Well, here it is, Friday again already, and time to take a look at what’s up in the world of science.

First, from the realms of Creepy Science (which is, I think you’ll admit, one of the more fun kinds of science), we have the Kraft Foods Dinner Decider.

Imagine this. There’s a little display gizmo in your local supermarket. You walk past it, not thinking much of it, but then notice that as you get into its range, the ad it is displaying seems oddly appropriate. You’re a mother of three wondering what to make the family for dinner, and wow, there is an ad for a Kraft product that would be just perfect and a family sized recipe suggestion to go with it. Wow, how did it know?

It knew because it scanned your face with a digital camera and then used facial recognition software to figure out your demographic via your age, gender, and so on. And of course, this is a Kraft technology, so everything they suggest will be a Kraft product. That’s not so huge a deal, though, because Kraft has like a zillion products. But still, nothing’s keeping you from taking the suggestion but making it with cheap generic products instead to save money.

Anyhow, does this sound like some kind of marketing team’s wet dream, or what? Look, we can demographically target each consumer on the fly! Think of how much more effective our ads will be now that we can READ THEIR MINDS! Well, OK, maybe not read their minds per se. Yet. But I have our IT guys working on that as we speak!

I honestly think it sounds like a waste of technology, and creepy to boot. I doubt it will make their ads more effective, and probably will just be something that comes and goes more or less unnoticed. It’s the sort of thing that gets made because marketing types desperately want to believe that this kind of thing can work, but the consumers honestly could not care less.

From the creepily commercial to the kinda creepy but ultimately very cool, we have Fruit Flies Are Smarter Than You (at one little thing).

Turns out, deep within the highly primitive brains of one of the world’s simplest creatures, the fruit fly, is a highly sophisticated neural network that does a very efficient job of arranging the fruit fly’s sensory bristles (told you it was simple) in such a way that the fruit fly’s sensory bristles make a very efficient network, with some bristles acting as “leaders”, processing and redistributing information to the other bristles.

By studying the way the fruit fly does this, scientists have come up with an equation, apparently an elegantly simple one, that can be used to make modern communication networks and distributed computer processes similarly efficient.

What impresses me the most about this story is that they got an actual, functional, useful equation out of their study. So many of these “let’s study a biological model and figure out how it does X” type studies end up with very vague or contradictory results. They start out with the right idea, but either the subject is simply too complex for basic analysis or the researchers start off with the right focus but then get bogged down in the details.

It’s like all those people in the olden days who tried to invent a way for humans to fly by imitating birds. It sounds logical on the face of it, but without understanding the actual principles involved in bird flight (like, for example, Bernouli’s principle and that all important lift-to-weight ratio), it was tragically and absurdly doomed to failure.

And speaking of the tragically absurd, did you know that DNA can electro-magically teleport?

That is what a Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher named Montagnier is claiming. He put some DNA in water in one test tube, and some plain water in another test tube, stuck them in a Farraday cage to filter out interference from the Earth’s eletro-magic field, put a copper coil around them to generate a weak electro-magic field around the tubes, and waited.

Then, one night, when the moon was full and the stars were aligned and the garden faeries were dancing widdershins, he checked Test Tube #2 via PCR and lo and behold, there was DNA in there!

Obviously, it must have gotten there from Test Tube #1 via some completely unknown process that violates all known laws of physics and chemistry! That’s the only logical and sensible explanation! Not, you know, that maybe the water in Test Tube #2 was contaminated in the first place, or they did the PCR test wrong, or a million other less magical explanations.

Seriously, if this guy hadn’t been one of the people who got the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine for definitively linking HIV with AIDS, nobody would have even heard of this malarkey. If I was the Nobel people, this crap would make me wonder what exactly this guy contributed to that award winning study.

I’m guessing he brought the pot.

One last thing. I like this little snip from the article on PopSci :

The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication.

Oh really? What a surprise that such a sterling and well founded study has not yet been snapped up for publication by all the most respect scientific journals in the world! Surely, any minute now, we can expected this groundbreaking revelation to be reproduced worldwide and then published in Nature.

Because that’s the thing : this is an amazingly easy to reproduce experiment. Lots of universities have the stuff for electromagnetic shielding lying around, and they all have PCR (used to reproduce DNA samples so they are big enough to study) now, and after that you just need a known DNA sample, some test tubes, some copper tubing, a wire, some batteries, and a faucet.

A first year chemistry student could put that together in an hour.

Personally, I would love to see Mythbusters take this one on. It would be hilarious.