Zombie stories are often about the utter failure of the government to deal with a big problem and, thanks to George Romero, also a great way to expose issues of class and social status. No one really believes they might attack one day. Zombies are a metaphor, like vampires or werewolves, for the horrifying and uncanny aspects of the human. They also remind you that, when things really hit the fan, you’re on your own. So be prepared! The Center for Disease Control does not want you to be caught unawares. In a post that walks the line between “ha ha this would never happen” and “but seriously just in case, you never know,” Ali S Kahn details the worthy forms of emergency response to hoards of the necrotic, brain-seeking undead:

1. Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information. Family members meeting by their mailbox. You should pick two meeting places, one close to your home and one farther away
2. Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane. Pick one place right outside your home for sudden emergencies and one place outside of your neighborhood in case you are unable to return home right away.
3. Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.
4. Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.

I’m wary of the idea of meeting at the mailbox. Though I’m no expert, I have a strong suspicion that the mailbox is insufficiently fortified against the shuffling corpses invading the neighborhood. But hey, I’m not at the CDC, so I’m going to trust Kahn on this one. Maybe she keeps a shotgun (or cricket bat? Lobo?) in her mailbox. I just don’t know.

What I do know is I need to get an emergency kit like the one on the right. Because a zombie hoard is nonsense. But the Singularity might trigger a new stone age and I won’t be able to dash off to Wal-Mart for supplies. Should I be embarrassed that a small part of me hopes/expects some sort of epic disaster for the selfish reason that modern life doesn’t let me use a flashlight or flint in day-to-day routines? I mean, I just don’t have enough reasons in my life to use a kerosine lantern.

Maybe that’s how I can write off my next camping trip: research for zombie apocalypse.

For more on zombies, check out my series, the Ethics of the Undead.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of zombies kindly broadcasting their presence via Wikipedia

After a long search, you’ve found your Person of Interest—and he’s making it abundantly clear that, while you were hoping for a civilized chat back at the station, he makes it clear he doesn’t like the ambiance there. You don’t want to shoot, you’re too far away to use your Taser, and it’s not like you walk around with a spare tear gas canister hanging from your belt. What’s a law enforcement officer to do?

That’s where the StunRay comes in. A non-lethal, spotlight-like weapon, this new device is designed to disorient its targets with by overloading their neural circuitry with a burst of high-intensity light. Genesis Illumination, which makes the device, patented it in January. (You can see the device in action in this video put out by Genesis.)

Inside the StunRay is a 75-watt lamp which, after optics focus the light, produces a beam “10 times more intense than an aircraft landing light.” That’s a whole lot more light than the nervous system is used to processing. It allegedly overloads the neural circuits connected to the retina, essentially using the light to flood the brain—and incapacitate the target, from distances of up to 150 feet. The effects are reportedly only temporary, generally lasting anywhere from “seconds to twenty minutes,” Todd Eisenberg, the StunRay’s inventor, told Scientific American.

Genesis Illumination’s goal was to use light “to safely disable and disorient.” Guns, of course, can cause permanent injury, and even Tasers can pose serious safety risks. In comparison, the StunRay seems relatively safe. The information about the device, however, comes directly from Genesis, which obviously has a stake in the device, and the mechanism and effectiveness haven’t been externally verified.

The StunRay isn’t the first weapon to disorient targets with a bright beam. Dazzlers, as these weapons are known, were used by the British back in the 1980′s, and the Department of Defense has developed StunRay-like weapons of its own.

Image: Flickr / Theoddnote

I have a confession. I used to be all about the Singularity. I thought it was inevitable. I thought for certain that some sort of Terminator/HAL9000 scenario would happen when ECHELON achieved sentience. I was sure The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix was a fairly accurate depiction of how things would go down. We’d make smart robots, we’d treat them poorly, they’d rebel and slaughter humanity. Now I’m not so sure. I have big, gloomy doubts about the Singularity.

