Sometimes there’s a thin line between your average scientist and your mad scientist, and this one is certainly walking a thin line, but it may just benefit the human race.  Professor Terry Bradley, an expert on trout, salmon, flounder, and tuna, has been playing in his laboratory with his students, working on something a bit fishy.  They’ve been pondering a genetic anomaly in cattle, specifically the Belgian Blue Cattle.  These bovines are basically your normal cow, with one very distinct difference:  They have about twice the usual muscle growth.  It’s called “double muscling” and is due to a variation in the gene responsible for production of myostatin, which counteracts muscle growth.  And now they’ve finally hit on how to introduce this gene into fish.

Enter SuperTrout.  This transgenic fish contains the same “double muscling” gene.  And it’s a monster!  …At least in muscle mass.  These heavily muscled genetically altered fish themselves seem to generally behave like their natural counterparts.  They just have more lovely flesh for us to eat.  Which is what Professor Bradley wants.  Imagine the amount of people that could be fed by farming these fish!

Only, there’s that little government regulation thing to worry about.  Not to mention, are they actually safe to eat?  And what could happen if they were accidentally introduced into the wild?  It’s food for thought.

Direct Neural Interfacing may not be a reality yet, but the development of controlling computers purely with our brains is certainly making headway.  And Dr. José Contreras-Vidal, along with his team of researchers from the bioengineering and kinesiology departments of the University of Maryland, College Park, have been making some pretty big strides in this direction.

In an article in the March issue of The Journal of Neuroscience Dr. Contreras-Vidal and colleagues showed that with just an electrode-covered cap and some clear gel they can use an array of 34 electrodes to capture our  brain thinking that it has been typing on a keyboard using good old electroencephalography, or EEG.  Yes, that’s right, once dialed in, no actual key pressing was necessary.  Some of the patients in this study have already managed to communicate to one another through a word processor.  And all of this without any hardware wired directly into anyone’s brain; just a cap worn on the head.

More fascinating is that while the testing right now is being done with a 34 electrode cap, most of the useful data is actually just coming from two points, the primary sensorimotor cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule.  Meaning that theoretically it may be possible in the future to actually reduce the cap to only contain two electrodes.

What’s more, Dr. Contreras-Vidal has no intention of just creating a simple brain-keyboard.  “We hope to show that a person with a stroke or an amputee would be able to control an assistive device, ” says Dr. Contreras-Vidal.  To this end he already has healthy subjects controlling a computer’s cursor on the screen, and controlling an artificial hand.  One day his research could be fundamental in the control of artificial limbs in a safe and affordable way.

Dr. Contreras-Vidal also hopes to one day incorporate some form of sensory feedback into the technology.  His belief is that visual feedback is a slow and imperfect means of confirming that what you think you’re doing is what you’re actually doing.  “We think it’s important to use other types of feedback, too, because vision is a slow signal.”

It’s a fascinating realm of possibilities.  What was once a toy may soon be the future of prosthetics and computer interfacing!

NewScientist has put out an article debunking the possibility of space travel using warp technology based on a scientific analysis made by Dr. William Edelstein (of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore) … and apparently neither the NewScientist editor, nor Dr. Edelstein, have ever watched Star Trek.

Now, I grant you, the science itself has some merit, for some situations.  Dr. Edelstein notes that hydrogen atoms, though sparse in space at a an average of two atoms per cubic centimeter in the big black yonder, would become a rather deadly phenomenon when traversing between the stars at near the speed of light.  He calculates that the path of travel of a starship even approaching lightspeed (99.999998 percent) would be hit by a “death ray” of radiation from the hydrogen atoms equal to 7 teraelectron volts, on par with the energy of the Large Hadron Collider beam.

Which is probably true.

That part I don’t think any scientist would really dispute.  When you travel at (or in the case of Star Trek, greater) than the speed of light, every particle in space becomes deadly.  And not just the hydrogen.  Even if it didn’t hit you like a Large Hadron Collider beam and irradiate you to death in a fraction of a second, it would certainly punch holes in the hull and the crew.

