For the benefit of the chicken yellow source of ideas, from the roginal   
   article if one reads past the headlines:   
      
   :   
   A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical   
   method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of   
   an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal   
   Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant   
   Malik, assistant professor in RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences,   
   outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon   
   patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age   
   civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.   
      
   Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data   
   that tell us about past climates using indirect observations. For   
   example, by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites   
   from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record   
   of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years. But as Malik   
   notes, studying paleoclimate time series poses several problems that   
   make it challenging to analyze them with mathematical tools typically used   
   to understand climate.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)