It’s science time again folks! Time to warm up the Science Machine and climb on board for a tour of six of the coolest and most interesting science stories of the week!

So take a seat, remember to keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, and HAVE FUN!

Our first stop is a fascinating study that showed that dolphins have very long social memories.

This study builds on the relatively recent discovery that dolphins have “names”, namely a series of whistles and clicks that signify a specific individual.

From that, and with the help of a facility where bottlenosed dolphins have been kept going back decades, complete with recording of the dolphin’s noises, scientists were able to play back the “names” of dolphins that a particular dolphin had not seen for decades, and sure enough, the dolphins reacted by perking up and immediately responding in kind.

“Holy crap, it’s Dave! Hey Dave! Man, I haven’t seen you in ages! How’s the wife and kids?”

This shows that the dolphins have very long social memories, comparable to those of monkeys, elephants, and human beings.

It also suggests that dolphins, like us, the elephants, and the monkeys, are a highly social species.

Say goodbye to the dolphins, folks, because out next step is a disturbing bit of analysis that suggests that all forms of violence increase during an extended hot, dry period.

This is especially important to us civilization fans who are worried about what will happen to the state of global stability as climate change makes the world hotter.

Obviously, droughts cause famine and famine causes civil war. That’s a no-brainer.

But it goes far deeper than that :

For every standard deviation of change, levels of interpersonal violence, such as domestic violence or rape, rise by some 4 percent, while the frequency of intergroup conflict, from riots to civil wars, rise by 14 percent. Global temperatures are expected to rise by at least two standard deviations by 2050, with even bigger increases in the tropics.

So it’s a little more serious than heat just making people a bit more grumpy.

Nasty. Next, we will visit what brain science is telling about liberals versus conservatives.

Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives’ eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement

This fits with my own observations that conservatives seem to thrive on fear. They see the world as being extremely dangerous and thus need a high level of order and predictability, even conformity, in order to quell this deep fear of a hostile world.

This is born out by the finding that the more secure people feel, the more liberal they become.

To illustrate this point :

…psychologist Jaime Napier found that asking Republicans to imagine that they possessed superpowers and were impermeable to injury made them more liberal.

So perhaps in order for liberalism to succeed, it needs to craft a powerful message of security.

Everything will be okay, folks. You can relax!

After that reassuring message, let’s go on to look at the latest news about oxytocin.

For a while now, the science press has been calling oxytocin the “love hormone” because levels of it have been shown to rise quite a bit when people are in love, or even just thinking about someone they love. It spikes after pregnancy when mothers are bonding with their children. It even spikes when someone is just thinking about a favorite television show.

But new results show that oxytocin also spikes when you have a very negative experience, including negative social experiences.

So perhaps it is not the “love hormone”, but the “memory hormone”. It responds not to the nature of the experience but its strength.

Positive or negative, things that cause a very strong response are automatically considered to be very important to our survival, and so we remember them very, very strongly.

Leaving the land of honeymoons and PTSD behind, we enter the world of potentially epoch-making studies about the origins of cancer.

A team of researchers has discovered that 21 different kinds of cancer-causing mutations all leave behind a certain “cancer graffiti” signatures that point directly as to what exactly caused said mutation.

These 21 signatures represent 97 percent of known carcinogenic mutations, and so this discovery could radically improve the epidemiology of cancer by letting doctors and scientists track specific carcinogens and their effects.

For decades, cancer research has involved a lot of guesswork. This guy smoked a lot, so that is probably what caused his cancer. But he also worked in a toxic environment for decades, and then there’s his genetic predisposition due to many cancer deaths in his family….

This new discovery may well take the guesswork out and let us know exactly what leads to what kinds of cancer and take steps to minimize the risks.

Out final stop is at what might be even bigger news : a potential vaccine for malaria.

The results are small so far, but very encouraging, especially because the vaccine works on adults. There are parts of the world where malaria kills millions every year. A vaccine against it would be the ultimate tool for consigning it to the dustbin of history along with polio, the whooping cough, and Spanish flu.

A vaccine would be even better than the current treatment, oral administration of quinine. Its one drawback is that it does need to be delivered intravenously, which adds a great deal of complication to the question of distribution.

