Having been prompted to check my BBC iPlayer account today, I discovered that a few programs I had downloaded were about to expire. So I have been watching TV. A particular series I’d like to share with you was broadcast on BBC4 in January. It is called Visions of the Future, and it is a 3-part documentary series fronted by Michio Kaku. I didn’t find out about it in time to get the first program, which is about AI, but I’ve seen the second and third. Part 2 is about genetic engineering and is very solid, but part three is spectacularly wide-ranging.
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Science
Saving the World by Eating
Suppose you were an absolute whiz at genetic engineering, what would you set your sights upon making? Unicorns? Domestic cats with tiger markings? Broccoli that tastes like chocolate? Beer that doesn’t give you a hangover? All sorts of ideas come to mind, but if you really wanted to do something good for the world, and you were happy to play with nice, simple little animals, how about this: bacteria that eat CO2 and shit gasoline.
Of course if you are Michael Crichton you’ll be immediately starting work on a book about how evil, genetically-engineered bacteria escape from a lab and almost destroy the world by eating the entire atmosphere until it turns out that they can be killed by spraying them with underarm deodorant (exact brand to be left to the product placement guys). But for the rest of us, hey, it isn’t such a bad idea, especially if it works.
A Ga Goo!
Can robots have babies? No, of course not. But that doesn’t stop scientists from building robot children. And why should they do such a strange thing? Because they want to teach a robot to talk, and it seems only natural that they should make it look like a kid. After all, it might have to go to school. The BBC has more on little iCub and his adult minders at the University of Plymouth.
Planet Hunting Close to Home
Earlier this week a schoolgirl from Montana won a National Geographic contest to think of a mnemonic that could be used to memorize the 11 planets of the solar system. Unfortunately for Maryn Smith her fame could be short lived, because it seems that there is yet another mystery planet hiding in the nether reaches of the solar system.
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Robots Will Kill Us All
The latest “we’re all going to die” story comes from a professor in Sheffield who is worried about the explosive growth in the use of military robots. Did you know, for example, that over 4,000 robots are currently in military service in Iraq? But it is not the state-sanctioned military that Professor Sharkey (a former judge on Robot Wars) is worried about:
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Tentacle Porn
The Australian research vessel, Aurora Australis, has been spending the summer conducting a census of marine life in the Antarctic. According to this Guardian report they have discovered some amazing creatures, including a jellyfish with 6-meter-long tentacles (over 18 feet, for metrically-challenged Americans). The mission’s web site contains a lot more photos. The video of the sea floor at 800m is particularly startling – it is like a garden down there.
Smarter Than Us?
Ray Kurzweil gave a speech to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston yesterday. According to The Independent he claimed that computers will be as smart as people by 2030. Hmm, that’s just 23 years away. Am I likely to last that long? Probably not. It would be interesting to see, though.
Of course, as is the way of futurology, Kurzweil will be proved to be either hopelessly optimistic or hopelessly pessimistic. Meanwhile, I’m still reading Matter. As you should know, in The Culture the AIs keep humans as pets.
Clones for Sale
Upset that you are likely to outlive your pet? Fear not, a Korean firm is going into the business of pet cloning. When tiddles or fido drops dead, you can just order up a replacement.
Interestingly the company is also planning to go into the business of producing clones of clever creatures such as dogs that are especially good at sniffing our explosives. What’s the betting they are also looking at champion race horses? A wide horizon of possibility stretches before us.
Women More Neurotic Than Men – Official
Rats! Sometimes science can be very inconvenient.
Apparently some clever folks in Sweden have discovered that women’s brains are more susceptible to the influence of serotonin, and worse at getting rid of it, than the brains of men. And this means that they will be more prone to anxiety and depression. The problem has been found to be particularly acute in women who also have serious problems with PMS. So there it is, proof of what men will doubtless say they knew all along.
I am not going to be depressed about this. Really, I’m not.
Retail Therapy
Well, the good news is, girls, that going shopping is a natural reaction to being sad. The bad news is that you are likely to end up spending more on individual items that you would when you are happy. Also the silly boffins didn’t bother to find out whether shopping actually made you happier which is, after all, the entire point. Full report here.
Mind That Wormhole!
The Independent’s science columnist asks whether travelers from the future will be visiting Geneva soon (with help from a picture of a police box).
Don’t Need Men
Via La Gringa I find this article about making sperm cells from women’s bone marrow. Who needs parthenogenesis anyway? This way we don’t get clones. Of course, as the article points out, there’s a big difference between making a sperm cell and getting it to fertilize an egg, but it is a big step along the way.
Smells Sexy?
Did you know that there is a gene that determines whether a woman finds the smell of male sweat sexy or not? That could explain an awful lot. And apparently there are three states: either you find the smell sexy, or you find it disgusting, or you can’t smell it at all. I appear to be in category three (but then my nose is pretty ineffectual all round so it could be just me). Anyway, now I won’t feel anywhere near so inferior when women authors go on about male smell in sex scenes.
Seeing into Other Dimensions
Linking two previous posts (here and here) I find that scientists at Berkeley and U. Madison believe that the new toy at CERN will allow then to see the shapes of the Calabi-Yau spaces – the curled-up 6-dimensional spaces that string theory predicts exist in our 10-dimensional universe (yea, gross simplification). Apparently it is all to do with Kaluza-Klein gravitons. This is all beyond me, but it is seriously cool.
Higgs Where Are You?
Nature reports that the final piece of the new detection system has been lowered into place at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Once all of the pieces have been connected up and tested, the search for the Higgs Boson can begin. Do click through, it looks like they got Stephan Martiniere to do the photograph. (Sometimes real life imitates the wildest science fiction.)
Strings Spotted in Universe?
Up until now, string theory has been just that, a theory. There has been no way of testing it empirically. Up until now. The latest news is that a group of astronomers studying perturbations in cosmic background radiation have observations that they believe are better explained by string theory than by current models of the structure of the universe. Details here.
Dark Here
So how do we know whether dark matter exists when we can’t see it? Why, gravitational lensing, of course. Stitch a bunch of Hubble photos together and you can map where the stuff it. More details in The Guardian.
Positively Positronic
You know that old pulp thing about how our heroes are flying through the galaxy and they see a cloud up ahead, and it turns out to be anti-matter? Well it turns out that there is a big cloud of anti-matter at the center of our galaxy. Truly, we live in a science-fictional world.
The Economist on Longevity Treatments
Workable treatments for significantly human lifespans are still a long way off. But they are, it seems, not so far off as to seem silly. If The Economist can devote a long article to them then such treatments are clearly being taken seriously.
Chicken Little Arrives
It appears that the FDA is about to approve the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals (despite fears from consumer and environmentalist groups that such foodstuffs might contain “chemicals”).