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.