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.

But start reading enough about nanofilm, and anyone would discover there’s actually some real science out there that can justify parts of this plot. Think of the episode as a kind of pointillist canvas, with each dot of discovery forming the big picture of a Sci Fi plot device.

Nanofilms are, in general, a totally pedestrian concept. Put simply, it’s a layer of material that coats something else, only since it’s a nano-something,  the coating will only be a molecule or two thick, at the most. Several commercial companies make nanofilms that make glasses, computer monitors, or optical lenses resistant to fog and finger prints. Some of these are self-reactive (like on Elventh Hour, but without the picking up metals from their substrate part) in that they spread over the glass surface and bond with it.

Also, like in the show, researchers are studying the electronic applications of nanofilms. The Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems published an article in February suggesting that ti would not be difficult to create a nanofilm switch.  The film reacts to chemical stimuli and changes its resistance, altering the flow of electrons. There’s also been work looking at the the properties of nanofilms as self-generating, and electrically conducting, plastics, though early results have only just been published.

In medicine, there’s great hope that nanofilms will provide enormous benefits as the problems are worked out. An overview of the field published in Nanomedicine proposes several potential applications, including “coatings for medical implant devices, scaffolds for tissue engineering, coatings for targeted drug delivery, artificial cells for oxygen therapeutics, and artificial viruses for immunization.” The notion of using a nanofilm to coat an implanted medical device has already been patented. Nanofilms can be used both to protect the devicce from the body’s environment, and also can be designed to trigger the device when it experiences certain chemical changes.  Some Swiss researchers have also worked out a way to use a virus to deliver a nanofilm coated ball of DNA to a cell. Wait, hang on: Nanofilms and viruses? Bad idea, man.

But afterward I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe The Doctor was sitting a little stiffly on his high horse. As far as we can tell, Adipose represents a painless way to lose weight. Sure, it can be used to kill people, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not inherent in the drug. I suspect Adipose would have a long line of customers even once full information was provided.

Naturally, people have been looking for a pill to help them lose weight since more or less forever. But consider that in recent years, obesity has been described more and more frequently in terms of an epidemic, right down to epidemiological studies of how the problem is spreading. Now blogger Jennifer Gibson pulls together some of the research to argue that obesity may in fact be caused, at least in some people, by a virus called Ad-36.

Early research found that 30% of obese people were infected with Ad-36, while only 11% of non-obese people were infected. New research finds that Ad-36 has a direct effect on human fat stem cells. The virus infects the fatty tissue and increases replication, differentiation, and accumulation of fat cells. Ultimately, this leads to larger fat cells, and more of them. The virus also increases lipid sensitivity and decreases leptin secretion of the new fat cells.

She also says that sometimes people who know other people who gain weight rapidly can even catch the virus. She goes on  to argue that the spread of obesity cannot entirely be explained by sociological factors like too much TV watching orpoor eating habits, that the existence of some kind of fat bug may go explain the speed with which the problem has progressed.  If Gibson is right, then some people may be able to solve some of their weight problems with the application of an anti-viral, or some other treatment that attacks viruses.

[Hat tip to io9]

In other news from nerdland:

• Want to build your own Death Star? Just pony up $15 septillion (15 followed by 24 zeroes). Rick Gold decided he had a few spare minutes to work out just how much the construction of the Death Star hurt the ole Imperial Budget.

• A man robbed a pair 7-11 stores in the Denver area armed with a bat’leth, the traditional weapon of the Klingons. The dude himself may represent a new high for geekery, but I also enjoyed the sourcing required by ABC-7 Denver to explain the bat’leth to viewers: “The Startrek.com Web site describes the Klingon weapon as crescent-shaped and about a yard long.” and then “Klingons were warlike enemies of the good-guy United Federation of Planets in the original “Star Trek” series but were allies in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (Hat tip to everyone, but in my case Geekologie)

• Scientists are getting so close to being able to implant drug delivery systems under the skin and control them via WiFi that other scientists are writing papers to express concern over security. I must admit, I’d hate to have my antibiotics hacked.

It turned out that the nearby NASA research facility was developing a version of the Streptoccucus bacteria that, when injected into a person, produced a ton of hydrogen sulfide, reducing the person’s breathing rate and core body temperature– essentially, hibernation.  As it happens, hydrogen sulfide (familiar to which anyone who’s ever smelt a rotten egg), is considered one of the possible options for inducing hibernation in mammals.

In 2003, Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, saw a documentary on spelunkers that discussed the danger of hydrogen sulfide: the gas is produced by volcanoes and deep-earth vents, and it can rapidly induce a coma. Moth imagined that breathing a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and other gases could cut off just the right amount of oxygen to the blood to induce suspended animation in mammals. He experimented by putting a mouse in a chamber with 80 ppm hydrogen sulfide, and the mouse entered a state of hibernation (the character of Jacob Hood demonstrates this effect on the show). His results were replicated in May by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital. Unfortunately, a January paper in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine showed that there were problems getting the technique to work on larger mammal, like pigs. Instead of inducing a state of hibernation, the study found the gas actually acted as a stimulant.

