Hard to believe that another wacky yet wonderful week has gone by already! But here we are at yet another jolly holly Science Day, and here I am with another brace of science stories to march across your mind and put on a bloody good show.

As usual, the hardest part of writing this column was choosing which half-dozen stories to cover out of the score or so potential beauties all vying for your attention.

But after many rounds of competition and a particularly brutal swimsuit round, I can now present you with the six stories that made it to the semi-finals!

First off, a story which I have been dying to talk about since I discovered about, but which I am choosing to do first because it is only somewhat related to science.

It’s about the discovery of literally thousands of cave paintings in Mexico.

4,926 of them, to be precise, in 11 different locations. One cave alone had more than 1500. It is a find simply staggering in scale. It’s like finding a hundred Lascaux’s. The sheer amount of information in this find will be keeping archaeologists, archivists, analysts, and other academics busy for decades.

To me, cave paintings mark the true beginning of culture in the modern sense of the word. I often think about that moment when some caveman (or woman) first looked at some scribble they made and saw… something. Something from their life. A person, an animal, fire, whatever.

That had to be an extraordinary moment for that individual.

Next up, a piece of the Drake’s Equation puzzle : a bacterium that thrives at -15 degrees Celsius.

It’s called Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, and it lives in tiny pockets of extremely salty freezing water found inside permafrost.

So the requirement for liquid water remains, of course, but the actual temperature of said water can be as low as fifteen below and life does just fine there. The bacterium was even observed still respiring at -25 degrees Celsius, and might even be able to survive even colder conditions.

This offers concrete proof that the parameters of Drake’s Equation have never been broader, and certainly suggests that life of a sort might exist on that tantalizing neighbor of ours, Mars.

We know there is some water on Mars, and there could certainly be pockets of it that stays liquid due to being very salty and near a volcanic heat source.

And then…. life on Mars!

Our next story is from the frontiers of both genetic science and psychology : scientists have been able to eliminate one form of schizophrenia in mice.

It is the form associated with high levels of activity from a gene called NRG-1. When the mice had high levels of activity from this gene, they exhibited schizophrenia-like symptoms, such as hyperactivity, inability to remember what just happened, and inability to ignore stimuli.

To me, that sounds a lot more like genuine ADHD than schizophrenia, but I suppose it is hard to tell when a mouse is hearing voices or hallucinating.

Only ten percent of schizophrenics have this form of the disease, but still, if a drug could be developed to reduce activity in NRG1 to normal levels, it could provide relief to at least some of the victims of this most mysterious and perplexing organic mental illness.

Reality issues are the hardest to treat.

And now for the wackiest sounding science story of the week : adding spinach to solar panels nearly triples their efficiency.

Yup. You read that right. Spinach. Like what Popeye eats.

Specifically, the photosynthetic protein from spinach, which they sprayed onto silicon and discovered made for a current 2.5 times stronger than your more typical solar cell.

That is an impressive enough result by itself. With solar, it has always been about the efficiency : how much current per square inch of solar cell. That is the vital statistic determining how well solar can compete with other, dirtier and less sustainable ways of generating electricity.

It seems odd to me that this spinach thing works, though, because I always assume photosynthesis produced glucose, not electricity.

But perhaps the role of the chlorophyll is to focus energy that is then used to synthesize the glucose.

Who knows? Maybe another plant does it even better!

And if you think that’s impressive, scope this, junior scientists : a team in Scotland has gotten the go-ahead to start testing artificial blood from stem cells!

First, a vocab check : in this case, “artificial” means “not generated by the human body”. These would be human blood cells identical to the ones currently moving stuff about inside all of us. They would just have begun their lives as harvested stem cells instead of inside your bone marrow.

And obviously, being able to mass-produce human blood would be a simply massive medical achievement, especially if it is cheap. No more blood drives, no more running out of blood in the OR, and just think of the progress that could be made against blood-borne illnesses and other blood diseases.

Not to mention the impact on the vampire community. For them, it would be nothing less than revolutionary.

No more cow’s blood for Nick!

And finally, what story gets Pride of Place this week? Well, sad to say, I was a little self-indulgent this week. This is not the most important or world-shaking story, just the one I found most interesting.

Turns out there is a strange movement afoot amongst the young male nerds of today, and it all revolves around a substance called Soylent.

It’s not people.

Instead, it’s an open-source attempt to create a drink that supplies all that your body needs as the ultimate in meal replacement.

Its inventor, Rob Rheinhart (great name), describes it thus :

I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources… The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’.

At this point, I have to separate my artistic/aesthetic side from my scientist side.

My artistic/aesthetic side find the entire idea utterly repulsive. Only programmers and engineers would want to eliminate eating and consider that a triumph of “efficiency”.

I mean, you know this guy has the wrong end of the stick when he declare’s Soylent’s taste to be “irrelevant”, when it’s the first thing anything wants to know about the damned stuff.

Still, scientifically, I find the attempt quite interesting. I have wondered for a long time why there could not be a single nutritionally perfect diet supplement that would provide everything your body needs so that you would not have to worry about nutrition at all.

And as far as I can tell, Soylent is pretty close. It needs roughage, and something to make it taste good, or it will not get the job done.

Nobody wants to drink something that tastes awful and gives them diarrhea. (Well, except engineers.)

But there’s no reason why sufficient roughage couldn’t be added to keep one regular, and we have some pretty strong and yet healthy artificial flavours and sweeteners to make it taste good.

I still don’t think an all-liquid diet is a good idea. But there is no reason why you could not use Soylent as your dietary supplement, like a multivitamin, then eat whatever you like, secure in the knowledge that you have your nutritional needs covered.

And anecdotally, at least, it seems to make people feel amazingly good, which is exactly what I would expect would happen if your body is finally getting everything it needs.

Most people in modern life are suffering from a host of nutritional deficiencies without even knowing it. A lot of modern malaise might well stem from, ironically enough, malnutrition.

And anything that can end that has my vote of approval.

Seeya next week folks!