Michael Anissimov tries to restock the flames of fear over at Accelerating Future with his post “Yes, The Singularity is the Single Biggest Threat to Humanity.”

Combine the non-obvious complexity of common sense morality with great power and you have an immense problem. Advanced AIs will be able to copy themselves onto any available computers, stay awake 24/7, improve their own designs, develop automated and parallelized experimental cycles that far exceed the capabilities of human scientists, and develop self-replicating technologies such as artificially photosynthetic flowers, molecular nanotechnology, modular robotics, machines that draw carbon from the air to build carbon robots, and the like. It’s hard to imagine what an advanced AGI would think of, because the first really advanced AGI will be superintelligent, and be able to imagine things that we can’t. It seems so hard for humans to accept that we may not be the theoretically most intelligent beings in the multiverse, but yes, there’s a lot of evidence that we aren’t.

….

Humans overestimate our robustness. Conditions have to be just right for us to keep living. If AGIs decided to remove the atmosphere or otherwise alter it to pursue their goals, we would be toast. If temperatures on the surface changed by more than a few dozen degrees up or down, we would be toast. If natural life had to compete with AI-crafted cybernetic organisms, it could destroy the biosphere on which we depend. There are millions of ways in which powerful AGIs with superior technology could accidentally make our lives miserable, simply by not taking our preferences into account. Our preferences are not a magical mist that can persuade any type of mind to give us basic respect. They are just our preferences, and we happen to be programmed to take each other’s preferences deeply into account, in ways we are just beginning to understand. If we assume that AGI will inherently contain all this moral complexity without anyone doing the hard work of programming it in, we will be unpleasantly surprised when these AGIs become more intelligent and powerful than ourselves.

Oh my stars, that does sound threatening. But again, that weird, nagging doubt lingers in the back of my mind. For a while, I couldn’t place my finger on the problem, until I re-read Anissimov’s post and realized that my disbelief flared up every time I read something about AGI doing something. AGI will remove the atmosphere. Really? How? The article, in fact, all arguments about the danger of the Singularity necessarily presume one single fact: That AGI will be able to interact with the world beyond computers. I submit that, in practical terms, they will not.

Consider the example of Skynet. Two very irrational decisions had to be made to allow Skynet to initiate Judgment Day. First, the A.I. that runs Skynet was debuted on the military network. In the mythos of the film, Skynet does not graduate from orchestrating minor battle plans or strategizing invasions in the abstract, but goes straight from the coder’s hands to getting access to the nuclear birds. Second, in the same moment, the military rolls out a fleet of robot warriors that are linked to Skynet, effectively giving the A.I. hands and then putting guns in those hands.

My point is this: if Skynet had been debuted on a closed computer network, it would have been trapped within that network. Even if it escaped and “infected” every other system (which is dubious, for reasons of necessary computing power on a first iteration super AGI), the A.I. would still not have any access to physical reality. Singularity arguments rely upon the presumption that technology can work without humans. It can’t. If A.I. decided to obliterate humanity by launching all the nukes, it’d also annihilate the infrastructure that powers it. Me thinks self-preservation should be a basic feature of any real AGI.

In short: any super AGI that comes along is going to need some helping hands out in the world to do its dirty work.

B-b-but, the Singulitarians argue, “an AI could fool a person into releasing it because the AI is very smart and therefore tricksy.” This argument is preposterous. Philosophers constantly argue as if every hypothetical person is either a dullard or a hyper-self-aware. The argument that AI will trick people is an example of the former. Seriously, the argument is that  very smart scientists will be conned by an AGI they helped to program. And so what if they do? Is the argument that a few people are going to be hypnotized into opening up a giant factory run only by the A.I., where every process in the vertical and the horizontal (as in economic infrastructure, not The Outer Limits) can be run without human assistance? Is that how this is going to work? I highly doubt it. Even the most brilliant AGI is not going to be able to restructure our economy overnight.

