A mother’s diet can affect her grandchildren

A mother’s diet can change the behaviour of a specific gene for at least two subsequent generations, a new study demonstrates for the first time.

Feeding mice an enriched diet during pregnancy silenced a gene for light fur in their pups. And even though these pups ate a standard, un-enriched diet, the gene remained less active in their subsequent offspring.

The findings could help explain the curious results from recent studies of human populations – including one showing that the grandchildren of well-fed Swedes had a greater risk of diabetes.

The new mouse experiment lends support to the idea that we inherit not only our genes from our parents, but also a set of instructions that tell the genes when to become active. These instructions appear to be passed on through “epigenetic” changes to DNA – genes can be activated or silenced according to the chemical groups that are added onto them.

This article at New Scientist further proves the possibility of the environment affecting the DNA of subsequent generations, and also that genes can lay dormant until triggered by environmental conditions

Humans are still evolving!

Well, given the inaccuracies involved with looking so far back, it could be one big burst of evolution, circa 9,000BC:

....researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

...Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations

....Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans.

New 2012 cataclysm book

Lawrence E Joesph has a 2012 cataclysm book coming out in January. Here's his summary of possibilities (all of which I agree with):

# Ancient Mayan prophecies based on two millennia of meticulous astronomical observations indicate that 12/21/12 will mark the birth of a new age, accompanied, as all births are, by blood and agony as well as hope and promise.

# Since the 1940’s, and particularly, since 2003, the Sun has behaved more tumultuously than any time since the rapid global warming that accompanied the melting of the last Ice Age. Solar physicists concur that solar activity will next peak, at record-setting levels, in 2012.

# Storms on the Sun are related to storms on the Earth. The great wave of 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma coincided with one of the stormiest weeks in the recorded history of the Sun.

# The Earth’s magnetic field, our primary defense against harmful solar radiation, has begun to dwindle, with cracks comparable in scale to the ozone hole opening up randomly. A pole shift, in which such protection falls nearly to zero as the North and South magnetic poles reverse position, may well be under way.

# Russian geophysicists believe that the Solar System has entered an interstellar energy cloud. This cloud is energizing and destabilizing the Sun and all the planets’ atmospheres. Their predictions for catastrophe resulting from the Earth’s encounter with this energy cloud range from 2010 to 2020.

# Berkeley physicists, who discovered that the dinosaurs and 70% of all other species on Earth were extinguished by an impact 65 million years ago, maintain, with 99% certainty, that we are now overdue for another such mega-catastrophe.

# The Yellowstone supervolcano, which erupts catastrophically every 600,000 to 700,000 years, is preparing to blow. The most recent eruption of comparable magnitude, at Lake Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, led to the death of more than 90% of the world’s population at the time.

# Eastern philosophies such the I Ching, Chinese book of changes, and also Hindu theology, have been plausibly interpreted as supporting the 2012 end date, as have a range of indigenous belief systems.

# At least one scholarly interpretation of the Bible predicts that the Earth will be annihilated in 2012. The burgeoning Armageddonist movement of Muslims, Christians and Jews actively seeks to precipitate the final End-Times battle.

Evidence - Supernova caused extinctions!

There was a supernova 41,000 years ago, followed by an intense blast of iron-rich grains that impacted the planet roughly 34,000 years ago, followed by a comet, which may have been composed from the remnants of a supernova explosion, 13,000 years ago. The comet caused the demise of the mammoths in North America.....

A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the extinction of the mammoth.

...Firestone and West believe that debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density, comet-like objects that wreaked havoc on the solar system long ago. One such comet may have hit North America 13,000 years ago, unleashing a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. They found evidence of this impact layer at several archaeological sites throughout North America where Clovis hunting artifacts and human-butchered mammoths have been unearthed. It has long been established that human activity ceased at these sites about 13,000 years ago, which is roughly the same time that mammoths disappeared.

They also found evidence of the supernova explosion’s initial shockwave: 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks that are peppered with tiny impact craters apparently produced by iron-rich grains traveling at an estimated 10,000 kilometers per second. These grains may have been emitted from a supernova that exploded roughly 7,000 years earlier and about 250 light years from Earth.

“Our research indicates that a 10-kilometer-wide comet [or broken up, causing Carolina Bay], which may have been composed from the remnants of a supernova explosion, could have hit North America 13,000 years ago,” says Firestone. “This event was preceded by an intense blast of iron-rich grains that impacted the planet roughly 34,000 years ago.”

In support of the comet impact, Firestone and West found magnetic metal spherules in the sediment of nine 13,000-year-old Clovis sites in Michigan, Canada, Arizona, New Mexico and the Carolinas. Low-density carbon spherules, charcoal, and excess radioactivity were also found at these sites.

