Daily Archives: March 2, 2012

It’s Friday. It’s Science. It’s a thing.

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Like my period-rich, tough, dynamic wording of the title of this feature? This is science with balls. Science with machismo. Science that has to stand three feet back from the urinal or it will shatter.

This week, we have something that is surprisingly edible, the most fucking Michael Bay ready piece of technology you will see today, possibly the coolest scar ever, and growing diseased brains in a jar.

For science, of course. And not just because it sounds like the perfect thing to cackle over while you rub your hands together in fiendish glee in your secret underground laboratory.

And what better way to punctaute that thought than with a bolt of lightning?

The Lichtenberg Man

I am not one hundred percent sure that this is truly what this Reddit link says it is, but according to Reddit, the following is a picture of the scar that some dude got from getting hit by lightning.

Can this be real? Click to enlarge.

I mean, how likely is it that getting hit by lightning would give you a picture of lightning on your arm? Well, it’s not quite as ridiculous as it seems.

If it’s legit, then that is an example of a living Lichtenberg Figure, which are figures created in materials by electrical discharges that, lo and behold, look pretty much like fork lightning does in the sky.

You can even create these neato figures in soft plastic if you have the time and the patience to mess around with the two for a while.

So it could be that this guy has an actual Lichtenberg Figure on his arm from his brush with death.

Or, he could have done it himself with a pin.

Either way, it’s an awesome scar with a killer story and probably gets him laid.

So, happy ending(s) either way!

Food Coloring 2.0

Now this is a fun little invention : edible spray paint.

OK, I admit, put that way, it sounds gross, but that’s the way the article describes it. I prefer to think of it as “sprayable food coloring”, but that is just me.

Anyhow… so what does such a thing, whatever you call it, look like?

It looks like this :

You did say it should be a GOLDEN brown, right?

Is that not bizarrely wonderful and wonderfully bizarre? But for sheer chic, elegant plate appeal, you have to go with this pic :

They're like Chistmas decorations you can eat!

Hard to believe that’s still food, huh? But it totally is. The spray paint is as edible and harmless as regular food coloring, and yet, it can make things all shiny!

Technically, it comes in four colors : gold, silver, red, and blue. But really, who cares about red and blue? We can make food that color already!

I admit, I have an odd fascination with food that does not look like food, so I might be biased toward this product a tad.

But just think of the eye-popping effects you could achieve for your fancy restaurant with this stuff!

Growing Your Brain

Scientists in Edinburgh have come up with a way to grow brain cells from the skin cells of people with various mental disorders in the lab, thus making it a lot easier to get them for study without having to get them from animals or cadavers.

This, to me, seems like a fairly amazing leap in stem cell technology. We are up to turning skin cells into brain cells already? That is huge, huge news! If we can grow new brain cells with someone’s own DNA in them, we might just be able to “patch” brain injuries that were previously completely untreatable.

And heck, we might even be able to give people extra brain capacity. Recent revelations about brain plasticity have made it clear that the brain can route its activity around an injury, reassigning rasks and resuming function almost seamlessly.

So now there’s talk that perhaps the brain could use that same flexibility to learn to address and use extra lab grown brain matter incorporated into its structure for the purposes of, quite literally, expanding your mind.

I am not sure if that would make you any smarter. But it might become necessary if we start expanding human lifespan past the point at which our mental address table can handle it.

We might need the extra memory space.

Fire And Iron

Finally, to finish of this week’s entry with a very big bang, we have this story about the American Navy’s latest railgun weapon.

What is so cool about that?

Watch this clip, and you will know.

It belches fire like a dragon and throws what looks like a futuristic anvil at speeds of up to 5,500 MPH with the combined energy of 32 one ton cars hitting a brick wall at 100 MPH, that’s what’s so cool.

I mean, is that the most Michael Bay invention ever, or what? Fire. Speed. Destruction. Baygasm.

Check out the future plans for this thing :

The eventual goal is a ship-mounted 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles. It shoots projectiles using electricity instead of chemicals, which would theoretically be safer because you would not have to tote dangerous gunpowder on a ship. It uses an electric field to accelerate a metal conductor between two rails and launch a projectile.

I love that it is a purely kinetic weapon. No payload, no propellant, no guidance, no need even to rifle the barrel. Just a hunk of metal moving at speeds that MAKE AIR CATCH ON FIRE.

That is pretty freaking awesome in my books. I wonder if it creates a sonic boom? Not to mention the shockwave created by pushing the air ahead of it so damned fast.

Is it wrong to find a weapon of death this cool?

