Also on the New Chronology Yahoo Group forum in August has been a discussion of tawannas, a title used by Hittite queens, and the spread of that term by the Philistines and Etruscans - in late 9th century on the New Chronology framework. In that context the migration might well be visualised as primarily a migration of people from SE Anatolia (at the end of the LB Age) with minimal connections with the Aegean. There are a lot of emails on the subject with a diverse number of points of view - too many to repeat here.

At www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR20100903023 ... the Washington Post, September 3rd, has a post on the Amazon rainforest - in this instance the section that is in Peru, below the Andes mountains. It begins by saying the idea that the Amazon Basin is a virgin environment unblemished by the excesses of human behaviour, and in fact barely touched by a human footprint, seems to be wrong.

At www.physorg.com/print202724011.html there is another ESA report - this time on the role of the Amazon and the Orinoco in the Ocean Circulation system in the South Atlantic. Fresh water from the Amazon tends to create a flow or current of low salinity surface water. It seems to circle back on itself as a result of a much stronger ocean current off the coast of northern Brazil which is the southern equivalent of the North Atlantic's Gulf Stream - and well recorded in ocean circulation research.

At www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-286&cid=release_2010-286 we have a report that seems to suggest that NASAs Viking Mars Lander mission in 1976 may actually have examined soil that contained carbon based building blocks of life. Organics and perchlorate may have been present in the soil  although it is quite possible the organics had an origin in meteorites - and the ability of perchlorate to break down organic material was not realised at the time.