I know I am beginning to sound like a broken record^[1], but wow that week went fast. Hell, the whole month feels like it has galloped past at breakneck speed, and boy does that make a fella feel old.

Now I won’t lie to you. It has been a pretty thin week for science. Nothing really spectacular has come down the line, and to be perfectly honest, I was almost tempted to skip this week entirely and give you something other than the Friday Science Whatever instead.

But no, I will not deny you your science injection this week.

In fact, let us warm up our science receptors with this marvelous video of what the brave men and women working in the International Space Station get to see every day.

A Room With A View

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Now that, my friends….. is a view.

In fact, arguably, it is the best view available to live human beings in this entire Universe. It is the sort of view that I hope will fuel space tourism in the future.

You do not need to build a luxury hotel in space. All you need is the minimal creature comforts… and that amazing, incredible, indescribable view. Everyone who has seen that view, in person, has said it changed them profoundly, like a religious experience.

And not to be crass, but that kind of unique experience is something you can sell.

Imagine the social advantage you would have over other rich people if you had been to space when they had not. Imagine being able to hold forth endlessly on how it changed you, how it really gave you a fresh perspective on things, and how (this is the really juicy bit) you really cannot understand it until you have been there yourself.

That would get the rest of the private jet set salivating to go as well, and space motel rooms should then be sold to the rich like everything should be sold to the rich :

With an auction! Get them crawling all over each other to fund space exploration with their own personal fortunes when they will not pay for it with their taxes.

And of course, with enough capital, the industry expands, the number of space motels explodes, and the price goes down, till it becomes no more expensive than a mid-range expensive vacation.

Of course, by then simply everybody will have been to orbit, so what is a bored billionaire to do to get the upper hand at the country club to do?

Go to the Moon, of course.

The Fourth Bond^[2]

In other space related news, did you know that there was a third kind of chemical bond?

Not covalent, not ionic, not metallic, but a weird fourth type that can only form in the incredibly intense magnetic fields inside white dwarf and neutron stars. These fields are ten thousand times stronger than anything we could hope to create on Earth, because even if we could get the energy and the technology together somehow, the very intensity of the magnetic field would start warping the apparatus itself.

That is the freaky world of mega high magnetic field intensities. So to say that this discovery has no immediate real world application is a bit of an understatement.

But scientists are wondering whether the principles involved could be applied to the “barely past the stage of being science fiction” field of quantum computing.

Whether it can or not, attaching your fascinating but fairly obscure discovery to one of the hot science buzzwords of the day is always a good idea when it comes time for funding.

Certainly, we need all the help we can get as we come up against the limits of silicon computing and perhaps, even, the limits of binary computer and the semiconductor model entirely.

Up against such a challenge, all angles must be explored. Electricity was once just a scientific curiosity, after all, and people thought Maxwell’s equations were useless.

That is why we must fund basic science. You never know from what tiny and obscure seeds the next technological revolution will spring.

You Can Hear Me Now

Finally, an interesting development in the marvelously massive and fertile innovation space that is the world of cell phone technology : a phone that you can hear no matter how noisy your environment is.

And what intrigued me is that this is not accomplished via bone conduction, which is a technology that has been on the verge of becoming practical for at least a decade^[3], but something they are calling “tissue conduction”.

Instead of trying to get the vibrations that make up sound through our thick skulls, which tends to muffle things up a bit, tissue conduction transmits sound through the soft tissues of our heads.

This makes a certain amount of sense to me. After all, our ears, noses, and throat are all connected via sinus tissues and the Eustachian tubes. Using those soft tissues to get sound directly to the eardrum and to bypass the skull entirely seems at least plausible.

And the results of the research are apparently so good, they are rushing right into production :

The Urbano Progresso, currently available in Japan, is the first phone to use tissue conduction; the feature will debut in the U.S. within a year.

OK, first off… Urbano Progresso? that’s not a phone, that’s a Starbucks order.

Japan is so silly!

But back on topic, I am surprised they were able to go from concept to research to reality so quickly. But that is the light speed world of cellular technology for you.

I’m as big a fan as someone who does not even own a cellphone can be!

Seeya next week folks!