Fantasist's Scroll

Freaky.
While I don’t reccomend fishing for giant catfish with a basketball lure, it does seem to work. At least, if the pictures posted at this link are any indication. I know people have a hard time believeing me, but I met a guy who was a diver in Illinois who talked about these giant, mean catfish in the Mississippi. Apparently, all the nice, warm, waste water from power plants and what not pouring into various dammed parts of the river can produce catfish up to six feet in length. That is a GIANT catfish! And, as a rule, these suckers hide in the muddy, murky bottom just waiting for a tasty morsel to swim by. According to this guy, they seem to like the taste of diver. He described to me how he had to beat one off his arm with a small log because it was trying to pull him under a submerged tree where it lived.
Holy shades of the X-Files!

Now this is really cool!
Once again, science-fiction becomes reality with a GPS-enabled, real “Hitchhiker’s Guide”. A prototype traveler’s guide that is more than just GPS-synced maps, this little baby gives you historical information and other tidbits that might interest a tourist based on where it reads you via participating networks. The author tested this on the 850-acre parkland surrounding Ashton Court, which is somewhere in the UK, from what I gather. I’m not familiar with it myself, but it must be a popular tourist destination. In any case, this little bad boy, called an “Explorer”, sees where you are on the GPS grid and serves you multimedia content based on that location. As well as showing you those cool maps that we’ve all come to depend on so much. (You know, I think Gibson wrote about something like this, but more personable, in some of his work, too.)

Anyway, the future is now. At least in prototype-land. Hey, it’s the best I can do for a Friday Fun Link on the same day I’m getting divorced. Get over it!

Well, not quite yet.
But, according to this article on YahooNews, they are sequencing the Neanderthal genome. At least, they’re starting to try and do it. No one, including the scientists involved are sure that they’ll be 100% successful, but, sometimes, it’s the attempt that counts. And, there will be volumes of useful information that will be a by-product of this effort, not the least of which will be a greater understanding of the human genome.
Hmm, Plieocene Park? Well, maybe we’re a ways off from that, but it’s still pretty cool.

Has been found!
Yep, using a relatively new technique measuring the way light from a star “wobbles” as it’s bent around a planet, a new extra-solar planet has been found in a previously unconcieved of situation. Until the astronomers at the California Institute of Technology found what the call the “Tattooine planet”, scientists didn’t think that binary or trinary star systems could support a planet of any reasonable size. They felt that such systems, which outnumber single-star systems like our own by 20 percent, were just too unstable to maintain a planet. But, now they know better. This discovery, of course, opens a whole new realm of possibilites for space discovery and colonization. Not to mention gives a whole lot of validation to the space opera writers who’ve imagined multiple suns setting in alien skies since the early days of science-fiction.

“We can rebuild him.”
Researchers have hit the Next Big Thing in prosthetics: a bionic arm that feels. According to this article on the Chicago Tribune website, biomedical researchers have come up with an artificial arm that has sensors built in which allow its user to feel. The “fellings” are actually relayed to a tiny computer, which in turn relays the signals to “plungers” in the prosthetic’s harness. These “plungers” stimulate nerves which are interpreted by the brain as being attached to the hand. It allowed an experimental patient to “feel” someone touching the back of his “hand”. The sensors and relays are sensitive and accurate enough to let the patient identify individual fingers and tell researchers which one was being stimulated.
An amazing development that, to me, reads like science-fiction. No wonder William Gibson has all but given up writing science-fiction and slid into general fiction with Pattern Recognition. Everyday life has become science-fiction!

Amazingly, that’s not science-fiction.
At least, not according to this article on the UMass Amherst News site. Researchers there have found a bacteria that excretes nanowire. Apparently, these are actually natural conductive materials that help explain how these microbes clean up ground water, among other things. Note that the scientists didn’t induce this behavior, but simply discovered it. Still, it’s pretty revolutionary. Could this be the begining of fully organic computers? Maybe bringing us one step closer to a living, self-repairing robot or android? The possibilities are endless.
Especially if you’re a science-fiction writer who’s a little fuzzy on the details.

Geez, don’t these guys watch B-movies?
Apparently, the scientists at Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research have succcessfully brought technically dead dogs back to life. According to the article on News.Com.AU, the scientists replaced the dogs’ blood with a very cold saline solution of unknown properties, though I suspect it was more than just saline. Three hours later, they put the blood back and gave the dog an electric shock to restart its heart. Apparently, they were quite successful and the dog showed no ill effects. They eventually plan to try this on humans.
I realize this is all about getting a process for suspended animation, but the idea of bringing something back from the dead… Well, I’m sure I’m not alone when I find this a little disturbing. And, seriously, I wonder if they’ve seen Reanimator. Maybe they should be require to before they get human test subjects.

Think about that this weekend and enjoy your freaky Fun Friday Link!

Where’s Majel Roddenberry when you need her?
According to the Technology Review, we’re only three years away from a quantum computer. What does that mean? Calculations on an unimaginable order of magnitude greater speeds than any we’ve know so far, among other things. At least, the speeds and calculations are unimaginable to me! Really fast stuff. And, also, these computers will be able to factor all kinds of horribly complicated equations that we can only just concieve of now. Truly, it will result in a computer not too far removed from that of the U.S.S. Enterprise, which was able to calculate all sorts of obscure probabilities from pretty fuzzy word problems asked by the crew. Indeed, this might be the first step towards true machine intelligence.
Eventually, that is. The computer they’re predicting in the next three years won’t be anything close to that, but, apply Moore’s Law to that and consider the difference between the 8088’s of ten or twelve years ago to the Pentium 4’s of today. The possibilities are endless.