Experts have identified the precise location in Wales of some of the megaliths used in the construction of Stonehenge.

It’s a pretty major achievement to discover the location of the millennia-old quarry down to a few metres, but this also throws up some new mysteries. The rhyolitic rocks differ from all others in South Wales. The presumption is that they were chosen for a specific reason. How were they identified and why? There has been some interesting work done elsewhere into the acoustic qualities of particular stones at prehistoric sites. Is this important?

And this discovery has also kicked a hole in theories of how the stones were transplanted to Salisbury Plain. A consensus was growing that they were floated on rafts along the coast, but the exact location’s inaccessibility to water makes this unlikely. The old geologic theory – that the stones were pushed by advancing glaciers from Wales to Wiltshire during the ice age – is pretty flimsy as there aren’t any other Welsh rocks scattered around the Plain.

New research suggests cephalopods may have developed consciousness before mammals – the first truly thinking creatures on the planet.

Scientists have found cephalopods – including squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – can use tools, navigate mazes, learn from each other, mimic other species and solve complex problems.

Yet they followed a completely different evolutionary line to “smart” vertebrates like chimps, dolphins and crows.

New Scientist reports: “Octopuses make it notoriously difficult to get recordings from electrodes inserted into the brain, because they can selectively shut off blood supply to an area of their body or brain. That’s if they allow the researchers to insert electrodes at all. Jennifer Basil, a cephalopod researcher at the City University of New York tells the story of one colleague who took on that challenge: ‘He thought the octopus was anaesthetised, so they put the electrode in and the octopus reached up with an arm and pulled it out.’ That marked the end of his work with octopuses. ‘He has worked with lots of animals but he said “that animal knows what I’m thinking. He doesn’t want me to do this so I’m not going to”,’ Basil says.”

You have been warned.

Anyone who’s read The Scar-Crow Men knows that codes play an important part in the story, as they did for real spies in the sixteenth century…and today.

New Scientist has a great article this week on eight codes that still remain unbroken, from the famous Voynich Manuscript to the CIA’s Kryptos monument to one of the final messages from the Zodiac serial killer.

Worth a read. You’ll have to sign up, for free, but you only get a window of a couple of days to check it out.

“We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?

The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.”

Interesting article in New Scientist (you’ll have to register, for free, to read it), examining how there could be some – perhaps many – things that we’re just not capable of discovering.

The author identifies a few – what lies beyond the cosmic horizon? how life began? – and then briefly dives in to the polarised consciousness debate (an area of personal interest). Here the argument is pretty much split between those who believe we will never discover what consciousness is and the reductivist mechanics who believe if we break down the brain just a little bit more we will find exactly which bit does what.

I’ve interviewed experts on both sides of the debate. From the snarky comment above, you might guess that I’m not 100% convinced by the reductivist approach and you’d be right. Roger Penrose’s suggestion that a quantum process underpins the nature of consciousness seems more elegant and interesting.

Worth a read.

Research physicists using a particle accelerator may have discovered a new force of nature. The team at the Tevatron is currently analysing its data before announcing it has found a previously-unknown particle.

If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered “fundamental force”.

“We’d essentially be saying there’s a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there’s four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks.”

He described a future two to three years away in which a user could wear glasses equipped with vision recognition technology that display the profile of any person the user comes into contact with, calling up their conversation history and other personal–but private–information.

No hiding from those drunken tweets or FB status updates. On the other hand, you may know who to avoid in the bar…

“On a recent field trip to the region, scientists discovered four new species of fungus that infect ants, take over their bodies and eventually kill them in a place that is just right for the organism to grow inside them.

The fungus can destroy entire colonies and leave behind gruseome ant graveyards, where twisted, dark corpses rest with their mandibles locked around leaf veins, a final act that secures the creature’s host in position before it releases spores to infect others.”

On the bright side, they go very nice in an omelette.

New Scientist is reporting “experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. ‘If the results are correct,’ says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, ‘these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.’”

Luc Montagnier, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for work establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that suggests a kind of quantum teleportation of DNA. It imprints on water, and can still be traced even through high levels of dilution.

In effect, the water stores the information.

Naturally, a great many scientists are outraged by the suggestion – even before they’ve seen the data.

NASA has uncovered an entirely new life form on our planet that “doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living” on Earth.

The lead scientist behind the research Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon says, “This microbe is doing something different than what we know.”

She adds, “We’ve cracked open the door for what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe. and that’s profound to understand how life is formed and where life is going.”

NASA says this could “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

Turns out it wasn’t 88mph after all. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has completed a successful experiment with quantum time travel.

Seth Lloyd and his collaborators “have identified a new approach to the problem that opens up the strange world of time travel to experiments,” according to a report in New Scientist magazine.

What is so tantalising about time travel is that there seems to be nothing to prevent it. As far as the laws of physics are concerned, time can run forwards or backwards. But time travel of the kind that Marty McFly gets up to in the movie Back to the Future is a different kettle of fish. It requires an object to go back in time while everything else keeps creeping forward. Still, there is no shortage of ideas about how this might happen.

Even more fascinating, the MiT team sent a photon back to “kill” itself.

The magazine says, ‘When this experiment is done, something interesting happens: every single time the time travel works, the gun fails to go off. And when time travel fails, the gun works. To put this in the language of the grandfather paradox, as long as there is some chance of your gun misfiring and the assassination failing, time travel may work. “You can point the gun but you can’t pull the trigger,” says Lloyd.’

