Archimedes Spiral used earlier than previously thought
"A geometrical figure commonly attributed to Archimedes in 300 BC has been identified in Minoan wall paintings dated to over 1,000 years earlier." Could just be an artistic type experimenting, but given the accuracy, appears that mathematics and tools were used
Males can inherit the vices of their father - via DNA
Still more evidence accumulating, showing that DNA mutations can be inherited, which gives us the possibility of cosmic radiation causing rapid evolution. The study shows that men who smoked prior to puberty have fatter children than those who don't. Not a big deal, but who knows what else is being inherited besides a tendency to put on weight...
THE sins of the fathers are, indeed, visited on subsequent generations. Nutrition and smoking in early life may influence the health of men's sons and grandsons, a new study has revealed.
These striking inherited effects are thought to be due to subtle chemical changes to DNA known as "epigenetic" modifications (see "Mapping the epigenome"). And they could have big implications for public health: the behaviour of today's children, for example, may be stacking up problems for future generations.
Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at University College London, and colleagues at Umeå University in Sweden, have two lines of evidence for health effects being passed down the male line.
There is actually a 13th constellation that could perhaps be part of the zodiac. On Dec 21, 2012, the sun will pass through constellation of Ophiuchus. Ophiuchus means Serpent Holder, and in my book I am suggesting that the serpent is the symbol of mutational evolution. Read more at lightparty.com
That's right! Chickens have retained the ability to grow teeth. These means that horses might have retained the ability to grow a horn like a unicorn, and humans might have retained the ability the grow a third eye or be 10 feet tall...
Working late in the developmental biology lab one night, Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination of the snubbed beak, he found tiny bumps and protuberances along its edge that looked like teeth--alligator teeth to be specific.
Exactly how the mutation causes the chickens to sprout teeth is unknown, Fallon notes, but a similar effect can be produced in normal chickens. Harris proved this by engineering a virus to mimic the molecular signals of the mutation and caused normal chickens to briefly develop teeth that were then reabsorbed into the beak.
Could this be evidence of a new space nasty? One that can occur close enough to cause us harm in 2012?
A new kind of cosmic explosion, catalogued as GRB 060218, has been spotted in Earth's celestial neighbourhood, scientists report.
The blast seems like a gamma-ray burst, but when scientists first detected it with NASA's Swift satellite on 18 February, the explosion was about 25 times closer and lasted 100 times longer than a typical gamma-ray burst.
"This could be a new kind of burst, or we might be seeing a gamma-ray burst from an entirely different angle," said Swift scientist John Nousek at Penn State University. Astronomers don't fully understand gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). But they theorize that when one is pointed our way, it appears brighter than when the beams it produces shoot off in other directions.
The explosion originated in a star-forming galaxy about 440 million light-years away towards the constellation Aries. This would be the second-closest gamma-ray burst ever detected, if indeed it is one.
The burst lasted for nearly 2000 seconds, or about 33 minutes, astronomers say. Most bursts last a few milliseconds to tens of seconds.
It was dimmer than most. Even so, the newly spotted point of light in the sky outshines the entire galaxy in which the event occurred.
If the eruption indeed precedes a supernova, then it would reach peak brightness in about a week, scientists said.
A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.
LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday.
The company's lofty objective will sound familiar to followers of NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams from Earth – can climb, ferrying cargo, satellites and eventually people into space.
link me2012, February 25, 2006 at 12:03:00 AM AEDT
Tutankhamen teaches scientists a lesson
There is no record of white wine in Egypt until the 3rd century AD, and yet 1600 years prior to then, teenage king Tutankhamen stashed a few bottles of it in his tomb.
This is typical of the problems of modern science, they presume something didn't happen or exist until the evidence turns up.
"The change in shape since 1997 is very subtle: an increase in equatorial radius of about one 25th of an inch (one millimeter) per year, according to measurements."
But what is causing it? Follow the link for some non-catastrophic possibilities...
"The odds of a cloudy day increase by around 20 per cent when the cosmic ray flux is high," says Harrison, amounting to a few extra days of cloudiness per year.
When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere they produce charged particles which seem encourage the growth of cloud droplets. Compared with greenhouse gases the effect of cosmic rays on climate is small. But it could help explain some of the more mysterious changes in climate Earth has experienced in the past.
China: Pyramid-like Buildings found in Fuxian Lake
Chinese researchers have found ancient buildings similar to Mayan pyramids under Fuxian Lake in southern China’s Yunnan province.
Gengwei, a professional diver, told reporters on December 19th, 2005, that images from sonar scans showed that a large relic covering at least 2.4 square kilometers sits underwater in Fuxian Lake.
He said eight main buildings were found all under the water, including a round building and two large high buildings with floors that liken to the Mayan pyramids of Latin America.
The round one is similar to a colosseum in form, with a 37 meter wide base and a gap to the northeast.
One of the large, high buildings has three floors, a 60 meter wide base and lots of small steps linking the floors. Another is even larger, with a 63 meter wide base standing five floors and a total 21 meters high.
