Holy particle physics, is it Friday again already? Well, time for some sweet, sweet science, then.

Let’s start off with something somewhat important and kind of serious, and get THAT out of the way.

Recently, the Pentagon has declared that cyber-attacks by other nations can constitute an ‘act of war’ which would then provoke an armed response from the American Armed Forces.

This was something that simply had to happen. As the article points out, there will be a lot of tricky issues to work out before this goes from policy to implementation (like how you prove a foreign nation is behind an attack, and how much of a response is justified), but it’s a Internet world now and far too many extremely important things happen online for the Internet world to remain outside the purview of national defense strategy. The days when we could still pretend the Internet was just a nerd’s playground or a fun new hobby are long long gone. Billions if not trillions of dollars of business happen daily online. People live a significant part of their lives (ahem) in the digital realm. To leave that undefended would be wildly irresponsible. It would be tantamount to simply withdrawing one’s troops from a vital strip of one’s border.

So while none of us in Not America are particularly keen to hear Americans devising yet another reason to invade people and blow stuff up, it would be foolhardy and naive not to acknowledge the necessity.

On to cheerier news : A Montreal based company called Enerkem is attracting major major investment from some big time players into its process for burning trash to produce energy.

The idea of burning trash to produce energy has been around for ages, but up until now, it’s just not been feasible. Every process attempted produces less energy than it took to collect the trash and burn it, and that’s obviously no way to run an energy concern.

But Enerkem claims they have the problem licked, and at their experimental plant outside Sherbrooke, Quebec, they will soon be producing 1.3 million gallons of ethanol fuel annually.

What impresses me is not just the dollars they attracted, but the players. The recent investment game from oil refinery giant Valero, no fools they, and even more signifigantly, those mega giants of the world of trash, Waste Management, whose familiar green dumpsters and garbage trucks with “WM” on them have become such a ubiquitous part of the modern world, they are like a branch of the government. If your apartment complex or office building has a dumpster, chances are, WM owns it and empties it.

Also, hey, go Canadian science! I would be extremely pleased to see a Canadian company be the one that comes up with the tech that leads the world into a more recycled future. (I honestly wish absolutely everything was recyclable. Then we could stop taking more from the environment all the time. )

I have a few vague reservations about ethanol as a solution, but hey, whatever solves the carbon problem is fine by me.

And speaking of cool new technologies, someone has come up with a very cool use for the new generation of remote controlled quadrocopter surveillance drones : getting footage of wild animals without scaring the expensive organic fertilizer out of them.

It’s obvious when you think about it. A lot of the buzz (so to speak) about these groovy new copters, which are no bigger than your hand in some cases, is that they can fly around and wirelessly beam back video in a unobtrusive and nearly silent fashion.

And while this conjures up visions of swarms of drones invading out privacy like something out of Terminator 2’s dystopian future, at least in the minds of us with brains stuffed full of science fiction and paranoia, I have to admit, using the technology to spy on wild animals instead of domesticated humans really appeals to me.

The trick with shooting footage of animals in the wild has always been capturing them in “candid” fashion. How do you get footage of animals behaving as they do in the wild when you are a bunch of clumsy humans in trucks and Jeeps, making noise and disrupting the scene?

There’s only so far you can go with footage of animals fleeing in terror and soiling themselves.

Before now, the solution has been to go ahead and disrupt things getting there, then set up a station in a likely area and simply wait for the animals to get used to you being there, then use the best telephoto lenses you can find to capture them acting in a reasonably spontaneous fashion.

That, however, means staying in the wild for months at a time with a large crew, and that is extremely expensive. Far better to be able to go there with basically no more than a backpack full of quadcopters and get your footage by basically spying on the critters.

I look forward to seeing what kind of footage this produces.

Wow, am I crispy fried some bad sleep. I am so damn tired of this shit.

Anyhow, let’s watch some video!

First off, a neat little video project someone did called Hey you! What song you listenin’ to?

The premise is nice and simple. Grab your video camera and pick a busy street and wait for the hundreds of people who will undoubtedly walk by listening to the iPod and other MP3 players, and just ask them what song they are listening to.

and while it kind of lacks structure or thesis or, let’s face it, a point, it’s still a pretty cool little random sampling of what people on the street are listening to these days. I often have the urge to ask people that very question when I see them wrapped in their own private audio world myself. Back in the eighties, when dinosaurs in parachute pants roamed the Earth and we are all ruled by a mighty purple Prince, my Walkman and I were inseparable, so I can totally understand why the MP3 player is so popular.

I just don’t have one myself, because honestly, most of the time I am either home or with friends, so when would I listen to the darn thing? I don’t have a walk to and from school to endure any more!

The one that really surprised me was the Frank Sinatra lady. Old Blue Eyes forever!

Next up, a way for women with impressive endowments to finally get (or at least simulate) respect!

Finally, a way for women to get men to look in the general direction of their brains!

