More Science Bits

White House denies Obama went to Mars….TEOTWAWKI is coming – are you ready?...What the FRACK!...Hot pet for 2012 – slime mold…A robot for your cat

By Will Collette

“White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.” This is the actual title of an actual article on Wired.com. According to Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings, who claim to have worked for DARPA, the super-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, they were part of a DARPA project that teleported explorers across both space and time. One group of DARPA explorers, including then-19-year-old future President Barack Obama, were beamed to Mars during the 1980s.

They say he made the trip to Mars and back twice between 1981-1983. According to Basiago and Stillings, Obama was part of a CIA project to “establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space” and to “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence.” They say he was instructed by Major Ed Dames that “Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten.” Sounds like good advice to me.

PS - It was DARPA (not Al Gore) that actually invented the internet, which is now such a top-drawer source of valuable information such as this article. 

Dec. 21, 2012 means TEOTWAWKI. I am so glad we now have an acronym to use instead of “The End of the World As We Know It.” This will save space and prevent carpal tunnel syndrome as Progressive Charlestown strives to give you wall-to-wall coverage of the predicted TEOTWAWKI as prophesied by the Mayans and a couple of guys with tin foil hats. December 21 is supposed to be the big day. 

From the TEOTWAWKI blog

This coming year should produce a bumper crop of OMG-TEOTWAWKI stories, not to mention movies, books, TV shows, blogs, etc. Here’s a really good blog if you want to go all in (click here). It’s loaded with great advice on what weapons, supplies and tin foil you will need for when the end comes. In Charlestown, we have lots of open space where you can set up your survival burrow. Just watch out that you don’t get grabbed by Deputy Dan Slattery’s Open Space Cadets.

What the Frack? No, that’s not just a line from Battlestar Galactica, but a genuine concern in Ohio after a 4.0-magnitude earthquake struck near the Youngtown, Ohio, area. The quake occurred on New Year’s Eve. Reuters is reporting that the quake was not a natural event, but was generated by high-pressure fluid injection into the ground to push out natural gas – a notorious process called “fracking.” According to Reuters, this was the finding of a state expert and led the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to shut down five deep injection wells in the Youngstown area. But just imagine how much worse it would be if instead of those wells, there were (gasp) a wind farm at that site. Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich is a strong supporter of oil and gas exploration in the state and is expected to overrule the agency’s suspension.

Slime mold (not vomit): "Sit!" "Roll over!" "Fetch!"

That’s some smart slime mold. The Telegraph of London reports that Professor Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Future University Hakodate in Japan has discovered that brainless slime mold (and no, that's not Rick Perry) can figure out how to get out of a maze. He observed the mold growing cells that took it through the most direct route through the maze, showing, as he put it, that “Humans are not the only living things with information-processing abilities, … Simple creatures can solve certain kinds of difficult puzzles.” The one catch is that you first have to teleport the cells to Mars.

This is DEFINITELY not going to happen, at least not in my house. Roboticist Taylor Veltrop of Aldebaran Robotics has taken one of his company’s prototype robots and programmed it to do remote-controlled cat grooming. There is some merit to such a device, since many cats will resist (with extreme prejudice) the efforts of their companion humans to wash or brush them. 

My theory is that they are insulted that humans would feel they need human assistance. So a robot may be useful in avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. To use his robot adaptation, you must wear a head-set (and endure having people take photos of you looking like a total geek) so you can see through the robot’s eyes and give the robot virtual guidance in grooming the happy pet. The caption text under the YouTube video says the guy spent the last year of his life working on this project. I sure hope it wasn't LITERALLY the last year of his life.

Here is a video that claims to show Veltrop’s cat Lotus sitting on Veltrop’s wife’s lap and getting brushed by the robot. It’s amazing what they can do with CGI these days. Or heavy-duty kitty drugs.