SCIENCE! Isn’t it awesome? There is a reason I dedicate one seventh of my blog entries to science news, and that is because I absolutely love science. At one point I thought I might become a professional scientist, but then calculus happened and well, there went that dream.

Besides, I am much better suited to writing about science. I have crazy awesome verbal skills, I devour science news like Pac-man eats dots, and honestly, it would have been really hard for me to pick one scientific field and focus on it.

There is just so much cool stuff happening out there!

And then there’s stuff like this.

Smells On Your Cell

Finally, the innovation billions of people have been waiting for with breathless anticipation! No, not a cure for cancer or a TV so big you can live inside it… it’s the ability to transmit smells via cell phone! Isn’t that so much better?

The moment I read the headline for this story, I know exactly how it would work and how, as a result, incredibly stupid it would be.

As the article points out, the human sense of smell is incredibly complex. In order to actually transmit smells, you would first have to be able to encode them – no small feet given how complex some molecules are – and then (the hard part) be able to manufacture them on the other end.

It would basically be teleportation. Not going to happen any time soon.

Instead, the device simply transmits a signal to the receiving cell phone telling it to release one of the pre-manufactured preset scents that come with the device.

So you can totally send someone the smell you are smelling…. if you happen to be smelling one of the device’s own scents.

That is not vaguely useful, interesting, or most importantly, what it claims to be.

And that is why I think this Chakar Perfume app is fit…. for the pit.

And speaking of inane inventions….

No More Burning Your Mouf

Here we have an invention that provides immediate relief for the pain caused by burning your mouth on a hot beverage or food.

And sure, we have all been there. Once. Or maybe twice. Coffee and pizza are the usual culprits, although for me, the most consistent offender has been microwave burritos.

(Seriously, those things are full of molten freaking lava when they come out of the microwave. What good is a product that cooks in a minute and a half if you can’t actually eat it for ten minutes?)

But seriously, who the heck burns their mouth often enough to keep a bunch of breath strip type burn aids in their product? Who is stupid enough to eat too-hot food all the time, but smart enough to think ahead and buy a product for it?

There must be some sort of advanced medical use for it, though. There are rare, terrible diseases that can cause outbreaks of chancre sores in the mouth.

Maybe those people could use it?

Soft and Crusty

Recent science has revealed that surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan (one of the fave for life in this solar system) is soft and crusty, like freshly frozen snow.

Or maybe damp sand. A recent analysis of what, exactly, happened when the Huygens lander landed on the surface of Titan. It did make a 4.7 inch dent into the surface, which jived with the theory that the surface would be soft, but then bounced out again onto the surface, where it came to rest with no further sinking, suggesting the surface has some rigidity.

So it is like that really fun (when you are a kid) kind of snow where the surface is frozen and can bear some weight, but with enough pressure you break through to the soft snow underneath.

And what kid could resist trying to cross the snow without breaking it? It was like one of those scenes where people are trying to cross thin ice, except the worst thing that could happen was a dunk in the snow up to your middle.

This suggests that when we next go to Titan, we will need to be wearing snowshoes. Or at least, our lander will need to be.

Quick, somebody contract Bombardier to make a Space Skidoo!

Is Anybody Home?

And finally, it is Big Finish time, the coolest story I came across this week, and it is a doozy, at least for a brain science nerd and philosopher like myself.

Ready? Scientists in Europe think they may have come up with an objective way to test for consciousness.

Bang! Zoom! Consciousness. If you can read this, you are already doing it.

Obviously, the first and most immediate implications of an objective and widely accepted test for consciousness would be medical. We use phrases like “brain dead” rather glibly, but there is mounting evidence that someone can zero out an EEG and still be alive, or at least, potentially alive again.

And seeing as one of the universally accepted criterion for death in human beings is “will never be alive again”, this puts medical ethics in a heartbreakingly precarious position.

The test builds on a field of mathematics that I find quite intriguing, complexity math. That is the math of determining the complexity of a system, and hence, over time, being able to tell whether a system is growing more complex or less complex.

Being a systems kind of fellow, this intrigues me. And as applied to that marvelously and mysteriously complex system known as the human mind, and the incredibly difficult question of consciousness, it absolutely fascinates me.

Consider my Spock Eyebrow fully engaged.

Beyond the medical, I am just dying to know what this technique might teach us about the nature of consciousness. The history of the quest for AI has taught us that one way to learn about the nature of the human brain is by trying to reproduce it, and a test for consciousness, in a sense, is recreating human consciousness in the form of a mathematical model.

It is no fMRI, but expanding the boundaries of our understanding of just what, exactly, is going on in our heads is always a good thing.

Seeya next week, folks!