Hi there science fans! We’ve got a Severe Weather Warning here in Friday Science Roundup land, and the forecast calls for another heavy rainfall where the waters is made of pure undiluted concentrated SCIENCE NEWS!

So put on your raincoat, slip into those old yellow rubber boots, quack twice like a duck and once like a very silly person who is quacking for no good reason, and leave the umbrella in the closet by the door, because before we are done, you will be soaking wet with SCIENCE!

You know, but just your head. Because the rest of you is in a raincoat and boots.

Metaphors are so complicated.

First up, in pretty good news, Japan’s richest man is launching an insane plan to make Japan’s energy grid at least 60 percent renewable.

The nutty billionaire in question is Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank and richer than a Frenchman’s last meal. His plan calls for massive amounts of wind turbines (makes sense for an island nation with tons of coastline) and geothermal (makes sense when said island nation is full of, and made by, volcanoes) and the abandonment of nuclear.

I am pro-nuclear, so I don’t know about that last part, although I am also for whatever works best. But the thing is, this guy’s plan is insanely ambitious and expensive (to the tune of $26 billion, with a b, dollars) and he’s only talking about maybe contributing one percent of that from his own funds.

So bravo, Rich Dude, for wanting to do something big, but boo hiss for thinking you can do it on the cheap. Where is the rest of that money going to come from? Heaven? You have the right idea, but you have to go all the way with this. Show the world the ultimate expression of wealth : doing something not even governments can do.

Use those billions to save the world and the global economy with one hell of a stimulus package! And dare other billionaires to follow suit.

Next, we have a headline to blow your mind : using AIDS to kill cancer.

Seriously! It has been done. Researchers took about a billion immune-system T-cells from a very ill leukemia patient named William Ludwig, used a variant of the AIDS virus, HIV, to deliver cancer fighting information to them, and then put them back in.

At first, nothing happened. Then, all hell broke loose and Ludwig got very, very ill for two weeks with something a lot like a very nasty flu. And then said flu disappeared.

And with it, went his leukemia. All of it. Just plain gone.

It is early innings yet, but if this works out, it could represent the first step towards the Holy Grail of oncology : the ability to train the body’s own immune system to kill cancer cells. Cancer’s whole schtick is that it looks just like a healthy cell to our immune systems, and if that could be changed, we could wipe cancer out.

And cancer patients are (sadly) already used to being very ill for months from their chemo. Being very ill for a couple of weeks to be maybe cancer-free would be nothing.

And finally, the big big one of this last week : Scottish scientists are attempting to use non-organic molecules to make non-organic life.

That’s right : they are going to take things which are not life and make life out of them.

THEY HAVE THIS KNOWLEDGE.

Or at least, they think they will have it soon. Holy crap, Scotland!

The project is led by Professor Lee Cronin, and they plan to take their inorganic lego kit and bodge together

“…an inorganic cell, in which internal membranes control the movement of energy and materials, just as in a living cell. These cells can also store electricity and could be used in medicine and chemistry as sensors or to contain chemical reactions.”

Mind-boggling isn’t it? Taking bits and pieces and making a new life form from scratch? I have to admit to being a little scared of the implications. We know so little of ecology, what if we make something we can’t control?

But Grey Goo fears aside, what I particularly like about this story is the potential effect on Drake’s equation. I have long suspected that what we think of as organic life is only one possible path towards the self-organizing principle of big-L Life itself, and this suggests I may have been right.

Who knows what forms of “inorganic” life we might find out there some day? For all we know, that might be the majority, and our path the aberration.

If so, I hope the future alien races we meet can forgive us the charmingly naive provincialism of calling our form of life “Life”.

After all, we’re new at this.

That’s it for this week, folks! Tune in next week, when we will discuss how to use magnets to keep people from lying!