Welcome, welcome one and all to the latest (for now) edition of my Friday Science Whatever, wherein I vent some of my gushing and frankly slightly more than sane enthusiasm for all the latest and greatest (or sometimes just the freakiest and geekiest) science stories of the week.

And yes, that was all one sentence! That’s just how enthusiastic I am folks. Better not stand too close or you might get some of the froth on you.

Warning : The first three rows WILL get wet.

But enough of my usual palaver, let’s get down with some freaky cool science stuff!

Breaking The Rules

First off, let’s go to the always fascinating world of nanotech, and the deceptively simple substances known as graphene.

Graphene was one of the first nanotech materials created, and consists of a hexagonal grid of carbon atoms, like hex paper made of carbon but in three dimensions.

Pretty cool, huh? But it gets much cooler.

Recently, some scientists at science powerhouse MIT have discovered a new weird property for graphene : when spread in a single atomic layer over a substance, it begins to show some of the same chemical properties as that substance.

That violates one of the most fundamental rules of chemistry : that substance A is substance A and will behave exactly like substance A and not substance B unless something chemically changes substance A to substance B.

The very idea that substance A can be made to behave like substance B just be putting the two close enough together is downright ludicrous. It sounds, in fact, like some kind of Homeopathy woo-woo bullshit about water having memory or your Special Magic Charm Healing Magnetic Jesus Bracelet being extra powerful because it was in the same box as a chunk of meteorite.

But the results are in, and it is happening. The going theory is that graphene is so incredibly thin that its atomic fields overlap with whatever it is wrapped around, and thus begins to share some of that substance’s chemical properties.

Freaky! Here is my concern : I hope this information promulgates rapidly through the nanotech world, because I could easily see this bizarre property causing a lot of confusion where different studies produce radically different descriptions of the properties of graphene depending on what substance the graphene happened to be laying on when they studied it.

Watch Out For Sand People

Next up, we have this amazing hotness : the Aerofex hover bike, something remarkably like those way cool bikes they zoomed through the forests of Endor on in Return of the Jedi!

It is still in the testing phase and so might never make it to market, but still, when you have an image like this to show investors :

Aerofex tester, shown here on his way to Tashi station to pick up some power converters.

I am pretty sure they will get whatever funding they need.

And there is no special new science fiction style technology making the bike go up. It is actually a very old design from the 1960s, otherwise known as the “hovermania age” by hovercraft enthusiasts named me, with a modern fix up to its mechanical design.

As so often happens in this column, this scratches a speculative itch that I have had ever since I learned the sad news that hovercraft, while amazingly super freaking cool, are really not practical for anything but the occasion Channel crossing and/or Bond action scene.

The ground effect is just too hard to control and render stable, and so you get a sad world where you could have a hovercraft in your garage, but it would get you to work at the speed of a person on a bicycle who is looking for an address.

Since then, I have wondered if the march of technology would someday bring ground effect vehicles back into the ream of possibility. And it seems it finally has!

If they could make something like in that picture available at a commercial level, it would make all those people on their motorcycles seem laaaaame.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Now you know I save the coolest story for last, and you might be thinking, what could possibly be cooler than real world hoverbikes?

The answer : a real world replicator!

Or at least, the closest thing yet.

The Imagine 3D Printer from Essential Dynamics (what a great vague corporation name!) prints at room temperature (no more of that hot extruded plastic crap) and can print with damn near anything you can make soft enough for its tubes.

And this means…. you might wanna sit down for this… it can print food.

Admittedly, it can’t just create it out of thin air (or ‘warp energy’, for us Trek nerds). You kind of have to put food into it to get food out of it. And you have to stick that food into a blender and make it into a thick paste before you can print with it.

But still, as someone who loves kitchen gadgets, it sounds like the ultimate kitchen toy. Imagine all the possibilities inherent in being able to print with, say, chicken paste. You could make incredibly intricate sculptures for your wedding table centerpieces in a snap.

But that is too linear. Once you start imagining a printer that has chicken, beef, carrot, and garlic instead of red, yellow, blue, and black, you realize that this could open up an entire new world of cuisine. Who knows what experimental chefs could create with something like this?

Even more becomes possible if you add some sort of simple baking element, like for instance the sort of “hot bulb” oven that powers all those Easy Bake Ovens. That would give people a way to harden their creations. I am guessing stuff made of goo does not hold together well.

And that is just the food options. This could very well be a Clarke level invention, where it is as impossible to imagine all the applications for the technology as it was to predict all the future applications for plastic way back in the days of Bakelite.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

Seeya next week, folks!