Yes! Actual science on an actual Friday! After two or three weeks of various life randomizing events, mostly pretty bad, I am actually back to doing the weekly science roundup on the right day of the week for a change! Rejoice, o science lovers, for the Fairly Decent Times are here again!

Feels good to be back in the saddle and back to normal (so-called) once again. Granted, my finger is still in a dressing (which has begun to ITCH dammit) and will be until Sunday, and still feels kind of weird, and I wonder what is going on under the Band-aid (not looking forward to taking THAT off), but what the heck, I am clearly on the mend.

So let’s find some science and get it on!

Your Robot Army Awaits

Robots are awesome. I think we can all agree on that. Being able to make stuff that does stuff is an incredible kick, and as proof, I offer the fact that we have wholeheartedly embraced robots as a world culture despite the fact that technically, apart from dubious utility as a slow and awkward vacuum cleaner, robots are not really useful to us unless we happen to be car factories.

But designing and building a new robot takes a lot of time, money, and expertise, and most of us simply do not have enough of all three of those to be robot designers.

But that might be about to change, thanks to the Printable Programmable Machines initiative, which plans to make it so that anyone with access to a 3D printer can design, program, and print their own brilliant ideas for robots.

Granted, you would still need some basic design and programming skills, but nevertheless, this could in theory democratize the robot design and build process down one very important level, increasing the number of potential active roboticists in the world by a thousandfold or more.

And that is a very good thing. If we are ever to realize the dream of, for instance, the household servant robot, it will be because we finally have enough bright and ambitious minds working away at all the little problems inherent in something that complex.

Or who knows, maybe they will come up with something entirely new that nobody has even dreamed of before, something so simple and cheap and useful that we all get one and it ends up completely changing the very fabric of society.

Either way, cool beans!

Not An Oxymoron

Meanwhile, over in the always wild world of particle physics, where the folks at the Thomas Jefferson Accelerator Project are looking for (this is not a typo) dark photons.

Dark photons are a theoretical particle that unlike a regular photon, would have a mass. And it would still carry the four forces with which we are familiar with, plus a mysterious fifth force that we know nothing at all about.

Spooky sounding, isn’t it? Dark photons carrying a mysterious unknown force… sounds like some great techno babble for how your science fiction villain’s powers work.

“Puny Earthlings, your feeble human weapons are no match for the mysterious force of my Dark Photons!”

That kind of thing.

It is all beyond my mental reach let alone grasp, but it all sounds very intriguing. It even might hold the answer to where the heck all that dark matter/dark energy stuff is out there. Dark matter and dark energy from dark photos… makes some kind of sense to me.

If they have mass, I can only assume they do not travel at the speed of light, as otherwise you get into that pesky divide by zero problem which would mean said particle had infinite energy.

Physicists hate that kind of thing.

Where Is Everybody?

A Friday Science Thing would not be complete without some creepy science, and this one will be no exception. A pair of artists has figured out how to use a process normally used by NASA to study stars in order to produce pictures of famous, busy places without all those people getting in the way.

Here is what that looks like :

Chilling, is it not? Like a science fiction tale where something terrible has taken all of humanity except for our poor hapless hero, who is left to run through the empty streets in increasingly desperate need for the sight of a single other human face.

The idea of the technique is deceptively simple. You take a really long exposure of the subject, and then this NASA process subtracts out anything that is moving, like people and cars.

Sounds simple, but the math alone involved in being able to discern what is a blurry streak and what is a solid bit of scenery must be simply staggering.

Hard to imagine a practical use for this technique, but it certainly makes for a very interesting artistic effect. If I were them, I would go from town to town, selling various town governments pictures of their highest traffic areas, areas usually quite busy during the day, as they would look without anybody in them.

I am sure they would find enough takers to make a go of it. Could look very nice blown up to mural size on the wall of a Town Hall or Chamber of Commerce.

Lest We Forget

Lastly, I will sneak in some content which is not at all science, but it is science fiction, so it is half science, and that counts, right?

Check out this bit of subversive Star Wars art :

I love this piece. I especially love the inclusion of the “toaster droid” (actually a messenger droid, according to Star Wars lore) from the original Star Wars movie. I laughed so hard when Chewbacca growled at it and it ran away when I was a kid.

Well, that is all for this week in science and science fiction, kids.

Tune in this time next week. It just might happen again!