(Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Bear and his predicament. But today was a therapy day, and you know what that means. Time to stick a USB connector into my limbic system and press PRINT. )

I talked with my therapist today about my recent brush with thoughts of self-harm and severe depression. I told him about feeling like I lived in a room with unlocked doors yet I still can’t leave. (I guess I am chained to the wall. But I have the key and the chain is made of tissue paper. )

I talkd about feeling like parts of me that have been kept apart by my mental disintegation are now coming into conflict for the very first time. I am going to have to make some decisions about myself. Reintergration cannot be acheived without some form of conflict resolution.

Chief amongst these conflicts is the tug of war between all the latent growth and enthusiasm that has started to surge within me at the prospect of having a bus pass and all that freedom, and the thin but surprisingly strong chain of cold hard fear that is still holding me back.

I feel like I am a big dog tied up in the back yard, straining at the very end of his lead as hard as he can. Something is going to break. Either the collar, or the chain…or the dog.

In a way, this feels like the Final Battle. This is the End Boss. I have defeated the rest of the depression but now I have to get past the hardest, most resistant, most diamond hard part of the blockage inside me that has kept me trapped inside myself (the ultimate claustrophobia) for damn near twenty years.

But that might be part of the problem. The conflict might not need to be so severe. I know that this out of control freedom seeking animal inside me is like a raging river at full flood coming up against the solid brick wall of my remaining depression. If I could just slow that raging river down, maybe the system would rebalance itself without any dire, winner takes all conflict.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe it will take that kind of primal power of unchecked emotion to blast that barrier to pieces.

I don’t know which approach is the right one. It’s a tossup as far as I can see.

But I do know one thing : I don’t FEEL like slowing down. I want this shit RESOLVED. I am very tired of living a tiny lonely life when I have nothing to be ashamed of and am, in fact, a pretty amazing dude.

So I am more than willing to bet it all.

Either the chain goes, or I do,

There is no moderate, reasonable option.

Sometimes you have to stop being reasonable in order to get things done.

I was going to write tonight’s entry from the big computer, but I am receiving worrying communiques from my nether regions and so I thought I would be safer lying down with the fan blowing to cool my fevered brow.

Lately, when I post from my tablet, it is via the official WordPress app. Only took me around a month to figure out that there had to be one.

Because it’s true. There’s an app for that.

Heck… there’s thirty.

And while the app is very slick and easy to use, the one thing it lacks is a wordcount function of any kind. So if you have been wondering why some of my entries have been shorter lately, that’s why.

Without a handy dandy wordcount there on the bottom of my editing window, I can no longer work to wordcount, and that means I am done when I feel likenbsp; I am done.

This has its positives and negatives. On the pro side, it keeps me from just rambling on and on just to get to some arbitrary number of words. So in a crude way, it makes me more succinct.

On the con side, I am not gettng as much of a workout as I used to, and I fear the long term consequences of such a slackening of discipline.

If anything, I should be writing more words a day, not less. I know that, as vital as it is for me to blog nightly, it is not enough to keep me creatively content and satisfied. That was the whole reason I started doing daily videos in the first place.

And I know that my recent sharp upsurge in depression has a lot to do with having a lot of pent up creative energynbsp; really wants out, but my fears and my primal paranoia won’t let them go.

Somehow, I need to drill a hole in that dyke and relieve this internal pressure that pushes me into a dark, angry, resentful “I hate my life” dangerous frame of mind,

Just from typing what I have typed so far, I feel a million times better than I have all day. I feel much calmer and less panicked and angry. This is what makes me feel better. Imagine if I did even more of it!

So why don’t I? The same reason that I don’t do a million other things that I know damned well would make me feel better.

Because knowing what will make you feel better does not make you feel like doing it, at least if you are an emotional cripple like I am. You would think the promise of relief would be more than enough to get you moving towards itnbsp; and you would be right if you were talking about a healthy person.

But I am not healthy, I am, in fact, quite ill with a disease called depression. And that means that my motivational machinery is rusted shut a lot of the time. It takes a mighty force indeed to make me move, and when I stop moving again, the lethargy of inertia sets in and I just rust shut once more.

I totally know that what will make me feel a thousand percent better about myself is investing some of my copious (but suppressed) energies into more meaningful action that creates concrete results.

And way less dicking arund playing stupid video games.

But will that be enough to get me to do it? I don’t know.

Why is it so hard for me to do things to make myself happy?

Must be all that rust.

