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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.’

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…

“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.

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.”

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

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

What you always feared is true.

His comments were made today as scientists gather in London to discuss the prospect of discovering extra-terrestrial life.

New Scientist reports that a meeting will be held in Texas in June to discuss if, and how, and in what form, such an attempt at communication should be made.

There is opposition. Our oldest stories tell us that it’s not always wise to let the gods notice you, which is what’s on the mind of SF author David Brin. He resigned from a SETI panel because he felt there wasn’t enough discussion of the potential repercussions from such a broadcast. He says: “I dislike seeing my children’s destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien”

The stuff of science fiction is just day-to-day business for Jacque Fresco, a futurist who’s come across my radar a few times in the past. He’s a designer and an inventor with a view on where we’re going and what we need to change to survive.

His latest work is The Venus Project – a vision of how to integrate the best of science and technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society based on both human and environmental concerns.

Click on the link above and you’ll see some absolutely breathtaking art that wouldn’t look out of place on an SF book cover. You can find out more about The Venus Project here:

About time, too.

They can perform quite complex tasks effectively. Unlike Hoon and Hewitt.

A research project at medical centres across the UK, US and Europe is examining what happens to consciousness after we “die” (in inverted commas because death is measured by a sliding scale and it’s possible to be brought back, sometimes up to an hour after the heart stops beating). It’s arisen out of numerous reports of Near-Death Experiences, as well as a study that shows 20% of people who have a flatline brain state and are resuscitated, still have lucid memories of what happened around them. Obviously, a lack of brain activity suggests that shouldn’t be the case.

The study could release its findings as early as 2012.

Meanwhile, Critical Care Doctors at the George Washington University Medical Faculty have released a new report which shows that patients “experienced a sudden electrical ‘alertness’ or spike in brain waves in the moments before they died. The spikes came in the same moments just before each patient’s death. They rose to comparable levels and were consistent in duration.”.

Researchers suggest this may be the first scientifically recorded sign of the near-death experience.

Zeilinger and others working in the field have shown that widely separated particles can somehow have quantum states that are linked: by observing one, the outcome of the other is affected. But as New Scientist magazine says, “No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.”

Read the full account of questions that keep physicists up at night at the New Scientist site.

Part of this belief is based on the Mayan Long Count calendar, which, according to some academics, comes to an end on December 21 (or 23) 2012. An End, with a capital E. Typically of the academic world, there is no firm agreement on this, with some saying the calendar actually ends 4.134105 × 10 to the 28th years in the future. Which is what is commonly known as “wiggle room”.

But it’s not just the Mayans. A similar prediction lies in the myths of the Hopi Native Americans, in the I Ching, some say in a code hidden in the Bible, and in the writings of the philosopher Terence McKenna, who created a formula which predicted a singularity of infinite complexity on December 21 2012, when everything and anything imaginable will occur simultaneously. Which seems to happen in my office on a regular basis.

All New Age Nonsense, some say. Well…it doesn’t matter. Much to the annoyance of my arch-rationalist friends, things which don’t exist can often have a greater effect on the world than things that do. If enough people believe we are approaching a time of “spiritual awakening” or “consciousness change”, they will make that happen. Altering patterns of behaviour. Becoming, say, more environmentally-minded. More socially aware, or politically aware. Then, 2012 becomes a focal point for changing the world. Putting it right.

On the other hand, maybe all these predictions are right.

For that reason, I’m going to be documenting here anything and everything which might relate to this. Strange events, odd coincidences, political and environmental acts, UFO sightings, religious phenomena, scientific advances and anything else which might take my interest. Who knows – a pattern might appear – or not? And as anyone who has read my books knows, I’m very interested in hidden patterns.

I’m interested to hear of any links, sightings, bizarre occurrences – personal or global, acts of activism, and transcendence, which may or may not fit into this. You can sign up for my forum and leave a message there, or DM me through that site.

I think we can have some fun with this.

“Beyond its revolutionary technological applications and scientific impact, the evidence of an active role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality holds profound implications for our view of ourselves, our relationships to others, and to the cosmos in which we exist. These, in turn, must inevitably impact our values, our priorities, our sense of responsibility, and our style of life. Our ability to acquire, or to generate tangible, measureable information independent of distance or time challenges the foundation of any reductionistic brain-based model of consciousness that may be invoked. The lack of notable correlations in the data with standard learning curves or other recognizable cognitive patterns, combined with the repeatable and distinct gender-related differences, suggest that these abilities may stem from a more fundamental source than heretofore suspected. Certainly, there is little doubt that integration of these changes in our understanding of ourselves can lead to a substantially superior human ethic, wherein the long-estranged siblings of science and spirit, of analysis and aesthetics, of intellect and intuition, and of many other subjective and objective aspects of human experience can be productively reunited.”

You know I’ve spent the last nine years writing about this stuff in Age of Misrule, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent, right?

And then Dan Brown goes and writes about it in The Lost Symbol and gets all the attention. Bastard.

It’s interesting and inspiring research and like Brown says in his book, has the potential to instigate a paradigm shift in scientific thinking.