Linketies: Science Friday

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  Well, about those flying cars -- back to the drawing board.
  


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  Wired magazine has written an interesting profile of neuroscientist Henry Markam. If you haven't heard of Markam, he's one of those guys whose ideas about the future of technology make TED talks seem almost bland. Four years after he gave his own TED talk where, among other things, he laid out plans to build a computer replica of the human brain and develop a sentient hologram, he's moving full steam ahead. And now he has some serious money behind him.
  


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  Research in invisibility continues to race ahead and researchers now have a prototype of a "cloak" to shield objects from thermal sensors. The idea here is not insulation in the standard sense, but actually making the object look as though it is not there -- at least if you are "looking" at it with thermal imagers only. This kind of technology would have a wide range of applications in anything where heat flow is important -- for example, energy and electronics.
  


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  The discovery of new exo-planets has become almost routine. But astronomers have now found a new technique -- using the subtle effects of Einstein's theory of relativity. Using this technique, scientists have found a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a star 2,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, aptly nicknaming it "Einstein's Planet". Interestingly, Cygnus has long been on the radar of SETI researchers.
  


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  Only two weeks into the application process, an ambitious project to try to establish a human colony on Mars has received 78,000 applications from people willing to make a one way trip to the Red Planet. Meanwhile, NASA is pondering a food supply for its own 2030's Mars mission. As anyone ever involved in farming or gardening can tell you, growing food is nowhere near easy even on Earth -- keep in mind that until a few hundred years ago, getting enough food took up most of our time.
  


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  It hasn't even been that long since military scientists cracked the secrets of shooting down a missile with a missile and now Lockheed has developed a system to shoot down a missile with a laser.
  


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  From the "One Nation Under Surveillance" Department: Buried in the massive immigration proposal working its way through Congress is a provision for building a massive bio-metric database of nearly every American. The proposal would also require that employers use the database to look up every job applicant. And to think the NRA has been worried about a gun database.
  


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  In another example of completely eroding privacy, the Supreme Court is currently considering a case challenging the ability of corporations to patent human genes.
  



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  Radio host Bill Moyers interviewed the authors of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. This is definitely a book I'll be picking up. The interview was a fascinating case study on how corporations fight against the public interest in matters of health and science, leaving us all to deal with untold amounts of toxins in our environments and our daily lives.
  

Incidentally, some might argue that Science Friday is an odd place for articles about personal privacy and government policy. But shaping the future isn't just about cool new technologies and gadgets -- it's about building a future that serves humanity rather than enslaves it. It's important to consider the dark side of new technologies as well as the promise.