yes there is, RX J1856.5-3754 (also called RX J185635-3754, RX J185635-375, and various other designations). Discovered in 1992, it is between 150 & 450 light years away. Next closest is Geminga (Gemini gamma-ray source), a neutron star approximately 552 light-years away in the constellation Gemini.
Although it is highly impressive that DNA from 100,000 years ago has been extracted from the tooth of a Neanderthal child found in a cave in Belgium - what I find interesting is the following:
The study, reported in Current Biology, suggests our distant cousins were more genetically diverse than once thought...
"The Scladina sequence has revealed that the genetic diversity of Neanderthals has been underestimated," a team led by Dr Catherine Hanni of Ecole Normale Superieur in Lyon, France, wrote in the journal Current Biology.
"Thus, more Neanderthal sequences than the six presently available and longer than 100 bp are needed to fully understand the extent of the past diversity of Neanderthals."
Could it be that due to whatever really drives human evolution was permanently present back in those days, and that all Neanderthals were of their own unique individual strain?
Elderly Astronomers Agree on Cosmic Rays = Evolution
I no longer feel like an idiot...
...after decades of focusing their attentions skyward, the Meinels – now in their 80s – are grappling with a question that seems, at first light, to be far, far away from astronomy. Namely: Why did modern humans and other species emerge some 40,000 years ago?
Their answer: Cosmic radiation, which the Meinels will elaborate on June 20 in a noon public lecture at the University of San Diego, part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Coming from almost anyone else, the suggestion that a burst of cosmic radiation profoundly mutated life on Earth and altered the course of human evolution would probably be dismissed as outrageous science fiction.
But Aden and Marjorie Meinel have been both serious and significant players in astronomy for a good chunk of the last century. ...Marjorie's interest was inherited: Her father, Edison Pettit, was one of the founding astronomers of the 102-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory, east of Los Angeles. Aden's interest evolved over time. It began as an apprentice in Mount Wilson's optics shop, through a stint in the Navy as a rocket engineer and at the California Institute of Technology, where his doctoral dissertation eventually resulted in the world's first solid Schmidt spectrograph – a device for measuring and charting wavelengths of light in space.
With Marjorie serving as adviser, editor and muse (and mother to their seven children), Aden launched a career designing, developing and directing observatories around the world. He helped establish the first national observatory at Kitt Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., in the 1960s, then moved to Steward Observatory and taught at the University of Arizona. At various times, he helped build telescopes in India and China. In the 1980s, he and Marjorie moved to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena where they helped launch space-based telescopes like the Hubble. Aden retired in 1993, Marjorie in 2000.
While reading a story about ice-core research, Aden wondered whether the core samples also contained information about cosmic radiation levels over the Earth's history. To his and Marjorie's surprise, an examination of existing ice core data showed a significant surge in radiation roughly 40,000 years ago – about the same time, they noted, that modern humans emerged in Eurasia, and numerous other species in the northern hemisphere were either undergoing significant change or disappearing altogether.
“That's when we first became tempted to put two and two together,” said Aden. “If there was a large surge of cosmic rays, and there's good evidence that these rays can (cause mutations), the question becomes, did they help create new species of life?
“Our findings indicate that two very rare occurrences happened at roughly the same time, which suggests that how we've evolved might not be just slow, random mutation and natural selection. Maybe we are partly the product of cosmic radiation.”
The Meinels even have a likely source for the radiation: the gaseous remains of a dying star called the Cat's Eye nebula discovered by William Herschel in 1786.
According to their hypothesis, the nebula began emitting a burst of radiation roughly 200,000 years ago. “Around the time that Neanderthals began to appear,” said Aden.
Approximately 40,000 years ago, the frequency and intensity of the radiation surged, spawning in the Meinels' view, a host of evolutionary changes. “Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth passed out of the nebula's jet of cosmic rays, ending the accelerated mutations,” said Aden.