Well, that’s all for this week, folks! More cool science when next we meet! Ciao!

Gathering some moss

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Time to clear out the browser again. Maybe I should make this a separate category of post. Put it under “links” as “dump”.

It sounds gross, but if my StumbleUpon is any judge, an awful lot of people put “link dumps” and “pic dumps” on their blogs without even thinking about it twice.

Anyhow, got some keen things awaiting inclusion clogging up the old Firefox right now, so I figured it is time to line them up, kit them out, give them a stern talking to and a big hug, and then send them out into the world to fend for themselves.

Letting go is always the hardest part.

A Very Interesting Question

A fascinating article over at TechCrunch (where did the E go? or is that a totally different site?) asks a highly pertinent question for our time : Is printing a gun the same as buying a gun?

Not that long ago, this would have been a completely nonsensical question. “Printing a gun” would be as absurd a concept as making yourself rich by drawing pictures of gold bars. You could no more print a working, functional, real world gun than you could print a living dragon.

But with the rapid advances in what used to be called “rapid prototyping” and is now called, much more sensibly, “3D printing”, things are not so clear.

People are 3D printing out all kinds of things. I mean, you can download and print a freaking Stradivarius, for crying out loud.

But somehow, despite my even mentioning the printing of rifle parts in the above linked article, the issue of people being able to 3D print dangerous things never really occurred to me before now. (I guess I was too distracted by the Stradivarius thing. )

The potential implications are vast. The law certainly has no way of coping with this. The entire structure of gun control laws revolves around controlling the manufacture and sale of firearms. The idea that someone without a whit of gunsmith training might just decide to print themselves out an AK-47 and some ammo was never envisioned.

Before we get too excited, I must caution, this is not happening right now. 3D printers print things in plastic polymers, and fairly soft ones at that, so they would make pretty lousy guns. But this is something that we may have to deal with in the near future.

This sort of thing has the potential to make all kind of laws meant to keep dangerous things out of the wrong hands completely obsolete.

A sobering thought, and something to chew on.

The Ultimate Silencer

And while we are thinking dark thoughts about the future, let us talk about this weapon that makes it impossible for people to talk.

Now, the story is a tad sensationalistic. It acts as though this is a magic “silence gun” that could make a whole room full of people unable to talk like it was some kind of mute button on life, and it is nothing of the sort.

Instead, it just plays a single person’s voice back at them with a slight delay. This seriously disorients people and makes them instinctively stop talking to clear up the confusion.

This is no big leap for science. This is technology so basic that I used a similar device at the Ontario Science when I was a kid in 1978. At the time, this Delayed Auditory Feedback was considered a possible explanation for why some people stutter. They hear their own voice echoed back to them.

So anyhow, relax, this is not some totalitarian superweapon. It could only ever work on one person at a time, and a determined enough person could, I think, shake off the effects.

What interests me is the stated purpose of this weapon, to wit :

The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.

To me, that just bristles with the rage of the shy and the unassertive. Like some perhaps mildly Asperger’s engineers got so angry at being verbally bullied by hecklers and highly articulate people who were NOT FOLLOWING THE RULES that they invented what amounts to a “shut the fuck up gun” to insure they would get a chance to speak.

Seems downright mad scientist to me, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you know, you could take an assertiveness class, or get a better chairperson for your meetings.

I’m just sayin’.

How “Now” Is This?

Finally, a story for this exact moment in history, about how that modern demon known as “autocorrect” actually prompted a major police incident.

Damn You, Autocorrect, indeed.

For those of you who don’t know, “autocorrect” is a feature mostly used in texting via cell phone, where the phone tries to guess what you meant to type and replaces what you typed with said guess.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Well, it is. And in this case, it actually caused a high school to go into lockdown for two whole hours before the situation was resolved.

It all started when a student tried to text a friend “Gunna be at West hall this afternoon”. Seems simple enough, right?

But autocorrect, in all its dubious wisdom, turned “Gunna” into “Gunman”.

And the recipient of said text, instead of say, texting back asking “Did you mean to say gunman??”, freaked out, told the authorities, and madness ensued.

To me, autocorrect makes things worse far more often than better. It is way easier to simply absorb a typo (we cna figrue otu thigns pretyt esaily) than to deal with a completely wrong word in a sentence.

I mean, compare “I have to see you after clsas” with “I have to see you after Callais”.

I rest my case.

But people get caught up in this because autocorrect is turned on by default on most cell phones, and people don’t know they can turn that shit off.

Although after an incident like this one, they might take the time to learn.

That’s all for today, folks! Seeya tomorrow, with SCIENCE!