OH MY GOD the amount of amazing science stories that came along this week! Narrowing it down to just six from a field of twenty has been exhausting.
First off, a rare thing for this column : a video.
Now we have dealt with the concept of teaching your immune system to hate cancer before, but I thought the video was just so well made and so touching that I just had to share it with my fellow science fans.
To think they took a little six year old girl who was inches from death’s door and not only saved her live but completely cured her… it’s positively miraculous.
We might actually be witnessing the dawn of a future without cancer. One where a cancer diagnosis is not the profound life-altering shock that it is today, but just a nuisance that means spending a couple of days in the hospital feeling really sick.
And that’s only if the cancer has already spread all over your body. Presumably, less advanced stages would have less of an immune reaction.
Maybe some day, we will be telling our children about cancer like Depression era people talk about polio.
Another potential miracle : converting biomass directly into fuel/a>.
Scientists have taken a gene that lets certain microorganisms live without sunlight by making electricity from minerals, put it in a bacteria that is easy to mass produce, and created a bacteria that lives off electricity and turns biomass into butanol, which you could then put directly into your gas tank.
This is far more efficient than making biofuels from, say, corn, and that means it might just make fuel that is a lot cheaper than gasoline, and all it needs is electricity to do it.
Nevertheless, we don’t really get ahead if burning butanol puts as much carbon into the air as gasoline. In truth, I am thinking we want to get away from the whole “burning things” mindset.
Next up, this surprising headline : New Structure Found in the Cornea.
When I saw that headline for the first time, I did a double-take and says “Really?”, because you just do not hear about finding new structures in the human body any more.
The age of the anatomist is long passed, and one just naturally assumes that on a strictly parts level, we know all there is to know about the human body.
But this fellow, Dua, has found a sixth layer of the cornea that nobody knew existed until now. It is being called, appropriately enough, Dua’s Layer, and its discovery will hopefully lead to better outcomes for things like corneal transplants.
Way to go, Dua!
Out next item strikes close to home for yours truly : software coaches for social phobia treatment.
The idea of using software to aid in the tried and true “graduated exposure” therapeutic model is not a new one. A lot of other phobias have been treated this way for at least twenty years. The software lets the patient control the experience (“OK, show me the picture of the spider for… one second!”) and thus makes them feel more confident in their own ability to overcome said phobia.
But social phobias are a whole new level of complexity because us social apes have such complex mental hardware to read and interpret the social cues of others that you need a pretty sophisticated understanding of it all to even attempt to simulate social exposure.
It should work, though. I can see the graduations as starting with simulated (or controlled) text interactions, then picture chat, then interacting with an animated avatar, and finally to interacting with another live human, one just in the next room perhaps,via video.
And then on to direct reality, of course. Being social phobic myself, I can state that I can see this being a lot of help in building up my social confidence.
Oh, and it could prove invaluable for treating autism spectrum disorders as well.
Moving on. Remember holograms? They were so cool. Science fiction led us to believe that we would all be watching 3D TV by now, where the action looks like it is really happening inside your television “tank”.
Well, we might be getting there at last, because MIT engineers have come up with a brand new way to make holograms that is far less limited and expensive than before.
The secret is a new kind of spatial light modulator (the thing that makes 3D pixels in space) (also, AWESOME NAME) that is far cheaper to make and far more flexible than previous models.
I mean, check this out :
“It is now possible… to make holographic video monitors with full-colour, standard video resolution and a 30Hz (hertz) refresh rate.”
And all for roughly 500 bucks American! I can’t wait.
But where will we store all that 3D information? Why, on our brand new 1 petabyte (aka 1000 terabyte) DVD-R’s, of course.
I shitteth thee not! And to do it, they had to find a way to hack a previously set in stone physical law concerning the nature of light called Abbe’s Law.
Abbe’s Law states that you can’t focus a beam of light down any narrower than half the light’s wavelength. This has, until now, put a hard limit as to how small the encoded bits on optical media could be, and hence, limited data density.
But via some clever manipulation of light using two lasers at once, it is possible to get a beam of light that is functionally much smaller than Abbe’s Law would dictate, and thus data densities of simply staggering proportions are now possible.
According to the developers, one of their hyper-DVDs could hold 10.6 years of compressed video, or 50,000 full length high definition uncompressed movies.
Are you thinking what I am thinking, Pinky? I think so, Brain : entire television series on a single disc! Not to mention what that would do to personal computing data storage space, although theoretically we are all on “the cloud” now so that is not really an issue.
Yeah, well, you’ll pry my hard drive from my cold, dead hands.
That’s it for this week, folks. I was going to tell you about a plant that eats sheep, but it is too damned depressing to think about.
See you next week!