Giving blogging from the living room a try. How exotic! Blogging from my couch in the living room instead of sprawled out on my bed or sitting in front of the big computer.

It is downright tragic how big a change that is for me.

And I am not sure it will last for the whole blog entry. It is, so far, decidedly less comfortable than the more traditional positions, and I am all about the comfort.

It is surpringly hard to find a good position for typing when seated on the couch.Getting the screen at the right angle to the keyboard is quite tricky.I suspect this case was designed with a readily available flat surface perpindicular to the ground in mind. A not unreasonable assumtion.

I have felt pretty crappy today. Slept a lot, which rarely helps my mood. You would think that getting caught up on sleep would make me feel better, but this was not kind of sleep.

This was the evil kind of sleep which takes way more out of me than it puts back. I feel drained and abused and like my entire body aches from a deep bruising. Plus I seem to be developing a very nasty sinus slash eyestrain headache, and my usual countermeasures are only delaying the problem, not eliminating it.

Headache train is bearing down at a hundred miles an hour, and all I can do is wriggle a little further down the track.

So that sucks. Emotionally, I feel like a hunted animal, trying to flee danger but there is no way to go, no where to hide, and dangerand fear on all sides.

Trying hard not to think about fox hunts right now.

Oh, the experiment is over, at least for now, by the way. I am back on my nice comfy bed. Considering how crappy I feel, this is not the night for experimentation. It’s a night for getting as comfortable as possible and doing my best to weather whatever storms may come.

When I feel like this, all tender and raw, it is very hard for me to keep my anxiety levels down. Thinking about anything even remotely stressful sends my anxiety levels skyrocketing, so I have no choice but to stay mellow and distracted.

Story of my life, really.

It’s like I am on high simmer and I could boil over at any second. Like my body wants to have a big anxiety attack, but the Paxil (and/or my self-control) won’t let it, so I am stuck in this yellow alert status.

Maybe I should just let it happen and get it over with. Might be better off in the long run. But I do not think I am capable of that just yet. So instead, I will turn off the lights and hope some time in the dark will help.

Wish me luck with that.

Hey there science fans! It’s time for another big week of big stories about big science!

Just five stories for you this week. It’s been a relatively slow week for science, and to be quite honest, that is a bit of a relief.

These weeks where I have to slog through 22 links to come up with six that fit are a lot of work!

So this week, we relax a little, pour ourselves a relaxing libation, put our feet up in order to minimize stress on our spines, and deal with some nifty science stories,

Call it Science Siesta Time. Ola, amigos!

First of we have this bright idea (ha ha) for painting public trails and walkways with glow in the dark paint.

The technology, called STARPATH (sounds like astrology software), is based around a paint that absorbs ultraviolet radiation during the day, then radiates it back out during the night.

So, pretty much just like whatever glow in the dark doohickey you had as a child. For me it was stickers.

The idea is that you would then have, basically, a self-lighting path, which eliminates the “pools of light” problems associated with street lights, not to mention saving on the electric bill.

A lot of small towns with tight budgets could get a lot of relief out of not having to pay to power and maintain as much street lighting any more.

I am not sure this would be an actual replacement for all street lighting, but it would be boffo for nature trails, bike paths, and other such instances.

And I mean come on… you are walking on a path made of light! That has got to be cool as beans on toast.

Next up, we learn that scientists have found the coldest place in the universe.

And as both Einstein and Hawking predicted, it’s between Anne Coulter’s legs.

Ba dum bump. OK, now that I got THAT out of my system, let’s talk about the actual story. The real deal is that scientists have observed a spot in the universe, called the Boomerang Nebula because it keeps moving back in with its parents (not really), that is only one degree above absolute zero, or 1 degree Kelvin.

And that’s neat and all, hut finding out that something in space is very very cold is not exactly headline news. What makes this cold spot so interesting is that it is actually colder than the background radiation of space.

That means that the Boomerang Neubla is somehow refrigerating itself. Is that cool, or what?

Oh, plus it also looks like this :

Spooky, no? Space has such cool stuff in it. It sucks so bad that we can’t go out there and see it close up yet.

Still waiting on that Alcubierre-White drive, people! Chop chop!

Well, so much for nice clean stars and space. Now, on to the gooey organic stuff.

First up, we have great news from the world of, guess what, tissue engineering. The Colombian lady who received the world’s first artificially grown trachea is still going strong five years later.

There has been zero, absolutely zero, immunological response and that means absolutely no rejection. Her body accepts the transplant of what is a pretty major part of one’s body as if it was its own flesh.

