“In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines.”

—George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

What some politicians fear most is that this young, educated population reminds them of the Arab Spring and they are demanding change. They fear what they call “the pink revolution”. When people say, as they so often do, that feminism is the preoccupation of a few white middle-class women in the west agonising over whether to wear lipstick or not, I wish they could see these angry men and women out at night demanding that women be safe, who say rape is always a weapon used to keep women in fear.

For something is happening here, anger is overtaking fear. The dam has burst. The debate the politicians want is one of law and order, but the radical one is about how to change the culture itself. And because this is India we are taking about a myriad of cultures. Somehow, though, through the shock and the trauma, this country is examining itself

The Mayan calendar did not resonate because most people expected an irate Mesoamerican god to knock on the front door with a jaguar hat and a flamethrower. Instead, collapse fantasies are an excuse to confront a visceral fear that, back in reality, we have created a civilization too complex to pilot and with limited time before it strikes the rocks.

If you attach certain molecules to cadmium telluride quantum dots, they will latch onto certain targets, making it possible to detect trace amounts of substances ranging from pesticides to cancer cells.

As versatile as cadmium telluride quantum dots are, however, they’re not easy to make. It’s especially tedious to fashion them so that they’re not toxic to living cells, since both cadmium and tellurium are nasty metals. In the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, a group of scientists at Kings College London offer a remarkably easy way to make them.

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Earthworms can sense metals in their meals. They immediately respond by making special enzymes. Exposing a worm to cadmium, for example, causes it to produce enzymes called metallothionein in its gut. The metallothionein grabs hold of the cadmium and stores it away in special cavities inside the cells, where it undergoes chemical reactions to make it less dangerous to the worm. Then immune cells attack the cells and engulf them. The worm eventually excretes them safely out of its body.

Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, and a bunch of mates say they have teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometres across a lake in China. That’s an impressive feat for several reasons. The trick these guys have perfected is to find a way to use a 1.3 Watt laser and some fancy optics to beam the light and receive it. Inevitably photons get lost and entanglement is destroyed in such a process. Imperfections in the optics and air turbulence account for some of these losses but the biggest problem is beam widening (they did the experiment at an altitude of about 4000 metres). Since the beam spreads out as it travels, many of the photons simply miss the target altogether. So the most important advance these guys have made is to develop a steering mechanism using a guide laser that keeps the beam precisely on target. As a result, they were able to teleport more than 1100 photons in 4 hours over a distance of 97 kilometres. That’s interesting because it’s the same channel attenuation that you’d have to cope with when beaming photons to a satellite with, say, 20 centimetre optics orbiting at about 500 kilometres. “The successful quantum teleportation over such channel losses in combination with our high-frequency and high-accuracy [aiming] technique show the feasibility of satellite-based ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation,” say Juan and co. So these guys clearly have their eye on the possibility of satellite-based quantum cryptography which would provide ultra secure communications around the world.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.

London, as so often, looks like a separate country. It has by far the most diverse and cosmopolitan ethnic makeup: less than half of the population is classed as “white British”. It has the seven of the 12 local authorities where Muslims outnumber those of no religion, and one, Tower Hamlets, where Muslims outnumber Christians. London is also the future: of the 10 local authorities with the highest proportion of children under four, seven are in London and the other three are close. And although the south-east region as a whole is least affected by the present recession, it’s clear that most of the counties surrounding London are culturally very different to the capital, even if they share some of its wealth. They are much more homogeneous ethnically, economically, and by religion.