Happy Friday, folks. (Hey, that would make a great name for a chain of pub restaurant after work hangout type places, Happy Fridays. Take that, TGIFridays!)

I have a few science story links kicking about, looking up at me with sad, expectant eyes, wondering when they will make it into the big leagues and finally be included in one of my world famous, globe spanning, really neato blog entries, and so I figured I better take care of them lickety-split before those adorable little misfit ragamuffins form a Little League team that steals everyone’s hearts with their shenanigans and eats me out of house and home.

You know. Like termites.

First up, brace yourself for a trip into the world of the creepy crawlies, as the next story is a spider related story. So take your anti-heebie pills and come with me.

For we are about to learn how male wolf spiders learn to dance from television.

No, they don’t watch an all-singing, all-dancing, all-spider version of Dancing With The Stars on an increasingly desperate Animal Planet. But a recent study proved they can learn mating dances from other male wolf spiders who they have only seen via a television and, presumably, somebody’s really, really creepy porn stash. (Don’t feel bad, dude, I am sure you only watch it for the articles. )

Not only did they copy the ones they saw, but they only copied the ones which where successful in landing the male some spider booty.

This, creepy factor aside, is a pretty mind blowing result, because as far as we knew, invertebrates like the arachnids were in no way sophisticated enough to learn from others of their own kind. We sort of assumed that was a mammal thing, to be honest.

In fact, it suggests that these spiders must have something that functions like our own mirror neurons, which fire in exactly the way it would be required for us to repeat an action we see another human performs, and might well be the basis for one of humanity’s greatest gifts, empathy.

Spiders with empathy? It’s not impossible. For arachnids, wolf spiders are surprisingly sophisticated hunters, hunting in much the way an intelligent mammalian spider might, able to vary tactics according to conditions and follows a number of hunting behaviours instead of having just the one trick, like web spinning or lair building, like most spiders.

Moving away from the fascinating but creepy world of spiders, we come to this story about how researchers in Japan are taking tsunami-ravaged land and turning it into a full automated robot farm.

Is this cool, or what? Check this out :

After salt is removed from the soil of the 600 acre plot, the agriculture ministry’s plan calls for unmanned tractors to work fields lit by LEDs that will keep insects at bay in lieu of pesticides. The robotic tractors will till, plant, and tend to rice, soybeans, wheat, and various fruits and vegetables that will then also be harvested by their robotic overseers.

It’s about time! High efficiency automated farming has been on my “flying car” list for ages. We are never going to be able to get agrarian efficiency up to the point where we can feed the poorest of the world without a radical rethinking of the farm based model. This sort of automation could be as big a leap in farm yields as the invention of fertilizer. Imagine if we could feed twice the people in half the land for half the price!

Finally, a story that has me absolutely riveted with fascination : this in-depth article that suggests, among other things, that most soldiers in war before the modern era would never shoot to kill.

It turns out, human beings have a very strong resistance to killing other human beings, despite what decades of war and crime might lead you to think.

The sort of rigorous psychological abuse that we take as a normal part of military training in the modern era was virtually unknown prior to World War II. Before that, studies showed that only one man in five was actually shooting at the enemy when they fired their weapons. The rest would just shoot in the air, or shoot vaguely at the enemy but without aiming.

Now partly, that might be due to simply the different nature of war. A conscripted soldier in an imperialistic war might behave differently than a volunteer in an ideologically backed war. And so on.

Myself, I am curious about the role of the gun in this phenomenon. Obviously, in the era of the sword, you could not very well just wave your sword in the general direction of the enemy and get away with it. It would be pretty clear that you were not really committed to this whole war thing.

So presumably, this applies to only gun warfare, when you can fire to no effect and still look like you were really trying to kill a guy. Or, even better, you were not firing to kill at all, but to keep the enemy from going where you are firing.

The depressing part of the article is that in the modern era, we have come up with all kinds of ways of psychologically brutalizing our soldiers to make sure that pesky “thou shalt not kill” instinct that makes us reluctant to kill one another does not get in the way of the important business of war.

It makes sense that we are reluctant to kill one another. All dangerous predators have to have such a built in resistance, lest minor conflicts prove lethal.

Oh, and this just in : watch what happens when you drop a Gummi bear into molten potassium chlorate :

Holy shit, right? That is one highly energetic reaction. Intellectually, we know that if something is high in calories, it means it is high in potential energy.

But to see all that energy come leaping out of an innocent little Gummi is quite a different matter.

And is it just me, or does that hissing sound sort of making it sound like the Gummi is screaming?

It’s probably just me.