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In the year 1271, a young seventeen-year-old Venetian named Marco Polo left with his father and uncle on a voyage to the palaces of Kublai Khan in China. It was a journey that would last twenty-four years
After serving seventeen years in the courts of Kublai Khan, Marco returned to Venice in 1295, where his story was recorded by a French romanticist named Rustichello, in a book titled in Old French Le Divisament dou Monde (or The Description of the World ). The text swept Europe.
Marine biotoxins and neurotoxins are already the most potent poisons in the world. So nasty that they are beyond even man’s ability to duplicate. Did you know saxitoxin, from bacteria in certain shellfish, has been classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction?”
“The human body is composed of a hundred trillion cells, yet only ten trillion are ours. The other ninety percent are bacteria and a few other opportunistic organisms. We live cooperatively with this foreign environment.
the Khan supplied the group with fourteen giant galleys and over six hundred men. Yet when they reached port in Persia, only two ships had survived the journey and only eighteen men.” “What happened to the rest?” Kowalski mumbled. “Marco Polo never told. The French writer Rustichello hints at something in the preface to the famous book, a tragedy among the islands of Southeast Asia. But it was never written. Even on his deathbed, Marco Polo refused to tell of what happened.”
“Dante’s Divine Comedy, including the famous Inferno, were the first books written in Italian. Even the French came to nickname the Italian language la langue de Dante.”
“Eyam was a small village in England. Back in the sixteen hundreds, the Black Plague struck the village. But after a year, most of Eyam still lived. Modern genetic studies revealed why. A rare mutation was present in the villagers. In a gene called Delta 32. It was a benign defect that was passed from one family member to another, and in such an isolated township, inbred as they were, a good portion of the town had acquired the mutation.
“Only a very small percentage of our DNA is actually functional. Only three percent, in fact. The other ninety-seven percent is considered genetic junk. It doesn’t code for anything. But some of that junk DNA bears a remarkable resemblance to viral code. The current belief is that such coding might serve a protective role, to help us survive future disease.”
“Genetic markers found worldwide show that most humans carry a specific set of genes against diseases that can only be acquired by eating human flesh. These findings suggest that our ancient ancestors might have all been cannibals.
Cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as blue-green algae, were as ubiquitous as the sea itself. They grouped into myriad formations: thin filaments, flat sheets, hollow balls. They were instrumental to evolution, being the predecessors of modern plants. Early in the earth’s history, cyanobacteria also generated the planet’s first oxygen atmosphere, making the world livable. And since then, they had adapted to millions of ecological niches.
Angkorian history remains a mystery, or at least remains purely hypothetical. Their writings were in sacred palm-leaf books called sastras. Which, like the homes here, did not survive.
Practitioners of Kabbalah search for mystical insight into the divine nature of the universe by studying the Hebrew Bible. They believe that divine wisdom lies buried in the very shapes and curves of the Hebrew alphabet. And that by meditating upon them, one can gain great insight into the universe, into who we are at the most basic level.”
God didn’t give us these big brains and not want us to use them. We were born to question, to search, to strive for a fuller understanding of the universe, both external and internal.”
