While the Prawns seem to have mastered DNA-detecting technology, it remains a bit beyond our reach out here in the real, human world. But that may be the next big frontier in biometrics. Because, let’s face it, the typical kinds of biometric security used in of the lairs of movie super-villains isn’t science-fiction anymore—it’s reality.

Fingerprint scan? We can do that on a laptop, or even a mere thumb drive. Palm scan? Pssh. Placing a hand on the scanner is passé. Retinal scan? Of course. Facial recognition? Voice recognition? Done and done. All of these different biometrics has been exploited by security companies trying to make money in a world where verifying authenticity is becoming an increasing problem. But the biological signature big business and national governments really want to capture is DNA. Unlike our faces and voices, it never changes. Unlike our fingerprints, it’s very difficult to fake. And except for identical twins, it’s totally unique to each individual (and it may soon be possible to distinguish even identical twins [pdf]). Because this technology would be so valuable, everyone from the Austrian national government to major corporations is toiling away (pdf) in their R&D departments to  develop a DNA biometric lock.

But fear not, defenders of privacy: Science is still reasonably far (pdf) from using DNA for a biometric lock. First, there’s the sampling problem. There was a time when the only way to get a useful DNA sample was to get a drop of blood or a swab of tissue from inside the person’s mouth. And while it would probably be fair to force Tom Cruise to prick his finger every time he wanted to gain entry to the Mindhead—err, the Scientology—err, his secret hideaway, useful DNA can be extracted from skin cells just by using a simple adhesive piece of paper. Still, not optimal for a lock and key device.

Then the DNA has to be amplified and sequenced. It’s a staple of Hollywood crime shows that DNA this process can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, but in reality it takes hours to run the polymerase chain reaction. Then the amplified DNA has to be sequenced, and only then can it be matched up to an encoded “lock” to see if the person can be admitted. Again, watching Tom Cruise stand fuming for three hours outside the fortress of solitude is a pleasing thought, but it’s not really going to happen.

Still, there are a number of other DNA-oriented tricks companies are trying. Applied DNA Sciences, a company in Stony Brook, NY, has discovered a way to layer plant DNA into one-of-a-kind objects, like art work, or antiques, that they swear will have no effect on the object. They also can layer the DNA into ink and toner, allowing the possibility of printing money or credit cards with a DNA signature that could be read with a special scanner.

Of course, the fast way to figure this stuff out would be to reverse-engineer some handy alien weapons and see just what makes the weapons work or not work. Did the human scientists in District 9 think of that? Well, that would be a spoiler, now wouldn’t it?

Will we use metal in the future? What else would we build things out of? Might we use organic technology (machines and buildings made of or from biological organisms) instead?”
In The Graduate, that iconic film from 1967, bewildered 20-something Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) gets some career advice from a businessman who leans close and intones “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” Benjamin didn’t follow that advice, but the rest of the world did, and in spades. By 1979, global production of plastic had exceeded that of steel and is still growing, reaching over 200 million tons this year. There’s no doubt that plastic will continue to play a major role in how we make things, but it won’t replace everything.

In some ways, plastic is the material of the future, the latest step in humanity’s long upward trek through the ages of stone, bronze, iron, and steel. The word “plastic” comes from Greek roots meaning “capable of being molded.” Compared to metals and other materials, plastic is infinitely versatile. With its ability to shape-shift and to take on different mechanical and optical properties, it shows up in a huge spectrum of applications from packaging and plumbing to toys, medical supplies, and computers. And unlike iron and steel, plastic doesn’t rust.

But plastic also has problems that will prevent it from replacing metals any time soon. Its very durability can be an issue. Discarded plastic objects can survive for centuries in garbage landfills without degrading, and plastic artifacts have been found polluting the oceans far distant from any land. Also, what doesn’t seem to be widely appreciated, the raw material to make plastic comes from a resource we need to conserve, petroleum.

On top of this, metals do some things better than plastic—just try cutting up an apple with a plastic knife. Copper and other metals are needed to conduct electricity through power grids; all plastic can do is insulate the current-carrying wires. However, plastic is making inroads relative to some materials such as wood, which is being replaced by plastic “lumber” in certain applications.

Plastic also offers a possible way to actually construct things using biotechnology. Unlike metals, which are classified as inorganic, plastics are organic; they’re made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same constituents as living things, which links plastic to biological products. For instance, under the right conditions, certain microorganisms can synthesize compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These display properties like those of artificial plastics, with the benefits that they’re not petroleum-based and are biodegradable. Researchers are investigating ways to mass-produce these bioplastics, for instance by bioengineering plants to create them.