But recent developments in intravenous patches which deliver medicine via a postage-stamp sized patch riddled with microscopic needles might just provide a route around that problem, and countless others.

A future without cancer or malaria? Sign me the heck up.

Well that’s it for this week’s science tour. We hope you enjoyed your visit. The next tour will be a week from today, and will feature all new exhibits from all over the world of science.

Please remember to take your packages and valuables with you, and have a safe and pleasant evening.

Sounds kinky, right?

Well it’s not.

Well, maybe just a little.

I explain masochism.

Maybe I will take on sadism next.

Finally! We’re back with all that wonderful science that has been piling up over the last few weeks.

Truth be told, your science reporter is not at his best today, and was tempted to skip yet another week of wonderful, wonderful science in order to do something a little less arduous.

But I just could not disappoint you science fans for yet another week. So here I am, raring to go and read to plunge into the stack of science stories piled up in my inbox and ferret out the gems.

And it’s all because of you wonderful science Fans!

We’ll start with a small thing that could turn out big : self-cooling windows.

Researchers at Harvard have invented a window that has an ultra-thin vein of water embedded in the pane. The idea is that water from a building’s water supply would come in and absorb heat from the window and then exit the system.

Some of you will recognize this as pretty much the exact same system (but with blood) that animal life (like us) uses in order eliminate excess heat.

The result, so they say, is a window that lets in just as much light, but no heat. This could save people boodles of cash on their air conditioning bills and make for much more temperature-neutral environments for us finicky humans to live in.

I wonder if they could circulate hot water from a building’s hot water supply through in the winter and cut down on heating costs as well?

And speaking of simple but very nifty bits of technology, check out this billboard.

It uses a very simple system to bring fresh, clean water to people who desperately need it. From what I can tell, this sort of thing is cheap to make and very low maintenance, and yet it can mean the difference between life and death for so many people.

Of course, it only works in a coastal desert or other similar high humidity, low rainfall conditions. Those are fairly rare. So it’s not going to solve the world’s drinking water problem by itself.

But for those places, it could change everything. We take clean water for granted because we live in water paradise, where there is almost always enough rain to keep the reservoirs full.

But for billions of people, there is no guarantee there will be any rain at all.

And hey…. moisture farming!

Next up, a story near and dear to this column’s heart : lab grown beef!

Yes, the world’s first lab grown hamburger has taste tested, and the reviews are in.

Two brave souls volunteered to lead the way, and they said it looks like hamburger to them and feels like hamburger to the mouth, but is lacking in flavour.

Any chef could have told them that. Every cook knows that extremely lean hamburger is tasteless. You can get rid of all the clear fat and that actually makes the ground beef taste better.

But the brown fat, that’s where the flavour resides. Get rid of that, and eww.

The scientists say that altering the process to produce a fattier product is no problem, and so the next round of tasting will go better.

And from there, who knows? If they can scale it up, we might have lab grown hamburger in our supermarkets and fast food joints as early as a few years from now.

In other good news, selfish behaviour is not rewarded by evolution.

This despite all those “selfish gene” believers who can’t seem to grasp the fact that nature is jam packed with highly successful species which cooperate with one another, the most successful of which is us, homo sapiens, a species very adept at balancing individual and collective needs.

Clearly, it can be advantageous for an individual to cooperate if said cooperation helps their social group as a whole. The problem with zero-sum economics of selfishness is that does not and cannot include the benefit one gets from being a member of a strong collective.

This makes it seem like cooperation has no benefits, only costs. But if we take the benefits of cooperation into account, it is clear that cooperation can be a very good deal even on just the selfish, amoral level of economics.

And speaking of the selfish and amoral, there is some indications that sociopaths might be able to be taught to empathize after all.

The results are purely based on brain imaging and are hence a little thin, but promising. It turns out that you might be able to turn on a sociopath’s empathy by getting them to imagine themselves in the same situation as someone else.

That activates those vital areas of the brain that we use in order to judge our actions against the consequences to others. We imagine “how we would like it if someone did the same thing to us”.