Because that’s essentially what it is. They took a donor trachea, washed away all the cells leaving the protein scaffolding behind, and built the trachea back up with the recipient’s own cells.

The patient is alive and well and leading a normal life despite being one of the first human beings to receive one of these organs. She didn’t need any immunosuppressant drugs, which is fab because honestly, we kind of need our immune systems and anything that keeps us from having to suppress it is a very good thing.

Next on the hit parade is this uber nifty DNA scanner.

IT derives its nift for many things. It’s faster than the usual scanner, it measures far more base pairs, and it even supports USB so you can scan DNA on the go.

But the real shockeroo is the price tag : $1000.

You read that right… one thousand bucks. That’s it. For $1K, you too could scan 70,000 base pairs of DNA in the comfort of your own home, office, or clean LOOKING motel room.

A thousand bucks isn’t pocket change, but it’s definitely a consumer price. There will be tons and tons of well heeled geeks out there that will want one just to have one.

But the real market, of course, will be genetic researchers. With a sequencer that cheap, the study of genes will become far more democratized, and hence the whole science will move at a much, much faster pace.

This can only hasten the era of gene based medicines that treat all kinds of previous untreatable conditions.

Just imagine what all those nerds and scientists (pro nerds) will be able to do with that power.

Probably something like rewriting the entire genome of an organism.

That’s the Big Story of this week, folks, and I think you can see why. The brave new world of genetic engineering building custom genomes and then writing them into organisms is here.

Granted, in this case, it was just the genome of that ever present bug E. Coli , but that is just a starting point. Eventually it might even be applicable to multicellular life.

That would still leave the problem of how to rewrite an entire lifeform’s DNA without killing it. We would have to invent a really amazing form of suspended animation. Then maybe we would get nanobots, or even custom viruses, to change the genome in every single cell.

It is a breathtaking possibility and really gives me that sense of vertigo that I mentioned before, where I feel like I am looking into a whole new future stretching out before me.

It’s both exhilarating and frightening to contemplate. There is so much going on in science right now.

The one thing I can say for sure is that the future will be very… different.

And I, for one, am ready for that.

At least I think I am….

Seeya next week!

Oy, what a day. Ever have one of those days where you just can’t seem to sync up with reality and so it feels like you are constantly running to try and catch up with it?

A fool’s game, surely. If the rates are not the same, you and life with continue to fall out of phase and you will have to keep putting in more energy to catch up, over and over again.

The smart money is on stepping off the damn merry-go-round, catching your breath, getting your bearings, then waiting for the right moment to hop back on again.

But usually, when I end up in this state, it’s because I start moving before I start thinking and when that happens, I don’t have the energy to spare to stop and think of what the logical next step is.

I’m too busy trying to catch up!

I have been somewhat under stress this month because of the financial damage done by V-Con. Well, V-con, and then my GST reimbursement check being around fifty bucks less than I thought it would be. That is what did the real damage. That was fifty bucks that just plain disappeared.

Lesson learned. Never count on money you don’t have yet. I don’t know what abstruse formula the Canadian Government uses to determine the amount of GST I paid in the last quarter, but evidently it does not produce a reliable result.

I knew this, but somehow I didn’t expect the variance to be as high as fifty bucks. Perhaps the two quarters previous had been abnormally high. I don’t know.

But it was a kick to the nads and so I have been just barely scraping by, and now, I find myself in the position of needing to borrow money, which I hate.

I hate borrowing money for so many reasons. For one, I am borrowing from friends, which makes me feel like I am presuming on their good will, and I had that.

Plus, I don’t like having this financial obligation hanging between me and my generous friend. It makes me feel like I am in the wrong now, and only paying them back will put me in the right again, and that is why I am always quite eager to pay it back and get right again.

On a purely personal level, I hate borrowing money because that is money that will, in effect, disappear in the future. At some point in the future, I will be starting out a month already in the hole, and I hate that so very much.

And perhaps most of all, having to borrow makes me feel like I have failed to manage my money properly and that always makes me feel stupid and lame. I do my best to manage my money carefully, and to mess that up makes me feel less secure.

And I am someone who needs to feel materially secure because he can relax. One of the things that will have the most benefit to me, mental health wise, about my coming status as a fully disabled person is that the extra money will not just buy me nice things.

It will make me feel a lot more secure. I won’t be just barely scraping by any more. That means the world to someone like me, who takes security very seriously because it has a huge impact on my self-esteem and my mood.

