Enlightr Blog

Not much I can say about it... just watch.

 

If you do, great news! Recent advances could mean that the woolly mammoth could be a common sight in a zoo in the near future.

"In November 2008, a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania reported they had sequenced a large fraction of the mammoth genome. The genome of any living species is the DNA genes which make up the chromosomes that reside in the nucleus of every cell and if we have that, then we might be able recreate the entire beast. We are on the road that leads to cloning a woolly mammoth."

How long do you think Jarassic Park will take to be a reality? If science keeps going this way, I'd say it's likely in the future. I for one, would love to see it.

"A new DNA decoding machine made this exciting success possible because it can work with genetic material from hair and DNA that is broken up and can only be isolated as fragments. Decoding the entire mammoth genome is only question of money, cost estimate is about $USD 2 million."

At only a cost of money I doubt it'll take much longer, so watch out people. Here comes the woolly mammoth, back from the dead to a zoon near you.

Cloning the Wolly Mammoth [environmentalgraffiti.com]

When two people live together for a long time and have a good working relationship, they often begin to look alike. This is because they are constantly mirroring each other's facial expressions, which, over time, builds muscle definition in the same areas of the face. Even couples who don't look facially similar can appear similar in a photograph because they use the same smile.

In 2000, psychologist Dr John Gottman of the University of Washington, Seattle, and his colleagues, discovered that marriages are more likely to fail when one partner not only does not mirror the other's expressions of happiness, but instead shows expressions of contempt. Instead, this opposite behaviour affects the smiling partner, even when they are not consciously aware of what is happening.

In the 1980s, several American hospitals introduced the concept of the 'Laughter Room'. Based on Norman Cousins experiences and other laughter research by Dr Patch Adams.

They allocated a room and filled it with joke books, comedy films and other humorous tapes, and had regular visits from comedians and clowns. Patients were then exposed to 30- to 60-minute sessions each day. The result was impressive. A dramatic improvement in patient health and shorter average hospitalisation time per patient was found. The Laughter Rooms also showed a decrease in the number of painkillers required by those in pain and patients became easier to deal with. So you could say that doctors now take laughter more seriously.

Percy Fawcett was an incredible character. He was the real life inspiration for Indiana Jones and he was close friends with Arthur Conan Doyle - his talks with whom helped provide inspiration for Doyle's famous book The Lost World. Fawcett was an archaeologist and adventurer, his sudden disappearence in the Amazonion jungle in South America went on to cause the deaths of over 100 people in over 13 failed expeditions to find his remains.

Born in 1867 in Torquay, UK, he went on to become a colonel in the military, serve in World War 1 and work for the Secret Service in North Africa. He later returned to studying archaeology and wildlife and continue his South American expeditions.

In the 1920s Fawcett had convinced himself through the research of historical records and ancient tribal legends that somewhere in Brazil there was a hidden lost city that Fawcett referred to in his papers as "Z". In 1925 Fawcett and his son set out to find the lost city, receiving funds from a London group of financiers known as The Glove. Fawcett and his son left instructions stating that if they did not return, nobody should go in search of them lest they suffer the same fate.

May 29th, 1925 was the last time they were heard from. Fawcett had sent a telegraph to his wife explaining that they were about to enter unexplored territory and cross a section of the Amazon River. They were never heard from again. In the following decades there were many attempted searches for the traces left of Fawcett and his expedition. All that remained to be found were unverifiable rumours of his disappearance - rumours ranging from the plausible to the bizarre. Rumours that Fawcett had been killed by wild animals, disease or natives abounded but none had any strong root in evidence. One outlandish rumour went that Fawcett had lost his memory and become the leader of his own tribe of cannibals. Over 13 expeditions have since been sent to recover his remains, and over the course of these expeditions, over 100 people have perished.

A Danish explorer, Arne Falk-Ronne, travelled to the Mato Grosso region, the area of jungle where Fawcett disappeared, in the 60's. He wrote in a book he published in 1991 in which he wrote that he had discovered Fawcett's fate from a man who had heard it from one of Fawcett's murderers. The story goes that Fawcett and his companions lost all their gifts for the native tribes whilst travelling along the Amazon. Continuing without gifts was considered by the tribes a "serious breach of protocol" and when found to be all seriously ill by Kalapalo tribesmen, the tribesmen decided to kill them. Colonel Fawcett, considered by the tribe to be an old man, received a proper burial; the others were simply thrown into the river. Falk-Ronne travelled to the Kalapalo and reported that one of the members confirmed the story he had been told.

There is no evidence to support any theory of Fawcett's disappearance, but Falk-Ronne's seems a likely candidate. Whatever the truth is, it's a damned interesting story.