However, just because a sociopath imagines him or herself in a particular scenario does not mean they actually care about someone else in that situation.

That is the difference between empathy and sympathy. You can feel what another is feeling without caring. It’s just information. You might even think they deserve to feel as they do.

But to sympathize is to care that the person is in distress and want to help, which can be activated almost without empathy because we can understand that another human is in some sort of distress purely from looking at their facial expression, body language, and so on, without having to be able to imagine ourselves in their exact position.

And finally, brace yourself, science fans, because this one is scary as hell : scientists have been able to implant false memories into mice.

The method is a little complicated, and very brain science intensive, but the net effect was that they made these mice react to a benign environment where they had never received a painful stimulus as though it was another one in which it had.

And that’s pretty fucking freaky, n’est-ce pas?

Even a very simple, almost crude result like that becomes damned sinister if you imagine it applied to human beings. All those 60’s science fiction stories about government mind control come roaring back into life if you can imagine that some group could condition you to respond to certain situations, like say an anti-government protest, like you did to another, say the room they tortured you in.

As for anything beyond that, well, then we get into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind territory, if we are lucky, and Total Recall territory (or worse!) if we’re not.

It is a weird time to be a brain science fan. On the one hand, we are discovering more about the human brain than ever before and the insights gained are truly breathtaking.

But the potential uses for these insights honestly scare the hell out of me.

I mean, where do you go if you are not even safe in your own mind?

And with that happy thought, I bid you adieu for another week, science fans!

Keep dreaming the future!

Another hot summer week has slithered past us and it is once more time to delve into the deep, wonderful caves of knowledge and go spelunking for science.

We have our usual half-dozen delights this week, including a world changing crop technology, stopping light dead in its tracks, an anti-mosquito patch, a hidden planet, antimatter in solar flares, and the possibility of life on Earth two billion years ago.

Let’s start off with that patch that stops mosquitoes.

I admire their approach. I am a big fan of stripping down problems to their very basics and then building the solution atop that stripped down base. So I really admire their back to basics approach.

And the technology looks amazing. If it works, it could change the world. Mosquitoes are a nuisance here, but around the world, they are killers. A simple patch made of food-grade compounds would be extremely cheap to make and hence well within the reach of the philanthropic organizations of the world to fund on a very large scale indeed.

Sales of the patch here in the modern world could also provide a revenue stream for distribution to where it is truly needed.

I don’t quite get how a patch on your clothing gives you full-body protection, though.

Next, let’s talk hidden planets. Scientists may soon be able to prove the existence of a massive and heretofore unknown planet dubbed Tyche (after Tyche Brahe, I assume) way, way out in the Oort Cloud.

The Oort Cloud, besides being fun to say, is the layer of ice asteroids forms the outer shell of our solar system. It’s where most of our comets come from, and it just might contain a massive gas giant like Jupiter as well.

Scientists have been hypothesizing that there was something out there perturbing Oort objects for a long time. A detailed analysis of all the forces acting on the Oort objects just did not add up. There had to be something they were missing.

And that thing might just be a planet called Tyche, way out beyond the orbit of Pluto.

I wonder if something that big could become a comet?

In other cosmic news, turns out there is antimatter in those solar flares.

Solar flares, those solar storms that cough out enormous chunks of solar material as well as loads of particles into the solar system, have long been thought to contain antimatter particles, but until recently, nobody had actually managed to detect them.

But what I really like about this story is this passage :

When the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, there was probably about as much matter as antimatter, scientists think. Somehow, collisions with matter destroyed most of the antimatter (when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate), leaving a slight surplus of matter, which became the planets, stars and galaxies in our universe.

There is an awkward elegance to that explanation of why there is stuff rather than nothing that find enchanting. We are all products of a slight surplus in matter.

Imagine if things had gone differently!

Next, some Totally Trippy Physics : scientists have managed to stop light for a full minute.

You read that right. They made light (as in photons), which is not only the fastest thing in the Universe but the fastest thing there can be in the Universe, hold completely still for a full minute.

Back in 1999, it was demonstrated that the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum when scientists managed to create a medium that slowed light down to a mere 17 meters per second.

