I thought it would be interesting to keep track of all the wacky news (scientific, technological, and otherwise) that seems to be pointing towards something like Timewave Zero ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_theory ). I don't necessarily buy into this new age theorizing, but you'd have to be an idiot not to see that technological "progress" is increasingly exponentially and our world is approaching sci-fi reality...
Our world may be a giant hologram
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300...
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
New evidence of life on Mars spotted by NASA
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2...
Something is happening beneath the surface of Mars that causes substantial amounts of methane gas to burst out regularly, a discovery that NASA scientists say represents the strongest indication so far that life might exist, or once existed, on the planet.
The methane is released into the atmosphere in specific areas and at regular times, they found, in a pattern that would be consistent with the gas being a byproduct of biological activity beneath the planet's parched surface.
Principal investigator Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said the detection does not mean that life definitely exists on Mars, because the gas can be produced by subsurface geological or chemical processes as well.
Nevertheless, "we believe this definitely increases the prospects for finding life on Mars," said Mumma, whose findings are being published online today by Science Express.
Invisibility cloak one step closer to reality
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM...
In a breakthrough that could signal a new era for human technology, US and Chinese researchers announced they are a step closer to creating an invisibility shield.
In a development made possible by advances in designing complex mathematical commands known as algorithms, engineers at Duke University, North Carolina were able to create what they call "metamaterials."
These materials can "guide electromagnetic waves around an object, only to have them emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space," according to the team, whose work was published in the January 16 edition of the journal Science.