May twenty SEVEN, two thousand and ELEVEN. Hey, that rhymes!

Forgive me, bad sleep has addled my brain. I just woke up from a dream in which I turned a corner and there on the wall was this HUGE bug, bigger than a dinner plate, and it made this horrible buzzing sound that made the air shake with how loud it was. It was mostly like a huge fly, but with some beetle features. And it was coming right at me. Scared me so bad it woke me up.

I blame all the Monster Hunter Tri that I have been playing. Lots of imaginative nasties in there.

Anyhow… on with the science!

First, some mad props to some extremely bright researches for invented a truly magic marker.

The problem : millions of mothers and babies dying each year from easily treated prenatal conditions. The majority of these are in third world countries, where the fifty cent dipstick test we use to screen for these conditions here in the modern world is prohibitively expensive.

Enter this new marker. Instead of the dipstick urine test, you just draw a line on a piece of paper, and then drip a drop of the patient’s urine onto the line. If it changes color, you have your result.

The first one developed detects a common but nasty condition called pre-eclampsia. It can cause very serious complication for the mother, but if caught early, it can easily be treated.

And with the marker test, the cost goes from fifty cents per test to one third of a cent per test. That makes the marker test one hundred and fifty times cheaper.

Now that is the kind of efficiency that can save millions of lives.

Next : cleaning up Japan’s radioactivity problem with the help of a truly heroic blue goo.

The stuff is called DeconGoo, and like a lot of miracle products, it was discovered by accident. A researched accidentally dripped a solution he was working on onto the floor. When he went to clean it up afterward, he discovered that it had solidified into a rubbery blue gel that was easy to peel up off of the concrete floor.

But the truly miraculous thing was that where the goo had been, there was a spot so incredibly clean that absolutely no amount of scrubbing could match it. It had stuck to, and then encapsulated, everything on the surface that was not made of the surface.

Pretty awesome, huh? I want some of this stuff just for cleaning around the house. I am also kind of curious as to what would happen if you put this stuff on human skin. Presumably, it would be one hell of an efficient depilatory and exfoliant, if nothing else.

But for now, its noble use is to clean up all the little traces of toxic stuff left over after a hazmat situation. Right now, the usual method involves essentially good old soap, water, and elbow grease, and that has the distinctly unfortunate problem of taking the stuff and putting it into water, which is hard to clean up and has a nasty tendency to seep right back into things, go places you don’t want it to go, and in general be a bitch and a half to deal with.

Not so the new blue goo! Everything it soaks up gets trapped in the goo when it solidifies, and then you just peel it off like it was so much Silly Putty.

That is freaking awesome.

And speaking of awesome, Disney wants you to truly feel your video game experience. In fact, they want it to send chills up your spine.

They have invented a chain which uses a device they call the Sensory Brush to exploit a number of little known minor flaws in how our bodies perceive vibration to create a number of lifelike tactile sensations to enhance your video game (or even movie) experience.

Of particular note is the claim that this system could mimic the feel of the gravity and acceleration associated with race car driving for a driving based video game.

I don’t much care for driving video games myself (unless I get missile launchers), but I have to admit, that sounds pretty freaking sweet.

And get this… the system can also simulate feelings like rain dripping down your back, or someone touching you from behind. Imagine THAT moment while watching a scary horror movie! They had better make those seats water-proof, or rather, urine-proof.

And, you know, porn. ‘Nuff said.