Still typing with a gimpy finger and that is still not a heck of a lot of fun, but it does not seem to have gotten any worse over the last 24 hours, and so I will skip the trip to the Emergency Room and stick with doing what I do, namely writing, even though doing it is a trifle harder than usual right now.

So here it is, finally : some cool science type stuff! I have a lot of it I want to share with you nice people, and I better share it right now, before any more of it shows up and I have nowhere to put it.

Connect It All

This is not strictly speaking science, but it is too cool not to share with you fine folks.

Lots of nerdy kids loved their LEGO, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob connecting block toys, but always wondered : what could I build if I could use all of my connecting toys together?

Well wonder no more, nerd kids and kiddish nerds (which is, face it, all of us)! Thanks to the wonderful world of 3D printing, you can connect everything with everything!

I was never much for toys as a kid. Give me a bucket of LEGO and I would make some random abstract structure while I explore just how the things stick together, but once I had figured that out, I would lose interest, and go back to reading,

As for the rest…. why would I want to build a helicopter out of LEGO? It will just be a lame LEGO helicopter. Even if it made a really realistic looking one, I still would not care.

Never much for the toys. What a weird kid.

But even I can see how cool being able to connect ALL your stuff might be.

The Sky Pirates

Not quite in the ultra cool Nausicaä sense, but this might just be the first step towards that kind of piracy.

Those bastions of Internet anarchism The Pirate Bay, known mostly for being the number one place to go to find a bittorrent of that software you want but do not want to pay for plus their highly public and successful (for them) tangles with the forces of corporate information control, want to take this game into the future by establishing a network of autonomous flying network nodes.

As attractive as this idea is, with visions of quadcopter WiFi nodes giving Internet access to people in oppressed regions, odds are this idea is at least somewhat ahead of its time. We have the technology, just barely, to pull this off on a rotating rechargeable basis… drones working on rechargeable batteries and working in rotation.

But then there needs to be a base, and bases can be found and seized. The real prize is a fully autonomous drone that uses solar energy and ergo never needs to land. And we are not quite there yet.

But give it a few years, and we will see.

It Kills Potholes

This has me terribly excited, because if it delivers as promised, it could change things for all of us, especially us urban jungle dwellers.

It is called The Python, and its makers say it can fix a pothole in two minutes flat.

And that is just with a single operator! Imagine how quickly and cheaply your community could fix those axle shattering tire grabbers on your street if they had one of these babies. Instead of having to force six surly city workers to actually do their job for a change and ten have them for some reason take a full week of blocking your street (no doubt to punish you for making them work) in order to fix one lousy pothole, they could have a Python that simply patrols the streets looking for potholes and fixes them on the spot, right then and there.

And once they caught up with the backlog, it would not even need to patrol that often. Once a week would be plenty, and it could catch small potholes before they become big ones that cause big cracks in the pavement, thus saving money on repaving as well.

Coming from Prince Edward Island as I do, where the only smooth pavement is on the Trans-Canada and where the potholes have their own postal codes, this sounds awesome to me.

Soothing the Savage Beast

And finally, a story that has me written all over it, scientists are finally figuring out what kind of music appeals to animals.

Despite some people’s claims that their dog loves Debussy and detests Andrew Lloyd Webber, under controlled scientific conditions, animals show a profound indifference to human music.

That is because, for one thing, their hearing operates on a different set of frequencies than ours. So for a lot of our music, they are just plain not hearing most of it.

That much is fairly obvious. But tempo and tone matter just as much as tune. It turns out that heartbeat is the universal metronome, and so animals prefer music which is as fast (or slow) as their heart rate.

And what is more, they prefer music that incorporates the tone of their natural, happy noises. In social animals, this would be the noises they make to indicate to their group that everything is A OK.

To me, the amazing thing about all this is that they took such a goofy and whimsical idea as “music for animals” and actually made it work. They are getting real results here.

How real? You can, no word a lie, now buy music for cats.

I totally hear that in a Bill Murray from Scrooged voice when I read it.

I really wish I had a cat to test said music upon. It would be totally worth $1.99 to me to be able to be part of such a marvelous bit of pet science.

Well that it is for this week, science lovers! Next week, it might even be on time.