Hi fellas,

First off, I'm not posting this as a platform for controversy between TTE (TOE) and THEOLOGY. Rather, I just thought it was an interesting bit of news that we should watch as it develops. My outlook has always been that people should not make themselves the victims of needless arguments, but rather be thinkers or at best students about issues in life.

Consequently, the reposting of this news item does not invite bashings from any side of the divide: hence, "Don't Bash The Theory". This is what someone who is studying the subject simply has to say. We read and observe and share thoughts thereto - not fights on top of him O. . . I dey beg!

The news follows in ernest.

Human Evolution Coming to a Halt

          Press Assoc. - Tuesday, October 7 04:21 am

          _______________________________________________________________



          Human evolution is grinding to a halt, according to a leading genetics expert.

          The gloomy message from Professor Steve Jones is: this is as good as it gets.

          Prof Jones, from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at
          University College London, believes the mechanisms of evolution are winding
          down in the human race.

         At least in the developed world, humans are now as close to utopia as they are
         ever likely to be, he argues. Speaking at a UCL Lunch Hour Lecture in London,
         Prof Jones said there were three components to evolution - natural selection,
         mutation and random change.

         He said: "In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of twenty.
         Now, in the Western world, 98% of them are surviving to the age of 21. Our life
         expectancy is now so good that eliminating all accidents and infectious diseases
         would only raise it by a further two years. Natural selection no longer has death
         as a handy tool."

         Mutation rate was also slowing down, he said. Although chemicals and radioactive
         pollution could cause genetic changes, one of the most important mutation triggers
         was advanced age in men. "Perhaps surprisingly, the age of reproduction has gone
         down - the mean age of male reproduction means that most conceive no children
         after the age of 35," said Prof Jones. "Fewer older fathers means that if anything,
         mutation is going down."

         Random alterations to the human genetic blueprint were also less likely in a world
         that had become an ethnic melting pot, according to Prof Jones. He said: "Humans
         are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the
         animal kingdom, and we have agriculture to thank for that. Without farming,
         the world population would probably have reached half a million by now - about the
         size of the population of Glasgow.

        "Small populations which are isolated can change - evolve - at random as genes are
         accidentally lost. Worldwide, all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity
         for random change is dwindling. History is made in bed, but nowadays the beds are
         getting closer together. Almost everywhere, inbreeding is becoming less common.

         "In Britain, one marriage in fifty or so is between members of a different ethnic group,
         and the country is one of the most sexually open in the world. We are mixing into
          a global mass, and the future is brown."

         He added: "So, if you are worried about what utopia is going to be like, don't; at least
         in the developed world, and at least for the time being, you are living in it now."

          _______________________________________________________________

        source: Yahoo News.

Ticking time bomb

No be only 'Evolution' o. . . another theory still dey here to share. Enjoy.


Nobel Prize for Asymmetrical Universe

Two Japanese and American win physics Nobel

By Niklas Pollard Reuters - Tuesday, October 7 05:41 pm

_________________________________________________________________________

[img]http://d.yimg.com/i/ng/ne/rtrs/20081007/13/1698426468-kyoto-university-emeritus-professor-toshihide-maskawa-speaks-during-news-conference.jpg?x=180&y=142&q=75&sig=W7d6Zg2W_I9G2N9NY5lndQ--[/img]

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared
the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping explain why the universe is asymmetrical
and thus fit for life, the prize committee said on Tuesday.

The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of Chicago, and
Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why
the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known
as broken symmetries.

"The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations
from symmetry at the microscopic level," the committee said. This broken symmetry
allowed particles of matter to outnumber particles of anti-matter.

This is lucky for all living things -- because if the universe were symmetrical, anti-matter
would be constantly meeting matter, and exploding.

The work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behaviour of the tiny particles
known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model, which unites three of the four
fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and
electromagnetic force, leaving out gravity.

"Professor Nambu laid a really theoretical foundation for modern particle physics,"
Sakue Yamada, emeritus professor of the University of Tokyo, told Kyodo news.

Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, which
describes some interactions between protons and neutrons, which make up atoms,
and the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons.


SHARED PRIZE

He shared half of the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize with Kobayashi
of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation and Maskawa of Kyoto
University.

Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted there were three families of quarks, instead of
the two then known. Their calculations played out as predicted in high-energy
particle physics experiments and there are now six known types of quarks -- up,
down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.

Kobayashi said the news of his Nobel prize came as a shock. "It is my great honour
and I can't believe this," he said.

Maskawa said he was not surprised.

"There is a pattern to how the Nobel prize is awarded," he was quoted as saying by
Kyodo. "I am very happy that Professor Yoichiro Nambu was awarded. I myself am not
that happy."

A surprised Nambu greeted reporters and photographers at his three-story brick home.
"I don't know about the money yet," Nambu, 87, told Reuters.

Physicists are now searching for the spontaneous broken symmetry, the Higgs mechanism,
which threw the universe into imbalance at the time of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research,
or CERN, in Switzerland will be looking for the Higgs particle when they restart the collider
in spring 2009.

The prize, awarded by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences, was the second of this year's crop of Nobel prizes.

The prizes are given annually for achievements in science, peace, literature and economics.
The prizes bearing the name of Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with
the 1895 will of the Swedish dynamite millionaire.