I still remember how low I got when I lived with Angela and had almost no cash. Good thing the food bank was there because otherwise, I would not even have been able to afford bus fare to go places.

But still, it really felt like I was a ghost in the world of consumer capitalism. Other people passed me by, people who could afford things, people who could buy things to make themselves happier, people who did so without even thinking about it, people who had no idea how good they had it just because they had money in their pocket that they could afford to spend.

It is a very very cold and lonely and isolating feeling. I was there with them, but we lived in very different worlds. Poverty does that to people.

So yay, coming greater relief from poverty. $900/month is still not much, but it’s $200/month more than I am getting now and therefore it’s almost a thirty percent increase.

That is going to make a huge different in my life. And there is a purely psychosocial factor too, in that this new status means I am disabled, period. I have the status of someone who society officially says is not expected to work and not expected to get better either.

This will hopefully do a lot to help me feel less like a failure and more like a person who is ill and therefore not expected to do the same things other people do.

It’s not, I suppose, as good as a visible disability in that respect, but then again, those tend to come with way too heavy a price to wish for.

I mean, I have a lot of health problems, but at least I can walk, see, and poop unassisted, and that is something to be truly thankful for.

So really, good things are coming my way and I have a lot of reasons to look forward to a brighter, shinier, warmer future.

I just wish it wasn’t more than a month away! The waiting is going to drive me nuts. This next month, my last at $700/month, is going to be very annoying.

I can’t help thinking “if only I had started this process a week earlier, I would be getting a bigger check this month instead of the next!”.

But that’s just the way the Happy Fun Ball bounces, I guess. In the future, I am sure I will look back at this painful interregnum and laugh a witty, urbane, knowing laugh of seasoned nostalgia.

“Ah, life. “ I will tell my handsome and intelligent husband. “To think, I spent all those years living in the dark before finally finding you.”

Hey, if you’re gonna dream…..

Seeya later folks!

I am besieged by awesome links today. Let the battle for freedom begin!

This looks like it could be amusing, if you’re not arachnophobic.

Obviously, these people are not taking themselves seriously and the whole thing fit neatly into the new and rather fun movie genre of “action comedy”.

I love the premise, I love the whiff of a promise of satire of the giant monster movie genre, and that is definitely one bigass spider.

I have always found giant movie monsters boring and cheap and predictable. They are like a merger of two genres I don’t like : disaster movies and monster movies. So I would love to watch a movie that mock the tropes of the kaiju world.

Plus, seriously, what is scarier than a giant spider? I can’t think of another creature that would be more frightening in Giant Atomic Size.

Then we have this brilliant piece of citizen activism and productive culture jamming.

Don’t get me wrong… sometimes culture jamming is artistically valid in and of itself.

But I love, love, love what these people did. Especially because they did it not just by being clever enough to wear almost-identical shirts, but because they succeeded because they were relaxed and friendly (easy when right is on your side) and the pipeline people are all tense and defensive because they know that people will be asking them questions for which they have no good answers.

That is a breathtakingly wonderful example of the battle between right and wrong being won by the people with right on their side. I think these people have the right idea. Show up wherever the megacorps are disseminating their corporate propaganda, and offer people the truth.

That… is how you do it.

Or you can attack the evils of the world via satire.

Note that I said satire, not comedy, because I didn’t find the video funny. Satire is a form of comedy but it is volatile stuff and does not quite entirely fit into the category of comedy.

Some satire is simply to make a point, and not to make people laugh.

I did love the bit about the training montage to 70’s slow jams, though. That was hilarious. But the part before that was just a tad too on the nose to be funny.

Your mileage, as always, may vary on that.

And I love the attempt to make climate change deniers look like a more readily recognizable form of asshole. This makes it easier for the average citizen, who is not all that sure whether they understand enough science to know if climate change is real, to nevertheless identify, mock, shame, and ultimately make entirely irrelevant those kinds of people.

Then we have this rather fun bit of mysterious minimalism : Another Word, Another Day.

Some dude recorded himself saying exactly one English word a day for three years. That’s all that is there. The archives of him saying exactly one word a day in a dry, low-affect voice, with no explanation, no way of identifying the speaker, nothing. Just… words.

Sometimes, it’s not even him. It’s some random British chick, or a guy with an Australian accent, or who knows who else.

I love it. I love it as art, as a beautifully elegant and effective non-statement. By being so anonymous and minimal, it just creates a space without filling it.