If you want to speculate even further, way past the idea of growing plastic rather than making it in factories, think about the science-fictionish possibility of bioengineering plants to produce plastic exactly in a desired shape from a drinking cup to a house. Current biotechnology is far short of this possibility, but science fiction has a way of pointing to the future. If bioplastics are the materials breakthrough of the 21st century, houses grown from seeds may be the breakthrough of the 22nd.

I predict we’re going to look back at the release of the original, Swedish Let the Right One In as the vampires’ artistic high point.  I also predict that the release of the American version will mark the end of the whole bloody, sexy craze.

So what’s next for fans of the undead?  Zombies.

Anticipating public demand for a government response to the growing threat, mathematicians at the University of Ottawa have published an epidemiological model of an outbreak of zombie infection. [viaTalking Squid]

This comes just a few months after the Boston Police confirmed via Twitter that they would promptly inform the public in the event of a zombie attack.  [via Consumerist]

And we’re just one month away from the release of the new Woody Harrelson movie Zombieland.  I’m telling you, people.  Zombies.

Character X: Oh my god I can read minds! And move things with my brain! And start fires! And I’m suddenly becoming hella smart!

Scientist character responsible for explaining things:  Aha! Normally we only use 10 percent of our brains, but Character X is accessing the rest of his brain! Now s/he has super powers!

Me, watching: ARRGG!

Using even a pretty cursory knowledge of neuroscience, one thing is clear: We use our whole brain. We use different sections of it for motor control, for higher thought, for fight or flight reactions, and so on and so forth. When neuroscientists and their many colleagues test the brain to see which parts are doing what, they’re looking at the whole brain, not just 10 percent. So every time the meme pops up in even my favorite shows, I kind of go a little nuts. But I’ve always wondered: Where does this meme come from?

Frankly, there is no clear understanding of the source.  Maybe some people think we have a bunch of neurons that we’re not using, or that we can only use 10-percent of our brain at a given moment. Or maybe they’re looking at all that white matter in the pictures of brains, all that stuff that cushions the the gray matter, and wondering what that stuff does. But Discover blogger and columnist Carl Zimmer has a piece this month that offers one possible  explanation for the phenomenon:

In the mid-1800s researchers discovered cells in the brain that are not like neurons (the presumed active players of the brain) and called them glia, the Greek word for “glue.” Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Today we know the name could not be more wrong.

So, roughly 150 years ago, scientists studying the brain wrote off 91 percent of our brain as mere glue for the more important neurons that do the actual thinking. We now understand that they were wrong, but this strikes me as the sort of fact that can seep into the general culture and then become very difficult to dislodge.  The fact that psychics and TV shows through the years have propagated the myth surely can’t help.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading Zimmer’s whole piece, as it is filled with his usual erudition. In short, he describes how scientists are making headway on solving the riddle of the glial cells. Among other tasks, they provide scaffolding for neurons, they insulate neurons, and they act like a kind of brain janitor, pruning dead or useless cells. Zimmer even cites Spanish neuroscientist Alfonso Araque who believes that certain glial cells assist with thinking and not just maintenance tasks for the lordly neurons.

And now that this idea is, once again, scientifically dispensed with, a plea to the writers and producers of sci-fi shows and movies who care about actual science: No more of the 10-percent-of-our-brain myth, please. There’s plenty of real mystery to support plots without using bogus ones.

“There was a day and time when authors didn’t worry about making technology work. You just had to have the spaceship work,” said Staffel. “These days, technology is changing at such a rapid rate, that the science-fiction writer has to compete with reality in a way they didn’t before. People also understand technology more so than in the past, so if it isn’t right, the reader will spot it.”

The panelists—Greg Bear (City at the End of Time), David Williams (Burning Skies), Dani and Eytan Kollin (The Unincorporated Man) and Kirsten Imani Kasai (Ice Song)—cited alternative energy sources, environmental decay, eventual development of quantum computing, and man/machine interfaces in military and biotech arenas as technologies with the most impact on society.

“Biotech is transforming everything,” said Bear. “It has resulted in the removal of the middleman between audience and creator. But removing teachers and experts from the throne is not always such a good thing.”

Williams mines the weaponization of outer space and cyberspace, and military application of civilian technology for ideas.

“The only thing that’s cooler than ‘x’ is blowing ‘x’ up,” he laughed. He also noted the acceleration of technology will redefine our lives and ourselves. “In the next few decades, the focus will be less on what kind of energy we have and more on how we use it, what we define as human, and huge segments of the population retreating into religious denial, because technology is coming at them so rapidly.”