If you were traveling at near the speed of light, relatively speaking.

Here’s where the first observation of the technology of Star Trek itself seems to have failed.  Warp speed is accomplished by literally warping local space/time.  You in effect create ripples around the spacecraft and ride through the waves of warped space instead of traveling in a straight line from Point A to Point B.  You effectively skip over the majority of the space that you sort-of travel through.  It’s a way to cheat Einstein and his relativity, because you do not travel at the speed of light (or even anywhere near it), you travel at a safe speed, but continually bend space around you to shorten your relative trip.  And with the skipping of traversing of all of that space, you skip running into all of the things occupying that missed space, like those pesky hydrogen atoms Dr. Edelstein counted up.  Because Dr. Edelstein is counting up the whole space, not the relative space.

It’s the whole point of warp speed.  That’s why it’s called warp.  It’s not because it just sounds cool.

Now how exactly a warp field is generated, I’m sadly not geek enough to say.  I’d suspect a gravity-based system is in play since, well, that’s how our universe naturally warps space and time.  Whatever the means however, it takes a lot of energy.  Which is why Star Trek fuels its ships with mind-boggling energy reactors such as matter/antimatter powerplants!

So right there is already great concern over just how NewScientist and Dr. Edelstein see the hydrogen in the universe affecting Star Trek specifically.  I’m sure the calculations made apply quite aptly to, say, trying to send a rocket to the speed of light.  But not to the science employed in Star Trek.

But that’s really only just the beginning.  Because we also know that in the Star Trek canon even the first warp-capable ships from Starfleet used polarized hull plating to deflect nastiness away from the hull and protect the ship and its inhabitants.  It’s funny, but I don’t see any mention of how this technology affects things in Dr. Edelstein’s scientific study.  Nor is there any mention of one of the most obvious technologies to come from Star Trek canon to protect a ship: energy shields.  (Which, again, I don’t know how exactly they operate, but I would wager is based somehow on containing plasma within an electromagnetic field.)

And that doesn’t even begin to dive into the possible alloys of which the exterior armor on the hull, nor interior shielding to protect the crew, could be made of.  And why do I mention that?  Because Dr. Edelstein specifically calculates, “that a 10-centimetre-thick layer of aluminium would absorb less than 1 per cent of the energy.”  Well great.  Who is using pure aluminum as shielding for anything in space?  Certainly not anyone in Star Trek.  According to canon even their glass is some doped-up transparent aluminum.  However that is made, I’m sure it isn’t just raw aluminum.

So then, what is my point?  Well two-fold.  First, if you’re going to do calculations on near-lightspeed to make some commentary about space travel, maybe you should take the time to research the technology that would be used to achieve that speed before you open your big mouth.  (Note that Dr. Edelstein presented his study to the American Physical Society meeting in Washington DC.)  This applies to the editors at NewScientist as well, who really ought to screen these things, since that is their job and all.

And second, if you’re going to specifically target a canon like Star Trek to throw your half-baked study at, maybe you should first respect that canon enough to do due diligence in studying it.  Because you’d probably be amazed at all of the hard science and theoretical physics that went in to creating it in the first place.  Unlike Star Wars for example that is nothing more than a space-pimped melodrama with fantasy in mind and a lot of fill in the blanks, Star Trek is a heavily scientific canon where a lot of intelligent people have taken the time to actually work these things out.  And anyone with any modicum of respect for what they’ve chosen to target should have taken the incredibly small amount of time and effort it would have needed to find that.

So Dr. William Edelstein, and the folks at NewScientist, maybe the next time you want to be scientific you should stop trying to sensationalize your findings by comparing them to something that you couldn’t have been bothered to research and just stick to the science.

And don’t knock The Enterprise.

