Holy particle physics, is it Friday again already? Well, time for some sweet, sweet science, then.

Let’s start off with something somewhat important and kind of serious, and get THAT out of the way.

Recently, the Pentagon has declared that cyber-attacks by other nations can constitute an ‘act of war’ which would then provoke an armed response from the American Armed Forces.

This was something that simply had to happen. As the article points out, there will be a lot of tricky issues to work out before this goes from policy to implementation (like how you prove a foreign nation is behind an attack, and how much of a response is justified), but it’s a Internet world now and far too many extremely important things happen online for the Internet world to remain outside the purview of national defense strategy. The days when we could still pretend the Internet was just a nerd’s playground or a fun new hobby are long long gone. Billions if not trillions of dollars of business happen daily online. People live a significant part of their lives (ahem) in the digital realm. To leave that undefended would be wildly irresponsible. It would be tantamount to simply withdrawing one’s troops from a vital strip of one’s border.

So while none of us in Not America are particularly keen to hear Americans devising yet another reason to invade people and blow stuff up, it would be foolhardy and naive not to acknowledge the necessity.

On to cheerier news : A Montreal based company called Enerkem is attracting major major investment from some big time players into its process for burning trash to produce energy.

The idea of burning trash to produce energy has been around for ages, but up until now, it’s just not been feasible. Every process attempted produces less energy than it took to collect the trash and burn it, and that’s obviously no way to run an energy concern.

But Enerkem claims they have the problem licked, and at their experimental plant outside Sherbrooke, Quebec, they will soon be producing 1.3 million gallons of ethanol fuel annually.

What impresses me is not just the dollars they attracted, but the players. The recent investment game from oil refinery giant Valero, no fools they, and even more signifigantly, those mega giants of the world of trash, Waste Management, whose familiar green dumpsters and garbage trucks with “WM” on them have become such a ubiquitous part of the modern world, they are like a branch of the government. If your apartment complex or office building has a dumpster, chances are, WM owns it and empties it.

Also, hey, go Canadian science! I would be extremely pleased to see a Canadian company be the one that comes up with the tech that leads the world into a more recycled future. (I honestly wish absolutely everything was recyclable. Then we could stop taking more from the environment all the time. )

I have a few vague reservations about ethanol as a solution, but hey, whatever solves the carbon problem is fine by me.

And speaking of cool new technologies, someone has come up with a very cool use for the new generation of remote controlled quadrocopter surveillance drones : getting footage of wild animals without scaring the expensive organic fertilizer out of them.

It’s obvious when you think about it. A lot of the buzz (so to speak) about these groovy new copters, which are no bigger than your hand in some cases, is that they can fly around and wirelessly beam back video in a unobtrusive and nearly silent fashion.

And while this conjures up visions of swarms of drones invading out privacy like something out of Terminator 2’s dystopian future, at least in the minds of us with brains stuffed full of science fiction and paranoia, I have to admit, using the technology to spy on wild animals instead of domesticated humans really appeals to me.

The trick with shooting footage of animals in the wild has always been capturing them in “candid” fashion. How do you get footage of animals behaving as they do in the wild when you are a bunch of clumsy humans in trucks and Jeeps, making noise and disrupting the scene?

There’s only so far you can go with footage of animals fleeing in terror and soiling themselves.

Before now, the solution has been to go ahead and disrupt things getting there, then set up a station in a likely area and simply wait for the animals to get used to you being there, then use the best telephoto lenses you can find to capture them acting in a reasonably spontaneous fashion.

That, however, means staying in the wild for months at a time with a large crew, and that is extremely expensive. Far better to be able to go there with basically no more than a backpack full of quadcopters and get your footage by basically spying on the critters.

I look forward to seeing what kind of footage this produces.