"It's completely taken me and many other solar scientists by surprise," says Dr Lucie Green, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

The drop off in activity is happening surprisingly quickly, and scientists are now watching closely to see if it will continue to plummet.

"It could mean a very, very inactive star, it would feel like the Sun is asleep... a very dormant ball of gas at the centre of our Solar System," explains Dr Green.

This, though, would certainly not be the first time this has happened.

Given the lack of a clear and compelling Rubicon separating simple from complex animals and simple from complex behaviors, the belief that only humans are capable of experiencing anything consciously seems preposterous. A much more reasonable assumption is that until proved otherwise, many, if not all, multicellular organisms experience pain and pleasure and can see and hear the sights and sounds of life. For brains that are smaller and less complex, the creatures' conscious experience is very likely to be less nuanced, less differentiated and more elemental. Even a worm has perhaps the vaguest sense of being alive. Of course, each species has its own unique sensorium, matched to its ecological niche. Not every creature has ears to hear and eyes to see. Yet all are capable of having at least some subjective feelings.

Taken literally, panpsychism is the belief that everything is “enminded.” All of it. Whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock or an electron. Everything that is physical also possesses an interior mental aspect. One is objective—accessible to everybody—and the other phenomenal—accessible only to the subject. That is the sense of the quotation by British-born Buddhist scholar Alan Watts with which I began this essay.

I will defend a narrowed, more nuanced view: namely that any complex system, as defined below, has the basic attributes of mind and has a minimal amount of consciousness in the sense that it feels like something to be that system. If the system falls apart, consciousness ceases to be; it doesn't feel like anything to be a broken system. And the more complex the system, the larger the repertoire of conscious states it can experience.

Accelerating technological advances will rekindle hope that man can manipulate the atmosphere and genes to help lifeforms flourish. Stories will move away from howling and towards the possible. The new optimism will be most clearly seen in science fiction. The biggest successes in the genre in 2014 will be cheering tales set in the near future. That will mean more of Africa, more of equitable politics and, crucially, more of engineering solutions.

Sir Isaac Newton predicted the world would end in the year 2060, scribbling the date on a piece of paper, according to theories uncovered by academics in Jerusalem.

The prophecy has been unearthed from little-known handwritten manuscripts in a library, a BBC documentary due to screen on Saturday will show.

The pages show Newton's attempts to decode the Bible, which he believed contained God's secret laws for the universe.

The most definitive date he set for the apocalypse, which he scribbled on a scrap of paper, was 2060.

In the case of GJ 436b, the hot Neptune, there are two possible explanations for the lack of observed features in the spectrum: either the planet has an atmosphere that's nearly devoid of hydrogen, or it's covered in a layer of high clouds. Right now, the error bars of their measurements encompass models of both of these options, but they say that some additional observation time will allow them to rule one or the other out.

In the case of Super-Earth GJ 1214b, however, the authors already have enough observations to rule out the hydrogen-poor atmosphere. That leaves clouds as the only viable explanation for the spectrum that they see.

These clouds are almost certainly not the water vapor clouds that we see on Earth. Both exoplanets are much closer to their host stars, with correspondingly hotter atmospheres. As a result, both papers suggest that the clouds are likely to be composed of what we would call salts in their solid form: "Zinc sulphide and potassium chloride are both plausible candidates for the composition of the cloud." On the Super-Earth, the authors also indicate that a Titan-like atmosphere, where UV light has triggered chemical reactions that create complex hydrocarbons, is also a possibility.