Back to science! It feels good to be back, folks. We have six scintillating stories of science and the search for knowledge to cover tonight, so let’s get seated comfortably, open our minds up all the way, and let the sunshine of reason and progress take us into the future!

First up : Local girl makes good!

That’s Victoria student Ann Makosinki and here simple little miracle, the human heat powered flashlight.

It’s brilliantly simple and potentially a real game changer for all kinds of human portable gizmos. Sure, right now it’s a flashlight, but if it can power a flashlight, it can power other things too.

We mammals radiate a lot of heat, and that’s free energy from our point of view. If all it takes is a temperature differential, and the bigger the differential, the brighter the bulb, then I want to see what these things can do in the winter!

Who knows, maybe they could be used to help power the lights (and the heating!) in buildings during the winter. Could save a lot of money and energy!

But here’s a brain twister. Say you use this power source to power a refrigeration unit. The colder it gets, the more energy the power source makes.

But the more power it makes… the colder it gets.

Sounds like perpetual motion, doesn’t it?

Next up : is your computer smarter than a four year old?

That’s what the people behind an AI called ConceptNet 4 asked themselves. To get the answer, they gave the AI the same sort of test you would give a young child to test their mental abilities.

Results were mixed.

Sloan said ConceptNet 4 did very well on a test of vocabulary and on a test of its ability to recognize similarities.”But ConceptNet 4 did dramatically worse than average on comprehension­the ‘why’ questions,” he said.

So when they say it’s as smart as a four year old child, they really mean one that autistic.

Still, bravo for thinking outside the box and using a child’s learning test to test your AI!

When they get to “as smart as a ten year old”. call Jeff Foxworthy.

Okay, from here on, it’s medical miracle time!

First up : a brain scan to diagnose ADHD.

Color me skeptical. The theory seems sound enough. Measuring the ratio between two kinds of brain waves in order to find out how fast those impulses are firing in there.

And their results seem decently founded. And Dog only knows, the world needs an objective measure of ADHD and it needs it RIGHT NOW.

And nobody is saying they will use this as the sole diagnostic tool.

But I am still reluctant to endorse such a device. The brain is not that simple.

Next up : Lee Majors as The Bionic Pancreas!

Well OK, not really. It’s more like a hyper sophisticated glucose pump. I won’t call something the Bionic Pancreas until it makes insulin the way the pancreas does, from materials in the bloodstream, and no longer requires artificial insulin.

But still, the device is damned impressive. Patients using it spent one tenth of as much time at high blood sugar levels as someone using another device. The BP(tm) continuously monitors blood sugar and releases insulin on an as-needed basis.

Exactly like your actual pancreas does. In that sense, the name is accurate.

I am still not that keen about having an insulin pump installed on me, but if it essentially returned me to non-diabetic status, it would be worth it.

Imagine being able to eat what I wanted, like a normal person! I miss the sweet life so much.

And if that doesn’t impress you, how about a miracle drug that cures all form of cancer?

Turns out, there is a protein called CD47 that tells your body to treat the cancer cells as normal cells, as opposed to attacking and destroying them as it would any other foreign body.

The new treatment consists of an antibody that attacks CD47 and disables it, and at the same time frees up powerful immune cells call macrophages that act as the intelligence gatherers of immunology.

They are the cells which identify threats and then “teach” the white cells about them, and then the white cells attack. By opening the door for these macrophages, this antibody robs cancer of its primary defense and teaches the body to attack cancer and destroy it.

And cancer is just a cluster of cells. It’s not like a bacteria or virus that can fight back by developing an immunity or multiplying rapidly.

Once it’s naked, it’s helpless, and eliminating it will be less disruptive to the body than fighting off the common cold.

We have cancer on the run, folks.

And what can top that? How about the man without a heart? And no, I am not talking Paul Ryan.

Remember the Jarvik artificial heart from way back when? Well the science of artificial hearts is back again with this new device.

But it’s not like any heart you have ever seen before.

For one thing, it doesn’t beat.

That’s right, be still my beating heart, it’s a non-beating heart. The device pumps blood via dozens of tiny turbines instead of the fist-squeeze type motion of our natural hearts. So there is no pumping, no heartbeat, and no pulse.

And yet there’s the patient, alive and well and breathing on their own and everything.

First off, I want to congratulate the team for not getting stuck trying to copy our existing hearts. Biomimicry is rarely a successful approach to technological solutions. Instead, you have to strip the question down to its absolute basics : what does a heart do? And how can we do that in a way that works?

And the idea of, in the same era, stopping both cancer and heart disease makes me feel lightheaded. Those are the two biggest killers in modern society.

Solving both of those alone could bring our life expectancies up a decade.

Throw in all the work being done in stem cells, lab grown organs, and telomeres, and we might just see another big jump in life expectancy in my lifetime.

In order words, just in time.