A source no smaller than CNN briefly legitimized the story of two Georgia hunters finding physical evidence of Bigfoot. The “news” came amid a flurry of news of scientific breakthroughs and gadgets of the future, prompting hope that 2008 would be the year all the lunchboxes of my youth come true.
Sadly, we’re still just dreaming.
Finding Bigfoot was a childhood dream and nightmare
Bigfoot Captured!
Bigfoot failed to materialize on August 15th, as the hunters promised. Despite the media onslaught that included a streaming feed of the press conference by CNN, many thought it wasn’t even a good hoax, pointing to a strong resemblance between the body in the freezer and the retail costume it turned out to be. One of the hunters tipped his hand during a podcast by hinting at a reveal on September 1 that would make him rich. Less than a week after the press conference—by the time the “body” had thawed—it was proven to be a hoax.
Life on Mars!
Finding life on Mars isn’t the mission of the Mars Phoenix, but the little robot digger is trying to confirm whether conditions for life could exist. Earlier this summer, Phoenix confirmed the presence of water, a huge win for Martian Manhunter fan club. The soil samples won’t explain an earlier photo taken in January by one of the Rovers, of course, and scientists are currently debating whether the presence of the perchlorate oxidizing agent in the soil is a death knell for finding life on the Red Planet. No danger of H.G. Wells proving prophetic, but a few simple bugs would be nice.
James Bond has an invisible car!
In Die Another Day, James Bond slid around a frozen lake to show off the real-life Aston Martin Vanquish and its reel-life cloaking device. According to Q, the tech was made possible by a series of cameras that projected images on the surface that one would see from the other side of the vehicle. UC Berkeley scientists took two recent developments in metamaterials—that is, composite materials with the ability to bend electromagnetic waves—to inch closer to developing an invisibility cloak. This science leverages negative refraction to bend visible light around an object. The materials are very fragile, though, and still years from practical use.
Space … The Final Frontier
The Age of Star Trek is upon us. Sure, Gene Roddenberry predicted cell phones, but the best part of Trekdom is a warp drive engine that could go faster than light. Two Baylor physicists have expanded on a previous design—the Alcubierre drive, first proposed in 1994—which suggests changing the shape of space into a bubble pushing a ship forward. According to the theorists, the warp drive would require an amount of energy equivalent to converting the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy. So, no shuttle trips to Risa anytime soon.
Splitting Water
Reports came out this month that scientists managed to replicate photosynthesis and use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. While that doesn’t seem sexy, Leone Spiccia of Monash University suggests huge potential for the process: “Hydrogen has long been considered the ideal clean green fuel, energy-rich and carbon-neutral. The production of hydrogen using nothing but water and sunlight offers the possibility of an abundant, renewable, green source of energy for the future for communities across the world.” All those space cruisers are going to need a near limitless source of inexpensive energy to keep the warp drive running.
We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
The ultimate lunchbox for me featured the Six Million Dollar Man running and jumping over security fences. You would think such a lunchbox would be able to stand the test of time, but sadly it rusted away from too much use of a leaky thermos. Bionics, though, are very much in use, most notably in the form of a hand—the i-LIMB, by Touch Bionics—that won the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for best innovation in engineering. That artificial hand is truly an amazing piece of tech, but it sadly is missing the signature sound that made Steve Austin a top OSS agent and able to defeat the robot Bigfoot constructed by an alien race.
iLIMB by Touch Bionics
Sigh. We are making progress, but the promised flying cars are still not here. Maybe in 2009.