But there’s always the vampiric alternative. In 2005, Dr. Patrick Kochanek drained dogs of about half their blood and replaced it with a cold saline solution. The process actually put the dogs into totally suspended animation. As reported in DISCOVER, the dogs had no heartbeat, no breathing, nothing.  The dogs were left asleep for three hours before Kochanek pumped the saline out and the blood back in. Most of the dogs came back to life with no ill effects. A few dogs suffered from brain damage and lethargy, leading to charges of “zombie dogs”.

Following up on this research the next year, a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Hasan Alam,  was looking into ways to keep a critically injured patient alive while awaiting surgery. Alam actually drained  a pig’s blood almost entirely before replacing it with a cold saline solution of nutrients. He left the pigs in this state of animation for two hours to approximate surgery, and then revived them. He’s tried his technique on 200 pigs and achieved a 90% success rate for revivals.

The way I figure it, putting humans into hibernation — even extreme hibernation —  isn’t going to make it possible for a single person to traverse the light years between us and our stellar neighbors. It just takes too long, even at an extremely slowed metabolic rate. For that we’ll still need either a generation ship or straight up cryonics. But for shorter, but still tedious,  journeys between planets, traveling in hibernation may be just the thing. Personally, I hope they’re able to improve on the hydrogen sulfide technique, rather than the cold-saline technique. I don’t think anyone likes the idea of traveling 100 million km to Mars with half their blood in the fridge.

Part way through the episode, one of the victims, Isaac, collapses while jogging. Our intrepid hero, Dr. Jacob Hood, rushes him  to the hospital and then has his comrade-at-investigations, Rachel Young, put out a Mayday for a decompression chamber. Amazingly, they locate a mobile chamber and have it rushed to the hospital (normally they fly patients with the bends to a chamber, rather then bring the chamber to it).  Once ensconced in the chamber and under high pressure, Isaac’s twitching stopped.

Scientifically, this chamber business makes sense so far. The bends are caused normally when nitrogen bubbles stored in tissue at a certain pressure are released as the pressure drops. Typically it’s a problem for divers who don’t follow their dive tables carefully: at depth, the nitrogen in SCUBA air gets stored in tissue, and as the divers come back up to the surface, the bubbles are released. It typically causes pain, but can lead to paralysis and death.

But dramatically speaking, the producers needed to ratchet up the tension. So the gene therapy continues to produce nitrous oxide gas at higher and higher rates, which forces the techs to raise the pressure on Isaac to keep the bubbles in his blood. And oh what pressure! Decompression chambers measure pressure in feet of sea water (fsw). They start him at 165 fsw.  Then they raise it to 300 fsw. 500! By the last cliffhanger they’ve maxed out the chamber at 1000 fsw. This is actually ridiculous. Look, SciNoFi makes a strong effort to let SciFi be SciFi, because, hey, who wouldn’t want an all-purpose sonic screwdriver? But sometimes a show just pushes the envelope too far, and this pushed my buttons, big time.

Let’s put that 1000 fsw in context. The all time record for a basic SCUBA dive is held by John Bennett, a famous technical diver, who descended to 838 feet. Isaac, therefore, was 162 feet “deeper” than the all time record. Also, 33 feet of sea water is one atmosphere. So 1000 feet of sea water is 30 atmospheres, enough to at least render poor Isaac completely immobile inside the chamber, and raise serious questions of whether he would be strong enough to inflate his lungs. And man, when Hood has to go inside the chamber to deliver the cure, that must have been a pain in the tuchus. That hyopdermic must have felt like it weight 30 pounds.

Oh yeah, and by the way, even the Navy’s decompression chamber can’t deliver 1000 fsw. It has an operating maximum of 7.5 bars, or about 244 fsw. Okay, we’re not in Fringe territory yet, but tsk, tsk, Eleventh Hour, we’ve come to expect more from you.

Sanctuary is a show about a small group of investigators, lead by Tapping’s character of Helen Magnus, which specializes in finding sentient mutants and monsters. Some are helped; those of a more aggressive turn of mind are captured. Magnus is, incidently, well over a hundred years old, having become immortal sometime in the Victorian Era via an incident which will be revealed later. Magnus is aided by her bounty-hunter-esque daughter and the new guy (and audience surrogate), a psychiatrist.

The show started life in 2007 as a series of eight webisodes, which form the basis of tonight’s two-hour pilot. However, for those who’ve seen the webisodes, from what I could see in the 30-minute edit Sci Fi showed us last night, there have been changes, including a significant revision in the psychiatrist’s back story.

The show promises to be a lot of fun, and its long gestation period seems to have taught the creators how to use their enormous use of VFX appropriately in the service of storytelling instead of just hitting the audience with flashy gee-whiz scene after scene: Santuary is the first television series to almost exclusively use virtual sets — apart from the props that come into direct contact with the cast, pretty much everything you see on screen (including furniture) is computer generated.