So keep your hats on folks, don’t start fretting about evil AGI until we live in an economy that is solely robot labor. Until then, I just can’t see it. I can’t see how AGI gets hands. Maybe that’s a limit on my vision. But if the nightmare scenario of AGI going sentient and rogue over night comes true, then I think we’re all in good shape. Sure, it might screw up our communications networks, but it’s not going to be able to do much of anything outside a computer. Anytime you start getting nervous, remember all the things we still need people to do, and how much occurs beyond the realm of the computer. In that light, the Singularity is just a digital tempest in a teacup.

Image of a very scary computer bank by k0a1a.net’s photostream via Flickr Creative Commons

Follow Kyle Munkittrick on Twitter @PopBioethics

Michael Burnam-Fink ponders the on-again-off-again relationship the military has with human enhancement:

In 2002, Dr Joseph Bielitzki, chair of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, announced a grand program to improve soldiers, with the slogan “Be all that you can be, and a lot more.” His targets: sleep, fatigue, pain, and blood loss. Other projects studied psychological stress, memory, and learning . . . The words on everybody’s lips were “human enhancement,” the use of science and technology to upgrade the human body and mind . . . According to military futurists, the then-new War on Terror required a new type of soldier, independent, fast and more lethal than ever before.

But in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military discovered that elite special forces alone could not restore stability to war-torn countries. General Petraeus’s counter-insurgency strategy relies on building relationships with local partners and requires soldiers with diplomatic skills, not combat enhancements. Approximately $4 billion in annual research funding was shifted away from blue-sky projects to better reconnaissance drones and defenses against roadside bombs, the insurgent’s weapon of choice. And in combat, hard lessons were relearned: War is random, and a super-soldier is just as dead as anyone else if his Humvee rolls over an IED.

Emphasis mine. Burnam-Fink’s point is one well taken: amping up your average G.I. Joe into some sort of techno-berserker übersoldat is not the solution for modern warfare. Super soldiers are still quite susceptible to mundane threats. But re-read that little bit I’ve bolded about Patraeus’s counter-insurgency relying on relationships and diplomacy. The conclusion was that combat enhancements were not as useful as hoped, not that human enhancement in general was deemed ineffective.

Sounds like the US military should focus on enhancing the qualities Patraeus said worked. Create great soldiers who are better, nay, super diplomats. Moral and mental enhancement might improve the panoply of diplomatic skills, including language learning, situational awareness, and culturally sensitive negotiations. Not exactly as Hollywood Cool as see-around-corner rifles or personal heads-up displays, but no one ever said real human enhancements would be glamorous. More to the point, these enhancements would save lives. If a soldier can form a relationship with the locals and properly evaluate an urban environment, then that may lead to more peace with fewer shots fired. Now that sounds like human enhancement.

Image of A U.S. Army Soldier from Task Force Regulars 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, Renegade company by Tech. Sgt. Cohen Young via DVIDSHUB on Flickr Creative Commons

The idea of attacking scientists to stem technological development is an old one. Perhaps the most dramatic example from recent times is Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his case the targeted killings were embedded in an anti-technology philosophy fully developed in his Manifesto. In the recent assassination attempts in Iran, we see the workings of geopolitical pragmatism in its most raw form.

Regardless of what we may think of Iran having the bomb, the strategy of killing scientists and engineers of a country’s technological infrastructure is one that should give us pause. Few steps separate this ploy to making them the domestic enemy as well, a tradition with an even deadlier history that includes the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s purge of academics.

Although on the fringe at present, there are parts of the public which are already in tune with this lethal segue. They view scientists as the people that bring us global warming and much else that is taking our technological society to potential crisis. Unfortunately, the way scientists are depicted for dramatic affect in popular entertainment doesn’t always help. A recent opinion piece in Nature criticized the effort of certain organizations to make the depiction of science and the work they do more accurate in movies. (I responded in another post.) Below the article, however, was one reader’s comment that made me think about how these unrealistic portrayals can be causing some real damage:

The reason that most depictions of science in movies are in a negative light is because it’s a reflection of reality. Every day, science is poisoning our oceans and air, destroying our communities and creating terrifying new weapons to be employed on the poor and oppressed of the world.