Cracked things it is “aggressively insane”, but I think it is magic.

OK folks… harsh tone shift. Things are about to get serious and macabre.

These are supposedly the last moments of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam.

It’s security camera footage taken from the elevator of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. After this, she somehow ended up in the hotel’s water tower, which is fifteen feet tall and locked all the time.

People are treating it like a big mystery, but it seems simple to me.

Seems like she had a very negative brain event. She might have had an embolism or an aneurism that lead to her bizarre behaviour because she was, to put it crudely, short-circuiting. Even ending up in the water tower makes sense… we are monkeys, after all, and born to climb. Locked doesn’t mean impossible to enter.

It is an unpleasant theory, but it fits all the facts and brings it no unverifiable variables.

They say “How did she get through two locked doors and several alarms?”

I answer “How did her murderer?” To me, it’s obviously an inside job. Perhaps an employee found her dead, panicked because they thought they were going to get blamed (or reported to the INS), and either used their own keys or ran to someone who did, and for some reason, they decided that the water tanks on the roof were the perfect place to hide a boy.

On the other hand, this could all just be someone’s idea of how to make a viral video and there is no Elisa Lam and the young lady in the video is alive and well and giggling at people somewhere.

Honestly, at this point, both theories seem equally likely to be true.

I look forward to the eventual fictionalized version of this that will end up on Law and Order, Bones, or some other crime type show.

And finally, we have my little video contribution of the day.

Completely unexpectedly, it’s… A SLIDESHOW!

I was going to do a review of Behind The Candleabra, which I watched off DVD with Joe and Julian recently, but sleep robbed me of my ambition so I had to fall back on the ol tried and true.

I don’t know why I beat myself up over resorting to slideshows and Musical Minutes. The slideshows are funny and entertaining. I watched a few from a few months back recently, and they still hold up. They even made my roomies laugh.

I was just so much more ambitious and creative when the daily video thing began! Now I feel like all I do is tread water.

There must be some new frontier out there that needs me.

Maybe audio podcasts…

Hey there folks! Got another bumper crop of science for you, so let’s dig in!

As usual, we will be talking about brains, energy, tissue engineering, and miscellaneous cool stuff.

Random Cool Stuff

First off, a story just too damned cool not to cover : using ballistic missiles to deliver aid.

Some page the Tin Man, because this article tells you how to build a brand new heart .

Well, sort of. Like a lot of these frontiers of tissue engineering stories, the process they are talking about does not exactly create a new heart from raw ingredients.

You still need a heart (or spleen, or whatever) to start with. Then you wash away all the active cells, leaving just the protein scaffolding behind, which you can then populate with lab-grown cells from the potential recipient of the transplant.

Which is still awesome. You are taking a foreign donor heart, which would cause a massive rejection response, and turning into a cell-perfect host heart which will be genetically indistinguishable from the recipient’s real heart.

So I merely quibble. It’s not really making a heart in the lab if you have to start with a heart in the first place. The real magic will be when we figure out how to make that scaffolding build itself.

These people are taking a step in the right direction.

They are working on a 3D system for growing someone a new pancreas, something near and dear to my… duodenum, as I might need a replacement some day.

The 3D is the key aspect here, because one of the major things holding back tissue engineering for generations was our POV being stuck in the 2D world of our microscopes.

But cells, organs, and organisms grow in three dimensions in the real world, and the flattened 2D world of the microscope slide just does not cut it any more.

The pancreas builders are using a gel to suspend and nourish the cells, and this gives the cells a chance to grow in the three dimensional way.

Now THAT is more like it!

Alternative Energy News

The main problem with solar power is obvious : what happens when the sun goes down?

A major solar plant in Arizona has that problem at least partly solved.

This plant can continue to produce power for six hours after the sun goes down via a thermal storage technology that the article is weirdly reluctant to explain. Perhaps it’s a big time trade secret.

But six hours seems like enough. After all, a) even at the winter solstice, that’s half the night covered, and b) people tend to use a hell of a lot less electricity when they are asleep.

So assuming people are cool with using battery powered alarm clocked, this is doable. Less then ideal, especially for us night owls, but doable.

Presumably, the thermal storage can be improved upon in the near future.

Then again, maybe all this thermal storage will be unnecessary because in the future, they can store the juice directly in massive molten air batteries.

Yes. That it seriously what they are called. What the fuck, right?