And despite the supernatural connotations of monsters like werewolves, etc., the creators promise that the show will be firmly rooted in science fiction, and explained some of their ground rules at the panel discussion that followed the screening: There is supposed to be a “scientific explanation for everything,” said Sam Egan, a TV science-fiction veteran and writer on Sanctuary, “we’re at the boundary where science fiction and science fact meet.” This involves a certain discipline when it comes to plotlines, with show creator Damien Kindler citing a “no aliens” rule, for example, to keep the tone of the show grounded. A willingness to live within limits is a good sign for a show — when shows start making it up as they go along (see the later seasons of the X-Files for example), or start invoking endless deus ex machinas to resolve stories (Fringe is really starting to worry me here), it ultimately kills dramatic tension.

So far, Sanctuary looks like a show that deserves to do well. Now let’s see if the television gods smile upon it…

One of the entities turned out to be none other than Elizabeth Weir, onetime leader of the Atlantis expedition, who was believed to have been killed after her capture by the Replicators, technologically advanced humanoid life forms assembled from countless tiny nanoscale robots (played by a different actress in this episode). Weir has become a Replicator too, and has joined a small band interested in following in the footsteps of the Replicator’s creators (and humanity’s pseudo-ancestors), a super-duper technologically advanced race known as the Ancients. The Ancients are (more or less) no longer around, having long since ascended to another plane of existence. Ironically, it seems as if the fact that the Replicators are technological constructs is the limiting factor in preventing their ascension—the Ancient’s path to the next plane of existence appears to be a biologically-based one.

Part of the irony is because real-world thinking about the ability to transcend the bounds of our current existence is very firmly tied to progress in the computing realm. One scenario involves computers reaching a point where they can host a human mind, with silicon (or other, more exotic, materials) providing a substrate for a consciousness just as the neurons within our skulls provide a substrate for our minds today. Humans would scan themselves in, and digital versions of themselves would be free of the limits of our biological bodies, including death and disease. This scenario is only one of a number of possible futures that all fall under the rubric of the singularity, a term coined by futurist Vernor Vinge. Essentially, the singularity is a point sitting sometime in our future where the pace of technological change becomes so rapid, and makes such deep impact on our existence, that being able to envision what happens after the singularity is like a chimpanzee trying to figure out the design schematics for the space shuttle.

Freezing someone in order to revive them later is a common idea in science fiction. And it’s probably one of the areas where people are trying their hardest to turn science fiction into science fact.

Usually referred to as cryogenics, but more accurately described as cryonics, the appeal of this technology is obvious: a recently-dead or dying person could be frozen until such time as medical science discovers the fountain of youth and works out how to revive decades- or centuries-old carefully preserved corpses. And indeed, the first part of the equation may already have become reality. Companies such as Alcor will chill recently deceased (ideally within 15 minutes of death) individuals to temperatures below 180 degrees Fahrenheit. However, it is not known what affect this process would have on a subject’s mind, and there is no currently known way to revive a patient—and there may never be. Still that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from taking the chance—nearly 1,000 80 people are already stored in Alcor’s vaults (and for the record, it’s a gamble I’d be willing to take too, but unless the cost of living gets a lot cheaper, the starting price of $80,000 to preserve just my head is a truly fictional sum of money for me to stump up, even with clever financing options.)

On a less ambitious scale, people have been revived after lethal exposure to cold (the timescale here is tens of minutes, not years). And as DISCOVER reported last year, suspended-animation researchers have revived dogs that were clinically dead for as long as three hours. The immediate practical application here that the scientists are looking at is for trauma victims. Sometimes people receive injuries which could be surgically repaired in theory, but in practice it just takes too long to transport the patient to a hospital and then conduct a complex operation. The hope is that these people could be placed in suspended animation at the scene of the injury, and then operated upon in a relatively leisurely fashion. Clinical trials are currently being designed, but it will probably be many years before this becomes anything like a commonplace therapy. Until then, you can spend some of your time rooting for The Powers That Be to order a second season of The Middleman.

• Scifi movies summarized in one sentence [Scientific American] 
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• Atul Gawande on the brain, phantom limbs and why you have to scratch that itch [New Yorker]  
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• National Treasure be damned, there are actually 25 “original” Declarations of Independence [New York Times] 
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• While you wait for the chimps to declare independence, take the Planet of the Apes quiz [SciFi Scanner]  
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• And all men are created equal [via BoingBoing]:   

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

- Attention Jaron Lanier: FOX Virtuality pilot casting. [Hollywood Reporter via io9]

- Note to Discover Corporate: Time to order Japanese high tech brainstorming room. [Pink Tentacle]

- Ingeniously designed keg stand. [DVICE]

Even if you were an immortal, sword-wielding Scottish badass, how long could you statistically be expected to live? Over hundreds or thousands of years, wouldn’t you be just as likely to be decapitated in a car crash as by another immortal?

Not so, as we reported in the November 2007 issue of the magazine:

“Each year, American adults have, overall, a 1-in-1,743 chance of dying in an accident. That means that even if nothing else killed you—doing away with old age and disease—you would on average live to be 1,743 years old before a fatal accident. But you could do better. A 9-year-old child has much lower odds of accidental death, about 1 in 10,000. If we could keep everyone to this low rate (avoiding work and driving would probably help), we could typically live 10,000 years. About 37 percent of the population would do better yet, living on average to the ripe old age of 20,000, says James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.”