At the speed of life, we have once more returned to where we started on this merry merry-go-round of time we call the Friday Science Whatever. I have four hip hot stories to share with my science loving public today, and yes, there is a weird and wacky Japanese entry.
In fact, like last week, we will start with Japan and then move on to more serious science.
Eyes Bigger Than Your…
Once more, Japan leads the world in ridiculous attempts to solve problems with a vigorous but ill conceived application of technology.
In this case, the problem is dieting, and their solution is to invent augmented reality glasses that make your food look bigger so you will get full sooner and eat less.
The study showed that the control group ate 12 Oreo cookies in one sitting, whereas the group with the augmented reality glasses on ate only 11… a nearly ten percent reduction!
And to think, in order to create mind blowing, game changing results like that, all you had to do was wear heavy, clumsy augmented reality glasses with wires running in and out of them and eat your cookies with a bunch of scientists watching expectantly!
Talk about over-solving a problem. For the amount of trouble involved, I would want much more dramatic results than a lousy ten percent. I cannot imagine any way this could be practical, at least until we are all wearing augmented reality contact lenses 24/7 anyhow.
Oh, and speaking of which…
The View From Inside Your Computer
An entrepreneur named Randy Sprague has come up with the first steps towards that heady future.
He has invented an augmented reality system which combines a special pair of glasses with augmented reality contact lenses to give the user the complete augmented reality experience that, so far, is only the stuff of cutting edge speculative fiction.
In his system, which he calls iOptik (eye optic… get it?), the glasses contain two tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses, and the contact lenses act as both the projection screen and image filter.
What this gets you as a user is a view of reality with any sort of computer graphic projected over it. Want to know what other people who bought that brand of pineapple juice thought of it? Your augmented reality system could superimpose user ratings and a star rating over the product itself. Want to know the name and family details of the person you are talking to? Facial recognition software and some augmented reality graphics could show the info floating around the person’s head.
Now myself, I am not keen on this whole augmented reality business. I am pretty much only interested in it as a way to create extremely immersive video games and other entertainment experiences, and then you are not really talking augmented reality any more, just a different and more immersive display system.
As for practical life applications, I think the augmented reality advocates are missing out on a lot of little details, like the fact that being able to to something does not make it desirable. A world in which we are all half in the Cloud all the time sounds quite unpleasant to me. We already have a problem with people paying attention to their iPods rather than each other. Imagine how much worse it would be if the person could pretend to be paying attention to you, but is really playing Farmville on your forehead and writing snarky comments about what you are saying on Twitter.
I will not be signing up for it any time soon. I like being able to get away from technology.
Predicting Your Health Future
Speaking of technology intruding into our lives, University of Washington Assistant Professor Tyler McCormack has invented a new algorithm for predicting what problems patients will face in the future.
What makes his algorithm better than previous ones is that instead of simply applying statistical models directly to patients on an individual basis, it also uses the outcomes from other patients in similar situations to reinforce the conclusions, thus creating something similar to Amazon.com’s “Other people who ordered this book also ordered… ” crowd-sourcing data pool.
This leads to superior predictions, and creates a far more robust and deeply integrated prediction model than previous systems that did not draw in real world data to test the statistical model’s assumptions.
In theory, this could be a great help to physicians, who after all can only know so much about any given condition and certainly do not know about outcomes from patients other than their own, to work with the patient and see what problems might lie ahead of them, and work to head them off before they become serious enough to require the attention of a doctor.
That would be some top flight preventative medicine.
Radiation Burst From The Past
And now, as always saving the best for last, I present you with the mystery of the massive radiation burst from the past.
Recent evidence from tree ring studies have found that somewhere between 774 AD and 775 AD, the amount of carbon-14 in the Earth’s atmosphere jumped to twenty times the normal amount over the space of just under one year.
And the great part is, nobody knows why.
A lot of the obvious explanations have already been ruled out. Solar flares intense enough to do it would have had far more effects than a carbon-14 jump. It would have to have been far larger than the biggest solar flare ever recorded. There would have been massive auroras all over the world, and surely someone would have noticed and written that down.
As for a supernova, that would have created a “new star” in the sky even brighter than the ones observed in 1006 AD and 1053 AD, which were bright enough to be seen during the day. Again, surely someone would have noticed and jotted it down somewhere.
So we are not sure what the heck happened way back then to put so much carbon-14 into play. It makes for a highly stimulating mystery, and I love genuine scientific mysteries.
I cannot begin to offer any plausible theories. The science is far beyond me. The only theories I can come up with involve crashed alien spaceships or mysterious dark matter asteroids or the like, and those are entertaining, but hardly helpful.
Still, if there is one thing we science fiction writer types like, it is speculating, and I look forward to speculating on this one for a long time.
Seeya next weekm, Science Fans!