In The Unincorporated Man, the Kollins brothers explore the economic implications of technology and true nature of freedom. That story chronicles the last unowned man in a world where humans have become incorporated and no longer own a majority of themselves.

“Economics is the study of how masses of humans behave with a series of rules and using it to predict behavior,” said Eytan. “What happens when you really understand this and can manipulate the human mind?”

“We simultaneously want to be freed by technology, but we are also terrified by it,” added Dani. “And we should be terrified. Technology offers better ways to live and quicker ways to kill. Even if we used technology to create the perfect world, we’d probably screw it up, because that’s the nature of the human condition. It’s in that middle ground that we get to write our stories.”

For research, the novelists relied on science journals, Google searches, and getting the appropriate scientist to vet their writing for accuracy. “A scientist writing science-fiction is still only a specialist in one area,” says Williams.

Even when the science is stretched, it still must adhere to the universe imagined in the story. “Even if it’s excellent research, you only need a nugget of it, because it’s fiction,” says Kasai. “You can create a separate new reality as long as you operate according to the rules of that new reality.”

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

But producing synthetic human blood has been a grail of sorts of the medical profession for decades. Imagine, no more public-service messages on the radio, begging for donations, no more blood donor trucks. If synthetic blood came into being, there would be no more searching for exact blood types, or fear of contracting blood-born diseases from transfusions. Heck, the entire blood-for-cookie market would collapse, and I mean that in the best way possible. And it may actually happen, possibly within the next few years.

Last year, scientists working for Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) published results in the journal Blood that showed they could produce functioning, oxygen-carrying red blood cells from stem cells. By selecting stem cells from embryos that produce O-negative blood (universal donor), ACT could theoretically produce synthetic blood that anyone could receive.

But they have a scaling problem. ACT managed to produce five billion red blood cells from a single stem cell. But a liter of adult blood contains between four and six trillion red blood cells. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (ScotBlood), a kind of Red Cross for the UK, will try to pick up where ACT left off, developing technology that will allow for industrial-scale production of synthetic blood. Marc Turner, a  Edinburgh University scientist and head of ScotBlood, hopes to have a proof of concept within a few years, but he told the BBC he thinks it could be 10 years before full production is a reality.

Of course, the one question really left outstanding is this: Once we have TruBlood, will we also find out that there have been vampires living among us? ‘Cause I’ve been watching the show, and I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

How, you may ask? Pretty much just like Daredevil (or bats, or dolphins) do, by bouncing sounds off the environment and listening for the echoes. Blind people have been doing something similar to this instinctively, usually describing how they can “feel” a nearby obstruction like a wall or door. What they’re actually doing is hearing the changing sound of their footsteps as they approach the obstacle. A recent study led by Spanish researcher Juan Antonio Martínez at the University of Alcalá de Henares tested a series of different sounds and techniques designed to teach people how to use echolocation for their own ends. The most effective sound we can make, they discovered, is clicking sound of the tongue pulling away from the roof of the mouth.

“The almost ideal sound is the ‘palate click, a click made by placing the tip of the tongue on the palate, just behind the teeth, and moving it quickly backwards, although it is often done downwards, which is wrong,” Martínez said in a press release.

Normals, bereft of super senses as we are, must resort to gumption and stick-to-itiveness to actually learn how to echolocate effectively. Martinez said students needed two hours a day for two weeks to learn to tell when an object is in front of them, and a few more weeks to be able to identify trees and pavement. A 2000 study found that listeners in motion are able to take advantage of the Doppler effect to locate objects more effectively.

Then again, when there’s a powerful need to learn how to echolocate well, it can be done with astonishing virtuosity. Ben Underwood, who died just last month, became blind at the age of two from cancer. He learned to rollerblade and play Foosball just through sounds and echolocation (the video is pretty amazing). He walked down the street making just the sort of clicks Martinez recommended, and he could tell parked cars from fire hydrants from plastic garbage cans.

So for those of us who didn’t manage to get bitten by a radioactive puppy or hail from a distant asteroid orbiting a purple sun, there’s hope yet! Seeing with your eyes closed is a pretty nifty superpower we can all have… with a lot of practice.

We’ve just heard that we’re going back to Comic Con this summer, with a panel topic and line-up even bigger and better than last year’s event.

We are teaming up with Jennifer Ouellette and the crew at the Science and Entertainment Exchange to produce a panel on “MAD SCIENCE,” i.e. Science as a double-edged sword, ethically and morally neutral in and of itself, but dependent upon who wields it, and how.