And way back then, I said “Well, what’s next? Stopping it completely? What then?”

Well, now they have done it, and by they, I mean George Heinze and his colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany (man the Germans are doing the awesome physics lately).

Next, we make it roll over and shake a paw.

Moving a little closer to everyday life, we look at everyday life from 2 billion years ago.

When examining two billion year old soils samples, scientists have recently discovered evidence of a form of life called Diskagma buttonii which is too primitive to even be classified as plant or animal. The closest relative it has in the modern world is a kind of soil fungus.

I love how we keep finding evidence of life further and further back in the history of our planet. Not only is it a marvelous testament to the extraordinary tenacity of life, it pushes friend-of-the-column Drake’s Equation even further towards the “Universe filled with life” side of the equation.

And finding Diskagma buttonii wasn’t easy, either. They’re as small as 0.3 millimetres, and are darkly colored like the soil where they are found, making them undetectable via optical microscopy.

So this is a technological as well as a paleontological feat. Very impressive!

But not as impressive as this week’s Big Story.

Professor Edward Cocking (snigger) has invented a way for crops to take the nitrogen they need directly from the air instead of taking it from the soil and thus creating the need for highly toxic and expensive artificial nitrogen fertilizers.

That… is…. BIG. His discovery of a natural nitrogen-fixing bacteria could eliminate the entire fertilizer industry at a stroke, and create a rather extraordinary shortcut for the plant world in the process.

Eliminating the need for fertilization would be an enormous boon for the world food supply. Food prices would drop like a stone (which is a good thing for most people, Mister Farmer) and the third world would be far better able to feed itself, and finally have the chance to truly stabilize and modernize and join the rest of us in the modern world.

And that’s not even counting the benefit of no longer having enormous quantities of highly gross and environmentally damaging ammonia based fertilizers washed into the water cycle by rain and irrigation all the time by farming.

And just think of how much more “organic” cheap produce will be!

That’s it for this week, folks. Talk at ya later!

My vid will be at the end, as usual.

But first we have this happy story about a Canadian employee of Whole Foods who decided to go out in a blaze of verbal glory by penning a simply glorious “fuck you” resignation letter.

In it, he lists 23 reasons why Whole Food’s clean cut organic hippie-friendly image is complete and total bullshit and rips into the company like a vegan into hummus.

Now I love me a good “fuck you” letter. The poison pen is one of my favorite weapons and it is truly satisfying to see someone absolutely nail a soulless international megacorp to the wall by calling them out on all of their bullshit.

To have it done by a Canadian (well, a Torontonian, close enough) makes it especially sweet.

And to know that the target is a corporation headed by that Ayn Rand loving libertarian cunt John Mackey, well, that’s just the sprinkles on the cake.

But to me, the really succulent schadenfreude comes for the fact that our wonderful ex-employee emailed his resignation letter of awesomeness to every single Whole Foods employee in the world.

That is so awesome that I can barely contain my glee. Not only did he speak truth to power, something that is always worth big points in my books, but he also armed all the other serfs with that exact same truth, fulfilling the role of articulator to the hilt.

Individually, the other Whole Foods slaves have probably seen some of what the letter writer saw and felt many of the same things about their oh so green employer, but until that letter went out there, they had no idea that they were not the only one, and they may well have lacked the words to articulate how they felt as well.

But now they are armed with powerful language, and I am tickled pink.

And because the email went out to I am assuming thousands of people at the same time, there is absolutely no way on this Whole Earth to contain it now.

He described Whole Foods as a “faux=hippie Wal-mart”. Magnificent.

Next up, we have this video about a totally different kind of social issue, one very important to the sort of people I consider to be of my particular tribe.

It’s about geek girls being accused of being “fake geeks”.

I suggest you do what I did : watch the video twice, one time to read, the other to listen.

Now I want to be careful here, because this issue makes me extremely angry and I don’t want to lose it and have this blog entry turn into a harangue.

But let me put it this way : today’s vid was almost a big time rant on the subject, and the next one still might be. One of the surest ways to incite my rage is to present me with a situation where a group, like us nerds, who have known intense exclusion themselves, nevertheless turning into excluding bullying bastards themselves at the drop of a hat.