A 300 meter long and 5 to 7 meter wide rock road connects the two buildings.
The complex, located in present-day southern Yunnan province, is believed to be from an ancient civilization dating back to the Qin and Han dynasties, approximately 2,000 years ago.
Wait and see... often such claims are not so amazing when the evidence is finally provided.
An ancient map could prove that the Chinese visited the Americas 60 years before Columbus, and therefore supporting the theories of researcher Gavin Menzies
Meanwhile, some 1,000-year-old Viking teeth feature chiselled grooves that they probably copied from American Indians.
A low dose of radiation makes earthworms switch from asexual to sexual reproduction.
Enchytraeus japonensis, a species of earthworm found in Japan, normally reproduces by breaking into six or more sections, each of which grows into a new worm. But when Yukihisa Miyachi and colleagues from the International University of Health and Welfare in Otawara, Japan, exposed the worms to 4.5 micrograys of radiation per hour, about 15 times higher than natural background radiation levels, they stopped fragmenting. Instead, the researchers discovered that 85 per cent of the worms had produced eggs, some of which developed into juveniles, suggesting that the creatures had been having sex (Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, vol 79, p 1). The effect disappeared when the radiation level was increased to 30 micrograys per hour.
It has started! This is the first serious governmental initiative to protect our future survival in case of a global disaster/cataclsym...
WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity.
The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.
New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says Fowler.
The "missing link" fossils for cats don't exist because cat habitats are not very conducive to creating fossils. But what got me in this article are two things:
Cats evolved "remarkably quickly" (no further explanation given, unless you accept that 11 million years is quick)
Cheetahs apparantly migrated from Asia to the Americas, and then back to Asia before going to Africa (or maybe an ancient human took a pair to Africa in his boat??)
“These particles have much similarity with biological cells though they are devoid of DNA,” wrote Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, India, in the controversial paper.
“Are these cell-like particles a kind of alternate life from space?”
The mystery began when the scarlet showers containing the red specks hit parts of India in 2001. Researchers said the particles might be dust or a fungus, but it remained unclear.
The new paper includes a chemical analysis of the particles, a description of their appearance under microscopes and a survey of where they fell. It assesses various explanations for them and concludes that the specks, which vaguely resemble red blood cells, might have come from a meteor.
.... If the particles do represent alien life forms, said Louis and Kumar, this would fit with a longstanding theory called panspermia, which holds that life forms could travel around the universe inside comets and meteors.
These rocky objects would thus “act as vehicles for spreading life in the universe,” they added.
It was okay for a set of footprints to prove that mankind arrived in the Americas 40,000 years ago instead of just 10,000. But now that argon dating reveals the rocks are 1.3 million years old, orthodox scientists have determined that they aren't human footprints after all (because they couldn't be, could they?).
The article does not offer up any alternative ownwer of the footprints.
Doctors treating a woman at risk of having a premature baby may inadvertently be affecting her future grandchildren as well. A study in guinea pigs suggests that a drug commonly given to pregnant women to help their babies mature enough to survive can also affect the brains and behaviour of their grandchildren too. The finding raises a difficult dilemma for doctors, for while the drug undoubtedly saves lives, its side effects could last for generations.
This is now my equal favourite solution, alongside the Antarctica one of the Flem-Aths.
Atlantis the continent = South America (right direction from the Strait of Gibraltar, but perhaps a little too big?)
Atlantis the capital city = sunken city in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia
Given all the amazing stuctures nearby, and how well it fits with Plato's descriptions, this is a very neat solution. His book is called "Atlantis: The Andes Solution"
In the latest development, normal rats have been made to behave differently just by injecting them with a specific amino acid. The change to their behaviour was permanent. The amino acid altered the way the rat's genes were expressed, raising the idea that drugs or dietary supplements might permanently halt the genetic effects that predispose people to mental or physical illness.
It is not yet clear whether such interventions could work in humans. But there is good reason to believe they could, as evidence mounts that a range of simple nutrients might have such effects.
[in 2003 it was discovered]...the activity of a mouse's genes can be influenced by food supplements eaten by its mother just prior to, or during, very early pregnancy.
[in 2004 it was discovered]...mothers could influence the way a rat's genes are expressed after it has been born. If a rat is not licked, groomed and nursed enough by its mother, chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the DNA of a particular gene.
...Now the team has shown that a food supplement can have the same effect on well-reared rats at 90 days old - well into adulthood. The researchers injected L-methionine, a common amino acid and food supplement, into the brains of well-reared rats. The amino acid methylated the glucocorticoid gene, and the animals' behaviour changed.
..."Szyf's ideas are creating a buzz, as they suggest that methylation can influence our DNA well into adulthood. A huge number of diseases are caused by changes to how our DNA is expressed, and this opens up new ways of thinking about how to prevent and treat them"
So, radiation that damages the structure of foods we eat, could indirectly change our DNA, and possibly how we evolve???