Beloved Internet Personality Phil Plait is lined up to moderate (after he gets his tattoo) and we’re expecting guests from Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Fringe, Stargate: Universe and more.  Watch this space for additional details.

The GQ layout, “The Rock Stars of Science,” introduces a public service campaign that matches musicians with leading researchers in different medical fields to highlight the need for additional research funding.  The featured scientists include Francis Collins,  Harold Varmus and Anthony Fauci, all of whom have been mentioned in DISCOVER recently, so we can’t quarrel with the science cast or the cause.

My beef is with the rock stars.  Joe Perry?  Sheryl Crow?  Seal?  It’ s beyond me why GQ couldn’t find anyone who had produced a meaningful hit in the last ten years.  How about Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio (bonus: album is called “Dear Science“)?

The Louis Vuitton campaign features astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell promoting a $1500 handbag called the “Icare” (presumably as in Icarus as opposed to caring about space or handbags).  What does the space program have to do with Louis Vuitton?  Beats the heck out of me.  Just enjoy the video and hope that LV dug deep to pay these guys to participate.

But mostly I want to talk about pyrokinesis. And if you’re curious about that, you gotta click the jump, to avoid pesky spoilers from last night’s episode.

Whatever one wants to say about Fringe’s science, we should at least concede that they know their science fiction. The word pyrokinesis was indeed, as Walter tells us, invented by Stephen King though he certainly didn’t come up with the idea of people starting fires with their brains (King himself has admitted his indebtedness to previous sci-fi stories).

But can it be done? Well, technically, no. Brain waves generate hardly any energy, not even enough to light a light bulb. The ignition point of a piece of wood is about 307º F, and the ignition temperature of human fat is 480º F. Lighting them on fire would require far more than thought. (Thought plus gasoline and a match would do the trick. But I digress.)

For pyrokinesis believers, the theory is that people with the ability to set fires with their minds rely on a subatomic particle called a pyrotron. But while this idea gets some attention in the, ahem, alternative lifestyles press, it gets no attention from Google Scholar. Well, no attention, except for the fact that the term is widely used to describe certain pieces of scientific equipment. Oh, and the Australian government calls its fire-wind tunnel simulator a pyrotron, too.

There have, of course, been any number of reported cases of people with the pyrotechnics ability. I read several, and they were generally magicians’ tricks, but the best has to be A.W. Underwood, from all the way back in 1882. (Confession: I found his tale through Wikipedia.) Underwood managed to convince everyone in the town of Paw Paw, Michigan, that he had the ability to start fires with his thoughts. Dr. L.C. Woodman, a physician from the area, examined Underwood and came away convinced the phenomenon was real, and he even wrote his study up for Scientific American. The controversy about Underwood raged until Dr. R. Thomas, writing in The Medical Age, in 1883, revealed a possible method for the trick, one he had performed himself. First, he would store phosphorus in his mouth, near a gum. When he wanted to perform, he would hold a hanky to his mouth (”Seldom my own,” he writes) and spit the phosphorus into it. Then he’d rub the hanky in his hands. Bam! Houston, we have hanky ignition. Since phosphorus combusts at a temperature near that of the body, the extra friction was all that was needed to cause it to ignite. Thomas thought Underwood had to be using the same technique.

While that trick would certainly still work, I postulate another way to perform  pyrokinesis. Given that we now have the ability to use a toy to move objects with brain waves alone, couldn’t those brain waves just as easily trigger a computer that then flicked on a lighter? You might call that cheating. And I might set you on fire with my brain—with an assist to my trusty pyro-bot.

In this week’s episode of Fringe, we have a woman, Valerie Boone, who suffers from a disease that makes her into a vicious cerebrospinal-fluid-drinking sort of vampire. It’s ugly stuff: she dances languidly at a night club, gets picked up by cocky young men, goes home with them, and then snaps their necks so she can drink their CSF. Nummy!

On the plus side, if you’re going to make a human body your soda fountain, CSF isn’t a bad choice. The pressure  inside the spinal cord is relatively low, just 200-300 mm of mercury. That’s pretty far below air pressure, so the CSF should come flowing out like water out of a straw once she tears it open with her scary pointy teeth.

But I hope she’s not too thirsty. The human body only produces 500 ml of CSF a day, and it typically has 130 mm at any given moment. CSF is produced from the choroid plexus, a paired organ attached to the brain. The fluid fills the fourth ventricle of the brain and flows out to surround the brain, filling the area between the pia mater and the dura mater, two membranes that line the brain and the skull, respectively. The CSF provides a cushion, and a degree of buoyancy to the brain, protecting it from sharp blows and whiplash. The CSF  also carries toxins and drugs away from the brain, and it helps transport hormones from one part of the brain to the other.