The “awkward nerd” depiction of a scientist is far too fair. They are the monsters tearing our world apart while having the temerity to hold us in contempt for “not understanding them.”

How ironic that this comment serves as its own best argument for the need of some smidgen of truth in character development, contrary to the thesis of Daniel Sarewitz, who penned the Nature opinion piece.

Not surprisingly, the motivations of scientists are much more diverse than the simple portrayals of narrative fiction. They range from a desire to make the world a better place, to the self-centered pursuit of prestige, money, and power with little regard for the ethical implications of one’s scientific work. The first type doesn’t get a whole lot of play, while the second has great dramatic potential, and so we see it a lot more. As the French novelist Henri de Montherlant wrote, “happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page.”

Could the dramatically compelling caricatures of scientists of the “evil genius” type underlie some of the thinking behind the assassination attempts on Iranian scientists? It seems a stretch. But in its suggestion of a strategy for dealing with technological development of another country that is thought of as a threat, the killing of Iran’s scientists raises some troubling concerns about how scientists can be scapegoats for a society’s discomforts with technological progress, and how narrative fiction can be a lubricant for such a move.

In the early 1930′s, Tesla claimed that he had invented a death ray that would benefit the military in battle—one capable of destroying up to 10,000 enemy aircraft at distances of up to 250 miles.  It was so lethal that it would end the spectacle of war.

Tesla died before he could build this death ray, and he had no documentation hinting at its design in his personal effects. Nobody (not even the FBI) knows what happens to the death ray plans, if any existed.

Now it seems that Tesla’s missing death ray has been found, and it’s working, operational, and frying guests at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas.

In the not too distant future, the phrase “shooting up” could take on a whole new meaning. At least if the U.S. Army has its way. Wired‘s Danger Room blog reported a few days ago that the military is seeking bids for a high-tech form of vaccination that could be delivered quickly and efficiently to a large number of troops in the heat of battle. More specifically, the Pentagon wants a DNA vaccine that can be administered via a literal shot to the arm—and a jolt of electricity. All without causing too much “discomfort” to the patient, of course.

Suffice it to say that this futuristic-sounding vaccine would be a far cry from what you and I received as children. As last year’s swine flu epidemic made painfully clear, our current methods of vaccine development, which have remained essentially unchanged for decades, are woefully outdated. The vaccines take too long—upwards of seven months—to produce, are easily prone to failure if not prepared correctly and, in many cases, lose their potency after only a year. These failings have helped draw attention to DNA-based vaccines, cocktails of genetically engineered plasmids which offer the promise of inducing a stronger, and more targeted, immune response. Where regular vaccines are slow to develop and hard to combine, DNA vaccines can be made relatively quickly and mixed together to ward off multiple pathogens at once. They are also generally safer to produce and administer, more durable and can be scaled more easily.

Like other vaccines, however, they are still primarily injected into muscles and thus suffer from the same inefficiency problems. Because the DNA is not injected directly into the host cells but into the spaces between them (the “intracellular spaces”), the vaccine first needs to be taken up before the cells can mount a robust response and pump out the necessary disease-fighting proteins.

The two main alternatives cited in the Army’s solicitation are gene guns and intramuscular electroporation. The first gene gun was designed in the 1980s by a Cornell University scientist as a tool with which to transform plant cells by blasting them with microscopic DNA-coated gold or tungsten beads carried on a powerful whiff of helium gas.

Gene guns have since focused their crosshairs on animals and humans alike, particularly after the Army recently embraced them as their vaccine delivery method of choice. The main downside is that it can only deliver small quantities of DNA, not the two or more vaccines at a time that the Army wants. Intramuscular electroporation, which improves vaccine uptake by temporarily opening pores in their membranes through short bursts of electricity, can be used to supply sufficient amounts of DNA, but it comes at a cost: pain. So what ideal device would the Army like?

