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Moon Diamond's avatar

Actually a lot of heavy water is tritiated water which is not just heavy but radioactive. They swear that dumping tritiated Fukushima water into the ocean is harmless, that the decay energy is too low, but I’m not buying it. Suppose one of the hydrogens on a methyl group over an oncogene decays and causes it to become demethylated (could also be due to the carbon in the methyl group being carbon-14). Then the oncogene will be un-silenced and the DNA repair mechanisms may not even detect it.

Corn and other C4 photosynthesizers have a higher level of carbon-13 and carbon-14 than other crops. The Mayans ate a lot of corn and also I believe amaranth is a C4 photosynthesizer so my crackpot theory is that the excess mutations caused by eating food that doesn’t select against heavy isotopes as well, especially after a supernova or whatever event it was that raised global carbon-14 levels for a while, is what caused the Mayan civilization to collapse.

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bss.org's avatar

important piece, will let it soak in :)

thanks Jennifer

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