Of course, it might just make you self-conscious about how your brain looks. Vanity is fickle.

It’s a cute premise and quite well executed. I especially like it because all the lovely ladies involved seem to genuinely be having fun making this video, and that is quite infectious. One normally doesn’t get to see women so lovely doing something so patently silly, so it’s quite refreshing. And I am sure that for the ladies involved, it was quite liberating. Freedom from trying to impress everyone all the time! WHEE!

Of course, being a long time (if sporadic) fan of Saturday Night Live, I can’t help but think of the classic skit about the Women With Eyes On Their Breasts.

I’d link it, but it just ain’t out there. Damned NBC lawyers.

In it, aliens appear before a Senate committee who are the aforementioned women who have eyes on the their breasts. The explanation is that over time, women’s eyes migrated to the spot where men would be looking anyhow, and thus, men would finally be looking them in the eyes.

The ladies show up to offer humanity the benefits of their vastly advanced technology and offer to answer all the (all male) committee’s questions, but all the men can think about is questions about what it’s like to have eyes on your breasts.

The women eventually become so offended and annoyed that they leave and take their technology and wisdom with them, so it’s a little bit painful of a skit. But still, clever and funny.

Next up, we have the amazing people at Playing for Change doing an extremely soulful and elegant version of the Rolling Stones tune, Gimmie Shelter.

I love the way the Internet and other computer based revolutions in technology are being used for such feel-good and uplifting art. Through the magic of the Internet, people all over the world can jam together on a song and never een be int he same time zone.

And I like their version of the song quite a bit. I have never been that big a fan of the Rolling Stones’ original version. It always just seemed like a generic Stones tune to me, but this arrangement of it is quite good.

Makes me ponder going back to listen to the original again.

Plus, I used to think the bridge to the chorus was “it’s just a shadowplay”, but now it seems like it’s “it’s just a shout away”. Thanks a lot for that English public school diction there, Mick!

Well that’s all I have for you today. Tune in tomorrow, when I might actuallyh have something substative to say, instead of just a bunch of links plus my own unfocused commentary.

It all depends on where I am in my sleep need. Hopefully I will be in better touch with reality by then.

Got some fun and cool science stuff for you today, after yesterday’s emotional expectoration.

First off we have a completely awesome bit of technology that might just tempt you into thinking you are a superhero : an armored glove with a built in high powered taser.

It’s a elbow-length glove, and has a built in video camera and laser pointer. It was originally inspired by tales of a fatal mountain lion attack, but now it’s intended for use by law enforcement, corrections, security, and other such situations.

Here’s the description of a possible scenario :

A robber is cornered in a dead-end alley. He turns to face the police officer pursuing him, ready to fight. He pauses. The officer’s left forearm is encased in ballistic nylon, and half a million volts arc menacingly between electrodes on his wrist. A green laser target lands on the robber’s chest. He puts his hands up; it’s a fight he can’t win.

Note the complete and total awesomeness of having lighting arcing across your fingers. That fact alone makes me want one of these. You have to admit, that would be pretty damn intimidating!

Next up : turning a foreskin into a spine!

Perhaps I should explain.

Scientists have succeeded in transforming skin skills into living, working neurons for the first time ever. This isn’t stem cell research, technically, although it draws from the same science of cell plasticity. The skin cells are being turned directly into neurons, without becoming stem cells in between.

Oh, and the foreskins come in because discarded foreskins from the millions of circumcisions per year are a great source for skin cells.

The idea is that with this technique, plentiful skin cells could be turned into highly valuable neurons, which could in turn be used for a wide variety of cutting edge regenerative therapies that could repair the previously irreparable tragedies like spinal cord damage.

Imagine a future where people who have been paraplegic or quadriplegic for decades due to a spinal cord injury are given the full use of their bodies back.

It’s not that far away!

Who lets the blind see and the lame walk again? SCIENCE, BITCHES!

And speaking of the miracles of science, get this : at the University of Montreal, they have developed a drug that suppresses the recall of bad memories… and ONLY bad memories.

Go Canadian brain science!

Specifically, the drug, called metyrapone, blocks cortisol production in the body, and is normally used to treat abnormalities of the adrenal glands.

But it also affects your cortisol levels, and recent research has suggested that the stress hormone cortisol plays a vital role in the process that creates post traumatic stress disorders.

Basically, PTSD is created by an over-strong memory process. Very stressful events, for sound evolutionary reasons, create extremely strong and vivid memories that burn deeply into our brains. Evolution figures that if it’s that stressful, it’s probably very important that you remember everything about the event and that is remains prominent in your mind, so you can avoid it in the future.

And that’s fine in a state of nature, with familiar environments and relatively simple events like an encounter with a mountain lion. From that point on, you can just avoid that part of the woods, or remember extra hard to keep an eye out for mountain lion shit, or whatever.

