Stuff below the fold

A couple weeks ago there was talk of a radiation spike found in tree rings dated 774AD, but there were no historical reports that could find out why.

Then one non astronomer (Jonathon Allen, a biochemistry major ) heard a podcast about it, and did a google....it seems the AngloSaxon chronicle noted a supernova about that time.

His long-standing interest in history was helpful, he notes. "I knew that going that far back, there's very limited written history," he says. "The only things I'd ever seen or heard of were religious texts and 'chronicles' that listed kings and queens, wars and things of that nature."
His search found the eighth-century entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the Avalon Project, an online library of historical and legal documents hosted by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Scrolling down to the year ad 774, Allen found a reference to a "red crucifix" that appeared in the heavens "after sunset".

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Brain scans are able to find early brain changes of autism in infants, (long before they got shots)...

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It's going to be a looooong weekend.

they add a "leap second" to the clocks this weekend.

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Heh. animal fat and meat might help protect you against arsenic poisoning in Omega 3 containing fish.

Total dietary fat, animal fat, vegetable fat and saturated fat were also all associated with lower levels of arsenic, while omega 3 fatty acids, such as those found in fish oil, were associated with increased arsenic.

and then there is the problem of arsenic in rice milk....

I wonder if it is contamination from the arsenic pollution from using high arsenic coal in China...
the article mentions most of the poisoning comes from food and mentions " Coal is burned inside the home in open pits for daily cooking and crop drying, producing a high concentration of arsenic in indoor air."

Rice has to be dried before storage...here in the Philippines, the common way is to dry the unhusked rice on the roadways or on tarps, or to pay the rice company to dry it...but after we lost one third of our crop last year from a typhoon because we didn't harvest and dry it fast enough ,we now have our own rice drier, which uses diesel, not the cheaper coal...

This might be the link for arsenic in brown rice and rice milk...

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