Last week, as you know, Baroness Margaret Thatcher died, and here in the UK, where I live, there’s been mourning and partying in equal measure.

What there hasn’t been so much of is reflection on why Thatcher was such a bully, even to her closest allies — a trait that ultimately led to her downfall — and also what it might mean to be effective female leader today, just two-plus decades later.

I bring this up because I had the opportunity to attend a launch of Jane Noble Knight’s book The Inspiring Journeys of Women Entrepreneurs, hosted by Gina Lazenby, who invited a group of mostly female entrepreneurs to meet, eat and chat about exactly what feminine leadership looks like in 2013.

My maternal grandmother Stella, who migrated to the US from Italy at the age of 15, had both her babies at home. This was not because she advocated home birth so much as because she had been taught to regard medical progress with a fair degree of suspicion. ‘Don’t go to hospital; they change your baby!’ her own mother had admonished her in broken English.

We live in a time when many systems are falling down, but some of them need a bit of a push to finish the job. I’m thinking here of modern medicine, where we are witnessing the collapse of the current model, but where the old guard fighting as fiercely as possible to keep it propped up.

In Britain we’ve had disclosure after disclosure recently about the shocking state of most of the country’s hospitals: thousands dying from neglect and incompetence; hospital trusts paying private companies to do fast statistical shuffles to cover up the death rates; doctors and nurses admitting they themselves would not go to their own hospitals.

Every day around the world, there’s more evidence that the current medical paradigm isn’t working. The British health minister announced the other day that it’s now growing likely that our antibiotics, the mainstay of modern medicine, will soon be defeated by superbugs, and we may no longer be able to treat infections with drugs.

 The rest of the tools of modern medicine fare no better. The vast majority of ‘drug research’ upon which doctors rely for their treatments has been found to be fraudulent, the ghostwritten product of public relations firms, a necessity in the eyes of Big Pharma because the studies simply do not prove that drugs actually work.

Every so often a local hero comes along who entirely undermines our cynical view of the world as eat-or-be-eaten, and if you haven’t heard this story, it will make your day. 

That hero came in the unlikely form of Billy Ray Harris, who confirmed all the evidence I’ve written about concerning the immense, transformative power of the generous gesture.

Harris, a homeless black man who spends his nights sleeping under a bridge in Kansas City, managed to just get by with the change he was able to beg from passersby in one of the city’s squares.

One day, Sarah Darling dropped some change into his collecting cup, but unbeknownst to her what also dropped in was her diamond engagement ring.

That ring, worth thousands, could have transformed Harris’s fortunes, and after she left, a little devil ‘on his shoulder’ urged him to keep him.

The following day Sarah returned to the square. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said, “but I think I gave you something that’s very precious.”

Mr. Harris, whose grandfather, a reverend, had raised him from the age of 6, didn’t hesitate.  “Was it a ring?”

Professor Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has embarked on a wildly ambitious project:  to demonstrate that a tiny bit of cosmic jiggling proves that the sticks-and-stones universe you see before yourself is a hologram.                      

To test this question, Hogan has employed two giant interferometers at Fermilab, developed by some researchers at MIT. In a classic laser hologram, a laser beam is split. One portion is reflected off an object - and say, an apple – and the other is reflected by several mirrors. They are then reunited and captured on a piece of photographic film. The result on the plate – which represents the interference pattern of these waves – resembles a strange set of concentric circles.

However, when you shine a light beam from the same kind of laser through the film, what you see is a fully realized, three-dimensional virtual image of the apple. (A perfect example is the image of Princess Leia, generated by R2D2 in Episode 4 first movie of the Stars Wars series).

I’m sure you’ve heard of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation, which maintains that everyone on earth is only six friends or acquaintances apart from anyone else, and the Hollywood version, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which challenges you to link anyone in Hollywood in six steps, via his or film roles, to actor Kevin Bacon.

That got me thinking about another game: a list of those greatest influences that most shaped me from my college-student self to the author of science books like The Field.  At 18, I knew I wanted to write books, but I never could have predicted the content. Which 10 books were most responsible for taking me from there to here?

This is no mean task, as my husband and I are avid readers and also magpies: fiction, science, non-fiction of every variety, New Age, even cookbooks line shelves in every room in our house.  And of course not only books but also countless interviews with nearly 100 scientists informed my views. 

Nevertheless, this was roughly the process, the 10 degrees of separation between my interest in general literature (I studied English lit at university) and my current work in pioneer science.

Dear Friends,

Most people completely miss the biggest opportunity they will ever have in their lives for great and lasting change: the times of extreme adversity.

They focus on the immediate carnage — the lost property, the displacement in their lives, the cost in dollars and cents — and not the blessing of the curse – of  being propelled into a completely uncharted territory.

Alphabet City under water

Several days after Hurricane Sandy hit lower Manhattan, leaving most of Avenue C in the East Village under water, Zachary Mack, co-owner of Alphabet City Wine Company, published a blog in Forbes magazine about his experiences of waking up to see his shop under water. No business along his street had been spared.   ‘As someone who saw it in person, the sight was at once surreal and horrifying,’ he wrote four days after the storm.  Yet despite all of this, my spirits have never been so high.’ 

Within minutes of Zachary’s arriving at his wrecked store on the Tuesday, October 30, the day after the Con Ed transformer exploded, a group of three regulars showed up with flashlights and trash bags.  ‘What do you need us to do?  How can we help you?’ they said. 

Dear Friends,

Last year, I got tired to death of talk about 2012. I listened a good deal of powerful oration and prettily turned phrases about evolution, but did not see much hard evidence of anything besides business as usual. So I decided to become a little instigator of change myself by handing people an evolutionary action plan for free.

There would be no catch, no sales pitch, no back-end product hard sell, in fact no business agenda.  I’d help to set up the groups and give them a weekly guide to how to evolve, personally and as a community, and then show them how to bring their message out to the world.

Over time, I’d communicate with the groups via free teleseminars and webinars, and then have them connect with each other via my website.

It is not the end of the world, and we’re all still here, I’m happy to observe.  We averted a fiscal cliff, but we all harbour, even more than we did in 2012, the uneasy sense that we have reached the end of something, closed a chapter on our own history, arrived at a point where there is no turning back. The end of life as we’ve known it. The end of oil. The end of easily acquired stuff.  The end of cheap, flourishing modern capitalism.  The end of every-day-in-every-way our easy-street Western life is getting better.

So if it’s all burning down, if we have to build over scorched ground again, what do we put in its place? What exactly does post-2012 evolution looks like?

 Why do societies fail?

To answer that question, I’ve been reading the work of Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning geography professor and erstwhile anthropologist, who has built his reputation on asking the big questions of specific societies:  why do some of them thrive while others make stupid, even disastrous decisions?  What holds it together and what causes it to collapse?

I’ve been specifically interested in an interview he gave about a course he ran on the collapse of societies. Why had some societies like the Mayans in the Yucatan or the Anasazi in the American Southwest or even the Easter Islanders brought about their own destruction by ceaselessly mining (and finally exhausting) their own resources?

Today is the last day of the world – at least the world as we know it. Millions of people around the globe are celebrating the end of the old ‘I win, you lose’ paradigm and the beginning of a new, evolved consciousness. To get a glimpse of what that new paradigm might look like, we need to look no further than what happens when people make music together.

Psychologists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Salzburg, Austria, wished to examine whether our brains act “in tandem” with others when we’re engaged in a common purpose. Although some research had been done with functional magnetic resonance imagery, no one before had examined simultaneous brain-wave activity between people carrying out the same task together.