But modern human life interaction with a modern human’s complex and rich emotional life can create situations which are many magnitudes more traumatic than a run-in with a predator, situations so incredibly emotionally damaging that the psyche simply cannot process them, and so the PTSD victim becomes locked in a cycle where the mind is continually trying to process the memories and failing, and so the memories keep coming back with terrible vividness.

And because the point of this mechanism is to create a powerful association that steers you to avoid that same situation, the victim often finds their post-traumatic flashbacks being triggered by nearly anything which connects with the traumatic event. Depending on the severity of the emotional trauma, this can range from small highly specific triggers, easily avoided, to broad and crippling triggers that leave a person unable to cope with life at all.

This can cause severe disruption to a personal’s life, and lead to depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts. The idea is that a drug like this one would suppress the cortisol and hence prevent these too-vivid memories from being formed in the first place.

That could go a long way to reducing the emotional havoc wrought by terrible events.

Finally, we have some somewhat NSFW technology to show you.

This is a video clip of “the skweel”, a sex toy designed to simulate licking.

Warning, this video is probably NSFW, even though technically, we see people’s tongues all the time.

It also might make you explode in giggles, as it did me.

That is just hilariously wrong. I am sure it functions decently for its intended purposes and I am never one to knock anything that brings people pleasure and joy.

It’s just really funny to watch the thing in action. It’s so obscene and bizarre that you would almost think it was just some lesbian artist’s art piece rejecting the phallocentric world of women’s sexy toys, or something.

But no, it’s a real product you can actually buy!

I wonder how it lubricates itself?

May twenty SEVEN, two thousand and ELEVEN. Hey, that rhymes!

Forgive me, bad sleep has addled my brain. I just woke up from a dream in which I turned a corner and there on the wall was this HUGE bug, bigger than a dinner plate, and it made this horrible buzzing sound that made the air shake with how loud it was. It was mostly like a huge fly, but with some beetle features. And it was coming right at me. Scared me so bad it woke me up.

I blame all the Monster Hunter Tri that I have been playing. Lots of imaginative nasties in there.

Anyhow… on with the science!

First, some mad props to some extremely bright researches for invented a truly magic marker.

The problem : millions of mothers and babies dying each year from easily treated prenatal conditions. The majority of these are in third world countries, where the fifty cent dipstick test we use to screen for these conditions here in the modern world is prohibitively expensive.

Enter this new marker. Instead of the dipstick urine test, you just draw a line on a piece of paper, and then drip a drop of the patient’s urine onto the line. If it changes color, you have your result.

The first one developed detects a common but nasty condition called pre-eclampsia. It can cause very serious complication for the mother, but if caught early, it can easily be treated.

And with the marker test, the cost goes from fifty cents per test to one third of a cent per test. That makes the marker test one hundred and fifty times cheaper.

Now that is the kind of efficiency that can save millions of lives.

Next : cleaning up Japan’s radioactivity problem with the help of a truly heroic blue goo.

The stuff is called DeconGoo, and like a lot of miracle products, it was discovered by accident. A researched accidentally dripped a solution he was working on onto the floor. When he went to clean it up afterward, he discovered that it had solidified into a rubbery blue gel that was easy to peel up off of the concrete floor.

But the truly miraculous thing was that where the goo had been, there was a spot so incredibly clean that absolutely no amount of scrubbing could match it. It had stuck to, and then encapsulated, everything on the surface that was not made of the surface.

Pretty awesome, huh? I want some of this stuff just for cleaning around the house. I am also kind of curious as to what would happen if you put this stuff on human skin. Presumably, it would be one hell of an efficient depilatory and exfoliant, if nothing else.

But for now, its noble use is to clean up all the little traces of toxic stuff left over after a hazmat situation. Right now, the usual method involves essentially good old soap, water, and elbow grease, and that has the distinctly unfortunate problem of taking the stuff and putting it into water, which is hard to clean up and has a nasty tendency to seep right back into things, go places you don’t want it to go, and in general be a bitch and a half to deal with.

Not so the new blue goo! Everything it soaks up gets trapped in the goo when it solidifies, and then you just peel it off like it was so much Silly Putty.

That is freaking awesome.

And speaking of awesome, Disney wants you to truly feel your video game experience. In fact, they want it to send chills up your spine.

They have invented a chain which uses a device they call the Sensory Brush to exploit a number of little known minor flaws in how our bodies perceive vibration to create a number of lifelike tactile sensations to enhance your video game (or even movie) experience.

Of particular note is the claim that this system could mimic the feel of the gravity and acceleration associated with race car driving for a driving based video game.

I don’t much care for driving video games myself (unless I get missile launchers), but I have to admit, that sounds pretty freaking sweet.

And get this… the system can also simulate feelings like rain dripping down your back, or someone touching you from behind. Imagine THAT moment while watching a scary horror movie! They had better make those seats water-proof, or rather, urine-proof.

And, you know, porn. ‘Nuff said.

