Wow, hard to believe that it’s already been a week since I took off for VancouFur. Where does the time go?

Anyhow, now I’m back, and it feels good. Got a freaking ton of awesome scienceness to share with you eager beavers out there, and I just can’t wait to get down to it.

To start off, let’s talk about the discovery of a lost continent under the Indian ocean.

Now we have not actually found this continent yet, but we are hot on its trail. We have the smoking gun, which in this case takes the form of sand.

They have found grains of sand on the beaches of Mauritius, an island east of Madagascar, that contain zircons that are way older than expected, to the tune of between 660 million and about 2 billion years old.

We are learning a lot from zircons, aren’t we? Kickass. And to think most of us have only ever heard of the cubic kind.

Anyhow, based on the age of these zircons, geologists have deduced that there must have been a whole microcontinent somewhere in the neighborhood of Mauritius that vanished under the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago.

So, you know. No big deal. Just a whole continent we had no idea existed until now.

I am really hoping this leads to the discovery of a whole mess of exciting geological and biological finds from the days when the continent, dubbed Mauritania, was above the waves.

Staying with underwater life for the moment, we have the latest news from Lake Vostok, where after drilling down four whole kilometers into the Antarctic ice, we have finally found something : a kind of bacteria currently unknown to science.

And yes, for those of you wondering, there definitely was an X-Files that started like this, as well as being the setting for the best horror movie ever.

So, if you see a lone husky running towards you, scientists, shoot that fucking dog.

To refresh your memory, Lake Vostok is a lake that has lain beneath the ice of Antarctica for at least a million years. That means the waters of this lake have been locked away from the rest of the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus can hopefully give us a picture of what life was like back then.

It is a rare and wondrous opportunity, and I am glad it is yielding useful results. Realistically, the odds are that this bacteria will not be all that different than ones we already know.

But until the full search of all known micro-organic genomes is complete, we won’t know for sure.

Next up, we have this week’s entry into FSW’s favorite topic, brain science, and it’s a doozy, because it’s all about how some scientists have figured out how to connect rat’s brains together.

Yes folks, they created the world’s first brain to brain interface. One rat brain definitely could talk to another rat brain and vice versa, and nobody is disputing that.

Whether or not it was a meaningful conversation or not is somewhat open to question, and for some reason, the researchers are going on about linking multiple animal brains together to form some sort of organic computer, which seems entirely beside the point to me and makes me wonder if these people are doing this research for the right reasons or whether this whole thing just got funded on mad scientist appeals.

We already have really good computers. It is pointless to try to recreate in wetware what we already do perfectly well with hardware.

What I want to know is, how is the rat perceiving this strange new stimulus? Are the rats communicating via this interface, or is basically just annoying them?

And of course the obvious, could people do this? Could we all be instant messaging with our brains one day? And would that be a good thing?

Next up, we have a very cool story about how Chinese scientists have managed to measure the speed of quantum teleportation, and as you can imagine, it’s really freaking fast.

How fast? At least ten thousand times the speed of light. We have to say “at least” because there does not currently exist in this universe equipment precise or fast enough to measure something going faster than that. So we have to guess.

But when 10,000C is your minimum speed, we are talking really freaking fast here. It might well be instantaneous. We don’t know.

Quantum entanglement is, of course, the strange effect created by “entangling” two quantum particles and then moving them apart.

Somehow, when you do that, no matter how far apart said particles get, when you do X to one of them, the opposite happens to the other.

And as far as we can tell, this happens instantaneously. And that’s not just instantaneous from the point of view of human perception.

That is literally, scientifically, instantaneous, as in a duration of 0.0 with however many more zeros you want to add.

And that just blows my freaking mind.

Finally, we have our big story, and you might be asking yourself : wow, what can top all that?

And the answer is : fusion. Actual nuclear fucking fusion. And according to the guys at Lockheed Skunkworks, we are only four years away from it.

You read that right, four years. Not forty, like the old joke says (fusion is always forty years away), but four. As in 2017. As in real soon now.

To call this a bold claim is a Planck scale understatement. Nobody, not even the fusion enthusiasts working on tokamaks and toroidal plasma containment units worldwide, has been talking about real live fusion happening that soon.

Technical details are sketchy at the moment, but apparently this method relies on beaming radio waves into tightly controlled magnetic fields and creating safe and stable plasmas out of the most abundant material in the universe, hydrogen.

Charles Chase, the head of the team making these gobsmacking claims, says that he is confident that they will have proof of concept by 2017 and begin producing trailer-sized units capable of powering entire small cities shortly thereafter.

And it is hard to know how to react to claims that extraordinary. Obviously we all want it to be true. Something like that could change the world and forever solve all our energy problems.

But it’s so unexpected and so frankly outrageous a claim that it is hard to believe it. It just seems too good to be true, and while that is not technically a logical or scientific measurement of likelihood (the history of scientific and technological progress is filled with implausible truths), it still makes fr a fairly reliable rule of them.

Still, on behalf of Mother Earth, and we, her most precocious and bothersome of children, I sincerely hope that Charles Chase knows exactly what he is talking about, and that by the end of this decade, all the electricity in the world is fusion based or the equivalent.

Keeping working on those electric cars, people!