Came across a bunch of pretty cool science stories lately, so I figured I would share.

Let’s start with a rave fave of mine, battery science. Some Japanese scientists have come up with a new battery tech called Ryden dual carbon batteries and from what it says in the article, it sounds absolutely amazing.

First, the specs. The company behind the Ryden battery, Power Japan Plus (totally the name of an anime attack), says that it can charge twenty times faster than the standard lithium ion batteries that power all our devices today. Charge times are important to today’s impatient millennials who consider any time spent disconnected from their smartphones as worse than Hitler death from rancid AIDS.

Myself, I just have the tablet, which takes around 90 minutes to charge from low to full. As I don’t use out of the home much, that is fine by me. But if I was more active, it would become an issue.

Okay, but a lot of new battery techs are promising faster charging. Big deal.

But what about how long it lasts? Power Japan Plus also claims that their Ryden batteries would let your electric car have a 300 mile range, which I am guessing is long enough for even the most ambitious of commuters.

Very good, but not that special. 300 miles is rapidly becoming the norm. What else?

This is what I think is its killer feature : it requires absolutely no rare earth metals. It’s made entirely of carbon. The anode and the diode are both carbon! The necessary difference in electrical potential between the two is created by using different organic electrolyte solutions.

And if there is one thing I know we will always have around, it’s carbon. In fact, we have a rather nasty surplus in the air that is causing all kinds of problems right now. All life on Earth is carbon-based. We have carbon everywhere!

And now we can turn it into the sort of batteries that will keep us from putting even more carbon into the air.

How keen is that?

Next up, dogs and cancer.

Don’t worry, it’s not dogs with cancer. It’s more evidence that dogs can be trained to detect cancer in people with an extremely high rate of accuracy.

And you thought those poor cadaver dogs has a depressing job.

Seriously though, evidence is mounting that some dogs can be trained to detect cancer. The dogs can smell the Volatile Organic Chemicals (or VOCs) that cancers produce in the human body, and can use that to detect the presence of tumours in the patient’s breath or urine sample.

This, of course, immediately makes me imagine an awkward scenario :

Doctor : Now before we begin, Mister Landmann, have you met my dog Rex?
Patient : Um, no…. uh, hello nice doggie. My, he likes to get close, doesn’t he? Why is he pawing the ground and whining? Look pal, your breath isn’t that great either. Look, now he’s pawing at the door, trying to get out. That is one screwy dog you have there, Doc. Doc? Doc? Now where did HE go?

Obviously I went totally Bob Newhart there.

Sadly, this research will not lead to a rise in dog ownership by clinicians. The scientists are merely studying the dogs to see how the dogs are able to do it. When they do, they hope to build an “electronic nose” that can detect those VOCs in something more like a laboratory setting.

Still, it is amazing to imagine having your life saved by a dog with a very keen nose, who detected your cancer way before it was a serious danger and can be handled without chemo or radiation or anything else horrible.

Now that would be a dog that would deserve a steak.

Finally, we have something that seems like it might be kind of important : we know how to make matter out of light.

In fact, we have known this since 1934. A pait of scientists, Breit and Wheeler, figured it out way back then, but at the time nobody took them seriously and thought they were a pair of cranks. And as it seemed, at the time, impossible to imagine how one would smash exactly one photon into exactly one other photon and then detect the results, their theory has remained unproven for 80 years.

But one day, some scientists at Imperial College London were talking, and they realized this idea was totally provable now, and published their method in a journal with the very cool name of Nature Photonics.

Sounds like something Wesley Crusher would be cramming for when he accidentally put the Enterprise in danger which it then had to be saved from by him.

Seriously, it’s weird that they ever let that kid near anything more complicated than an abacus.

Anyhow, the idea that we can turn light into matter seems rather important to me. For one thing, it would make teleportation seem just that little bit more plausible.

But more importantly, it means that would could create matter, actual matter, out of what, to us, is nowhere. After all, the Universe is full of light. Imagine a device that looks like a solar dish, but instead of electricity, it produces coffee.

Or blood plasma. Or… anything, really.

Like my roomie and icon of awesomeness Joe said, the ability to go from energy to matter is right there in Einstein’s theories. Matter and energy are one, and therefore, it is possible to go from one to the other.

But historically, it’s all been one way. We know how to, in a crude way, get certain kinds of matter to give up some of its energy. It’s something we basically understand.

After all, even a caveman standing in front of a fire is using technology to unleash the latent energy in matter.

But going the other way?

That is totally quasi-Clarke level technology.

Well that’s it for me for tonight, folks. Oh… went to the doc today. No bone damage to my knee, phew. It’s likely just a minor issue with the tendon connecting kneecap to leg.

See you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!