The optimal vaccination strategy would capitalize on the efficiency of electroporation, eliminate the discomfort associated with intramuscular injection, and be useful for simultaneous delivery of two or more DNA vaccines. A minimal successful outcome would provide effective delivery with reduced discomfort for one DNA vaccine.

For the moment, electroporation seems to be the method of choice among the companies operating in this burgeoning field. Inovio, a Pennsylvania-based startup that has emerged as one of the field’s dominant players, claims that its electroporation system can boost cellular uptake of a vaccine 1,000-fold or more. The company employs a handheld needle-electrode applicator tethered to an electric pulse generator to inject the vaccine into skin or muscle and deliver a few short zaps of electricity to jostle the cells into taking it up. Unlike most such electroporation systems, Inovio claims its own is relatively painless—”tolerable without anesthetic.” But it’s important to bear in mind that while DNA vaccines are making concrete progress, they still have quite a ways to go before they supplant conventional vaccines. (Plasmid purification, in particular, remains a challenge.) With any luck, the Army will have found its desired device by the time the first DNA vaccines hit the production line.

Image: alvi2047/Flickr

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.

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.

We’ll leave the debates over the acting, direction, and overall adaptation to others (except to say that Jackie Earle Haley stole the show). But one aspect worthy of analysis is the story’s main conflict—the constant “looming” nuclear holocaust. Granted, we never actually see any evidence that the aforementioned holocaust is looming, save a few shots of Nixon upping Defcon levels—but we’ll address that later. When Alan Moore first published the book in 1986, the apocalypse on everyone’s mind was Cold War atomic bombs—which, as we’ve noted, no longer pack quite the same anxiety punch as, say, biological weapons. Today, gas masks and duct tape have replaced air raids and backyard shelters in the popular conscious, to the point where seeing mushroom clouds onscreen feels like you’re watching an ’80s homage.

Of course, none of this means that the nuclear threat is any smaller now than it was three decades ago: The danger of nuclear war is still present, and fear of missile attack still drives plenty of policy and military tech decisions worldwide. But, like Bird Flu, nukes seem to have a PR problem: Despite the fact that they could wipe us all out, the thought of them isn’t all that scary.

Which is really the main problem for Snyder and his estimated $125 million budget: No matter how faithful your script and powerful your characters, it’s tough to keep a story suspenseful when you’re working towards a climax that doesn’t pack a serious punch. Not helping is the fact that the film completely ignores the other side—the Russians. We get a few choice shots of Tricky Dick mumbling about war, but never once do we see Gorbachev ordering missile launches or troop mobilization.

Granted, world annihilation isn’t dull—it’s still enough to keep an audience engaged for 2 hours and 43 minutes. Plus Snyder never misses a chance to smack us with stakes-raising reminders of devastation (we counted at least 8 shots with the Twin Towers in the background). And when the destruction does come to the Big Apple (why do TV shows and movies always love to decimate New York?) Snyder saves us the book’s graphic images of strewn corpses and bombed-out buildings, instead focusing on the internal struggle among the Watchmen ranks. Nine million people sacrificed for the greater good, meh—but we’ll watch one lovable sociopath in a ski mask.

So should Snyder have updated his apocalypse with biotech? He’d have faced the wrath of fans had he done so. Plus who would think nuclear war could ever get boring? It’s enough to make you wonder what the next big all-consuming fear will be. Oh, wait, we know that already: thinking robots.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

We see nerve gas often enough on TV and the silver screen that it’s worth understanding out just how it works. VX gas can be deadly when ingested or when it makes contact on the skin. Depending on how much exposure a victim has suffered, it can kill in 10 minutes or a couple of hours. It functions by interfering with the break down of acetylcholine in the muscles. Normally when a nerve fires, acetylcholine is released to cause the muscle to contract. After the contaraction, an enzyme is released to break down the acetylcholine, allowing the muscle to relax. The phosphorous in the VX gas bonds with the enzyme, causing the acetylcholine to stay in place, leading to muscle contractions and spasming. Death can result from asphyxiation, but also from the victim harming themselves while in convulsions.

