Giant Freakin Robot

Those afraid of dying young may find some of their fears dashed after reading this story. And then reality will come crashing back down on them later, when I’ve got nothing to do with it. The secret to living forever wasn’t available to generations past, because it just could not have happened. You have to crush up the bones of George Burns, Milton Berle, and Dick Clark, and smoke them in a cigarette tied together with one of Casey Kasem’s hairs. Just in case that sounds completely unfeasible, the real facts can be found when Germany’s Kiel University and the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) publish their study into how the polyp Hydra is linked to the human aging process.

Immortality is embedded in the realms of fiction, but the freshwater polyp Hydra is as close to an exception to the rule as is available for researching. While I’d love to believe the nifty radial symmetric design is what makes its life cycle everlasting, but it’s the simplicity of the organism, and its self-contained budding reproductive process that makes this happen. The stem cells necessary for this type of reproduction are capable of continuous regeneration. Stem cells in humans tend to lose that ability, and the tissue ages, including the heart muscles. The study, found in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, delves deeper into Hydra’s stem cell mysteries.

Until now, no one knew if the FoxO gene, the well-known branch of proteins involved in all animal and human cell proliferation, played any particular role in aging, or in the decrease and inactivity of stem cells as humans get older. The researchers isolated Hydra’s stem cells and genetically modified them with different forms of FoxO: normal, inactive, and enhanced. They found that those without FoxO possess far fewer stem cells, while those with inactive FoxO also saw a marked change.

To me, that kind of gene isolation would be the hard part, as the scientists now have the task of testing it in a multitude of ways. Given the knowledge that people who live beyond 100 years have been shown to possess highly active FoxO, it looks like the seemingly innocuous discovery of why a simple sea creature survives will lead to major advancements in human longevity. And if nothing I just said turns out to be true, I hope I live long enough to eat those words.

From bulletproof vests to Photoshopped images to cakes, the key to success for some products lies in the time-honored system of layering things. The Case Western Reserve University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and PolymerPlus have all joined forces through years of research and development to create an artificial lens that is nearly identical to the lens in the human eye, and the method of fabrication is just as important as the materials themselves.

Yes, there is an acronym for the technology behind these polymer lenses, and it’s called GRIN: gradient refractive index optics. With a GRIN lens, as with the human eye, light is refracted by varying degrees as it passes through. That’s the opposite of how it works with traditional lenses, such as those found in a microscope or telescope, whose curved surface only refracts light one way or another. In the past scientists have focused on other aspects of optics to bend light to various degrees, since the technology didn’t exist to replicate the gradual evolution of refraction.

For stars, sometimes it’s damned hard to stay looking that young. No, not those overly made-up fame hounds in Hollywood. I’m talking about the big, bulbous fireballs in the sky. The star known as 49 CETI isn’t lying about its age directly, but astronomers have been puzzled as to why it wasn’t showing all the signs of being 40 million years old.

A colossal band of gas surrounds the entire star, which is a feature of stars around 10 million years old. Since its discovery in 1995, the existence of the gas has remained a mystery until now. A team of astronomers reported in a study for the Astrophysical Journal that 49 CETI is enveloped by a disk-shaped region similar our own solar system’s Kupler Belt, which hangs out beyond Neptune. Similar, but 4,000 times more dense and massive than the Kupler Belt. And you thought Houston interstates got clogged.

How does this explain the gas? Picture a paradoxically unimaginable amount of mile-wide (on average) comets — I’m talking trillions — all smashing into each other at high speeds, roughly six times a second, and they’ve been doing that for an estimated 10 million years. Yes, elsewhere in the solar system, comets the size of city blocks are obliterating each other at a higher rate of occurrence than your breathing and blinking. Because the comets are typically younger than those in our solar system, they are likely to contain more carbon monoxide inside of them, which escapes during the collisions and keeps the star covered in a perennial fog.

Remember that spaghetti sauce volcano you made for that one science fair when you were the only person from your team that showed up, and your project blew up and ruined Mr. Mendleson’s suede shoes? Well, even if it worked correctly and you hadn’t given those classmates of yours burns on their faces, it would still be a piece of shit compared to these four 14- and 15-year-old girls from Africa, who have added their own spin to the phrase “waste not, want not.”