A bold new look at Creationism pits Science vs. Norse Mythology [ via reddit].
Category: Oddities
There’s a smiley face on Mars [link via digg]. If you look at it from the right angle, you can see the smile; you can also notice the splash of dust/ketchup/blood on the temple, just like in the Watchmen icon.
Did people notice the resemblence? They sure did. But, so did Alan Moore, I guess. This feature has been public knowledge at least since 1976.
Akiyoshi’s illusion pages are a great collection of optical illusions – this is apparently the source to the spiraling snakes illusion I linked to sometime ago. All sorts of images that seem to move, rotate, shift and distort.
Categories
The Evolution of Blondinity
Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun – the Sunday Times talks about research into the origins of blonde hair and blue eyes:
“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.”
…
Frost’s theory is also backed up by a separate scientific analysis of north European genes carried out at three Japanese universities, which has isolated the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair to about 11,000 years ago.
The hair colour gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.
Then, after comments from blonde celebs, they note:
A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.