In a paper to be published in the September 2018 issue of Biophysical Reviews and Letters, researchers have discovered that there is a correlation and possible cause and effect between otherwise invisible dark matter particles and melanoma, a type of skin cancer. This opens the door to more research in the interdisciplinary fields of physics and medicine.
In a recent study, Dr. Konstantin Zioutas from the Physics Department at the University of Patras and Dr. Edward L Valachovic from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the University at Albany - State University of New York discovered that there is a correlation and possible cause and effect between otherwise invisible dark matter particles and melanoma, a type of skin cancer.
Recent physics observations and analysis of melanoma data in the USA showed an unexpected planetary correlation in 1-10% of the diagnoses of melanoma (significance >5σ). It is proposed that streaming invisible dark matter, whose flux can be temporally enhanced via solar gravitational focusing, may be interacting with the human body.
The research aims to find out, for the first time, whether planetary correlations exist also in medical data. Monthly melanoma rates in USA in the 38-year period from 1973 to 2011 were analysed. The duo observed fast oscillatory behavior of melanoma diagnoses, which should be a random distribution in the absence of any periodic impact. They then performed complex statistical analyses as well as computer simulations with available planetary data, and discovered that the melanoma appearance shows a short periodicity which strikingly coincides with the orbital period of Mercury (88 days).
With the unexpected statistical correlation, the centuries old mystery of possible interactions between stars/planets and human body has been revisited. The driving idea is that streams of "invisible matter" get occasionally enhanced towards the Earth, due to gravitational focusing effects by the Sun and/or the other planets, increasing the interaction rate with the human body accordingly. This seems, as for the physics observations, the only viable explanation for the otherwise unexpected planetary relationship of melanoma appearance. This would mean that humans are the overlooked target and detector of the "Dark Universe" we are living in.
The conclusion from this research is that streaming invisible matter from the dark universe, whose flux can be occasionally enhanced towards the Earth via planetary gravitational focusing, and, even much stronger by the Sun, may be the explanation for 1-10% of melanoma diagnoses.
Recovering more precisely when and where the cancer diagnoses were made, more research could unravel the nature of the assumed streaming invisible matter as well as the interaction processes at the microscopic level.
The lead author, Dr. Konstantin Zioutas remarked that: "This out-of-the-box interdisciplinary work is based on the heretic assumption that not all dark matter constituents interact extremely feebly with normal matter. A follow-up systematic investigation might bring us closer to the origin of melanoma, unravelling also the nature of the dark universe we are living in."
Co-author Dr. Edward L Valachovic further commented on the discovery: "The underlying cause of cancer manifestation is an enduring mystery. The widely discussed dark universe may well be part of biological and physiological processes, as advocated by the statistical data analysis of this work. Where the periodic diagnoses, which coincide with planetary orbital periods, of some sub-classes of melanoma can lead us, is open to speculation and new suggestions. In order to advance this research approach in medicine the template of relevant Tables must be re-defined. The main conclusion is to record medical data daily or at least weekly."
"This 'first' observation in medicine is a spin-off from the CAST experiment at CERN, but we have to wait for more to come," added Dr. Zioutas.
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