Here we are at yet another Friday Science roundup, with still more hot and juicy exciting science news for all us big time science fans!

And there’s a lot to cover this week, so we’d best just tuck in and go at it.

It’s a great week for science fiction becoming fact. Take this development : a find and replace mechanism for the human genome.

Yes, with this technique, scientists can perform large scale edits to the genome of a cell in much the same way you would do “find and replace” in your favorite text editor or word processing program. Is something in that genome TAG when it should be TAA? No problem, just load the two strings into this process and ZIP. Fixed!

Now this is not going to be useful for therapy any time soon. Science fiction visions of rewriting every cell in your body to make improvements are still just that, science fiction. But what it will do is speed up genetic research by making testing a new genome for a cell that much faster.

Besides, I am not sure how a human being would survive having their genome rewritten. The transition phase, as the body slowly replaces each cell (and some replace way faster that others) would likely kill you.

So until we can put ourselves into suspended animation, it’s not going to happen.

But that’s just boring old biology. How about some freaky bending of the laws of nature and the rules of reality itself?

Scientists at Cornell have (believe it or not) built a little amusing gizmo called a space-time invisibility cloak.

They created conditions in which time and space were suspended. The physics is slightly beyond me (in the sense that the Andromeda Galaxy is slightly beyond the city limits of Waco, Texas) but according to the article, the Cornell team managed to compress light in such a way that they created a space-time nonevent.

Granted, it was only 110 nanoseconds long. But hey, it’s a start.

And of course, you know what I am thinking, right? STASIS PODS.

Stasis, the idea of being able to freeze a thing or a volume in time, has been a favorite science fiction trope of mine for a long time. Imagine being able to order food that had been frozen not in a freezer but in time right after it was made. Imagine donor organs (while we still need them) frozen the moment they were removed.

And of course, imagine “time travel” by having yourself put into stasis for ten years.

Who knows, this might be the start of all that.

But even that pales in comparison to another science fiction idea bursting into reality : the 3D scanning and reconstruction of crime scenes.

The British, always on the forefront of law enforcement, are the first big power to adopt this system. The 3D laser scanner gathers up to 30 million data points per sweep, with each sweep taking four minutes. They plan to make four sweeps per scene.

Then the information can be loaded into a computer and used to create a highly accurate 3D reconstruction of the scene.

Right now, it is planned mostly for auto accident scenes. That way, they can streamline all the complicated insurance and liability issues and clear the wreckage off the scene earlier, and restore proper traffic flow.

All very practical and cool. But what blows my mind is that this is a real thing, and not just a science fiction idea that I have had in my head for the longest time.

Not that I am the only one, of course. Once computers had scanners of any sort, the idea of something that could digitally record every detail of a crime scene for later investigation via virtual reality is a natural one. I have been envisioning such a system in my mind for a long time, with bored looking cops waiting outside the door of a crime scene while the scanning team does their work.

I find it interesting that they are beginning with auto accident scenes. At first blush, you would think indoor crime scenes would be easier to scan.

But in reality, a room in a modern house is far, far more complex than a scene involving a few cars and a stretch of highway. Just look around the room you are in right now and try to count the number of surfaces, reflections, objects, and so on.

No way a scanner is going to be able to handle all of that, not at this early stage in the advent of the technology.

But just think of where this all could go in the future!

What am I saying…. the future is now.