Another week has whirled by like a snowflake spinning through the cold night air, and once more, we have alighted upon the doorstep of Dame Science, there to sample the marvels and delights she so generously and regularly gifts upon us.

This week’s crop contains traces of medicine, psychology, the mortuary sciences, and laundry from space.

So let us get started on our little tour, and see what wonders await us!

The Plastic People

Let’s get the ghoulish stuff out of the way first, okay?

First off, we are not talking about people who have fake, shallow personalities, or people who have had so much plastic surgery that they no longer qualify as organic life forms, or as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would put it, “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With”.

No, we are talking about human beings who are being turned into plastic in China.

It should come as no surprise that said people are dead both before and after this process. The process involves a complex series of steps in which various organic tissues are slowly and carefully replaced with plastics and polymers. End result : something quite like a medical cadaver, but one which does not rot or decay or, presumably, smell.

Obviously, this would be a fantastic teaching aid, and cut down on the number of actual medical cadavers needed by medical schools worldwide.

Alas, the article does not note whether a plastinized corpse can then be mass produced. One would assume the answer would be no. But still, it’s going to help medical education enormously.

And, I suppose, some people will use it to preserve a loved one forever. Eek.

Laundry From SPACE!

That covered, let’s talk about how in the future, you will be doing your laundry in a giant levitating futuristic letter Q from outer space.

Well, maybe. It’s just a concept now, but it is just so cool that I had to share it.

It looks like this :

Does that not just scream “sexy like the future”?

The idea is that your laundry would be in that ball in the middle, which is suspending in midair by an electromagnetic field, and then powdered sublimated dry ice would be blaster into the chamber. When this hits the dirt and germs on your clothes, it reacts, breaking them down and unsticking them from your clothes. Then it’s just a matter of filtering the gunk from the air inside the ball, and depositing it in a tube you can rinse, and presto chango, you have clean clothes in a matter of minutes.

It all seems quite impractical to me, but also beautiful. There’s so many questions, like, won’t my clothes be ruined by the cold? Will this mean I have to buy dry ice all the time in order to do laundry? How much energy does all this use?

But still, you have to admit, you can totally imagine people on the USS Enterprise doing laundry this way, can’t you?

A Pharmacy In Your Abdomen

And speaking of hyper-futuristic idea, what if there could be a device implanted inside your body that delivered all the drugs you need without you having to take another pill or remember to take your medicine ever again?

This could be coming to a hospital near you quite soon. The first such devices have already been tested in human beings. Seven elderly severe osteoporosis patients in Denmark had a year’s worth of medicine delivered by one, with no side effect and with the same dosages as if they had been taking the medicine the usual way.

The devices are controlled wirelessly, and contain tiny “wells” of the necessary drug(s) that can be activated by the patient, their physician, or a computer program.

Don’t worry, the wireless controls are extremely secure, so nobody is going to hack your bloodstream. Still, I can imagine an unscrupulous doctor using said system as a very high tech form of extortion.

Want your next painkiller dose? Slip me a fifty.

But what really fascinates me about this sort of thing is that it represents a sort of second endocrine system for your body. Once it’s in there, it’s basically an organ, and acts as one until the drugs run out, allowing for realtime chemical manipulation of your body.

It’s not hard to imagine one of these being integrated with the new crop of “medical lab on a chip” type devices, then set to deliver X amount of drug Y when condition Z is detected in the bloodstream.

Teach it to synthesize drugs out of your own bloodstream, and you basically have invented a new kind of human being. A cyborg on an intimate level.

I, for one, would volunteer to have my meds delivered thus. It would make me feel a lot more like a normal human being, not a sickly person on a lot of meds.

And speaking of my sicknesses…

A Definitive Depression Diagnosis?

An exciting new study suggests that there might well be a way to diagnose depression with a blood test.

It is just one study and the results were not perfect, but still, it is a tantalizing prospect.

It would mean an enormous amount for there to be a way to definitively say a person has depression. Far more than the medical science implications would be the impact on us sufferers.

Simply put, it would definitively prove depression is real. We depressives have an invisible illness, one which currently shows up on no physiological test, and so it is always possible for people, especially ourselves, to think there is no real illness, and we are, instead, just terrible people with massive personality defects.

A blood test could go a long way to dispelling that feeling, and that could be enormous help to depression sufferers like myself. When confronted with the disbelievers, we would be able to point to our blood tests and say “Hard science says you are wrong. ”

It would no longer be “all in our heads”.