In the show, the brilliant Dr. Hood comes upon a victim seconds after she has been exposed to the chemical. He does exactly the right thing: He triggers the emergency shower immediately, stripes off the exposed clothing and gets as much of the VX off her as possible. The poison can be countered with an antidote, so people exposed to the gas can be saved if they’re treated in time. They’re only hope is that their exposure is low enough that they can get to the hospital. A high dose can kill in 10 minutes, a low one might take hours to kick in. VX, even in gas form, is heavier than air, so the key to surviving it is to get to fresh air and high ground (which means you have to do the opposite of what you would do in case of a dirty bomb or atomic explosion, where the goal is to avoid radioactive fallout by going inside and staying on the lower floors, as fallout can settle on roofs, so make sure you can tell your apocalyptic scenarios apart!)

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Because they are interested in taking their quarry alive, Carter is equipped with something he has taken to calling a “bubble gun.” The gun immobilizes its target by shooting out a temporary force-field that forms a bubble. In the real world, bubbles—or more accurately, foam—actually are the basis of a gun designed to immobilize enemies.

The real-life bubble gun belongs to a class of weapons known as non-lethal weapons. These are weapons that should, in theory at least, incapacitate a target without doing the kind of damage that a bullet produces. (There is controversy about these weapons, with some arguing that they are still pretty dangerous, but, because a police officer or soldier is told they can’t cause serious harm, that officer or soldier is more likely to use such a weapon in situations where they otherwise would have shown restraint.) Tasers fall into this category, as are the kind of sonic weapons that have been used to repel pirates off the coast of Somalia. Somalia was also the location of the first active tests of the bubble gun in 1995, during the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The real-life gun doesn’t rely on force fields, but instead shoots a sticky foam, which its creators describe as “an extremely tacky, tenacious material used to block, entangle, and impair individuals.” Apparantly, the test went well, but the technology hasn’t become widespread since because of concerns that the foam might accidentally or deliberately get sprayed on a target’s nose and mouth, suffocating them. Still, foam-based technologies are very much under research, especially with regard to targeting the smallest enemies of all: pathogenic organisms and toxic molecules. Foams have been developed to neutralize bioweapons and nerve gas.

Bioweapons are also emerging as a component of the current Eureka mystery, so we’ll stay tuned for that. As for when we’ll see Eureka return to our television screens, the current rumor has it returning in June or July.

Now hang on, a hafnium bomb? Hafnium actually exists (which is more than I can say for some elements), but can it actually blow up like that? Well, some scientists believe it can.  In the real world, hafnium is closely related to zirconium, and it has many of the same properties. The structure of the hafnium solid is especially effective at storing energy. That makes it useful in control rods in a nuclear reactors, and also as a way to store energy as a kind of atomic battery.

To get any kind of explosion, start with the hafnium isomer 178m2. An isomer is an atomic isotope already charged with energy. Typically that energy will dissipate in its own random radiation, but in the case of hafnium, with it’s high storage capacity, a few (a very few) physicists believe it could be triggered to release all its energy in a fairly short space of time in a kind of explosion. I say “kind of” because  the energy released would be in the form of  gamma rays. As the highest energy form of electromagnetic radiation, gamma rays usually pass right through most solid objects. But when released in such high doses, they could, as Sharon Weinberger put it in the Wasington Post, “they could act like ray bombs in low-budget films, vaporizing living tissue and heating materials until they explode.” Nasty stuff. (Weinberger, who has written for DISCOVER, is a hafnium bomb sceptic and has since written a lively account of the controversy in her book Imaginary Weapons)

So storing energy in a hafnium isomer is one thing. Getting it all out rapidly enough to make an explosion is another. Carl Collins, a physicist at the University of Texas, claimed in 2004 that he got a lot of energy out just by shooting an X-ray from a dentist X-ray machine, but his work has not been duplicated and is considered dubious by many in the scientific community.

