Happy Chinese New Year

Kung Hei Fatt Choy

Funny engrish signs

These were doing the rounds of the office yesterday..

Mullet Man: hair follicle unlocks secrets of the ancients

Nuka Godfredsen's impression of 'Inuk', a 4000-year-old man from Greenland whose genome has been sequenced.

He had brown eyes, dark skin, thick blackish hair and type A blood. This Eskimo, who lived about 4000 years ago in Greenland, also had dry earwax, an increased risk of going bald and the metabolism of a person who could survive in a cold climate.

And his ancestors were, to the surprise of scientists, ancient people in east Siberia rather than neighbouring Native Americans or Inuit.

All this detailed information about the long-dead man comes from a study of a clump of his hair, which was preserved for thousands of years in the Arctic permafrost. Given the name Inuk, he will go down in history as the first ancient person to have had his full DNA code, or genome, sequenced.

Inuk, who was also inbred, is thought to have belonged to the extinct Saqqaq culture, the first group of people known to have settled in Greenland.

A team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen sequenced the DNA preserved in his frozen hair and compared it with the DNA of modern humans. The results are published in the journal Nature.

The team looked at more than 350,000 tiny differences in the DNA code which are associated with characteristics such as physical appearance and ancestry.

Inuk's ancestry suggests that a previously unknown human migration occurred about 5500 years ago. It appears a large group of his ancestors from eastern Siberia crossed the Bering Strait and travelled through North America to Greenland.

The researchers said the next technical challenge would be to try to sequence ancient DNA from human remains found outside the permafrost region.

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Festival to curry favour with India

PARRAMATTA will host a new festival, Parramasala, to celebrate the colour and flair of India in November.

The Australian Festival of South Asian Arts will be held from November 4 to 10.

Western Sydney Minister and Granville MP David Borger said Parramatta and the northern district had the biggest population of Indian and South Asian communities and was the perfect location for a colourful Bollywood-style festival.

The festival will offer a diverse multi-arts and cultural event with the highest quality of professional content, curated by the festival’s inaugural chief executive officer and artistic director, Philip Rolfe.

Premier Kristina Keneally said Parramasala would demonstrate NSW’s rich cultural heritage and be a premier arts event for Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

“It embraces the cultural diversity of western Sydney and sends a clear message about the importance of Indian culture to the state,” she said.

The festival announcement followed the government’s plan to establish a round-table meeting of ministers, agencies and Indian leaders to address the safety concerns of international students and the Indian community.

The first meeting with Indian community leaders will be held on Wednesday, February 10.