Holy cats, it’s Friday again already! We need to start putting these things further apart or something. I mean holy crapola, it’s September already! I am so not ready for it to be September yet. I am not even halfway done with August yet and I still have loads of leftover July taking up space and Tupperware in the fridge.
But oh well, time marches on, and so does the relentless forward rush of science. I have the usual jumbo pack of science related stories to share with you this week, so let’s skip the rest of the formalities and dig right in with both hands!
First up, let’s check in with one of my very favorite science type subjects, tissue engineering. No, not how to build a better Kleenex, but how to grow human tissue like muscles, skin, and hopefully one day entire organs in a lab.
A little creepy, I know, but the potential good for humanity of a future with no need for organ banks more than outweighs the ick factor.
The latest news is that some scientists at Holland’s Eindhoven University of Technology have figured out how to overcome the problem of lab-grown muscle tissue being flabby.
Turns out, it’s not rocket science. You just stick some Velcro tabs on either end of the muscle to stretch it while it grows, and voila, you get all the growing cells to align in the same direction and ergo become toned and firm and ready for the beach.
As a bonus, the muscles also grow their own intracellular blood vessels, which had been a problem as well. Thus, the path is now open for lab-grown muscles, which will mean a lot for medicine as well as tissue engineering’s even weirder offshoot, vat grown meat.
After all, the meat we eat is pretty much just animal muscle tissue. If we can grow animal muscle and fat in the lab, then we could see not just a future without organ banks, but a future without the slaughterhouse as well.
And speaking of glorious futures free of terrible things, how about long waits at the airport? We sure as heck could do without those, right?
Well an astrophysicist from Fermilabs, in his spare time away from pondering the very origins of things and stuff, has come up with a method that would cut the board times for airplanes in half.
His method is a little complicated, but this more or less explains it.
First, passengers sitting in the window seats on one side of the plane all board at once, in alternating rows (row 1, 3, 5, etc.). Then the same is done on the other side of the plane. Then the middle seats, still in alternating rows, boards on the first side of the plane. That continues with the other side’s middle seats, then (first one and then the other) aisle seats. Then, do it all again for the even-numbered rows.
So basically, the principles are : alternating-row seating, so that there’s always empty rows between the ones boarding, and boarding people from the outside of the plane inwards, window seats then middle seats (which are evil) then aisle seats.
As you can see from this video, it’s incredibly efficient without requiring the passenger to know or do anything new, just board when they are told to board, which we all already do.
Not only does this make the process faster, smoother, and most importantly less stressful for us, the poor cattle trying to get somewhere, but faster boarding times would mean more flights per day for the airlines, and hence, more dough ray me.
And all because its inventor, Doctor Jason Steffen, looked at the problem logically and with an open mind determined to find a superior solution.
Words cannot describe how much I admire that.
Finally, GPS. Is there anything it can’t do? From tracking lost pets to letting people become Mayor of their local hangout via Foursquare to, now, letting clever scientists track the underground nuclear tests of rogue nations.
Not the GPS units in everyone’s cell phone, but the satellites themselves. Some clever scientists figured out that underground tests still shoot a lot of radioactive stuff up into the air, and by monitoring the GPS distortions caused by said radioactive stuff (stop me if this gets too technical) they can totally pinpoint the location and intensity of these nasty little surprises when they happen.
Which is great, but beside the point. The important thing for these rogue nations is to convince the world they might have nuclear weapons, and thus, force the world to treat them like they are a big deal, and offer them all kinds of perks for discontinuing a potential nuclear program, and so all these rogue nations need to do is create the illusion of a nuclear weapons program and suddenly, from the point of view of a tin pot dictator who is total master of his nation, but it’s a tiny stupid shitty nation and so his megalomania is driven wild by the thought of all the world he does NOT control and how they might be looking down on him, that is pure fucking gold.
I think we should demand a higher level of proof before we give them the attention, importance, and respect they crave so much.
Anyhow, that’s all from me for this week, weekend shoppers! Remember to look boldly toward the future, embrace the new, and always remember, science is AWESOME!