Regrettably, the Rubel-Twitter incident last week overshadowed two major scientific announcements that are sure to change PR 2.0 forever.

Last Friday, astronomers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico spotted a giant cloud of superheated gas 6 million light years wide that appears to have been generated by a cluster of super-massive black holes. Space.com reports: "The plasma cloud is spread across a vast region of space known to contain several galaxies with super-massive black holes embedded at their centers."

According to study leader Philipp Kronberg, "These findings help explain the unwanted and confusing 'noise' we observe in the background."

In a related story Saturday, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg found that the origin of the human brain can now definitively be traced back to primitive central nervous systems in worms and bugs. Researchers examined the embryos of a marine annelid worm with a pristine nervous system and documented the molecular fingerprints of developing nerve cells. Study team member Alexandru Denes said, "The molecular anatomy of the central nervous system turned out to be virtually the same in the worm as in today's vertebrates."

When combined... these two studies go a long way in explaining all the current hype around PR blogging and the fuzzy rationale behind it. Excuse me but we know who those black holes are; and one does not need a very developed brain to Twitter as Rubel just demonstrated.

Brian Solis, Shel Holtz, B.L. Ochman, Jeremy Pepper, Debbie Weil, Brian Oberkirch, et al. could not be reached for comment.

In other PR industry news, global warming seems to be reversing the sex of lizards. Apparently, high temperatures can reverse the sex of dragon lizards before they hatch, turning males into females. Industry experts have long been trying to understand the makeup of the senior ranks at agencies.

More as these stories develop...