Swathes of dark comets may be prowling the solar system, posing a deadly threat to Earth.

Hazardous comets and asteroids are monitored by various space agencies under an umbrella effort known as Spaceguard. The vast majority of objects found so far are rocky asteroids. Yet UK-based astronomers Bill Napier at Cardiff University and David Asher at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland claim that many comets could be going undetected. "There is a case to be made that dark, dormant comets are a significant but largely unseen hazard," says Napier.

In previous work, Napier and Janaki Wickramasinghe, also at Cardiff, have suggested that when the solar system periodically passes through the galactic plane, it nudges comets in our direction (New Scientist, 19 April 2008, p 10).

These periodic comet showers appear to correlate with the dates of ancient impact craters found on Earth, which would suggest that most impactors in the past were comets, not asteroids.

Now Napier and Asher warn that some of these comets may still be zipping around the solar system. Other observations support their case. The rate that bright comets enter the solar system implies there should be around 3000 of them buzzing around, and yet only 25 are known.

Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4), widely expected to become a naked-eye object in early March, is now closer to the sun than Venus. Solar heating is vaporizing the comet's icy core and creating a wide, fan-shaped tail visible through binoculars in the southern hemisphere. Ignacio Diaz Bobillo sends this picture from Buenos Aires, Argentina:
"I saw Comet Pan-STARRS just before daybreak in the constellation Grus," says Bobillo. "This is what it looked like through a small telescope, imaged with an exposure time of 8x2 minutes."

In early March, Comet Pan-STARRS will make its closest approach to the sun inside the orbit of Mercury; at that time it could brighten to easy naked-eye visibility. No one knows exactly what will happen, however, because it is a fresh comet being exposed to solar heating for the first time. Experts discuss the possibilities in this video from Science@NASA.

[Editor's Note: With the truly alarming increase in the number of meteorites/cometary fragments entering our atmosphere over the past 10 years, and the startling meteorite detonation over Russia this morning, it is long past time that every single person on this planet informed themselves about the clear and present threat to all life on earth posed by these celestial 'visitors'. To this end, Laura Knight-Jadczyk has recently published the first in a new series of books that presents clear evidence that, not only has human history been regularly punctuated (or 'punctured') by 'rains of fire from the heavens,' we may be overdue for another round of cosmic catastrophe.

Below we present a relevant excerpt from this first new volume: Comets and the Horns of Moses (available from all Amazon web sites).]

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As I read through the piles of books on the archaeology, history (assumed and reasonably reconstructed from data), and especially the input from the sciences such as astronomy, geology and genetics that should accurately parallel the archaeology and history, but usually doesn't for all the reasons we've discussed so far, in order to collect the material for this series of volumes, the one thing that became increasingly apparent was that, over and over and over again this planet has been bombarded by various types of impacts, the most common being the overhead comet fragment air burst of the Tunguska type. These events have repeatedly brought cultures, nations, even civilizations, to their knees. Dark Ages are inevitably the result, and then, when human society begins to recover, myths are created, religions are born, or re-born with twists and distortions, and always and ever, the facts of the previous era of destruction are covered up in veils of metaphor and allegory.

Why? What sort of madness is this?

It is actually very simple. Historically, when a people begin to perceive atmospheric, geological, climatic disruption and all the ills that these bring on a society, including famine, plague and pestilence, they individually and collectively look to their leaders to fix things. That is where the concept of the Divine King came from to begin with: the king was supposed to be able to intercede for his people with the gods. If the king was unsuccessful with his intercession, a solution had to be found. Sacrifices were made, rituals were performed, and of course, if that didn't work, if the gods remained angry, then the king had to die. This is possibly due to a similar brain switch that drives people to seek whatever relieves the stress on their brain: if the gods are angry, find a scape-goat. And when it is the nation that is threatened, the most obvious guilty person or persons are those in charge, the king and his elite. What's more, they know their vulnerability to this reaction instinctively.

Then again, given that human history appears to be defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites, and if we are to assume that such corruption (and its spread throughout society) is the mechanism by which a civilization attracts cosmic catastrophe, blaming and deposing the elite is a good solution. The problem, however, is that the underlying mechanism is not understood by the people, which means that they lack the knowledge that, if they are to prevent further destruction, they must, at all costs, prevent the establishment of any future corrupt elite.