There you are, minding your own business, enjoying the camaraderie and social connections in a scene or a group, with everyone seemingly getting along just fine, when suddenly it strikes…. DRAMA!

You’ve only been on this forum for a few months, but you feel you know the place pretty well, and so it comes as a total shock to you when, out of the darkness of the human soul creeps….. DRAMA!

You can’t believe it! You finally found a place where people care as much about the best show in the Universe (Marsupilami, as if you had to ask) as you do, and then these ASSHOLES have to ruin it by starting up another round of that hated enemy…. DRAMA!

And the one thing you know, beyond even the ghost of the spirit of the shadow of a doubt, is that all these people in your group or scene are definitely the most whiny, emo, backbiting, divisive, factionalizing, self-destructive crybabies in the world!

Just every other group or scene.

Yes, if there’s one thing das Internetzen and all fannish groups agree upon, it’s that their group or scene is the absolute worst for interpersonal conflicts, people breaking into subgroups or subscenes, people taking things too seriously and/or too personally, and everyone doing it all right there in public and dragging everyone else into it with them, making people choose sides, and capsizing your precious little island of stability and commonality into the sea of people who just don’t get you.

It’s adorable, really, how many people can simultaneously hold the exact same mutually exclusive opinion about their particular in group. It’s a fairly harmless form of provincialism, roughly on the same level as every parent thinking their little ones are the cutest, smartest, healthiest children in the world. In both cases, on some level, the people involved know that it’s probably not true. But they just keep on thinking it anyhow. They have no choice.

Still, as someone who has poked his nose into a number of various subcultures and social groups, I have been amazed and amused at the universality of this conclusion. Somehow, completely independently, millions of nerds have all come to the same conclusion about their fan group : they are the absolute worst when it comes to that dread beast, DRAMA.

And obviously, probability alone would suggest this probably is not the case. With thousands of little drawers in the grand portmanteau that is the World of Nerds, the odds of your little cubbyhole being the worst for this “drama” phenomenon are very poor indeed.

So what gives? Why does this phenomenon happen again and again and again?

Part of the answer is found in the term “drama” in the first place. The fact that all the people involved intuitively point to certain forms of human interaction and label them “drama”, and use that word as a perjorative, as something that is so inherently bad that it inherently and instantly brings the character and even the mental health of the people involved into question, is the vital clue in this mystery.

People outside fannish circles do not think this way. It’s a nerd thing. Why?

First, we have to note that nerds tend rather heavily towards the intellectual. No duh, I know.

But as such, they tend, as a group, to have a very high level of abstract reasoning skills, but a relatively low level of social understanding and emotional awareness.

This makes for a group of people who are, on the one hand, very good at being reasonable and tolerant and mature (often helped by strongly internalized desire to seem “grown up”), but who lack the basic social and emotional awareness to understand the social milieu in which they participate. What is more, they lack the kind of broad social experience it takes to understand that “drama” is something which happens absolutely everywhere human being are socially connected. Period. It doesn’t matter if it’s a workplace, a fan club, an army barracks, or a knitting circle. Human beings are simply too complex to remain in perfect peace and harmony forever. Eventually, people get on each other’s nerves, and someone says something that sets another person off, and off we go into what we nerds call “drama” and the rest of humanity calls “life”.

So part of the problem is a certain kind of social naivete. Nerds do not know any better, so they figure other groups get along just swell, and there must be something wrong with their group alone. Thus, this notion is a subset of the much larger social illusion that “everyone is normal and happy but me”.

Another part of the puzzle is that nerds, being intellectuals, tend towards a rational, relaxed, conflict-avoidant, socially harmony seeking temperament. This is very good for short-term and somewhat superficial and impersonal association with one another.

But once human being associate with one another for a long enough time, they stop being cordial strangers to one another, the social barriers between them come down, and they begin thinking and feeling a lot more deeply about one another and the group as a whole.

This lowering of barriers leads both to the increased feeling of inclusion and intimacy that the socially isolated nerd seeks so desperately and to the increased chance for conflict.

In fact, those with a keen interest in a particular subculture should be glad to see conflict arising, because it means that the group has reached the point of success as a social enterprise that it has begone to act like that quintessential unit of human social interaction : a family, with all that implies.

Add into this the nerd/intellectual’s tendency to avoid conflict at all costs, and what you have is a lot of feeling being swept under the rug and suppressed in favor of short term social stability, leading to periodic volcanic eruptions in which all the suppressed conflict comes welling up to the surface in a white hot uncontrollable torrent, and wreaking havoc on the whole damn scene.

Hence, periods of seeming calm punctuated by short but very intense bursts of highly emotionally charged conflict… colloquially known as “drama”.

It would be better for all concerned if we nerds stopped fearing “drama” and started conflict as a natural part of healthy human interaction, instead of clinging to this idea that total calm is the norm and these outbreaks of conflict are some sort of pathological disease of your particular subgroup.

