Astrology Watch: Cardinal Climax Today

Astrologers are anticipating today to herald the onset of one of the most stressful periods of the current century in a period extending to - yes - 2012.  Today is the so-called Cardinal Climax, in which forces of massive change confront those of crushing oppression.  The image above is taken from the What the Fuck's Going On blog, where Earl Nash reports: "This is the view of the planets from New York City on Aug. 1, at 6am. We have the most planets in the tightest alignments and at the supposedly 'sensitive' Zero degrees of Cardinal signs. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I looked at records going back to the 1800’s, and this is the most difficult alignment I found. When I was at a conference in Boston last month, someone said this was the most difficult alignment they have seen in the last "1,000 years." Another person told me this is the worst alignment in "10,000 years."

The Oldest Living Things in the World

3,000 years old: Llaretta in the Atacama Desert, Chile.  A relative of parsley that resembles a large green rock. © Rachel Sussman.

On July 26, CNN reported on the oldest living things in the world here.  The article profiles Rachel Sussman, photographer and time traveller. You can check out her blog here.  Since 2004 she has been searching the continents for the oldest organisms on earth: "So far, she has shot more than 25 different species of plant or organism, each being older than 2,000 years - 'I wanted to start with the idea of year zero' - with the oldest being actinobacteria from the permafrost of Siberia estimated to be around 500,000 years old."  She commented further: "you get to encounter these things that are incomprehensible to our sense of time. What does 100,000 years feel like? It's something we can consider for a moment, but hard for us to hold on to it and for it to be meaningful."

9,500 years old: Clonal Spruce, Sweden. © Rachel Sussman.

The Age of the Genome 1

BBC reports on the Age of the Genome. Image © Coneyl Jay / Science Photo Library.

BBC has dubbed our era the 'Age of the Genome.'  Today on the BBC World Service there is the first of a four part series airing about the mapping of the human genome and its significance for medicine in our times.  On this blog, I've mostly talked about how we use physics, astronomy, archaeology, legends and mythology to understand eras of history that are beyond the reach of human records and associated concepts of time.  What I have not mentioned as much is the similar use of genetics and biology as tools for measuring time, and the impact of time, on the human experience.  In other words, the human genome sequence is not only radically changing our current period and leaving its mark on it.  It is radically reshaping our present and future by telling us about our deep past.  This BBC series may address how the genome is being used as a tool for writing the unwritten Prehistoric history of our species.  Program times are here.  You can listen to the program here.

Captured Traditions

Queen Elizabeth inspecting the Honour Guard in Ottawa, Canada Day, 2010. © Buckingham Palace Press Office (All Rights Reserved).

The Montreal Gazette has just reported that on July 25, Britain's royal family set up a Flickr photo account here.  There are photos going back to the nineteenth century, including pics of Diana and previously unseen shots inside Buckingham Palace.  This one popped out at me, as did one of the Queen receiving a hockey sweater with ER on it.

The First Nanosecond in the History of the Universe

The infant universe's rapid expansion. NASA/WMAP © 2006.

Yes, it's the time of year for big conventions and all sorts of news and ideas are floating around.  The Mars Society announced on July 23 that one of the keynotes at their annual convention, this year in Dayton, Ohio in early August, will be Dr. David Chuss of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, will be presenting a plenary session entitled The Early Universe which will discuss the epoch of rapid accelerated expansion, called "inflation", that happened within the first nano-second of the history of the universe."  Chuss is an expert in "astronomical polarimetry and is currently working on several projects that will endeavor to measure the polarization of the afterglow of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, in an attempt to probe the earliest instants of the Universe."  Research in Dr. Chuss's field is based on findings from a spacecraft that measures the heat remaining from the Big Bang, that is, the oldest light in the universe.

Heartbeat of the Cosmos and Our Sun's Twin Star

Binary Stars WR 25 and Tr16-244 in the Carina Nebula. Hubble Photo. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain).

MIT's Technology Review reported on July 12 that Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas and Richard Bambach at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC have reviewed the past 500 million years of earth's paleo-record to try to explain mass extinctions that have occurred like clockwork every 27 million years.  Their work has shown "an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%."