So when I first read about assholes on the Internet accusing some geek girls of being “fake geeks” who were only pretending to be geeks to get close to geek boys, I thought it was a joke. I didn’t want to believe this actually happened. It seemed so insane that a group of people (straight male geeks) would respond to there FINALLY being more female geeks around by asking them to prove it.

Even if they were faking it (they aren’t), they are doing it to make themselves available to people like you. Take the fucking compliment, wipe the drool off your anorak, and go out there and meet some women, god damn you!

I mean, I know that as a group, male geeks tend to be socially underdeveloped, but you would think they would at least be past the “girls are icky” stage.

Is it just that it seems too good to be true?

Count your blessings and hook the hell up already!

And finally, we have today’s vid, which is of a broader nature.

Yeah, it’s damn near fifteen minutes long. Yes, I need to work on being more succinct. Yes, I still have trouble staying on topic. And yeah, I still wish I was better at picking one thing and saying it.

And I really did try this time. I recorded around 20 minutes of video, then opened the editor and said “Right, I’m going to pare this down to a lean and agile five minutes!”.

A ha ha hah. Nope. It’s all connected to me and I, for the life of me, cannot imagine how to untangle one thread from all the others. It’s all too interwoven.

Oh well, I will keep attempting to acquire the necessary discipline and focus. So far, I am a very prolific writer. I can write lots and lots at the drop of a hat.

But editing it after still eludes me. In all honesty, I am better at editing the video me than I am at editing the writing me, but that is not saying much. At least when I edit the video me, I sometimes realize that whole sections are not necessary to the point I am trying to make.

Like I said. Sometimes.

But I still lack the will to “murder my darlings”, as the writer’s saying goes. It all seems good to me.

Well, or none of it seems good, but I have learned to get over that. Giving yourself no choice but to publish has a lot to do with that.

As for the actual subject matter, those are all thoughts I have had about the problem at the center of consumer culture for a long time.

But I only recently articulated it into “settle for less” and “say no to more”. People spend decades of their lives pursuing acquisition and success, only to find themselves with storage areas full and souls empty and forlorn.

There has to be a better way to live.

It’s another goofy one.

Back to science! It feels good to be back, folks. We have six scintillating stories of science and the search for knowledge to cover tonight, so let’s get seated comfortably, open our minds up all the way, and let the sunshine of reason and progress take us into the future!

First up : Local girl makes good!

That’s Victoria student Ann Makosinki and here simple little miracle, the human heat powered flashlight.

It’s brilliantly simple and potentially a real game changer for all kinds of human portable gizmos. Sure, right now it’s a flashlight, but if it can power a flashlight, it can power other things too.

We mammals radiate a lot of heat, and that’s free energy from our point of view. If all it takes is a temperature differential, and the bigger the differential, the brighter the bulb, then I want to see what these things can do in the winter!

Who knows, maybe they could be used to help power the lights (and the heating!) in buildings during the winter. Could save a lot of money and energy!

But here’s a brain twister. Say you use this power source to power a refrigeration unit. The colder it gets, the more energy the power source makes.

But the more power it makes… the colder it gets.

Sounds like perpetual motion, doesn’t it?

Next up : is your computer smarter than a four year old?

That’s what the people behind an AI called ConceptNet 4 asked themselves. To get the answer, they gave the AI the same sort of test you would give a young child to test their mental abilities.

Results were mixed.

Sloan said ConceptNet 4 did very well on a test of vocabulary and on a test of its ability to recognize similarities.”But ConceptNet 4 did dramatically worse than average on comprehension­the ‘why’ questions,” he said.

So when they say it’s as smart as a four year old child, they really mean one that autistic.

Still, bravo for thinking outside the box and using a child’s learning test to test your AI!

When they get to “as smart as a ten year old”. call Jeff Foxworthy.

Okay, from here on, it’s medical miracle time!

First up : a brain scan to diagnose ADHD.

Color me skeptical. The theory seems sound enough. Measuring the ratio between two kinds of brain waves in order to find out how fast those impulses are firing in there.

