You know, kidderlings, it’s never an easy task for me, your humble science reporter (well, accumulator, anyhow), to choose which of the Super Totally Awesome Neato Science Stories he has accumulated over the past week’s time to share with you. Science is just plain awesome, and having to winnow down the field to just a few is often harder than osmium steel.

But this week is special. There are just so many incredibly cool stories that even hit on my own specific special interests (I have a lot of those) that I am going to have to just load up the blunderbuss of science and shoot them at you gangsta style.

Ready? No? Good, let’s go.

Let’s get the ball rolling with sex. Or rather, the grim and horrible specter that took a lot of the fun out of it, AIDS.

We’re getting close to have that sumbitch beaten, at least on points, and now there’s a $1 microchip that can test for HIV in fifteen minutes
coming soon.

Is that not enormous bags of awesome? Seriously, one drop of blood, fifteen minutes time for analysis, boom, tells you if you have AIDS. Also does syphilis. And it’s the size of a credit card, with no need for a human interpreter and an accuracy rate about the same as a lab. And all for a buck.

My dream is that we can get back to the sexual liberation of the seventies before AIDS came along to wreck the party. Imagine a sex club where they tested people before letting them in. I think people would be willing to wait 15 minutes for an orgy, don’t you?

OK, what else…. well, it wouldn’t be a true FSR without some self-driving cars!

Granted, it’s not going to be on the road till 2020 and hence we are still in the blue-sky WTF BBQ stage, but still, GM has plans to make a two-person self-driving highly futuristic pod-car (NO POD RACES) and has made some neat looking prototypes for the press.

In terms of scientific progress, it’s little more than a PR stunt, but in terms of illustrating the powerful forces in play behind the self-driving car future, it kicks an entire burro ranch’s worth of ass.

What else… oh! In terms of sheer hardcore nerdity, the current champion is the rather amazing fellow who, no bull, built his own damn electron microscope.

Granted, it only does 50x magnification and not the 1000x that the big boys do, but seeing as he built it basically in his back yard for around $1500 (plus 100 hours of his own labour, but it’s a labour of love) and the big boys start at $250,000 and only go up from there, it’s still a staggeringly significant achievement.

That’s one of the things that makes this era we live in so exciting for us science buffs is these tool revolutions that completely break the rules on how much money you need to do serious big deal science. That’s going to throw the field wide open for millions of amateur scientists to get into the game and propel science and technology faster than ever before.

Just what we need to invent ourselves out of the problems we invented ourselves into!

Or how about a total revolution in computer graphics? A new way of looking at the problem of rendering 3D environments could lead to a radical leap in detail level.

The technology is rather provocotively called Unlimited Detail, and the idea is this : instead of building objects out of polygons, like we do now, you build them out of virtual atoms, millions of them per (virtual) square inch.

But that would take way too much CPU to do even a very small virtual area, so the genius of this guy’s method is that it only renders the atoms needed to produce a certain angle of view. Thus, the number of atoms to render is vastly reduced.

Of course, the people behind this technology have a unique problem : how do you prove your amazingly realistic computer graphics are not, in fact, just some digital video that you shot with your camcorder?

What an odd little gully in that big Uncanny Valley, huh? The only solution I can see is to do hyper realistic renders of things that simply do not exist. Nobody can claim you just used your camcorder to capture video of a giant space monster snorting cocaine off the Brooklyn Bridge, now, can they?

Speaking of which, let’s do one more line of science then call it a night : the Chinese have discovered the world’s largest fungus.

The sucker is half a ton and 33 feet across. It was found eating rotting wood under a tree in China, which allowed it to get so damn huge.

Now like all the things we think of as mushrooms and fungi, the above-ground bulbous part is actually only there to produce and launch spores. Its function is purely reproductive.

So yes kidderlings, what we have long suspected is actually true : fungi are actually giant bulbous sexual organs.

And now China has the biggest one.

Symbolically speaking, we are all screwed.

Seeya next week, folks!