(Additional reporting by Chisa Fujioka in Tokyo, Michael Kahn in London,
John Gress and Mike Conlon in Chicago; writing by Niklas Pollard and
Maggie Fox, editing by Patricia Zengerle)

_______________________________________________________________

source: Yahoo News.

Great stuff. Another beam of light pushing back the darkness of reality.

[list][size=14pt]Strange 'twin' new worlds found[/size]


The planemo twins:
Two peculiar planet-like worlds

A pair of strange new worlds that blur the boundaries between planets and stars have been discovered beyond our Solar System. A few dozen such objects have been identified in recent years but this is the first set of "twins". Dubbed "planemos", they circle each other rather than orbiting a star.

Their existence challenges current theories about the formation of planets and stars, astronomers report in the journal Science.

"This is a truly remarkable pair of twins - each having only about 1% the mass of our Sun," said Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, co-author of the Science paper. "Its mere existence is a surprise, and its origin and fate a bit of a mystery."

'Double planet'

The pair belongs to what some astronomers believe is a new class of planet-like objects floating through space; so-called planetary mass objects, or "planemos", which are not bound to stars.

               Now we're curious to find out whether such pairs
               are common or rare. The answer could shed light
               on how free-floating planetary-mass objects form.
               Valentin Ivanov

They appear to have been forged from a contracting gas cloud, in a similar way to stars, but are much too cool to be true stars.

And while they have similar masses to many of the giant planets discovered beyond our Solar System (the larger weighs in at 14 times the mass of Jupiter and the other is about seven times more massive), they are not thought to be true planets either.

"We are resisting the temptation to call it a 'double planet' because this pair probably didn't form the way that planets in our Solar System did," said co-researcher Valentin Ivanov of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago, Chile.

'Amazing diversity'

The two objects have similar spectra and colours, suggesting that they formed at the same time about a million years ago.

They are separated by about six times the distance between the Sun and Pluto, and can be found in the Ophiuchus star-forming region some 400 light years away. They go under the official name Oph 162225-240515, or Oph 1622 for short.

"Recent discoveries have revealed an amazing diversity of worlds out there," said Dr Jayawardhana. "Still, the Oph 1622 pair stands out as one of the most intriguing, if not peculiar."

His colleague, Dr Ivanov, said they were curious to find out whether such pairs are common or rare.

"The answer could shed light on how free-floating planetary-mass objects form," he added.

Oph 1622 was discovered using the ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla, Chile. Follow-up studies were conducted with the ESO's Very Large Telescope.

Source: BBC News[/list]

I gotta admit, the theory of Human Evolution coming to a halt is a totally new one on me.
I was only reading about the subject yesterday and everywhere I went it was stating that it's actually accelerating.

Just Google "human evolution accelerating" and you'll see what I mean. Normally when you Google, you have to sift through tons of irrelevence and loads of stuff that doesn't really have that much to do with the subject. But not this time. Even if you Google "human evolution slowing" most of the hits (apart from those about Steven Jones) are about it speeding up!!! So my jury is definitely against this guy.

Shows you the dichotomy of thoughts among some scientists. Just a theory, though, especially that Professor Steve Jones is 'a leading genetics expert'.

Here's another theory that some thinkers hold in diverse thoughts: Red Rain. Certainly, not all the details are in yet, so like I said: don't bash the theory - just observe.


[list][size=14pt]Red rain could prove that aliens have landed[/size]



The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday March 12 2006

In the article below, Dr Milton Wainwright was quoted as saying that red rain lacked DNA. Dr Wainwright has asked us to make clear that currently he has no view on whether red rain contains DNA and that it is physicist Godfrey Louis who is of that view.

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.

Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.

Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'.

But a few researchers believe Louis may be on to something and are following up his work. Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist at Sheffield, is now testing samples of Kerala's red rain. 'It is too early to say what's in the phial,' he said. 'But it is certainly not dust. Nor is there any DNA there, but then alien bacteria would not necessarily contain DNA.'

Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says. In addition, one analysis showed the particles were 50 per cent carbon, 45 per cent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron: consistent with biological material. Louis also discovered that, hours before the first red rain fell, there was a loud sonic boom that shook houses in Kerala. Only an incoming meteorite could have triggered such a blast, he claims. This had broken from a passing comet and shot towards the coast, shedding microbes as it travelled. These then mixed with clouds and fell with the rain. Many scientists accept that comets may be rich in organic chemicals and a few, such as the late Fred Hoyle, the UK theorist, argued that life on Earth evolved from microbes that had been brought here on comets. But most researchers say that Louis is making too great a leap in connecting his rain with microbes from a comet.

For his part, Louis is unrepentant. 'If anybody hears a theory like this, that it is from a comet, they dismiss it as an unbelievable kind of conclusion. Unless people understand our arguments - people will just rule it out as an impossible thing, that extra-terrestrial biology is responsible for this red rain.'


Source: Guardian.co.uk[/list]

[list]Further reading:

ANALYSIS OF RED RAIN OF KERALA

Dr. Godfrey Louis' Homepage[/list]

[flash=425,355]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBR3FPh5NM&hl=en&fs=1[/flash]