And their results seem decently founded. And Dog only knows, the world needs an objective measure of ADHD and it needs it RIGHT NOW.

And nobody is saying they will use this as the sole diagnostic tool.

But I am still reluctant to endorse such a device. The brain is not that simple.

Next up : Lee Majors as The Bionic Pancreas!

Well OK, not really. It’s more like a hyper sophisticated glucose pump. I won’t call something the Bionic Pancreas until it makes insulin the way the pancreas does, from materials in the bloodstream, and no longer requires artificial insulin.

But still, the device is damned impressive. Patients using it spent one tenth of as much time at high blood sugar levels as someone using another device. The BP(tm) continuously monitors blood sugar and releases insulin on an as-needed basis.

Exactly like your actual pancreas does. In that sense, the name is accurate.

I am still not that keen about having an insulin pump installed on me, but if it essentially returned me to non-diabetic status, it would be worth it.

Imagine being able to eat what I wanted, like a normal person! I miss the sweet life so much.

And if that doesn’t impress you, how about a miracle drug that cures all form of cancer?

Turns out, there is a protein called CD47 that tells your body to treat the cancer cells as normal cells, as opposed to attacking and destroying them as it would any other foreign body.

The new treatment consists of an antibody that attacks CD47 and disables it, and at the same time frees up powerful immune cells call macrophages that act as the intelligence gatherers of immunology.

They are the cells which identify threats and then “teach” the white cells about them, and then the white cells attack. By opening the door for these macrophages, this antibody robs cancer of its primary defense and teaches the body to attack cancer and destroy it.

And cancer is just a cluster of cells. It’s not like a bacteria or virus that can fight back by developing an immunity or multiplying rapidly.

Once it’s naked, it’s helpless, and eliminating it will be less disruptive to the body than fighting off the common cold.

We have cancer on the run, folks.

And what can top that? How about the man without a heart? And no, I am not talking Paul Ryan.

Remember the Jarvik artificial heart from way back when? Well the science of artificial hearts is back again with this new device.

But it’s not like any heart you have ever seen before.

For one thing, it doesn’t beat.

That’s right, be still my beating heart, it’s a non-beating heart. The device pumps blood via dozens of tiny turbines instead of the fist-squeeze type motion of our natural hearts. So there is no pumping, no heartbeat, and no pulse.

And yet there’s the patient, alive and well and breathing on their own and everything.

First off, I want to congratulate the team for not getting stuck trying to copy our existing hearts. Biomimicry is rarely a successful approach to technological solutions. Instead, you have to strip the question down to its absolute basics : what does a heart do? And how can we do that in a way that works?

And the idea of, in the same era, stopping both cancer and heart disease makes me feel lightheaded. Those are the two biggest killers in modern society.

Solving both of those alone could bring our life expectancies up a decade.

Throw in all the work being done in stem cells, lab grown organs, and telomeres, and we might just see another big jump in life expectancy in my lifetime.

In order words, just in time.

Hi there. My name is Mike but most people call me Fruvous. Pleased to meet you.

Last few days have been decent. Still seems to be my destiny to feel like utter crap for an hour or two a day, no matter what. Oh well, that’s true of a lot of people.

Although in my case, caffeine does not seem to help. I get the feeling that the reasons I feel so bad have to do with dehydration, sinus pressure, and bad sleep, and those are not things you fix with an ice cold mug of diet cola.

All you can do is get through it. Drink water, try to convince your sinuses to drain, shake the last grains of sand from Mister Sandman out of your head, and keep it together till you feel better.

Kinda feels like every day I fall apart in my dreams, and when I wake up, I have to put myself together all over again. But luckily, that’s gotten a lot easier due to the recent strides in recovery.

I have fewer parts, and they fit together a whole lot better.

Check out this extremely decent bit of satire from Extremely Decent Films.

Good God, Cracked. A massive DIV tag? What is this, 2003? It’s called IFRAME people.

Anyhoo, I thought it was a pretty good piece. Slightly wobbly, but the writing is quite good and the guy’s performance is solid. He is believable as one of those relaxed yet perky and friendly types that corporations use as their spokespeople, yet he also drops the satire hammer hard too.