But even with all these roles, it doesn’t actually have a lot of substance. It’s fairly salty, but it has just 15-45 mg/dl of protein and 50-80 mg/dl glucose. Multiplied across  130 ml, she’s only getting, at most, 65 mg of glucose and 58.5 mg of sugar. She’d do better eating a Snickers.

We’re told  mid-episode that Ms. Boone is drinking the CSF because a disease is using up her own.  Technically speaking, the CSF is on a one way journey: From the brain to the dura mater, to blood vessels, which carry it off. But leaving that fact aside, there is some evidence that the body is aware of what’s going on with it’s CSF and tries to compensate for problems. Scientists experimented with altering the sodium concentration of CSF in sheep. They found that increasing the sodium concentration caused them to avoid salty food, while decreasing it led them to desire more. So maybe Ms. Boone should have been eating more potato chips, and fewer people?

As she became CSF depleted,  she would start to suffer headaches, loss of hearing, blurring of visions, tinitis, and numbness of the face. Sounds unpleasant. No wonder she was so cranky all the time.

As we’ve mentioned before, though, this is sometimes problematic when it comes to J.J. Abrams’s Fringe.  Still, we try not to critique.

Besides, Polite Dissent does such a good job of it already.  Head over to PD today for a recap of last night’s episode, including his ongoing homage to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Moving on (and spoilers below). The linchpin of the episode was a character who, thanks to the experimental and fictional) Cortexifan treatment he received as a child, developed the ability to spread his emotions to people nearby. When he’s depressed and considering suicide, a nearby person might consider, say, jumping in front of the No. 7 Train (which is the most reliable train in New York. Again, just trying to be helpful here).  Obviously, here in the real world, emotions can’t be aggressively spread to random strangers…well, unless they’re looking at you…and talking to you… and generally interacting with you. OK, they can be spread to random strangers, just less strongly.

There’s a tower of research amply demonstrating that human groups respond to each other’s emotional moods.   We read other people for facial expressions, posture, and gestures and we respond by modifying our own responses to fit theirs. The tone and word selection of people we are talking to also influences our moods, especially when these people use strong negative terms like “hate” or “awful.” Recent research even shows that these emotional cues other people give off trigger different reactions in the parts of our brains that govern emotional response.

But those are all small group or person-to-person interactions. In December, Harvard and UC-San Diego scientists published findings showing that happiness can even spread across large groups. Their 20-year study of 4,739 people, they showed that happiness spread across different small group sub-units of the larger sample. A happy person could affect the moods of people with three degrees of separation.

But in Fringe we understand that the reverse-empathetic effect is caused by Cortexifan, an experimental drug from Walter Bishop. As yet, there are no drugs that amplify our ability to impose our emotions on others, but there’s a whole class of them that do amplify our ability to respond. Entactogens or empathogens (the debate rages over the proper name) are a whole class of drugs that improve our ability to empathize with those around us. The most famous member of this group, Ecstasy, has been heavily studied for its legendary ability to make people love one another, which is why it gets the fabulous nickname, the Hug Drug. You know when a nickname makes it’s way into scientific papers, it’s fabulous. Also, no longer cool. Again, just trying to help.

This week, an elaborately produced documentary from National Geographic Channel traces the path of the baby mammoth (”Lyuba”) from discovery in Siberia to analysis in Russia and Japan, as scientists try to piece together the details of its life and death.

Narrated by erstwhile Alias dad Victor Garber, the show makes impressive use of CGI animation and reenactments using the real-life participants to tell the story.

Globetrotting University of Michigan paleontologist Dr. Dan Fisher travels to Siberia to meet the reindeer herdsman who stumbled upon the mammoth and then to Japan to CT scan the find.  He later performs investigative surgery and forensic dentistry on Lyuba.  Along the way, he makes several breakthrough mammoth discoveries, including that baby mammoths ate their mothers’ feces(!).

Things only get dicey when the producers call on Dr. Fisher to “act” alongside the CGI.

So what about the cloning?

Despite teasing the possibility in the promotion of the show, the producers ultimately admit that cloning is still a remote possibility. While Lyuba’s DNA is the best preserved sample ever discovered, according to Fisher, “Cloning an animal as complex as a mammoth is far beyond our current technical capabilities, but there has been remarkable progress on various aspects of the problem. One day perhaps.”

Here at Discover, we’ll keep working on the dino-chicken.