But they are called that because, unlike traditional batteries, they get their oxygen from the air, not from an oxidizer built into the battery. This makes them super light, which is a very big deal when you are looking for a battery tech for electric cars, and they also have a very high energy density.

Those two factors combined might just be enough to fuel the next big leap in electric cars. Have batteries that are lighter AND store more power?

That is just what the electric car industry needs. It could be just what the doctor ordered to give electric cars more power and more range at the same time.

And now… THE BRAIN!

A new theory of one of the functions of sleep has emerged.

This one starts from the observation that during sleep, the interstitial spaces between neurons increase by as much as sixty percent and there is a large fluid exchange. Protein laden interstitial fluid out, nice clean cerebro-spinal fluid in.

The theory is that this is the body’s way of flushing the nervous system clean, and that all those complex proteins going out are various plaques and other nasty stuff that we don’t need.

It is, literally, brainwashing.

We are constantly adding to our knowledge of the functions of sleep. We used to think sleep must be for one thing and one thing only.

But that would be like thinking all the employees at your local fast food place do after closing is clean the big grill.

No, they do everything that can’t be done when there’s customers there.

Finally, the Big Story. Proof that some people are just born negative.

The brain science is complicated and a tad dry. Genetics, neurotransmitters, and so on.

But I would warn this people against leaping to the conclusion that everyone with this particular gene variant is somehow sad or even clinically depressed. Most of them will be just fine.

The world needs both positives and negatives. The most productive creative and business partnerships have been between the positive person who comes up with tons of ideas and who provides much of the driving force, and the negative one who finds the flaws in the positive one’s ideas so they can correct them together, and who also acts as the necessary voice of restraint and caution.

My guess is that the world has around the same amount of each, and that’s no accident. Having that kind of diversity makes us stronger as a species.

And with that, I am off for the night. See you tomorrow, folks!

Sorry for the expletive, but after taking a week off, I have a LOT of science stories to sift through this week. 22, as a matter of fact. So I hope you folks appreciate what I do for you when I make these silly science reports.

I feel like an employer with only eight job openings and almost three times that number of applicants. No matter what I do, a lot of them will go away disappointed.

But them’s the breaks in the rough and tumble world of science reporting. You’re either fascinating enough (and/or important enough) to make it in the big bad world of the FSW, or you’re yesterday’s lab reports.

Part I – General Science

We’ll warm up with a few miscellaneous science stories that I thought were cool.

The Gorgon Lake

This story is both tragic and incredibly beautiful in a very morbid way. There is a lake called Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania that both kills and petrifies any animal unlucky enough to enter its waters.

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in.

Birds are attracted to (or possibly are confused by) the lake’s extremely reflective surface and crash into the lake, where the high temperatures (up to 60 degrees Celsius) and extremely high alkalinity (between pH 9 and pH 105… wow.) kill them. Then, over time, the natron calcifies the birds, turning them into statues.

This is, I admit, not a very important science story, hut its ethereal and deathly beauty meant I could not possible ignore it.

Hacking The Genetic Code

Brace yourself for some scientific vertigo : Engineers at University of Washington have written a programming language for designing your own custom DNA.

Feel that? That’s the feeling of the future opening up before you.

The language is crude as of yet, more like the machine code of DNA than C++, but it’s an amazing first step towards a world where anyone with a computer can design a genome, code for proteins, or just see what would happen if the DNA molecule was shaped like Angeline Jolie’s tits.

C’mon. You know some programming geek will try it!

More Water On Mars

It turns out there is not just SOME water on Mars.

It’s freaking EVERYWHERE on Mars!

Pick any spot on Mars. Dig up a spadeful of dirt. Heat it up a little. Boom, you got water. 2 percent by mass!

That is freaking awesome. Not only does it mean that we could land anywhere on Mars and find water to both drink (important) and electrolyze for oxygen (SUPER FREAKING IMPORTANT), but it really strengthens the argument that at one point, the surface of Mars was covered with water.

After all, how else would it end up so evenly distributed?

And if there was water on the surface of Mars, then that vastly increases the odds that it once had life, and draws even more attention to the vital question of “What went wrong”??

Part II : Energy

Baking with Carbon

A new kind of carbon capture plant deals with the stuff by turning into baking soda.

Yup, good old bicarbonate of soda, the same stuff your Mom used to make her biscuits fluffy. The technology is called Airmine, and it could very well be just the thing to capture the bad stuff coming out of a power plant or factory and turn it into useful stuff.