If we simply understand that “drama” is inevitable and not something to be feared, we can open up the door to making our groups a safer and more accepting place to express anger, doubt, fear, and so forth, and hence deprive these attacks of “drama” of much of their destructive intensity.

Merely recognizing and accepting that some social tension is perfectly normal and natural and not something that can be punished or avoided into nonexistence will go a long way towards keeping the social waters of your fannish life calm and volcano free.

Above all, you need to be aware of what is happening in your group so you can be an intelligent and proactive member of your community instead of simply reacting when it’s already too late. Look for signs that people are feeling frustrated or unheard. Ask people what is bothering them. Make room for people to express themselves without feeling like they will be vilified for rocking the boat.

If you do this, you can have a community, fan group, subculture, or club that keeps going on being a supportive and happy place for us lonely nerds for many years to come.

If you don’t, sooner or later, you will be standing in the wreckage of a once fine group that seemed to suddenly and inexplicably tear itself to pieces in an orgy of irrationality.

It’s hardly inevitable or inexplicable. It’s normal human interaction, not a terrible shameful aberration unique to your particular grouping of intellectually advanced naked beach apes.

Surely we’re smart enough to see the thunderstorms coming and get in out of the rain?

Here we are again, with yet more boffo science to keep your brain fed and your future cooler than cool.

Let’s spark things up with one of my all time favorite subjects and one that has featured in many science roundups of the past : vat grown meat!

This time, it’s the venerable old gal the New Yorker Magazine taking a stab at the subject, and they point out that it was Dutch scientist Willem van Eelen who first proposed this idea back in postwar Europe, decades before the science to make it real was even remotely ready.

But now, we are seeing a future of cultured meat slowly becoming a reality, and it is something which I have been waiting for ever since I was introduced to the idea via science fiction as a child.

Icky images of industrial meat vats aside, it’s just such an attractive idea because it’s plausible (although, of course, not necessarily feasible) and the benefits of its invention would be enormous. No more raising billions of animals just to kill them. The meat animals of the past, the cows and chickens and goats and pigs and whatnot, would become just another animal at the zoo… along with the enormous amounts of land and resources required to produce and support them, and the vast meat packing industry required to butcher and distribute said meat.

Instead, meat would be mass-produced like any other food. It would be a better situation ethically, environmentally, even financially. Meat would be far cheaper and hence more people could incorporate its high-density nutrition into their diets even in poor parts of the world.

It is a future devoutly to be wished.

Moving on to another science fave (I am beginning to feel spoiled!), we have news of the completion of the largest ever survey of galactic history and its conclusion that yup, dark energy exists.

Not only does it exist, it is, in fact, the factor causing my favorite piece of mind blowing astrophysics knowledge ever : the fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Or as Pop Sci rather melodramatically puts it, dark energy is tearing the universe apart!

But just try to wrap your brain around the fact that the Universe is expanding faster than it used to and will only expand even faster in the future. How the hell does that even work? Where is your Big Bang now? One thing we can say for sure about explosions is that they are singular energy-imparting events. There’s a boom (or a Bang) and then everything slows down from there, and eventually comes to rest.

So how on Earth (and everywhere else) can the expansion of the universe be accelerating? Via this “dark energy” that must be out there, says we. I am pretty sure “dark energy” will be one of those phrases people in the future will chuckle about in the future when reading science history.

But at least it’s humble. It does not pretend to know what it does not. We know there must be a whack of energy out there we can’t account for, and we know it is “dark” because we can’t detect it directly, only deduce its existence via its effects.

The fact that there is such a massive mystery about what the Universe is doing and what most of it is made of making me giddy with excitement. Just thinking about it fills me with an electric thrill, like an explorer of old standing on the shore of an entirely unknown continent. The possibilities and the mystery enchant me.

Finally, we have this rather marvelous little meeting of science, art, and whimsy.

F5 2011 RE:PLAY Film Festival. Inductance from Physalia Studio on Vimeo.

I love this sort of thing, and I especially love the spirit behind it that the young people today seem to be embracing far better than us cynical and jaded Generation X types. A spirit of fun and joy and play that I find positively wondrous and ennobling. They didn’t make their lovely little arrangement of colorful plastic balls and powerful electromagnet because they were trying to invent something new to make them rich and famous. They did it because they thought it would make them happy by looking cool.

And lo and behold, it did. And they were nice enough to share it with us, and make us happy too.

To me, that is true art. Pure art, if you must. It is an act of joyful creation, where the creator(s) are motivated simply by the urge to create something which pleases them.

True art, and true science for that matter, is play.

There’s just too much cool science news around for me to wait till Friday to tell you, so you lucky people get a bonus helping of science this week!

Plus I am too sleepy to write anything more difficult. Stupid sleep apnea.

First up : robots inventing their own language!

It’s the result of a rather clever and well thought out experiment. Basically, folks at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Institute of Technology took your usual little box-on-wheels robots, with a camera for seeing and a laser range finder for avoiding collisions, and gave them ears and a mouth – or rather, a microphone and speakers – and let them loose in a maze to play simple games.

