I saw two items today about meteorites impacting Earth.  The first one (a Japanese video showing what would happen if a HUGE meteorite hit earth) I said, hmmm, that’s interesting.  The second one (Antigravitas - The sky is falling!) I said, this is scary.  VERY scary.

There would have been no warning. No time to evacuate. Instead an area slightly smaller than a football field would have been leveled in an instant. Everything within two kilometers of the blast zone would have been subjected to extreme heat and pressure. Close to the blast zone many buildings would have collapsed, while further away they might just have lost every window. Many would be on fire within the inner zone.

Let’s hope that we continue to get “lucky” w/r/t the cosmic dance of death that our planet is engaged with. If not, well, see you on the other side. And don’t forget to tell your mom that you love her.

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Such is the callout quote from a recent Nature article, which reports on a study by researchers that seems to show that RNA may (in some cases in some plants) contain a “backup” copy of DNA. This goes against the current idea of “inheritance” which states that the child gets the same genes (and gene mutations) as the parent. However, if this backup copy exists, it may be that the un-mutated genes exist in the RNA, and could (theoretically) be used to “overwrite” the mutated DNA genes. If this holds true for humans, this marks a profound opportunity shift in how we currently treat genetic diseases. Big stuff here.

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