Wow, another week has barreled by like a frictionless train and we are back to share all kinds of wonders from the world of science with you, the fortunate few.

Tonight, we have lasers, solar death beams, mega-canyons, miracle cures, the coldest thing ever, the Big Bang, and panspermia.

So let’s get started!

Solar Death Beam

An odd shaped skyscraper in London is doing a lot more than just giving middle management somewhere to go that keeps them off the streets.

At certain times of the day, it is producing an intense beam of concentrated sunlight that raises the street temperature to 150 degrees Celcius where it strikes, and has been blamed for bleaching the paint on other buildings, setting people’s carpets on fire, and even melting the paint on one poor man’s car.

When I first heard about this story, I wondered how on Earth a building dubbed the “Walkie-Talkie Building” because of its smoothly bulbous shape could generate something like that.

But then I saw this picture and it all clicked into place.

Gee, what could it be.

The other pictures I had seen made it look like the building was convex on all sides. But that pic made it absurdly clear. The whole front of the building is a giant concave concentrating mirror, just like the one they made for the Solar Death Ray myth on Mythbusters!

People are building those on purpose these days trying to create efficient solar power. And these folks built one by accident.

I am sure architects and engineers will be chuckling over this one for years.

Crashing Down Syndrome

Scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered a compound that completely reverses the effect of Down Syndrome in mice.

One injection at the right time in the mouse’s development caused the mice to develop perfectly normal cerebral capacity and hence normal learning and problem solving capacity as well.

That could mean that in the future, if a baby is born with Down Syndrome, they are just given a shot of this new compound and that is the end of it, forever.

Down Syndrome would become one of those birth defects that is totally treatable and that most people have never even heard of because taking care of it after birth is so routine.

Of course, there’s a small chance these mice will become hyper intelligent and TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

One artist’s concept of what that might look like.

Under The Ice

NASA data has recently revealed that their might be a huge mega-canyon longer than the Grand Canyon buried under the ice sheet in Greenland.

Here’s the scoop :

The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

Now normally, this would be interesting, but not all that important. Who really cares about things buried so deep under the ice that we will never seen them?

But with global warming accelerating, what was previously inaccessible becomes entirely plausible, and for all we know, we all might be vacationing in the Great Canyon of Greenland some day.

Headline of the Week

Next we have a story that I instantly knew I was going to feature today based purely on the headline : Weather could be controlled with lasers.

LASER WEATHER CONTROL. Tell me that’s not fun to say!

I mean, how Bond villain is that? Wasn’t there a Bond flick where some insane Scotsman was trying to control the world via weather control?

Bet he used lasers, too.

This weather control speculation is based on a recent discovery that extremely short duration laser bursts can cause ice to form and water to condense inside clouds.

Thus, lasers could be used to make it rain or snow wherever we liked, as long as there were clouds for us to zap. And that’s just the most obvious use. I am sure meteorologists can came up with far more subtle ways to mess with Mother Nature.

Big Cold Bang

In an effort to understand just what happened during the Big Bang, scientists at the University of Chicago recently chilled some cesium atoms to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero.

Obviously, when the Big Bang happened, it was mighty cold in… whatever it was the Big Bang exploded into. So this sort of experiment is necessary if we are to understand how everything got here.

That would be impressive just as a technical achievement. But it is result that matter, and they discovered that at such low temperatures, the cesium atoms behaved in a new and peculiar way, almost like sound waves traveling through the air.

Most importantly, the patterns created by these ultracold cesium atoms match the patterns found in the cosmic microwave background radiation, otherwise known as the echoes of the Big Bang.

That, scientifically speaking, is fucking awesome.

We are definitely on to something there.

Men From Mars

And finally, our Big Story for this week, more evidence for the idea that life on Earth originated on Mars, and that life may indeed be transplanetary.

Now to me, the evidence in question is pretty slim and has a lot of “if” and “then” type assumptions based around of all things, molybdenum.

It revolves around the idea that a) oxidized molybdenum is vital for the early stages of the creation of life on Earth and b) way back then, Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars had lots.

Pretty shaky stuff. But I am glad there are people pushing the panspermia idea because, while none of us can guess at how likely it is to be true, there is no logical reason why it cannot be true, and thus it is an idea worth theorizing about.

And hey, maybe we really are all Martians.

Wouldn’t that be neat?