Yee haw, pardners! It’s Friday night and time for all us science cowboys to wrestle us some prime broncs from the world of discovery and put out brands on them! So strap on your science spurs, grab your six shooter of speculation, and put on your ten gallon hat filled with twelve gallons of curiosity, because we’re heading out to rustle us some news from the Science is OK Corral!

{ The preceding was written by little eight year old Billy Batson of Watusi, Hawaii, who fell into a time warp from the 1950’s and is a little shaken up right now, so the Make a Wish foundation insisted that I let him write the intro to what they assured me is his favorite feature on his favorite blog in the whole wild world. Boy, those celebrities really know how to lay a guilt trip. }

Well, Little Billy, let’s play a fun game. Let’s see if you can figure out what the following scientific device is designed to do before seeing the label at the end of the video.

That’s right, Little Billy….. sperm collection! It seems our ever clever friends in the Orient have harnessed their twin assets of mechanical genius and complete and total sexual perversion and invented a one-stop shopping destination for the millions of guys who would really love to donate some sperm, like right now, but just don’t want to go through all the hassle of waiting in line and filling out forms at the sperm bank. Imagine the efficiency and convenience if there was one of these little suckers on every street corner, next to the ATM!

We would finally achieve mankind’s longest held and most treasure dream : enough sperm for all.

And free blow jobs, obviously.

Moving on to our next story…. ahem. Mi mi mi mi miiii! *fwee!* ah yes. Ahem.

Someday we’ll find it
the Atlantic Wind Connection
The generators, the shoreline, and you!

(to the tune of this, obviously)

The above-linked story talks about a highly exciting and ambitious project to creature a series of ocean-based wind farms connected to (and tethered to) the shore by transmission lines. The story says that wind farming at sea makes sense, because the wind is stronger and steadier out there, and you are less likely to get yobbos and doofi complaining about the noise or the view.

Makes sense to me. I suppose some fishermen or deep-sea tour operators might bitch, but you can always just offer them jobs on the wind farms. One of the aspects of the emerging new energy economy that I hope to see flourish is the possibility of independent entrepreneurs to go out and create their own energy-generating businesses, which would then allow a certain freedom to people to create their own personal lifestyles in a way never seen since the days of the Wild West. I would be quite eager to see what sort of communities sprang up based around offshore wind farming. The system they are talking about could support many small or medium sized energy producers, and I can well imagine that attracting the sort of eclectic mix of dreamers and drifters and misfits that the Gold Rush did.

I imagine small floating towns springing up to service these floating islands of entrepreneurial spirit, and a whole sea-based lifestyle emerging somewhat like the Florida Keys or the Greek Islands. A combination of relaxed atmosphere and ambition could make for a pretty interesting culture.

Heck, I might try it myself. After all, no reason they can’t transmit the Internet along those lines….

Finally, holy crap, now they have made quantum entanglement you can see!

Quantum entanglement is that freaky effect that makes two entangled particles continue to behave in opposite ways even if you separate them by (at last count) hundreds of miles. You do one thing to Particle A, and Particle B does the opposite, and what’s more, does so with absolutely no detectable time delay.

And while the results of the study in question, which replaced the standard mechanical photon detectors with the ones in the eyes of a bunch of scientists, are a trifle iffy (turns out, photo amplification and quantum entanglement don’t play well together for deep mathy reasons), it’s still a pretty exciting development in the world of quantum entanglement.

I am waiting till this stuff is developed enough to make a super expensive geek toy out of it. Imagine having two little boxes, and no matter how far apart you separate them, you can still get tinny audio through them with no delay. They would be the ultimate walkie-talkies!