So  the science is pretty questionable: Could our villain actually blow up hafnium with an X-ray machine? Well, phycists in the real world haven’t achieved it, but this kind of gray area is, after all, the whole point of SciFi. Maybe with  a little elbow grease and a lot of evil-genius know-how,  the hafnium bomb could be made to work.

For more on the U.S. Military’s research into the hafnium bomb, readers might want to look at this pair of excellent posts over on Wired‘s Danger Room blog.
Posting update: A surfeit of latkes and holiday galavanting caused me to get behind on Knight Rider and Eleventh Hour. I plan to catch up, so stay tuned.

Making a bioweapon requires more than just finding a disease thats suitably lethal and contagious. You need an infectious agent that can be stored under a range of conditions for at least some time, which can dispersed effectively, and which can be made in bulk. You can’t just grab one human, inject him with something at your convenience, and then send him back to infect all the rest — this might work once or twice, but then a simple quarantine protocol for all new arrivals or escapees would drastically limit the effectiveness of the weapon. You need some way to infect lots of people in a short period of time. In the shadowy world of bioweapon development, the favored approach is aerosolization: essentially creating a spray or mist of particles containing the infectious agent, which is then inhaled directly into the lungs.

This is not as easy as it sounds: a lot of agents can’t be effectively aerosolized for a number of reasons, including a short life span outside a living host, or because they are damaged during the aerosolization process. (This is why anthrax is a perennial concern to those tracking bioweapons as it naturally forms robust, long-lived, and infectious spores) When the U.S. stopped developing bioweapons in 1969, it had weaponized just seven agents. The Soviet Union worked on developing another 10 or so. Given that Skynet kills so many people and animals on Judgment Day, the pool of surviving diseases to weaponize would have been sharply reduced, limiting its options. (Most infectious diseases are essentially crowd diseases. Eliminate the crowds, or the animal reservoirs a disease can persist in, and you eliminate the the disease) All this means that one bioweapon, let alone two, would be a tall order, making it valuable enough to Skynet to send a terminator into the past to protect it.

Dr. Stefan Savage, a UCSD computer scientist, and his student, Benajamin Laxton, demonstrated their software on two images of a key. The first was taken from close range with a cellphone camera. The second set of keys was shot using a telephoto lens form a rofotop to capture an image of keys on a cafe table 200 feet away.  Then they wrote an algorithm in Matlab that could normalize the picture of the key depending on distance and the angle of the photo. Once the image has been normalized, it was a relatively simple matter to encode the ridges along the keylength into a numerical pattern, and then render that pattern into a real metal key.

Of course, the unanswered question for this experiment has to be, Why? Here’s what Savage said on the UCSD website: “If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos on-line, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys.”

Well, that’s a good point, and it’s something worth being careful about. But I still say he watched too many police shows.

While rooting through someone else’s trash for food or other essentials is often done out of necessity by unfortunates, dumpster diving here means the specific act of searching through commercial waste for technological cast offs, such as computers or computer peripherals. Often times the only thing wrong with this equipment is that it is simply not the latest model, and so has been replaced. Other times there is cosmetic damage only, or even when something is genuinely broken or worn out, it can be cannibalized for parts, such as disk drives.

Dumpster diving is one way recycled hard disks can end up being sold on places like ebay. There have been several reported cases of people purchasing disk drives at auction, only to find they have medical records or other confidential information still on them from their previous owners. This is why when you throw or give away a computer, you should always, always, always make sure the disk is blanked. You must use a “secure erase” program as it is otherwise trivial to scan the disk for sensitive information such as credit card numbers. Just dragging the files into the trash and emptying the trash won’t do as this as it will leave the file still intact on the hard disk—your files must be physically overwritten. A secure erase command may be already built into your operating system, otherwise you can download free software to do this.