The robots were programmed assign random names to places they visit, and say those names out loud, and through this, slowly build up a map of their environment.

Obviously, these two robots, called “Lingobots”, are not exactly going to be chatting with anyone about the latest sports game any time soon. But I admire the simple and effective experimental design, stripping the problem of language down to its most basic level by using arbitrary random labels (which is all words are, after all) and building on top of the existing spatially-aware robot designs already well established by previous robotics engineers.

As a result, we have a very interesting experiment that is sure to expand out knowledge of both artificial intelligence and the nature of human language as well.

Way to go, Queensland nerds!

Moving into considerably more controversial science, a firm in the United Kingdom will soon be offering people a chance to take a test to tell you how long you will live.

Now, don’t worry, this isn’t like that Robert A. Heinlein story, Life-Line. where Doctor Pinero could tell you exactly how long you will live and exactly when you will die regardless of the cause of your death. We are not to that level of near-mystical science yet.

Instead, this will be a simple blood test which capitalizes (quite prematurely, in my honest opinion) on the recent discovery that the length of the telomeres in one’s blood and the length of one’s life share a strong correlation.

The shorter the telomeres, the shorter the life, in other words.

In fact, this line of research has suggested that these telomeres might very well be the measuring stick of life, the burning candle that your body uses in order to know how old you are and hence when various age-dependent life processes, like puberty or old age, should start and stop.

This dangles the tantalizing prospect of a cure for all aging via simply returning one’s telomeres to the desired length somehow. Pick an age, any age, and in the future, telomere repair therapy could freeze you at that age, and as long as you kept up the treatment, you would never get a day older, at least as far as your body knows.

“Old age” is only one of the reasons we get sicker as we get older, however. There’s accumulation of toxins, the long term effects of gravity on body tissues, and parts just plain old wearing out.

Still, telomeretelomeres involved, and a test like this could do a lot more harm than good. People could make very important life-changing decision will long-term repercussions based on this test.

And speaking of making long term decisions that will change the rest of your life, how about voluntarily getting your hand amputated so you can replace it with a robot hand?

And you thought waking up after a night out with a bad tattoo was harsh!

Luckily, it’s not quite what it sounds like. True, the patient has a living hand, and is getting that hand removed in order to make room for a bionic replacement, but the hand is completely useless due to nerve damage from a motorcycle accident. No movement, no feeling.

So it’s not just a case of someone saying “I am bored with my perfectly functional hand, and want to be a cyborg”. It’s fully medically justified, in my opinion. Sure, the hand is still alive, but functionally, it’s dead, and squeamishness about taking off a living hand and replacing it with a robot model is no excuse for condemning this poor young man to a life without the use of a hand and impeding the progress of science towards a day when we can replace any limb with bionic parts should disaster fall.

Still, not hard to imagine a future where people get this done just for fashion, is it?

Today’s mishmash has a theme : bad things happening to the American Right.

Why? Because I love you.

We’ll start off with a fave from the past who has recently returned from his justly deserved grave of obscurity, Newt “Let’s Shut Down The Government And See Who Gets Blamed” Gingrich, and his recent insistence on calling Obama the “food stamp President”.

Sounds like pure Karl Rove poison, doesn’t it? Megajoules of evil, prejudice, bigotry, hate, and foulness distilled and concentrated down to the three words most likely to flip all the wrong switches in people’s brains to make them incapable of reason or compassion and hence force them to be just as much of a stinking pile of cesspool runoff as yourself and your heartless reptile brained cohorts.

It’s called politics!

But I think this sort of thing is losing its power and causing stronger blowback with each application of its slithering tendrils. This “food stamp President” shit is clearly coded racism, and it’s going to be a very difficult statement for him to justify if questioned on it at all. And the nice thing about election cycle politics is that you do not have to rely on that flaccid lump of quivering adipose tissue known laughably as “American journalism” to somehow penetrate the right wing reality prevention field and ask the awkward questions.

Your Republican opponents will do it! In particular, this is the sort of thing that Rand Paul or another dark horse Libertarian type to pick up and use.

Tell us, Newt : what, exactly, do you mean by “food stamp President”?

As proof that this brand of political poison is losing its potency, let me direct your kind attention next to this article about how ratings are declining for the right wing talk radio sphere of hate.

I am particularly heartened by the emergence of a “radical centrist” alternative, people who take a more balanced view of things and toe no party line and do not hand their independence of conscience in at the door in order to join a political team.

I have been calling myself a radical centrist for over a decade now, and I truly think two-party political thinking is rapidly going the way of the leisure suit. People are increasingly realizing that two options is simply not enough. People want to be represented by someone or some group who comes a lot closer to pleasing their own political palate than a two item menu could possibly provide.