...“The potassium-40 in the Clovis layer is much more abundant than potassium-40 in the solar system. This isotope is formed in considerable excess in an exploding supernova, and has mostly decayed since the Earth was formed,” says Firestone. “We therefore believe that whatever hit the Earth 13,000 years ago originated from a recently exploded supernova.”


Firestone and West also uncovered evidence of an even earlier event that blasted parts of the Earth with iron-rich grains. Three mammoth tusks found in Alaska and Siberia, which were carbon-dated to be about 34,000 years old, are pitted with slightly radioactive, iron-rich impact sites caused by high-velocity grains. Because tusks are composed of dentine, which is a very hard material, these craters aren’t easily formed. In fact, tests with shotgun pellets traveling 1,000 kilometers per hour produced no penetration in the tusks. Much higher energies are needed: x-ray analysis determined that the impact depths are consistent with grains traveling at speeds approaching 10,000 kilometers per second.

“This speed is the known rate of expansion of young supernova remnants,” says Firestone.

The supernova’s one-two punch to the Earth is further corroborated by radiocarbon measurements. The timeline of physical evidence discovered at Clovis sites and in the mammoth tusks mirrors radiocarbon peaks found in Icelandic marine sediment samples that are 41,000, 34,000, and 13,000 years old. Firestone contends that these peaks, which represent radiocarbon spikes that are 150 percent, 175 percent, and 40 percent above modern levels, respectively, can only be caused by a cosmic ray-producing event such as a supernova.

“The 150 percent increase of radiocarbon found in 41,000-year-old marine sediment is consistent with a supernova exploding 250 light years away, when compared to observations of a radiocarbon increase in tree rings from the time of the nearby historical supernova SN 1006,” says Firestone.

Firestone adds that it would take 7,000 years for the supernova’s iron-rich grains to travel 250 light years to the Earth, which corresponds to the time of the next marine sediment radiocarbon spike and the dating of the 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks. The most recent sediment spike corresponds with the end of the Clovis era and the comet-like bombardment. More.

Chinese Pyramids - Satellite Pics

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to put the effort in :)

Walter Hain from Austria has written an article, and complemented it with some good images from Google Earth showing several Chinese pyramids from above. Like these two:

Excess Cosmic Rays from the Cygnus constellation

Researchers led by Michihiro Amenomori of Hirosaki University in Japan plotted the direction of 37 billion cosmic rays and found a slight excess of 1 part in 1000 coming from a patch of sky roughly centred on the constellation Cygnus.

This suggests there is a source of cosmic rays inside our own galaxy coming from that direction, says team member Yi Zhang of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.

The excess is in the same part of the sky that exhibits an unexplained excess of high-energy photons called gamma rays in observations by the Milagro gamma ray detector in Los Alamos, New Mexico, US, and other instruments. More...

Within that constellation is Deneb, one of the brightest & luminous stars in our sky, a blue giant. It is approx. 3000 light years away.

Moon and rain = quakes

At New Scientist we learn that the likelihood of a quake is far greater if it is raining and/or a full moon:

Between October 2004 and August 2005 Robin Crockett from the University of Northampton, UK, and his colleagues monitored tremors and collected tidal data along the Java/Sumatra trench. They found that major quakes were 86 per cent more likely around new and full moons, when tides are at their greatest.

...Meanwhile Sebastian Hainzl from the University of Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues have noticed that rain can also trigger quakes. In 2002 they monitored tremors, rainfall and groundwater pressure in south-east Germany.

They found that water from a heavy rainstorm can reach spots underground where masses of rock are trying to move past each other but are stuck together by friction. The water can ease the friction, releasing pent-up tension so that the rocks jerk past each other and initiate tremors as deep as 4 kilometres underground

Mayan Doomsday Prophecy

Thursday, November 09 - History Channel

The world is coming to an end on December 21, 2012! The ancient Maya made this stunning prediction more than 2,000 years ago. We'll peel back the layers of mystery and examine in detail how the Maya calculated the exact date of doomsday. Journey back to the ancient city of Chichen Itza, the hub of Maya civilization deep in the heart of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, to uncover the truth about this prophecy. The Maya were legendary astronomers and timekeepers--their calendar is more accurate than our own. By tracking the stars and planets they assigned great meaning to astronomical phenomena and made extraordinary predictions based on them--many of which have come true. Could their doomsday prophecy be one of them? In insightful interviews archaeologists, astrologers, and historians speculate on the meaning of the 2012 prophecy. Their answers are as intriguing as the questions.