Reminds me, of course, of this classic bit. One of Lily Tomlin’s finest SNL performances, and just the kind of “delivering extreme damage with extreme precision” type satire that I love.

It’s the kind of satire that digs deep into the topsoil of the zeitgeist and taps directly into people’s anger about something and articulates it in a way that provides both catharsis and a wakeup call.

Often, the most important things are the hardest to deal with precisely because their very importance makes them the most stressful and painful and upsetting things to think about.

Satire can help solve that riddle by using comedy to release the pressure and tension, and give people the breathing space they need in order to deal with things.

Hence, the combined awesomeness of The Daily Show and Colbert.

We still love you, guys, even though you abandon us over and over again on the paper thin excuse that you also have lives.

A likely story.

I have been struggling with the urge to nap lately. I think it’s because I have been drinking way too much diet cola and that tends to mess up my sleep patterns.

So I end up getting super tired in the middle of the day, and it is very tempting to retreat into the warm (if not entirely safe) oblivion of sleep, and its magic ability to let you skip time.

The urge to retreat like that is strong, and I won’t claim that I won’t ever succumb. That kind of unrealistic expectation of oneself is part of the destructive “all or nothing” thinking that plagues depressives, and is a surefire recipe for failure.

Which is kind of the point. Resolve that whole fear of success thing.

After all, if you succeed, people will expect you to just keep on succeeding, like, forever, and that is just way too much pressure, man!

Better to get all relaxed and comfy in the warm embrace of total failure. That way, nobody expect anything from you ever and you can hide from everything until the day you die.

Here’s a pretty good talk about women and video games :

I will be talking more about my thoughts on the subject in tomorrow’s THE DEAL, but in general, I think her analysis is quite good. Like most feminist analysts, she makes the mistake of oversimplifying the motives and emotions of men in order to make them better fit a villainous mold, but she does it a lot less than many older feminists, and a lot of her points are spot on.

Video games are still mostly made by and for men, and not just any men, but male nerds, with all the issues inherent in being a population of omega males with high intelligence but low social IQ and hence not a lot of luck with the ladies.

I don’t agree that the Euthanized Damsel is primarily about a licence to commit violence against women, although that is definitely in there.

It is primarily about cheap pathos. It reminds me of the scene in a Western where the white hatted hero realizes his valiant steed (or trusty wonder dog) is too injured to go on, and so, with a single manly tear in his eyes, he has to put it out of its misery.

It works because it connects two strong male tropes, sacrifice, and the need to do what has to be done. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and all that.

Admittedly, though, this only elevates the women in these games to the status of beloved pet, or at best, ethnic companion. But it’s a step up from being merely a prop, a lust toy, a figuring on a pedestal, or a mere meaningless distraction from doing important man stuff.

I was going to do a video reply to the her vid, but unsurprisingly given what she has been through, comments are turned off.

Oh, and finally, today;s vid by little old me.

I am quite happy with it. It took four hours to make, but it’s a lot closer to that high density high quality high stimulation content I have been seeking than I have gotten before.

If anything, I may have overdone the “trimmings”. Oh well, the middle step between “too little” and “just right” is always “too much”.

Tomorrow, I tackle misogyny!

Hey there science lovers! We have another big bang boom bounty of beautiful science to share with you happy learners today, including two men cured of AIDS, oxygen on Mars, an explosion of planets, lava on ice, the coolest cast to ever hold a broken arm together, and the creepiest science story of the year so far.

We will start with lava on ice, as it is not exactly science news, just really fucking cool.

Lava Pour No. 5 from robert wysocki on Vimeo.

In case you are wondering, no, they did not go to an active volcano, slam a bunch of lava into the world’s toughest Thermos, then hightail it North.

Instead, they cooked up their own lava from basalt. Much cheaper, I would imagine. And as cool as it is to watch, the point of the experiment is to observe how lava and ice interact in order to better study how certain geological features form.

What I love about the vid is how the lava at the very edge of the flow is thinnest, and therefore the cold from the ice is enough to make it solidify, and therefore the lava in effect makes its own channel.