Astronomers claim to have discovered the first planet originating from outside our galaxy.

It circles a sun belonging to a group of stars called the Helmi stream, which once belonged to a separate dwarf galaxy.

The “dying star” piece of the information reminded me of this:

So now you know where they came from…

A major scientific journal is about to publish a peer-reviewed paper that may have staggering implications.

“Extraordinary claims don’t come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven’t yet happened can influence our behaviour.:

In other words, we have instinctive precognition, if the evidence presented in the paper holds up. The study has already been examined by sceptical psychologists who can’t find any flaws.

Cautious scientists don’t get to extrapolate from this. Everyone else can have a lot of fun. And there are *many* potential repercussions.

Not a Halloween/Frankenstein themed post.

Nearly twenty years ago now I spent some time with the acclaimed Vietnam war photographer Tim Page. He told me how an exploding shell sent a piece of shrapnel through his head and tore out about a third of his brain. Afterwards, he couldn’t walk, talk, write, and had to re-learn all his functions. But re-learn he did, over time, and the neural mechanism for each activity shifted to a new part of the brain, a recognised effect. When I met him, you couldn’t tell he’d been so devastatingly injured.

That discussion was part of an ongoing fascination I’ve had with consciousness studies. It’s a science that’s been through one or two revolutions over the years. For instance, one of those things that everyone knows is that brain cells can’t be regenerated. That’s based on a piece of 1928 research which was completely turned on its head seventy years later.

Thus, this:

“As Sharon Begley remarked in her book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, “The discovery overturned generations of conventional wisdom in neuroscience. The human brain is not limited to the neurons it is born with, or even the neurons that fill in after the explosion of brain development in early childhood.” What the researchers discovered was that within each of our brains there exists a population of neural stem cells which are continually replenished and can differentiate into brain neurons. Simply stated, we are all experiencing brain stem cell therapy every moment of our lives.”

The book by Newsweek science writer Begley looks interesting: “Contrary to popular belief, we have the power to literally change our brains by changing our minds. Recent pioneering experiments in neuroplasticity–the ability of the brain to change in response to experience–reveal that the brain is capable of altering its structure and function, and even of generating new neurons, a power we retain well into old age. The brain can adapt, heal, renew itself after trauma, compensate for disabilities, rewire itself to overcome dyslexia, and break cycles of depression and OCD. And as scientists are learning from studies performed on Buddhist monks, it is not only the outside world that can change the brain, so can the mind and, in particular, focused attention through the classic Buddhist practice of mindfulness.”

Scientists say it will soon be possible to record your dreams.

Slightly disturbed at the possibility of archiving some of the things that pass through my head in the wee hours.

“U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics, and said on Wednesday they might use it to help make tiny nanotechnology machines.”

Don’t you love popular science reporting? Who would ever have guessed that nanotechnology machines were “tiny”? And what about those “strange forces” of quantum mechanics? Spooky.

“The parasite, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, appears to take over the minds of infected ants.

On arrival the ants are compelled to bite hard on a major vein of the leaf before dying. The “death grip” leaves the ant in a perfect position for the fungus to grow and release its infectious spores.”

A thousand authors begin a new story…

Think you’re a rational, thinking human being in control of yourself and your surroundings? It’s an illusion. New research suggests our subconscious is really the part of us that is in control.

I’ve always known how important the unconscious is when it comes to creativity – it generates the most surprising and affecting parts of stories while I’m in that hazy, detached writing zone. (And that’s why writers who want to get published shouldn’t plot things out too heavily in advance – you’re cutting off the bit of you that is the most important part of the process.)

Now we know the subconscious mind stands behind everything – choosing when and how we respond, and identifying certain emotions – love, fear – as “more important”. The analogy in the above article is that the conscious mind is a searchlight, but the subconscious decides when to switch it on and where to shine it.

The UK will formally launch its new space agency on Tuesday. The nation has been alone among the major industrialised nations in not having an executive body to direct its activities beyond the Earth’s surface. The new organisation is expected to take control of the money spent on space by government departments and science funding agencies.

A report in New Scientist suggests the evidence for life on the Red Planet could be as plain as those lumps of rocks that scatter the landscape in all the photos we’ve seen a thousand times.

There’s never been any sign of complex carbon-based molecules on Mars, but sulphur is all over the place, more than on earth. Some microbes in our own backyard convert sulphates to sulphides as a by-product of their activity. Intriguing evidence of this microbial work has been found at crater sites – and similar tests could be carried on Mars relatively easily.

All we need is a Mars Lander fitted with the right tools. Oh, one’s already planned? When’s it hitting the red dust?

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will land on the Martian surface in 2012. It will carry a mass spectrometer that should be sensitive enough to see variations as small as 2 per cent in sulphur isotope abundances, says John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the lead scientist for the mission.

Further to recent discussions, I wanted to flag up a book – The Meaning of the 21st Century: a vital blue print for ensuring our future by James Martin – which raises many of the big issues facing us, the great opportunities technology can bring, and then ties it all up in a nice, neat bundle.

Martin is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author for The Wired Society which was prescient about much of today’s world. In this one, he interviews lots of experts across a range of disciplines and gives a powerfully-stated overview, which is hard to get in such a complex world.

It’s a popular science book, and easily understood, so all you uber-scientists don’t come here complaining that he’s not written it at a thesis level. Worth checking out for anyone interested in life in general, science and politics.