Hey there science fans! It’s time for another big week of big stories about big science!
Just five stories for you this week. It’s been a relatively slow week for science, and to be quite honest, that is a bit of a relief.
These weeks where I have to slog through 22 links to come up with six that fit are a lot of work!
So this week, we relax a little, pour ourselves a relaxing libation, put our feet up in order to minimize stress on our spines, and deal with some nifty science stories,
Call it Science Siesta Time. Ola, amigos!
First of we have this bright idea (ha ha) for painting public trails and walkways with glow in the dark paint.
The technology, called STARPATH (sounds like astrology software), is based around a paint that absorbs ultraviolet radiation during the day, then radiates it back out during the night.
So, pretty much just like whatever glow in the dark doohickey you had as a child. For me it was stickers.
The idea is that you would then have, basically, a self-lighting path, which eliminates the “pools of light” problems associated with street lights, not to mention saving on the electric bill.
A lot of small towns with tight budgets could get a lot of relief out of not having to pay to power and maintain as much street lighting any more.
I am not sure this would be an actual replacement for all street lighting, but it would be boffo for nature trails, bike paths, and other such instances.
And I mean come on… you are walking on a path made of light! That has got to be cool as beans on toast.
Next up, we learn that scientists have found the coldest place in the universe.
And as both Einstein and Hawking predicted, it’s between Anne Coulter’s legs.
Ba dum bump. OK, now that I got THAT out of my system, let’s talk about the actual story. The real deal is that scientists have observed a spot in the universe, called the Boomerang Nebula because it keeps moving back in with its parents (not really), that is only one degree above absolute zero, or 1 degree Kelvin.
And that’s neat and all, hut finding out that something in space is very very cold is not exactly headline news. What makes this cold spot so interesting is that it is actually colder than the background radiation of space.
That means that the Boomerang Neubla is somehow refrigerating itself. Is that cool, or what?
Oh, plus it also looks like this :
Spooky, no? Space has such cool stuff in it. It sucks so bad that we can’t go out there and see it close up yet.
Still waiting on that Alcubierre-White drive, people! Chop chop!
Well, so much for nice clean stars and space. Now, on to the gooey organic stuff.
First up, we have great news from the world of, guess what, tissue engineering. The Colombian lady who received the world’s first artificially grown trachea is still going strong five years later.
There has been zero, absolutely zero, immunological response and that means absolutely no rejection. Her body accepts the transplant of what is a pretty major part of one’s body as if it was its own flesh.
Because that’s essentially what it is. They took a donor trachea, washed away all the cells leaving the protein scaffolding behind, and built the trachea back up with the recipient’s own cells.
The patient is alive and well and leading a normal life despite being one of the first human beings to receive one of these organs. She didn’t need any immunosuppressant drugs, which is fab because honestly, we kind of need our immune systems and anything that keeps us from having to suppress it is a very good thing.
Next on the hit parade is this uber nifty DNA scanner.
IT derives its nift for many things. It’s faster than the usual scanner, it measures far more base pairs, and it even supports USB so you can scan DNA on the go.
But the real shockeroo is the price tag : $1000.
You read that right… one thousand bucks. That’s it. For $1K, you too could scan 70,000 base pairs of DNA in the comfort of your own home, office, or clean LOOKING motel room.
A thousand bucks isn’t pocket change, but it’s definitely a consumer price. There will be tons and tons of well heeled geeks out there that will want one just to have one.
But the real market, of course, will be genetic researchers. With a sequencer that cheap, the study of genes will become far more democratized, and hence the whole science will move at a much, much faster pace.
This can only hasten the era of gene based medicines that treat all kinds of previous untreatable conditions.
Just imagine what all those nerds and scientists (pro nerds) will be able to do with that power.
Probably something like rewriting the entire genome of an organism.
That’s the Big Story of this week, folks, and I think you can see why. The brave new world of genetic engineering building custom genomes and then writing them into organisms is here.
Granted, in this case, it was just the genome of that ever present bug E. Coli , but that is just a starting point. Eventually it might even be applicable to multicellular life.
That would still leave the problem of how to rewrite an entire lifeform’s DNA without killing it. We would have to invent a really amazing form of suspended animation. Then maybe we would get nanobots, or even custom viruses, to change the genome in every single cell.
It is a breathtaking possibility and really gives me that sense of vertigo that I mentioned before, where I feel like I am looking into a whole new future stretching out before me.
It’s both exhilarating and frightening to contemplate. There is so much going on in science right now.
The one thing I can say for sure is that the future will be very… different.
And I, for one, am ready for that.
At least I think I am….
Seeya next week!