Exactly one month till I am 40. Nuuuuu!
Anyhow, hi there science fans! Time for the latest edition of that Friday Science Thing. We have a passel (whatever that is) of scientific awesomeness to explore and play with today, so let’s put on our water wings and dive right in!
Let’s start at the thinnest part of the edge of science, known formally as the ‘craclpot zone” : an Iranian scientist claims to have invented a machine that can tell you your future.
The press has been quite incorrectly calling this a “time machine”, showing their usual level of science fiction illiteracy. Such a device would not be a time machine. Those let you travel in time.
If this guy Ali Razeq is, to the surprise of the world, not nuts, his device would be more akin to the crystal ball of Gypsy legend. It would predict the future but it would not get you there any faster than the one second per second you are getting right now.
Details are, surprise surprise, murky and few. The claim is that the device :
“…easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users…”
It does this, Razeq claims, using “complex algorithms”. Thanks Ali, that clears it all up.
Now, given a broad definition of ‘prediction’, you could easily make a program that makes basic deductions from facts about people.
Like, for instance, if a person is fifty, it would not be hard to guess that they will experience serious joint pain in the next five years.
But the real beauty of a scam like this is that nobody will know if it works for 5 years!
Next up, progress in that old favorite of ours, tissue engineering, or as they are calling it now (presumably because it sounds sexier), “regenerative medicine”.
Scientists have produced the first ever “lab grown” kidney, and it even works! Kinda.
They took an existing rat kidney, washed away the existing cells while leaving the highly intricate “scaffolding” in place, then used that scaffolding to build en entirely new rat kidney.
It even produced urine, which is one of the kidney’s most important functions. Sadly, once they transplanted it back into a rat (poor rat!), the urine production dropped to a trickle.
So this is not exactly a rousing success. But it is definitely progress, and I feel we can safely say that these people seem to be on the right track.
Kidneys are in high demand in organ transplant world, so anything that might lead to the ability to produce viable kidneys en masse would be a major medical breakthrough that could save the lives of millions of renal disease suffers.
Ideally, in the future we will be able to reproduce the entire prenatal sequence that leads to growing an organ in the first place, in the womb.
But at adult sizes… a baby kidney is not going to do an adult much good.
Next up, we have the Interesting Purely On The Basis Of Its Name winner of the week : some scientists are saying that the Earth may have a shadow biosphere.
Oooh, a shadow biosphere. Is it made of dark matter?
Sadly, no, or at least, no more than everything else is in this Universe of ours. The idea is that could be another biosphere made of an entirely different kind of life right here on Earth.
All us living beings on Earth, from the paramecium to the dolphin to us to the giant sequoia, are related. The Natives and other animists actually had that right. We are all based on the same type of carbon based biochemistry and are made of the exact same sort of stuff.
The shadow biosphere, if it exists, would be based on a totally different sort of carbon chemistry. Scientists estimate that, back in the days of the primordial soup, there was at least twenty different ways that life could have arisen from the primal goop.
If life did happen twice on Planet Earth, that would do wonders for another rave fave of this column, Drake’s Equation. It would greatly improve the chances of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos.
If this shadow biosphere does exist, though, it will only be on the microbial level.
Otherwise, to be honest, we would probably have found it by now. A strange creature that operates on an entirely different biochemistry than us would surely attract a lot of attention.
Finally, we have this bit of pure uncut scientific awesomeness… FROM SPACE!
Some kids wanted to know what happens when you wring out a washcloth in space, and our Man In The Sky, Canadian astronaut and current Commander of the International Space Station Chris Hadfield, took three minutes out of his busy day to check it out.
First off, wasn’t it freak to see him squirt the water onto the washcloth “sideways”? It looks totally unnatural to our Earth based eyes. But there is no up or down in space. The water was making it to the washcloth under its own pressure as it exited the squirt bottle alone.
And wow, what an amazing result! It is both unexpected and easily explained, as well as being extremely visual, making it an ideal illustrative case if you want to talk about zero gravity and/or hydrodynamics.
Due to how water behaves when exposed to air, any open container of water will have a layer atop of it that acts like a very thin skin.
That skin is called surface tension, and here on Earth, ut is a minor (but important) force. It really cannot compete with gravity.
But in space, there is no gravity, and so this minor force is all that is needed to coat Commander Hadfield’s arms in a slightly sticky sheath of water.
That is so cool it makes my toes tingle!
That’s all for this week, science fans! Tune in next week for a second passel of science and another very silly column name.