Friday, September 05, 2008

Quetelet would be interested

Danish investigators have found they can estimate your date of birth with a high degree of accuracy by subjecting protein from the lens of your eye to radio carbon dating

The transparent proteins, crystallins, remain essentially unchanged for the rest of our lives. Thus they provide a record of the environment we spent our first days in – including the type of radiation

1945-1960 nuclear bomb tests meant the quantity of C-14 in the atmosphere doubled. Since 1960 it has slowly decreased to natural levels

The fallout got into the food chain & into our crystallins. These proteins reflect the content of C-14 present in the atmosphere at the time of their creation, shortly after birth.

So there is no point lying about your age – at least if you were born during the years of variation


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