There’s just too much cool science news around for me to wait till Friday to tell you, so you lucky people get a bonus helping of science this week!

Plus I am too sleepy to write anything more difficult. Stupid sleep apnea.

First up : robots inventing their own language!

It’s the result of a rather clever and well thought out experiment. Basically, folks at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Institute of Technology took your usual little box-on-wheels robots, with a camera for seeing and a laser range finder for avoiding collisions, and gave them ears and a mouth – or rather, a microphone and speakers – and let them loose in a maze to play simple games.

The robots were programmed assign random names to places they visit, and say those names out loud, and through this, slowly build up a map of their environment.

Obviously, these two robots, called “Lingobots”, are not exactly going to be chatting with anyone about the latest sports game any time soon. But I admire the simple and effective experimental design, stripping the problem of language down to its most basic level by using arbitrary random labels (which is all words are, after all) and building on top of the existing spatially-aware robot designs already well established by previous robotics engineers.

As a result, we have a very interesting experiment that is sure to expand out knowledge of both artificial intelligence and the nature of human language as well.

Way to go, Queensland nerds!

Moving into considerably more controversial science, a firm in the United Kingdom will soon be offering people a chance to take a test to tell you how long you will live.

Now, don’t worry, this isn’t like that Robert A. Heinlein story, Life-Line. where Doctor Pinero could tell you exactly how long you will live and exactly when you will die regardless of the cause of your death. We are not to that level of near-mystical science yet.

Instead, this will be a simple blood test which capitalizes (quite prematurely, in my honest opinion) on the recent discovery that the length of the telomeres in one’s blood and the length of one’s life share a strong correlation.

The shorter the telomeres, the shorter the life, in other words.

In fact, this line of research has suggested that these telomeres might very well be the measuring stick of life, the burning candle that your body uses in order to know how old you are and hence when various age-dependent life processes, like puberty or old age, should start and stop.

This dangles the tantalizing prospect of a cure for all aging via simply returning one’s telomeres to the desired length somehow. Pick an age, any age, and in the future, telomere repair therapy could freeze you at that age, and as long as you kept up the treatment, you would never get a day older, at least as far as your body knows.

“Old age” is only one of the reasons we get sicker as we get older, however. There’s accumulation of toxins, the long term effects of gravity on body tissues, and parts just plain old wearing out.

Still, telomeretelomeres involved, and a test like this could do a lot more harm than good. People could make very important life-changing decision will long-term repercussions based on this test.

And speaking of making long term decisions that will change the rest of your life, how about voluntarily getting your hand amputated so you can replace it with a robot hand?

And you thought waking up after a night out with a bad tattoo was harsh!

Luckily, it’s not quite what it sounds like. True, the patient has a living hand, and is getting that hand removed in order to make room for a bionic replacement, but the hand is completely useless due to nerve damage from a motorcycle accident. No movement, no feeling.

So it’s not just a case of someone saying “I am bored with my perfectly functional hand, and want to be a cyborg”. It’s fully medically justified, in my opinion. Sure, the hand is still alive, but functionally, it’s dead, and squeamishness about taking off a living hand and replacing it with a robot model is no excuse for condemning this poor young man to a life without the use of a hand and impeding the progress of science towards a day when we can replace any limb with bionic parts should disaster fall.

Still, not hard to imagine a future where people get this done just for fashion, is it?