And I mean… molten lava on ice. How metal is that?

From the molten bowels of the Earth, we now go to the absolute chill of outer space!

First, in local news, evidence is really piling up that billions of years ago Mars had an oxygen atmosphere.

The Mars Spirit Rover has been busy examining meteoric and other rocks on Mars, and according to everything we know about planetology, the only way those rocks could end up like they are now is if there was a big time oxygen atmosphere on Mars around 4 billion years ago.

Blue sky on Mars?

Here on Earth, we did not get our oxygen atmosphere till one and a half billion years later. But in our defense, we kept ours.

And we know ours comes from all that plant life. And where there are plants, insects follow.

Mars having had life at one point is looking more and more likely.

Moving from next door to way across town, a recent study suggests that the number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy might be twice as large as previously thought.

They were studying red dwarf stars, which are by far the most common kind.

Then this happened.

Researchers found that the atmospheric circulation and cloud cover on these exoplanets meant these worlds could orbit their stars more closely than previously thought—expanding the habitable zone around red dwarf stars.

This, of course, is more good news for us Drake’s Equation fans. Number of habitable worlds is one of the most important, controlling variables in it, and when that goes up, that means the likelihood of their being other intelligent life out there goes up too.

Granted, it will be a while before we can go find out for sure. Heck, Mars is next door and we still don’t have it figured out.

But it’s nice to know we are not alone in the cosmos.

Next up, a quantum leap forward in the technology of immobilizing limbs : the Cortex Exoskeletal Cast.

Imagine a cast that breathes, is completely washable and shower friendly, is lightweight and thin, and is built to fit the patient’s arm precisely.

Actually, don’t imagine it. Look at it!

Oh, and it also looks totally badass.

The coolest thing from a technology point of view is that the thing is 3D printed. The injured part is first X-rayed to the get the inside view, then 3D scanned to get the outside view, then those two pictures are merged to make a model of injured part. Based on that model, the cast is designed and printed.

I am kind of curious as to how the cast then gets onto the injured limb.

Also in the world of medicine, two men appear to have been completely cured of AIDS via a stem cell transplant.

The procedure was meant to address the men’s cancer (cancer and AIDS… holy crap. ), but seems to have had the additional benefit of clearing their bodies of the AIDS virus.

And that’s… pretty freaking awesome. The men have been off their antiretroviral meds for weeks now and their tests come back absolutely clean. No AIDS virus detectable whatsoever.

It’s not a cure, not yet, but it’s amazing nevertheless. The procedure was a bone marrow transplant, and that is not going to be an option for most AIDS sufferers. It’s a dangerous and extremely painful operation, and of course, requires a very dedicated donor.

But when combined with all the other stem cell derived therapies showing extraordinary results these days, it suggests that we might just be on the precipice of a new medical revolution.

And finally, the Big Story for this week and guaranteed to be the creepiest fucking thing you have heard in a long time, an Italian neuroscientist claims that we now have the technology for full head transplants.

Yes, you read that right. Full head transplant. Taking your head and putting it on a completely different body. How Mad Science is that?

It’s a mind-blowing concept. How weird would it be to wake up with a body that is not your own? You would have to learn to walk and talk all over again, practically.

And of course, we’re talking about transplanting your head onto a live body, which kinds means that you would have to murder someone to pull this off.

Or use someone who is brain dead, I suppose.

And if it is possible to transplant an entire head, is brain transplant next?

You have to admit that even if you were old and evil and very rich, and wanted to have your life extended via head transplant onto a young and healthy body, it would kind of suck to have your head and your body not match afterwards.

Imagine how gross an old head would look on a young body!

Still, as horrifying as the idea might be, and setting aside where the healthy headless body came from, there is nothing actually wrong about the idea.

Sure, it gives us all the Cronenberg Creeps, but there’s nothing immoral about it. We all agree that the brain is the center of individuality, personality, and identity, so it doesn’t violate those ideas at all. And we don’t think someone with other sorts of transplants suddenly stops being themselves.

So while the squick factor is very high, it’s not actually wrong, per se.

Still gives me the willies thinking about it, though.