A Skymine plant is around the size of a semi, and, get this, is powered by the waste heat of the processes it is cleaning up. It would scrub out all the guck like sulfur and mercury out of the emissions (all of which have other industrial uses), then use a relatively simple chemical reaction to turn the carbon dioxide into bicarb, hydrogen gas, and chlorine gas.

There’s lot of uses for bicarb, and both hydrogen gas and chlorine gas have industrial uses, or you could just recombine them into hydrochloric acid which has even more uses.

Oh, and the only thing the process needs besides carbonaceous air is water and salt.

Not for nothing, but this is exactly the sort of thing that gives me a huge efficiency boner.

Hydroelectric Without Dams

But of course, if we could make energy a green way, we wouldn’t even need Skymine.

And we are surrounded by more energy than we could ever use. We just need to tap into it with devices like this new design for river water turbines.

It’s a simple idea. Put turbines in river. River flow spins turbines. Turbines generate electricity. No need to build a giant dam in order to tap in to energy of water based altitude differentials!

A simple idea, but tricky to implement. Luckily, the people at Verdant Power, the folks testing their gear on the East River in the story above, have the kind of funding that lets them just keep trying, and they now have a blade that survived 10 days of submersion perfectly intact.

In the future, energy will come from everywhere.

Part III : Brains

You knew it was coming! Time to talk brains.

The Most Extraordinary Brain Ever

The name of the article is Is This The More Extraordinary Brain Ever Seen?

And, well…. you tell me.

Above : an actual human brain that was actually inside someone’s skull doing all their brain things.

Looks like something an Alien from Alien leaves behind in the bathroom, doesn’t it? Or something that H. R. Giger left on the cutting room floor.

But no, that was actually the brain of some unknown person. All is known is that the person lived their whole life in a mental facility (quel surprise) and died in 1970. We don’t even know gender.

What we do know is that a smooth human brain with absolutely no crenelations is incredibly rare. Most people with this disorder don’t live to see their tenth birthday. There is a reason the brain is all wrinkly and crinkled, it’s because that vastly increases the surface area available for neuronal connections.

No wrinkles? No room for a human brain inside a human skull.

That person must have had very low function. Bravo to the hospital for keeping him or her alive!

The Eating Center

Scientists have refined our idea of what part of the brain controls appetite and eating.

We’ve known for decades that eating behaviours were somewhere in the lateral hypothalamus, mainly because when that is damaged, people don’t eat.

But scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill have used the completely freaky new techniques of optogenetics (using light to activate and deactivate genes) to further refine the picture down to a particular set of neural pathways that when activated, make mice voraciously hungry, and when deactivated cause the mice to lose all interest in food.

Being neurologists, the authors of the study are confident that it will turn out that eating disorders, including obesity, are really just neurological disorders.

But knowing where the problem can be seen and knowing what causes the problem are two different things.

Stopping Brain Death

For the real jaw dropping bit of brain news this week, though, you have to go to the realm of Alzheimer’s research, and the King’s College of London, where they have discovered a chemical that stops brain tissue death in its tracks.

That is huge news. We are eons away from being able to actually fix dead brain tissue, so our only hope in fighting Alzheimer’s and many other degenerative brain disorders any time soon is to keep the brain tissue from dying in the first place.

After all, if the brain tissue dies, so does the information stored in it, and even if you could repair the cell, that information is lost forever.

And that information is you

So anything that can keep those nasty prions from accumulating in your brain tissue and causing your brain cells to shut down protein production for so long that they starve to death is a good thing.

Well, that’s all for this bonus-sized edition of the Friday Science Whatever for this week. Trimming a list of 22 awesome science stories to the 8 most awesome was a brutal, bloody process, but in the end, only the truly worthy stories survived to stand on the platform of victory, heads wreathed in laurels.

And you just read them all! Good for you.

Seeya next week, science fans!

It is a seemingly mundane and everyday world that a lot of people use without really thinking about it and hence, use it wrong.

But once you understand what it truly means, you begin to truly understand the humanist endeavor.

Welcome back, my nerdlings. Come, bask in science awesomeness!

Can you say “Oops”?

First up, errata. Seems that story I did last week about them finding alien stuff in the upper upper atmosphere was just a bunch of hot air.

Charitably, we will just say that the lead scientist got a little too excited far too early, and not only went off half-cocked but without doing even half of the work you are supposed to do before you go claiming that what you have discovered is actual, legit science.

