Linketies: Science Friday

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  Hey guys, I have an idea. Why don't we take a strain of the flu virus known for being highly lethal and combine it with a strain known for being highly contagious. It'll be fun! What could possibly go wrong?
  


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  Imagine a material that's paper-thin and can generate electricity by turning any surface that it coats into a type of solar panel. Then imagine that it can even be programmed to change colors at your whim. That substance exists -- it's called graphene and it won its discoverers a Nobel Prize. In the future, it could be used to coat your house.
  


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  A tech entrepreneur is taking research into sustainable lighting to a whole new level with the Glowing Plant project. Using a combination of genetic tinkering with plants themselves and glowing bacteria, the project aims to see if lamps--or even streetlights--could one day be replaced by biology. Neat idea, but I hope they remember to account for people who don't have a green thumb and always seem to kill their houseplants. And what exactly is this fixation that genetic engineers seem to have for making things that glow in the dark?
  


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  Well, this one's not going to win any Oscars in the near future, but the Guinness Book of World Records is keenly interested. Researchers at IBM have developed the world's smallest movie by manipulating single carbon monoxide molecules on a copper surface with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. What's the point, you might ask? Advances in manipulating matter at the atomic level using the properties of quantum mechanics could have a wide range of applications, including new and improved data storage devices.
  


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  Los Alamos National Labs has recently revealed that it's been operating a quantum internet for the past two years. Quantum computing is something of a "holy grail" in computer science and such networks could theoretically allow for completely secure communications. As one of the commenters on the article points out, it also has implications for SETI, since a quantum network could also allow instantaneous communications across vast distances -- in theory, anyway.
  


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  Researchers at NASA were experimenting last month with using three cube-shaped nano-satellites -- amusingly enough named Alexander, Graham, and Bell -- to beam back pictures from Earth orbit. The cool thing about this? The satellites -- which were equipped with cameras for taking the pictures as well avionics to keep them in orbit -- were built using widely available off-the-shelf parts, including several components used in smartphones. Open-source space technology, anyone?
  


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  Here's another good article from Livescience about the implications of super-intelligent machines, the possibility of a technology singularity, and intelligent robots that could overtake humans by the turn of the next century.
  


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  A young Russian billionaire has launched a new project called The 2045 Initiative that has the goal of achieving human immortality by the middle of the century by creating android bodies for human minds. Dmitry Itskov also argues that we need new systems of religion and ethics to deal with the implications of immortality.
  


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  Maybe you're interested in living a lot longer but you're not all that keen on leaving your human body behind to set up shop in an android. Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have made a possible break-through in anti-aging research by blocking a protein pathway in the brain's hypothalamus.
  


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  Scientists monitoring the Arctic Ocean are finding widespread changes in the ocean's chemistry caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dissolving in the water and making it more acidic. Scientists are expecting this to cause huge changes in the marine ecosystem. Even if carbon dioxide emissions were stopped right now, it would take tens of thousands of years for things to get back to normal.
  


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  The New York Times summarizes last week's Citizen's Hearing on UFO Disclosure in Washington DC.