The era of the dogmatic and doctrinaire adherence to a Team A or Team B approach is finally reaching its long deserved sunset. People are increasingly willing to break with the pack mentality and say “What if neither option is good enough? What then?”

America, in the opinion of this Canadian, has been in desperate need of a strong third party (and fourth, and fifth… ) for a long time. The political marketplace needs more than a token minimum of competition in order to provide the voters with what they want, let alone what they need and what they deserve.

Finally, I am glad to see that the recent outing of the Koch brothers as the bastard billionaires bankrolling the majority of the right wing evil in America is bringing them to the attention of documentary filmmakers like Robert Greenwald, who will be taking them on in a new film.

This is exactly the sort of direction I like to see in this new era of citizen journalism. These bastard billionaires seem unreachable, but that’s a thin facade. In this modern era of Google journalism, a remarkable amount of rhetorical damage can be done to the mighty and the powerful simply by bringing together freely available public knowledge and putting it into a comprehensible narrative. You don’t need to land an interview with one of these whales or get “access” in any sense in order to launch your attack.

You just need a computer and a blog. Ahem.

I also approve of Greenwald’s taking a radical and personal approach to his anti-Koch campaign, finding the many homes of the Koch brothers and filming himself and others knocking on their doors and trying to get answers to questions as to why they are messing with America like they do.

Sure, it’s all very theatrical in a Michael Moore way, but someone has to remind these people that, no matter how rich you get, you are still a citizen of a nation just like everyone else.

I wonder if they would agree.

Yes, it’s Friday the Thirteenth, the most dreaded day in a triskadecaphobic calendar. I suggest you celebrate like I do, by finding yourself a black cat, and petting it.

Shouldn’t be too hard for you, Felicity.

And speaking of things which are black, check out this bit of news about black holes.

The skinny : some of the black holes we can currently observe in the universe may have been around since before the Big Bag.

Wrap your brain around that concept for a second. When I first read the headline, I did a full on “Whaaaa?” kind of reaction. I think I probably did at least a triple take. Mouth open, the whole deal.

This is what I love about astrophysics. Just when you think you have a grip on things, they come up with yet another way to completely blow your mind.

The idea of black holes so ancient that they were around since before the Big Bang is obviously grounded on a cyclical view of the nature of the universe, once in which the Big Bang was just the latest stroke in a never ending series of expansions and contractions of the Universe.

Big Bang, the Universe expands till the momentum imparted by the initial Bang is not enough to counteract the attraction of gravity between every object with mass in the Universe, then everything reverses direction and contracts into one massive super dense Big Ball, which explodes again. And so on.

Except for some black holes, apparently.

Shifting from the macrocosmic to the microscopic, it turns out that flatworms (planarians) can do a trick where they regenerate their entire bodies from only a single cell.

It’s long been known that flatworms have amazing regenerative powers. A basic schoolroom experiment shows off how if you cut a flatworm in half, both halves will regenerate into fully functional adult flatworms.

Pretty amazing, huh? Might not be the sexiest way to reproduce, or the most fun, but it does the trick. Well, now it turns out they can do that even if there’s only one cell of them left. You could theoretically make millo0ns of them from a single individual and a lot of time and Petri dishes.

Not all of their cells can do this trick, just certain specialized ones. Still, with a fairly amazing trick like that in their tiny arsenal, it does make me wonder why half the world isn’t flatworms by now, and why we aren’t they ones being sliced in half to see what happens by them.

We human beings are very interested in this trick because we are hoping that we can learn to do it for ourselves. Not that anyone is looking to grow entire new human beings from a single cell (that would be weird), but just the part where a whole something is regenerated from a single cell…. like say, a liver or a heart. If you could trick the body into making its own replacement organs, right there in your body, it would make the organ donor system obsolete and save millions of lives.

And speaking of people who need organs, let’s talk about zombies. Specifically, ZOMBIE ANTS.

This is by far my favorite bit of completely fucked up creepy science news in a long time. Turns out, there is this fungus that turns ants into its mind controlled zombie slaves!

Here’s all the gory details :

The fungus, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, causes ants to leave their colonies and head for a leaf which provides the ideal conditions for the host to reproduce.

When it gets there the ant goes into a ‘death grip’- biting down very hard on the major vein of a leaf. This means that when the ant dies, its body stays put so the fungus has time to grow and release its spores to infect other ants.

Is that creepy or what? It’s very easy to imagine ants shambling out of their anthills and heading right for that special leaf and then clamping down on it with a literal death grip. It seems like a complex behaviour to be caused by a fungal infection, but ants already have the necessary programming to go in search of specific things when the colony needs them. The fungus just needs to activate this “search” routine and places the plant it needs in there, and hyper-stimulate the “acquire” part so that the ant latches on and never lets go.

It’s a cruel way for even so simple an organism as an ant to die, starving to death but unable to let go.

Nature is truly more horrifying than we can imagine. It’s things like this that reinforce my belief in civilization.

