It’s a very spooky Friday the 13th!

Actually, it is not even vaguely spooky. It has been a lovely summer day except for a few moody gray moments to keep us on our toes, not a single particularly unlucky thing has happened to me (at least, nothing outside regular probability), I had a pretty good therapy session, and all in all, it has been a lovely day. Take that, triskaidecaphobia!

Besides, everyone knows it’s unlucky to be superstitious! Thank goodness I have never been superstitious, knock on wood.

And we are certainly lucky in that I have a full, metric bevy of science stories to share.

So let’s get down to it, boppers!

Let’s start off in the world of music, with a development that is sure to piss off a lot of people with painted vans and feathered hair : a stringless guitar simulator that anyone can play.

A Montreal tinkerer named Miroslaw Sowa teamed up with a Toronto software engineer named Vsevolod Zagainov to take over the world via chess create the Tabstrummer, an all-electronic guitar simulator where the musician (?) just touches both sides of the neck of the guitar to indicate where they would put their fingers on the frets of a guitar, and strums across a circuit that represents the strings.

All this sounds faboo to me. I come from a long line of guitar players, and I would love to learn to play, but I am simply too much of a wimp to shred up my fingers in order to build callouses, like I have seen my relations do. If someone can take the knifelike metal strings out of the equation, I would be more than delighted.

Of course, if it sounds like crap, it will not matter how easy it is to play. The kazoo is easy to play too, and a lot cheaper.

Next up, we have a fascinating story from the world of anthroplogy, once I have been sitting on for a while but which I just have to share with you now.

Warning, this does come from the Daily Mail, but still, give it a go.

It is the story of what might be called Britain’s Atlantis, an enormous ancient settlement in what the scientists call Doggerland, a vast area that was highly populated circa 20,000 BC, but which slowly sank under the waters of the North Sea as sea levels rose.

So that which was once verdant plains and valleys is now under hundreds of feet of icy cold water, which makes the settlement find even more exciting because the cold waters should preserve much of what these ancient people made.

So it truly is like a time capsule from our ancient past. The as yet unnamed settlement had tens of thousands of residents, and the amount we can learn from such a staggering find is incalculable.

Personally, I am very interested in their diet. What was their agriculture versus wildcrafting mix? Obviously, with so many people living close together, urbanization and specialization had been achieved. Did they have commerce?

Next up, we have one of my favorite things in science, a genuine mystery! And not just any kind of mystery… a SPACE MYSTERY of TITANIC PROPORTIONS!

See, something is up on Titan, the moon of Saturn. An enormous vortex 3,200 miles across has formed in the atmosphere around Titan’s south pole, and nobody knows why.

The problem is that we do not know a lot about Titan’s seasons. A Titanic year is roughly thirty Earth years, and so we do not have a lot of years of climate data to analyze. For all we know, this happens every other year on Titan, and we just have not watched it long enough to know.

Throw in the effects of Saturn on its satellites, and the satellites on each other, and we really have no clue what is up on Titan.

This could be perfectly normal Titanic weather patterns and if we are around and watching one hundred years from now, we will see it again.

Or it could mean that aliens are sucking up Titan’s atmosphere in order to recharge their mega death blasters before attacking the sweet, succulent jewel that is… The Earth!

We just do not know.

And finally, what is cooler than a SPACE MYSTERY? Why, lasers of course!

And what is the coolest, most awesome laser in the world? Why, the most high energy one, of course.

Well how does 500 trillion watts of laser power strike you?

That is the latest benchmark for the extremely amazing laser at the National Ignition Facility in California, U S of A. A thousand lasers fired simultaneously at a target only 2 mm in diameter, using a mind melting (literally, if you got in the way) 300 terawatts of power.

Now, just what is it the National Ignition Facility is hoping to ignite? Glad you asked, John. What the National Ignition Facility is hoping to ignite is nuclear fusion, the same process which keeps our beloved Sol pumping out the energy that all life on Earth needs to survive.

So if we could successfully spark up nuclear fusion by zapping a highly compressed pellet with enough energy to get things rolling, we could manufacture, on demand, miniature stars which would provide enormous amounts of energy for thousands of years with no additional input.

Fusion is just that efficient. And if you can make one, you can make as many as you like. Imagine a future where every city has its own captive star giving it clean, limitless energy. Energy so cheap they do not even bother to meter it any more. Power so cheap that fossil fuels cannot even begin to compete on price, and so their use just fades away, and the idea of powering your vehicle with gasoline will seem as bizarre, esoteric, and needlessly expensive as powering it with whale oil.

That is the dream of fusion, and it is one I share.

Plus, you get to build huge frickin’ lasers in the process!

How cool is that?