Tonight, I finally get around to sharing some of the kewl science news stories that I have accumulated lately.

Like how about this for supervillain-level awesomeness : Google is reportedly going to launch 180 satellites into geostationary orbits with the express purpose of bringing Internet access to the entire world.

Leave it to the richest, coolest nerds in the world to bring WiFi to the entire globe.

And that’s not their only world-changing Internet plans. They also are looking into using upper atmosphere balloons to do the same thing, as well as solar-powered drones beaming Internet down to the lucky people below.

But it is the satellites that have me the most excited because I included that exact thing, everybody getting their (future equivalent of) Internet from a series of satellites, in the novel I wrote last November, also known as way before I had ever heard about these Google plans.

So I feel like a real futurist now, even if I am the only person who has even read the book. I suppose if I published the book tomorrow, people would think I just stole the idea from Google.

Let them think what they like. I know I came up with it like 7 months ago.

In another part of that rockin’ world of Google scientific largess, we have the latest news on their self-driving car.

They now have a design for what the actual cars will look like, and they look like this :

Now THAT is a Smart Car!

I am pretty sure that is the Catbus‘ depressed younger brother.

Resemblance to a sad grey clown aside, Google plans on making a hundred of these little cars so they can ship them to various parties for further testing.

Obviously, with something as delicate and complex as a self-driving car, you are going to want to make damned sure that you have tested the thing to exhaustion. Never before has a technology taken on the kind of responsibility for the safety of human beings as the self-driving car.

Plenty of technology would be very dangerous to us if it failed, but all of those have a person at the controls. A self-driving car takes over that role and has to, in essence, think for itself.

If they can do that, why not self-flying planes? That seems easier than cars to me. Planes don’t have to negotiate bumper to bumper traffic, at least not once they are om the air.

I am sure that will be next.

On to materials science, which of course means nanotech.

Researchers have come up with a new material that is like graphene’s big brother. Instead of being the essentially two dimensional single sheet of evenly spaced carbon atoms that make up graphene, this new substance, cadmium arsenide, is a much more stable and useful form of nanotech.

Especially promising is the potential for this new substance to be formed into electronic components with such a high level of conductivity that it is almost as though the electrons in it have no mass.

This would do a great deal to speed up computing on all levels, letting it finally reach the near-light speeds of science fiction data flow.

The name bothers me, though, because as far as I know, cadmium is a rare Earth element and arsenic is, of course, highly toxic, so it seems to me like this stuff might be pretty tricky to make in large quantities.

Of course, the ingredients don’t define the final compound. As we all learned in high school, chlorine is a deadly toxic gas and sodium is so volatile that it explodes from contact with water, but together they make NaCL, sodium chloride, otherwise known as the table salt that we all both enjoy and need in order to live.

Well enough of the other stuff. Let’s talk about brain science. Freaky, scary brain science.

First off, scientists have gotten a glimpse of exactly how sleep is needed to encode memories.

I won’t go into the details of the experiment as they are pretty nasty and involve animal experimentation, but the gist of the results is that during sleep, our brains build new synaptic connections related to the day’s experiences and codify and save new skills we have learned.

I feel a little thrill of validation about that, because I have been supporting the memory theory of sleep and dreaming for a long time based purely on my own understanding of both observed fact and my subjective sense of my own cognition.

Sleep is when our brains sort through all the memories in our medium term storage from the day’s events and chooses which ones get put into long term memory and which ones get flushed.

That is why sleep deprivation makes you stupid…. your medium term memory is full.

Lastly and definitely most creepily, we have scientists erasing and replacing specific memories.

Only in mice, of course… so far. By tracking down the specific brain activity that happens from a specific stimulus as it becomes a specific memory in mice, the scientists were able to record the electrical signals involved, erase that memory, and then put it back in again without actually being able to read the content of the signal.

It’s kind of like monitoring transmissions from an enemy army who speaks in a language you can’t translate. You have no idea what the words mean, but if you noticed that the same string of gibberish always happened right before an attack, you might be able to transmit that back to the enemy and get them to attack when and where you wanted them too.

The scientists’ involved are talking about how this could be used to erase the over-powerful, unprocessable memories that ar the root cause of PTSD. And don’t get me wrong, that would be awesome. PTSD can be crippling and so far, all efforts to treat it have met with mixed and weak results at best.

But I don’t think you have to be Philip K. Dick to see how such power could be used for evil.

That’s it for today’s sciencing, folks. See you tomorrow!