Nasty, brutish, and short does not begin to properly describe the state of nature. How about brutal, nightmarish, and horrifying, for a start?

In order to launch my discussion of this topic, I am going to present you with an observation, and I am afraid it might seem a tad cynical or cold, but it is nevertheless true, and I include it not as an act of malice or sarcasm, but to illustrate the point I wish to explore in this essay.

The observation is this :

If you want to make a whore really angry, accuse her of being a whore not as just a way to make money, but because she loves sex so much. Because then she’s not just a whore, but a slut. And there is nothing worse than being a slut.

Strong stuff, I know, but fundamentally true. So why is this? Why is it that in society’s judgement of women, the second worst category, that of “whore”, is not even one tenth of the severity of the worst label we can place on a woman, that of “slut”?

Whores, or more properly female sex workers, are looked down upon because (in part) of our highly confused and status conscious society, they have, in the public mind, the dirtiest job around. It is the same sort of thought process that causes people to look down upon janitors, plumbers, and garbage collectors, no matter how much money they make. We consider sex to be dirty and shameful, and therefore someone who has sex with people for a living bears an enormous cultural stigma, a taint unlike any other.

But the real nub of this dark side to society’s judgmental shadow is that whores, simply by existing, make plain a deep shameful aspect of women’s life : the view of all women as whores, the view that all women are expected to get as much as they can for sexual access, and a woman judges her worth, essentially, by the price she can fetch.

Think about it : if someone calls a woman cheap, what, exactly, are they saying about her? They are saying that her sexual appeal does not fetch a very high price. A cheap woman is an inexpensive date and cannot demand much for her charms, either explicitly or implicitly.

A cheap man, by extension, is a man who, by being unwilling to spend as much in order to court and seduce a woman as she thinks she is worth, implies that the women, herself, is cheap.

And this is where sluts come in, because sluts are the ultimate cheap women : free. A slut, by definition, is a woman who gives away what other women are desperately trying to sell for the best possible price, and thus is far worse than any whore, because whores at least cost money. Sluts charge nothing, and thus depress the value of all women’s sexual access.

Still don’t believe me that this is how it works? Think about the old bit of advice mother give to their daughters to encourage them to remain virgins until marriage : “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”. Imagine what this says about the perceived role of women in society.

View through this dark lens, where a woman’s worth is, essentially, her price, then a slut is not merely a devaluer of women’s wares, but a totally worthless woman. A women whose price is zero.

Also viewed this way, the difference between a “nice woman” and a “whore” is not merely price, but whether or not said price needs to be explicitly stated or not. Once a whore tells her client her price, that is it, she has established her worth, and negotiations are over. She is now obligated by the customs of her position to provide what was been bargained for. Nice girls, on the other hand, don’t have to promise anything. They can negotiate from a far stronger position, one in which the buyer has to continue to pay simply in order to keep the option of buying open, and the woman can choose the moment of sale in order to maximize purchase price before the buyer loses interest.

And this price is not merely in terms of gifts or fancy restaurants. Often, the price a “nice girl” gets is in the form of power over her suitors. The power to change them more to their liking, the power to make them “prove themselves” over and over again, the power to have their own way in all things.

Obviously, this is a profoundly wrong state of affairs, primarily for women but also for men.

For women, it not only dehumanizes both them and their male lovers, turning what might be romance into haggling, it severely penalizes desire on the part of the woman. Deep within this tragically mercantile form of human interaction is the message that nice women never actually want sex, as that would vastly weaken their bargaining position. After all, if a man figures out that the woman actually wants to have sex, suddenly, the price he is willing to pay plummets. She’s a motivated seller. He might even get it for free, or at least, no further monetary investment. And what would that make her?

You got it : a slut.

Thus, female desire is locked behind enormous walls of self-denial and hidden in a complicated labyrinth of conditions and fears and lessons learned at a deep and painful level. Women are left stranded in a world whose messages are so mixed that many women can’t even decide if they are aroused or not, and when they do get as far as consent, find they cannot enjoy the act, because deep down, they are worried about what enjoying the act would imply.

It might mean they are a slut. What if they could have gotten more? Should they have held out longer? Will he still respect me in the morning?

Luckily, social progress has been breaking down these walls for generations. Slowly but surely, women are reclaiming their own sexuality and owning it, and demanding the right to have the same sort of sexual freedom men enjoy without penalty and have done since time immemorial.

And that’s why I am writing this essay. It greatly upsets me that this horrible cultural programming interferes with women’s ability to enjoy their bodies, their sexualities, and ultimate their intimate relationships, and creates so much completely unnecessary repression, complication, and madness in the female of the species that it fills me with sorrow and wage.

Claim your sexuality, ladies. Defend your right to be horny. Have sex simply because you want to do so. It is about considerably more than just the pleasure of an evening or getting to orgasm.

It’s about refusing to see yourself as a cow looking to sell her milk for the best price.