Giant Freakin Robot

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday for theatrical and televised gimmicks, such as William Castle’s buzzers-in-the-seats gig for The Tingler or his fake insurance policies taken our for horror movie audiences, lest they be scared to death during one of his features. It was also the time for the battle between AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision to see who could better bring smells into the visual medium. Given their flash-in-the-pan status, it’s obvious the technique wasn’t exactly one for the ages.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) holds a yearly Virtual Reality Conference, and this year’s exposition, held in Orlando, has revitalized the connection between sights and smells with a television that actually emits odors, rendering scratch-and-sniff cards to the annals of yesteryear. Now all those manure documentaries clogging up your DVR can finally be experienced as they were intended. Well, not exactly.

Part of what makes being a human interesting is the intuition that gives tool-making such a valued place in the history of our skills and talents. Flints became weapons, sticks were sharpened to become weapons, and many many other things became weapons. But sometimes it isn’t about weaponry. Sometimes it’s about pressing ham.

In 1980, Faustino Asensio Lopez was tending livestock with his father in a field near Ciudad Real in Spain when he found a 220-pound rock measuring 18 x 12.5 x 8 inches. In other words, no mere ball bearing. Lopez assumed it to be scrap metal leftover from the Spanish Civil War and took it home, where he kept it on his porch and he and his family used it to cure meats for 30 years. Until, that is, Lopez saw a 2011 news report about meteor sightings over Spain. He then contacted geologist Juan Carlos Gutierrez Marco, whose analysis of the rock confirmed it to be a prehistoric meteorite, and the fourth of its kind to be found in Spain over the past 115 years, having lasted this long mainly due to being buried.

So not only did Lopez discover that a household item of his is actually one of the rarer rocks ever discovered, he then found out the thing is worth somewhere around $5.3 million. Not a bad pay day for a farmer, or anyone else on the planet.

There are many, many conceptual contraptions that could change the way human beings live their lives, and the biological computer is hovering right around the top, just below a realistic oral sex replicator. But all bodily things aside, a team of bioengineers from Stanford University have come farther than anyone else in figuring out a way to mesh living matter and electronics together – the transcriptor.

Modeled after the transistor, which amplifies and switches electrical signals and power, transcriptors will do the same thing with genetic materials. That’s right, the device’s electrical flow is controlled by RNA polymerase traveling along a strand of DNA, in which the RNA’s movement is controlled by special enzyme combinations, integrases in this case. The scientists had to choose such enzymes that weren’t specific to any one form of life and were found everywhere in nature. Just in case we need to make that Venus Fly Trap computer I scribbled onto thousands of pages of construction paper in my youth.

Using a combination of different transcriptors, the Stanford team created a full array of logic gates that they call Boolean Integrase Logic gates, or BIL gates, if you’re into billion-dollar puns. With this variety of gates, there is almost no limit to the computations that a biological computer could perform inside a living cell.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t alone in being utterly dumbfounded by people who kept their toys on shelves, still cooped up in their original packaging. I mean, if you weren’t playing with something, what was the point in spending money on it? Wait, you say it cost how much? That’s like 40 Screwballs from the ice cream man. What kind of a dystopia am I living in? Luckily, it was just the 1980s.

It’s no question that the toy and design company Super7 understands that sentiment entirely, as shown by their upcoming line of previously unproduced figures from Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Alien, as part of their Reaction series. These toys, recently shown off in their full glory at WonderCon, existed only as prototypes from toy manufacturer Kenner, who chose not to go into production, perhaps not wanting to turn 1979 into the childhood nightmare battlezone that this commercial attempted to make it.