Looking like a lone headlight on a rainy night or a glowing lime in the sky, the bright green ball is actually the coma of Comet Lemmon, caught on camera by Australian astronomer Peter Ward from his Barden Ridge Observatory on Feb. 4 (view the hi-res version here). The comet's steadily-growing tail can be seen extending to the lower right.

Comet Lemmon (C/2012 S1) is currently traveling across the sky in the southern hemisphere and has brightened to a visible magnitude of about 6.2 - just at the limit of what can be seen with the naked eye under very dark, clear skies. Peter used a 14.25″ F7.9 Ritchey-Chretien telescope to capture the image of Lemmon, set against long-exposure trails from background stars.

Comet ISON, which is plunging toward the sun for a bright and fiery encounter in late 2013, has just sprouted a tail. It's not much--yet--but that is because the comet is still in deep space near the orbit of Jupiter. On. Feb. 3rd, amateur astronomer Rolando Ligustri photographed the development using a robotic telescope in New Mexico:
Comet ISON doesn't look very impressive now as it glides through the cold vacuum more than 600,000 km from Earth, but its appearance will improve later this year. On Nov. 28th, ISON is going to glide through the sun's atmosphere only 1.1 million km above the stellar surface. It could emerge from the encounter glowing as brightly as the full Moon, visible in broad daylight near the sun. If so, today's budding tail would likely grow into a garish appendage that wows observers in both hemispheres--no telescope required. Stay tuned for updates.

Update: NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has also observed Comet ISON's sprouting tail. Click here for a video.

Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.

Researchers from Royal Holloway, together with Sandia National Laboratories and 13 other universities across the United States and Europe, have found evidence which rebuts the belief that a large impact or airburst caused a significant and abrupt change to the Earth's climate and terminated the Clovis culture. They argue that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.

Clovis is the name archaeologists have given to the earliest well-established human culture in the North American continent. It is named after the town in New Mexico, where distinct stone tools were found in the 1920s and 1930s.

Glowing much brighter than expected, Comet Lemmon (C/2012 F6) is gliding through the skies of the southern hemisphere about 92 million miles (0.99 AU) from Earth. Amateur astronomer Rolf Wahl Olsen sends this picture from his backyard in Auckland, New Zealand:

"I took this image of Comet Lemmon on the 28th of January," says Olsen. "It has become quite bright now and has also grown a beautiful tail."

2013 could be the Year of the Comet. Comet Pan-STARRS is set to become a naked eye object in March, followed by possibly-Great Comet ISON in November. Now we must add to that list green Comet Lemmon (C/2012 F6). "Comet Lemmon is putting on a great show for us down in the southern hemisphere," reports John Drummond, who sent us a picture from Gisborne, New Zealand: "I took the picture on Jan. 23rd using a 41 cm (16 in) Meade reflector," says Drummond. "It is a stack of twenty 1 minute exposures."
That much time was required for a good view of the comet's approximately 7th-magnitude coma ("coma"=cloud of gas surrounding the comet's nucleus). Lemmon's green color comes from the gases that make up its coma. Jets spewing from the comet's nucleus contain cyanogen (CN: a poisonous gas found in many comets) and diatomic carbon (C2). Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight in the near-vacuum of space. Discovered on March 23rd 2012 by the Mount Lemmon survey in Arizona, Comet Lemmon is on an elliptical orbit with a period of almost 11,000 years. This is its first visit to the inner solar system in a very long time.

The comet is brightening as it approaches the sun; light curves suggest that it will reach 2nd or 3rd magnitude, similar to the stars in the Big Dipper, in late March when it approaches the sun at about the same distance as Venus (0.7 AU). Northern hemisphere observers will get their first good look at the comet in early April; until then it is a target exclusively for astronomers in the southern hemisphere. - Space Weather

"Junk" DNA includes a whole subset of names such as introns, retrotransposable elements, and non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In fact, ncRNAs are often located near genes known to be important to both stem cells and cancer, to serve as enhancer elements which promote their gene expression.[1] Stem cells are the cells that have the potential to turn into lots of other cells. So this junk DNA can influence how stem cells specifically differentiate into multiple cell types.

