As well as making for a great headline, this story also happens to be true. According to the BBC News website, scientists have been using satellite photos to locate penguins in the Antarctic – but as the penguins themselves are too small to spot, the boffins have been locating them using the brown stains produced by the birds’ accumulated guano.

Full story here: Link to BBC Science & Environment News.

My mind was stretched this morning by the following passage from an article in h+ magazine:

“They were trying to establish exactly how organic photosynthesis approaches 95% efficiency, whereas the most sophisticated human solar cells operate at only half that. What they discovered is nothing short of remarkable. Using femtosecond lasers to follow the movement of light energy through a photosynthetic bacterial cell, Engel et al. observed the energy traveling along every possible direction at the same time. Instead of following a single trajectory like the electrons on a silicon chip, the energy in photosynthesis explores all of its options and collapses the quantum process only after the fact, retroactively “deciding” upon the most efficient pathway”

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, the universe we know and love is likely nothing more than a 3D “hologram” produced by physical processes taking place on a distant, 2D surface:

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Read the full story at New Scientist.

According to space.com, scientists now believe that massive objects outside our universe are drawing clusters of galaxies toward themselves in a process they’ve dubbed “Dark Flow”:

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.”

An auction house sells off an 1800 year-old statue bearing an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, giving some to wonder if the “King” partook in time travel: Link

This article from New Scientist wins my vote for best headline of the day: http://tiny.cc/CfOD7

I’ve just been contacted by someone describing herself as “a huge fan” (you know who you are). This is the first time this has happened to me, and it’s simultaneously gratifying and weird to realise I might have “fans”.

On another note, things are hectic at work at the moment (due to an ongoing merger), so my writing schedule is all shot to hell. I am currently 2,600 words into a new story but don’t know when I’ll have time to complete it. I’m just trying to write as much as I can whenever I get the opportunity.

This is simultaneously cool and creepy: http://cubo.cc/

http://www.squidpunk.com/

This has to be an April Fool…