The Enterprise, NCC-1701

If you’ve been wondering where our solar cells are and why they’re not just everywhere yet as the green revolution churns onward, there’s a reason for that.  So far their construction still requires all manner of expensive rare materials such as silicon and cadmium.  And because of the way that they’re manufactured, silicon panels grown in vacuum, they’re just plain expensive to produce.  So as much as we’d like to see a solar renaissance, where we finally go from wow to now, it’s just not happening.

But all that may change.

Researchers at IBM think that they’ve hit the next best thing since sliced silicon: “High-Efficiency Solar Cell with Earth-Abundant Liquid-Processed Absorber”  It’s a completely new take on producing solar cells, based primarily on more “earth-abundant” materials such as copper, zinc, tin, selenium, and sulfur in a chalcogenide compound.  In fact, unlike silicon-based photovoltaics which have to be grown in a vacuum, these materials can just be sprayed on.  They’re applied in a slurry state, so spraying, dunking, printing, spin-coating, or what have you can be done to apply them to the solar cells.  So not only are the materials more friendly and available, but they’re applied in a process that is much cheaper and easier to manufacture.  And because they’re basically painted on, they can be applied to all sorts of shapes that would cause traditional solar panels to shatter if attempted.  The next paint job on your car or house might be “High-Efficiency Solar Cell with Earth-Abundant Liquid-Processed Absorber”.

The only downside is that so far the efficiency rate is only around 9.6 percent.  That’s a bit shy of today’s silicon-based photovoltaic efficiency between 10 and 15 percent.  Though researchers do like to point out that the technology is still in an early phase and efficiency may improve as the process is refined.  And still, for the price and theoretical availability, what one lacks in efficiency one can easily make up for in volume.

But Big Blue isn’t the only horse in this race.  Researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have made their own headway in a new photovoltaic direction: silicon wires.

In a new paper published in Nature Materials entitled “Enhanced absorption and carrier collection in Si wire arrays for photovoltaic applications” is described an entirely new process of solar absorption using arrays of 1mm thick silicon wires to create a flexible polymer.  This is a markedly different direction from the normal use of silicon in solar panels.  It uses far less material, a mere 1 percent of the silicon needed for traditional solar panels.  And yet in spite of the incredible reduction in the amount of silicon used (or perhaps because of it) panels made from these silicon wires have been measured at 17 percent efficiency, blowing away the competition.

What’s more, the bundles of silicon wires absorb solar energy “over a broad range of incidence angles“, meaning that they don’t need to be adjusted for optimum absorption nearly as often as traditional solar panels.

And just as amazing, because these panels are made from bundles of silicon wires, they’re flexible.  So not only are they much less likely to be damaged from things that would normally ruin the traditional brittle silicon panels, it’s a technology that would be easy to adapt to locales that aren’t traditionally flat, such as car roofs, or even the curtains in your window!

With the incredible savings and improvements in manufacturing that each of these new solar technologies offer, we just one day may find photovoltaic solar panels common building materials available to every home.  And with the flexibility that they offer, solar energy just may make the jump from small electronics and home panels to … everything and anything.  What a wonderful world it would be.

It’s the stuff of science fiction, to plug a living person into a computer and have it write directly to their brain, giving them memories and skills that they never learned by traditional means.  But now scientists are saying that they’re doing just that…

Sort of.

If by person, you mean a fly.  And if by memory you mean a theoretical memory of an undefinable but unpleasant event.

Scientists from Oxford and Virginia were able to narrow down the cells of the (fly’s) brain necessary for forming memories based on a procedure they have termed “optogenetics”, in which “a simple flash of light is used to release caged-molecules present in selective neurons that then stimulate the activity of those neurons.”  They got it down to just a mere twelve brain cells used to record memories.

Then using those same flashes of light they proceeded in “writing directly to memory”, allegedly giving the fly a memory of an unhappy event which never actually occurred.

Okay, okay, so it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for making The Matrix real.  Still, it’s a step in the right direction in understanding the brain.  One day this research could lead to something useful.