In fact, it is now estimated that 80% of our genome is biologically active with only 1% of our genome encoding for proteins:

Junk DNA Not Junk After All

A staggering batch of over 30 papers published in Nature, Science, and other journals this month, firmly rejects the idea that, apart from the 1% of the human genome that codes for proteins, most of our DNA is "junk" that has accumulated over time like some evolutionary flotsam and jetsam.The papers, representing 10 years of work of the ENCODE ("Encyclopedia of DNA Elements") project, completed by hundreds of scientists from dozens of labs around the world, reveal that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose and is biochemically active, for example, in regulating the expression of genes situated nearby.

That was known for some time, but it is now official since September 2012 or so. Evolutionary speaking, it makes a lot of sense...

Viral "Junk" DNA

The greatest shock of genomic science was to find that the human genome contains more viral than "human" genes. That is, the human genome is made from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors. They got there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours.

Viruses are peculiar things that at a zoomed-in level may look very pretty or downright creepy depending on the virus. A virus may have DNA or RNA and the type of genetic material depends on the function and nature of the virus. Some are very infectious, others allowed us to be alive since the gene that encodes for a protein that allows for babies to fuse to their mothers during pregnancy, is a virus gene.[2]

Most genetic diversity can be found in virus genes. Scientists agree that there are some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses in the ocean, and genetically they match almost nothing compared with genes from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism, even from any other known virus.

All living things have hundreds or thousands of genes imported by viruses. There is a group of viral species known as retroviruses which insert their genetic material into the host cell's DNA. When the host cell divides, it copies the virus's DNA along with its own. Retroviruses have "on switches" that prompt their host cell to make proteins out of nearby genes. Sometimes their switches turn on host genes that ought to be kept shut off, and cancer can result. This is precisely what our junk DNA - ncRNA- seems to be doing "next" to genes that have to do with stem cells and cancer cells.

What is known as endogenous retrovirus - endogenous meaning generated within - are the viruses that lurk in the genomes of just about every major group of vertebrates, from fish to reptiles to mammals. Virologists have found retrovirus-like segments in our human genome and they were able to track its genetic code down to an original functioning virus. The virus was called Phoenix, for the mythical bird that rose from its own ashes.

It is known that part of our junk DNA, the retrotransposable elements, is viral in its origin. It includes the endogenous retroviruses. But it is now argued that ncRNA (non coding RNA) might be viral in its origin as well.[3] This has interesting implications in the sense that epigenetic control of gene expression involves this junk DNA - ncRNAs.[4] It would mean that our entire junk DNA (98%) might well be very functional epigenetically speaking (more info on epigenetics below), and active in the induction of regulatory genes that code for stem cells, or for reprogramming or modulating genes known to respond to oxidative stress, DNA damage and p53 - a protein that regulates the cell cycle and is implicated in about half of all human cancers.

You might be wondering why we are reviewing all this viral genome potential. As it happens, the damage done by evil lectins - antinutrients - in our diet is through a lock-and-key mechanism, that is, a circulating lectin serves as a key that unlocks the cell to which it attaches. Evil lectins can initiate a cascade of events once they attach to the cell "mem-brain" that may lead to attraction of the immune system, cell death, production of chemicals, multiplication of the cell and so forth. It depends. And it might well depend on the adaptation response from the viral-like properties inside the cell, our "junk" DNA.

Harmful lectins - such as the ones found in gluten, soy, dairy, corn - cause inflammation and damage without a defense/immune response which end up being secondary to the initial damage. Some respond in quite a drastic way (i.e. autoimmune diseases) others respond in a milder way, constituting thus the wide nature of symptoms among people.

Moreover, wheat's evil lectin (WGA) and viruses share similar properties. For instance, when the influenza virus incorporates its own genetic material into our cells, the defense/immune system must attack its own virally transformed cell in order to fight the infection. WGA has access to our bodies and to our cells' "mem-brains" through viral ports. They then influence gene expression and trigger autoimmune attacks like viruses do. As John B. Symes, D.V.M. pointed out back in 2007:

European Space Agency's Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, that the planet's ionosphere balloons out like a comet's tail on its nightside. For Earth, which has a strong magnetic field, the ionosphere is relatively stable under a range of solar wind conditions.

But by comparison, Venus does not have its own internal magnetic field and relies instead on interactions with the solar wind to shape its ionosphere. Venus Express' new results have revealed for the first time the effect of a very low solar wind pressure on the ionosphere of an unmagnetised planet.

The observations were made in August 2010 when NASA's Stereo-B spacecraft calculated a drop in solar wind density to 0.1 particles per cc, around 50 times lower than normally observed this persisted for about 18 hours.