Yes, here it is, yet another Friday the 13th ^[1], a date which has scientifically proven to be, by far, the unluckiest day of the year on which to juggle flaming chainsaws on a tightrope over the Grand Canyon while naked, drunk, and suffering from a severe inner ear infection.

We have plenty of hot, tender, plump when you cook them news stories for you today, including freaky creepy robot footage, tidal energy facts, and a frightening new frontier in reproductive science.

Wow, this must be your lucky day!

Uncanny Valley Days

There are a couple of creepy (but extremely function, I should add) robots hanging around the world these days, just waiting to give you nightmares.

Like take our old pal PETMAN.

As you can see, he does push ups as well as stairs now, all in that horrifying “Terminator in physical therapy” kind of way.

I mean seriously, couldn’t they pretty the thing up a little before taping? Or is that hardcore robot skeleton look part of what gets them the funding these days?

It sort of looks like it cheats on the stairs to me, too. Like it has not so much mastered stairs as learned to make evenly spaced hops. Not the same thing.

Or how about a creepy robot octopus?

Kind of looks like a smoke detector got raped by an order of steamed bean sprouts.

In reality, it is the product of the creatively named Project OCTOPUS, and it uses all kinds of high tech wonderful stuff like memory alloys in order to make those tentacles twitch.

Fascinating in theory, but I am having trouble imagining it working out in the long run. The goal is obviously to make a robot which can manipulate objects in its environment without having to deal with something as complicated as a hand or as limited as a claw. And octopi have proven extremely good at using their tentacles.

But the human hand is complicated for a reason. It is an extremely sophisticated manipulator, far beyond anything we can create artificially. I think getting the robot to be able to do anything useful will prove to be far more complex than people suspect.

But who knows? For simple but tedious jobs like underwater cable or pipeline construction and inspection and/or even simple repairs.

Power from the Ocean

Moving on to alternative energy (which is so much hipper and cooler and edgier than mainstream energy), Pop Sci has recently published this interesting article about how one form of ocean thermal energy might work in the future.

I am fairly interested in this alternate energy prospect. It is true that the initial costs are quite high, but that is true of nearly all forms of public energy. We easily forget this in modern times because we tend to be getting our energy from an infrastructure bought and paid for by both the vision and the funding of many generations ago.

But all those dirty coal fired power generators, as well as the incredible amount of wire and pole that it takes to get it from the power plant to your home, did not come cheap. We have to think in those terms when we think of the energy of the future, and be glad that past generations had the will and the foresight to invest in the future for us.

I particularly love this part of the article :

A 3,200-foot-long, 33-foot wide pipe is not something you could build in a factory, haul out to sea and drop into the water, Meyer explained.

Well DUH. Obviously it would be built slowly and methodically like an underwater pipeline or cable.

Hey, maybe the OCTOPUS could help!

I’ll Take a Dozen Large Caucasian Eggs, Please

Finally, we have our Frightening Science Story of the Week.

In this case, it is the scary truth that we can now manufacture human ova in a lab.

Unsurprisingly, this involves stem cells. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have managed to prod some ovarian stem cells into turning into immature human eggs, and the really freaky part is, later this year, they plan to fertilize them to see if they are viable.

Not exactly the science fiction horror scenario of human eggs being produced on an industrial scale and human reproduction eventually not requiring the involvement of any human beings at all (mass produced ova, sperm, artificial wombs, clone armies… ), but it is still a strange thing to contemplate.

Using stem cells to produce medically needed body tissues is one thing. Nobody seriously has a problem with a future in which we can use stem cells derived from shed skin cells in order to generate a genetically identical new heart or kidney or spine for somebody.

But when you begin to involve human reproduction, things get far less clear. Suppose a corporation legally buys some blastocysts and sperm, then uses them to generate a zygote, then hired a surrogate and implants it in her.

Does the corporation then own te resulting child? They owned all the ingredients that went into it and all the equipment and labour as well. Nobody doubts that if a bakery makes a cake, they own the cake.

Well what about whipping yourself up a whole new person? What kind of rights would said person have?

And what happens when you implant extra eggs in a woman approaching menopause? Women have a finite number of ova, and when the last one goes, that trigger menopause. Would an unlimited supply of implantable ova keep a woman from experiencing menopause, period^[2]?

And if so, what effect would that have on the woman’s health and aging in the long run? What happens if you put an important biological signal on hold like that?

The future is a strange and freaky place, to have such questions in it!

That is all for this week, folks!

[[2]] No pun intended, I swear.