I would be more bummed out about it, but as far as I know, the far more credible story of finding extraterrestrial life inside a meteor is still viable, so fuck it.

We Are Not Alone

But maybe the aliens… are US! (cue Twilight Zone sting)

According to this fascinating (and kinda gross… definitely germphobe trigger warning) article, only ten percent of the cells in your body are genetically human.

The rest are various forms of microorganisms that have a symbiotic relationship with the human cells and which have, in a sense, co-evolved with us, but are not actually human.

Do you realize what this means? Holy batshit, Fatman…. we’re not workers, we’re management! What we think of as our human selves is just the overseers to a bunch of tame germs and such.

Or, less colorfully, we are all shepherds over a flock of beneficial microbes who give us their wool and we give them a place to live.

Philosophically and poetically, my mind is blown.

Black Holes Of The Deep

The ocean has black holes.

Not of the space kind, thank goodness, but something equivalent. They are whirlpools that have, purely by chance, developed a stable pattern that means that nothing can escape their circular current.

It’s one thing to learn that all vortices follow the same rules, but to see it demonstrated with something as freaky cool as a black hole of the ocean is something else.

Everything that enters these stable vortices circulates endlessly, meaning they can accumulate a lot of stuff like sea life, plastic waste, and oil.

I wonder if we could harness one of these black holes of the deep (tell me that’s not fun to say) in order to generate clean electricity.

And speaking of generating electricity… from this point on it is all about the energy!

Sing it, Old Man Earth!

It’s weird that he has clouds for hair.

Here’s four stories about three ways to get clean energy.

Method One : Microbes

Yup. We are talking Microbes that generate electricity.

A team at Stanford has cultivated a rather strange form of bacteria that actually generates electrical current as a byproduct of its digestion of organic waste.

You know what that means? POO BATTERIES!

Seriously though, while it is not known if this will ever produce enough electricity to power your iPod charger, it could very well be the sort of thing that provides the energy input for a slow but efficient detoxification project, especially if supplemented by solar.

Imagine dozens of little microbe-munching machines working patiently and tirelessly to detoxify a “dead zone” like the article says, or even just cut down the costs at your local sewage treatment facility.

I just love the idea of microbes that actually make things cleaner.

Method Two : Caged Atoms

Stepping a little into the Phantom Zone on this one, but not overmuch.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have found a way to make a thermoelectric material that is far more efficient than any other before it.

Thermoelectricity is relatively easy to understand. A thermoelectric material is one that generates an electrical current when used to bridge two material of different temperatures. The bigger the temperature different, the bigger the current.

This has enormous possibilities. Imagine a thermoelectric plant in one of Iceland’s volcanoes. Arctic cold up top (most of the year), fiery hot down below. Zap.

I don’t quite grasp how this trapped cerium thing makes for a more efficient thermoelectric effect, although I like the image of them all rattling the bars screaming “ATTICA!”.

But anything that leads to more efficiency in harvesting the gigawatts of energy that flow around us every day is great news to me.

Method 3 : Good Ol Solar, Part I

It doesn’t make the news as much any more, but solar power is still in the race and kicking some ass, at least in terms of the here and now.

Want proof? California just opened the world’s largest solar energy farm in the blistering sun of the Mojave.

See, this is what I love about California. They might not get the smartest government, but they at least have governments that think big and follow dreams.

This solar farm is not a photovoltaic solar farm. Instead, it’s of the type that uses rings of mirrors that all reflect sunlight toward a central tower that contains water. The sunlight boils the water, the water turns to steam, the steam runs a turbine, and just like that you got electricity.

I love this form of solar mostly because it’s the more practical system for turning sunlight into megawatts that we have in the world today.

But that might not be true in the future….

Method 3 : Good Ol Solar, Part I

A group of teams of scientists from around the world have announced that they have developed a solar cell with a whopping 47 percent efficiency.

That makes it the Guiness Record holder for most efficient photovoltaic cell and, more importantly, means that we are closing in on fifty percent efficiency mark that solar enthusiasts have sought for decades.

The idea is that at fifty percent, solar could compete with the current filthy energy from coal and oil on an even footing because it would cost exactly the same. No subsidies required.

And if we ever reached that state of magical equilibrium, it would take only the gentlest of regulatory pushes, say a five percent tax on dirty energy, to make solar come out on top.

And hey, who says we will stop at fifty percent?

It’s been behind in the race for a long time, but solar is definitely moving ahead right now.

It’s an exciting time to be alive and interested in science!

Seeya next week, folks!