Here is it, another funky fresh and fabulous Friday, and holy Hannah, what a week it has been for us science loving types. I have so many awesome science stories that I really could pull a Newsday and do two columns on subsequent days just to cover them all.
But alas, I will be at Vcon today, tomorrow, and Sunday, so there will be no blog entries for a couple of days (probably), so I will have to do the impossible (ish) and choose amongst them all.
So just remember, when reading, that these stories are the winners of bitter Darwinian competition.
The Nose Knows
To start off, we have this article about advances in electronic sniffers.
Or at least, that is what we are stuck calling them. Electronic noses. Virtual nasal appendages. The old electric schnozz routine.
Personally, I find that name gross, and prefer to think of them as discriminating molecular sensors. But I can see why they call them electronic noses. It gets the point across.
Anyhow, the article talks of the tantalizing proposition of being able to detect not just the presence of cancer, but the type of cancer, from nothing more invasive than a breath sample.
Imagine blowing into a tube at your doctor’s office and getting an instant readout of your health. Heck, they might even sell a home version for the hypochondriac market.
“It still says I have no cancer. This thing must be broken. I’ll buy a new one tomorrow. ”
And there are other uses too, like, for instance, in quality control for food manufacture : an electronic nose might well be able to sniff out food that has gone bad or is otherwise unsuitable for human consumption. And of course, they might also put a few drug-sniffing or bomb-sniffing dogs out of work.
Allergic to Everything?
And speaking of hypochondria, how about those people who think they are allergic to a million different things in modern life?
They are profiled in that article, and as you might have guessed by now, I am convinced that these people’s problems are psychological, not physical.
They convince themselves that they are allergic to a million different things in order to create problems they can exert control over, and thus exert control over the deep seated insecurities that are the real problems that the allergy narrative conceals.
It also provides them a powerful narrative to use in order to avoid dealing with reality. Like the lady profiled in the article says, dealing with her illness is a full time job. So surely, nobody could ask anything else of her.
It is not like allergies are mysterious things inexplicable to science. It is pretty easy to test for genuine histamine based allergic reactions, and yet, from what I have read, these people often actively avoid any such testing. Deep down, they know that their supposed allergies are not real (it is seriously impossible to be allergic to radio waves, for instance) and that therefore their delusional struct could not survive it.
As such, I think articles that take their claims of impossible allergies seriously are a little irresponsible. These people have a mental illness, not a physical medical condition. Feeding into their delusions is not helpful.
No More PTSD
And speaking of irresponsible journalism, check out this story with the totally unbiased and not at all sensationalistic title “This Is Scary : Scientists find a way to erase frightening memories”.
Um, no. What they have discovered (maybe) is a way to keep a person who has just experienced a horribly traumatic event from forming the super-vivid memories that lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and various similar illnesses.
We are very far away from being able to erase memories that have already been saved to your long term memories. So no worries, no Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind scenarios yet.
Still, I am pretty stoked at the prospect of being able to prevent future cases of PTSD. It is a terrible illness caused by the conflict between the mind’s desire to process its memories and its inability to cope with the emotions inherent in extremely traumatic events.
So the memories keep forcing themselves into the conscious mind in order to be processed, and then the conscious mind just forces them back down again. Tragic.
On to happier subjects!
Water On Mars
The Curiosity Rover has already justified its mission, because it just came back with some very strong evidence that there was free-flowing water on Mars at one point.
And where there has been water, there might have been life. We do not have conclusive evidence of life existing on Mars yet, but proof of water is a big step towards that.
At the very least, here on Earth, water means life. That;s the problem with planetology. We only know one planet in detail, and it’s the one you are one right now.
Take Me Home, Jeeves
Finally, an update on one of my all time favorite stories, the quest for self-driving cars.
Those wizards at Google’s self-driving car project have been hard at work, and have finally gotten what they really wanted all along, which is for their autonomous cars to be street legal in California.
Now they can test them right at their home in Mountain View, California, instead of having to go all the way to Nevada to do it.
But that is not even the most exciting news. The real nugget of fun in the article is the news that Google employees have been using these autonomous cars to commute to work.
Now it is already amazingly cool to work for Google. They are the employers all nerds dream of. But being able to play Michael Knight and be driven to work by your very own KITT takes it to a whole new level.
I would totally just lay down in the back seat and read while people gaped at my car driving itself.
And I would love every minute of it.
Seeya next week, folks!