It’s pretty funny now to look back at some of the artists’ predictions – one can’t help but think they might be a little bit disappointed with today’s lack of flying firemen and ever-present robots. But I wonder how many of our predictions for the year 3000 will come true (according to Busted, we’ll all be living underwater with lots of naked, triple-breasted women).

Anyway, here’s a few of the retro-futuristic illustrations by Villemard and Jean-Marc Côté (view the full set here):

Gravity-defying firemen

A conductor operates his mechanical orchestra

Madame at her toilette

Croquet in diving helmets!

A lazy teacher feeds textbooks into his pupils’ heads

Not all of them are so far-fetched though. This one is essentially Skype, albeit with vintage equipment…

Skype, retro-future style. Check out that hat…

And I’d be very grateful if anyone could explain this one to me. Some kind of equine theatre maybe? A fully-clothed version of Equus?

A horse on a stage. No idea what this one’s about…

Everyone loves a good Hollywood ending. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a masked hero finally dispatch an evil villain. But aren’t flying men with super-strength a bit passé? Maybe it’s time for some new, cutting-edge superheroes…

Introducing… Corner Woman, Neutrino-man and Camo-Kid (credit: Dave Gray for Guru magazine)

Science and superheroes have a surprisingly intimate history. Pick any of the well-known protagonists from the Marvel or DC comic books and the chances are you’ll be able to trace their history back to science.

Spider-Man, for instance, came into existence when geeky high school student Peter Parker was bitten by a (radioactive) spider during a science demonstration. Some superheroes were even fully-fledged scientists before freak accidents gave them their powers – Bruce Banner (the Incredible Hulk) and Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic from the Fantastic Four) are two examples.

The X-Men, whose superpowers developed from mutations, were undoubtedly inspired by the theory of evolution. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that anyone in the real world is going to start growing claws out of their hands, but mutations are known to play an important role in natural selection, in which a random mutation, if beneficial, can eventually become a new characteristic of a species.

Even Superman – “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” – is not quite as unscientific as you might think. In 2007, Dr Chris Stanley at London’s Natural History Museum discovered a mineral with the chemical formula ‘sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide’. He soon realised that this composition was remarkably similar to the description of a rock containing Kryptonite in the 2006 film Superman Returns. The real mineral, however, is white, powdery and harmless – quite unlike the green, radioactive material that blights Superman throughout his adventures.

Superman plays with himself (credit: JC Hancock)

Clearly, then, there’s a fair amount of science in the world of superheroes. But what type of superhero, I wondered, could be born from today’s cutting-edge scientific research? I decided to browse through some of the recent science news stories and create three science-inspired superheroes of my own. This trio probably won’t be gracing a Marvel comic or Hollywood blockbuster anytime soon, but I hope you’ll take them into your heart anyway.

Neutrino-man

Behold! Neutrino-man – the only human on Earth who can communicate by firing neutrinos out of his belly button. A superpower granted to him by the Gods of Particle Physics on Mount Hadron, these incredible, invisible particles travel through every material in the universe, allowing Neutrino-man to stay in constant contact with his base during his life-saving, death-defying, underwear-scorching missions.

Behold! Neutrino-man! (credit: Dave Gray for Guru magazine)

Nowhere is too remote for Neutrino-man. A submarine deep underwater? Neutrino-man uses his superpower to communicate with his support team on dry land. A space station on the far side of a distant planet? Neutrino-man sends a message to say that he’s just made friends with an alien. Hiking through the deepest, darkest rainforest? Neutrino-man phones home to say he’ll be back in time for tea.

Long live Neutrino-man and his neutrino-powered navel!

N.B. Contrary to popular belief, neither Neutrino-man nor his particles travel faster than the speed of light.

The science:Physicists recently sent the first ever message using a beam of neutrinos.

Researchers at the Fermilab facility near Chicago performed this feat by converting their message – a rather uninspired ‘neutrino’ – into binary code (the 1s and 0s used by computers). This code was then sent using a kind of neutrino Morse code, with the 1s corresponding to a pulse of neutrinos and the 0s corresponding to no neutrinos. Finally, the neutrino beam was detected at the underground MINERvA detector about 1 km away, where the message was deciphered.

This is evidently quite a complicated procedure, so why go to the trouble of sending a message using neutrinos? Well, because neutrinos are chargeless, virtually massless particles, they’re able to penetrate huge distances through matter. This gives them an advantage over the electromagnetic waves that we currently use to communicate, which lose their intensity as they penetrate obstacles such as mountains and oceans.

But there’s one big problem with this technology. Because neutrinos rarely interact with matter, they’re also extremely difficult to detect:  the detector used in this experiment registered only one in every ten billion neutrinos sent. This means that the household neutrinophone is likely to remain within the realms of fiction for the time being, unless you have the space and money to build an enormous neutrino detector underneath your back garden.

Corner Woman

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s Corner Woman! OK, so she may not have the most impressive moniker, but what Corner Woman lacks in name she makes up for with her unique ability of looking around corners. Prowling the gloomy alleyways of London, Corner Woman is always one step ahead of her adversaries, catching sight of them long before they’ve spotted her.

Corner Woman in action (credit: Dave Gray for Guru magazine)

Look out – here comes evil Jack the Kipper, Corner Woman’s sworn nemesis! Corner Woman presses herself against the nearest wall and uses her finely-tuned superpower to spy on her arch-enemy. The man-fish hybrid is rapidly approaching, his protruding lips contorted into a twisted grin, his bulbous eyes glowing under the fluorescent streetlights.

Suddenly, in one graceful move, Corner Woman swivels to face her unsuspecting foe. BANG! KAPOW! SHAZAM! Jack the Kipper is floored, face down in a puddle of his own slimy blood – a fishy corpse on Camden’s grimy streets. He didn’t see that one coming.

The science:A team of scientists in the US recently showed that even regular humans can look around corners.

The researchers first placed a mannequin behind a wall, hiding it from the view of a camera. Then, they fired a laser pulse at a screen angled towards the mannequin. The light particles (‘photons’) from the laser hit this screen, scattering them in all directions. Some of these scattered photons flew towards the hidden mannequin, bounced off it, and finally travelled back the way they came towards the camera.

So far, so unremarkable, you may be thinking. But the key to this experiment was the camera, which had an incredible time resolution of just 2 picoseconds. That’s two millionths of a millionth of a second – the time it takes light to travel 0.6 mm. This meant that the total distance travelled by each photon (from the laser to the mannequin to the camera) could be measured with sub-millimetre accuracy.

By angling the laser through 60 different positions, and feeding all this information into a computer algorithm, the scientists were able to reconstruct a precise 3D image of the mannequin – even though it was completely out of sight of the camera. Here’s a video showing the full process:

This corner-cutting technology could have a number of useful applications. Surgeons, for example, could use it to help them see around awkwardly-shaped organs when performing an endoscopy (looking inside the body using a tiny camera), whilst search and rescue teams could use it to locate trapped survivors in an emergency situation.

Camo-Kid

Camo-Kid is a master of disguise. Dressed in a bodysuit of black rubber, he often attracts suspicious glances around his hometown. But, as soon as there’s an emergency, Camo-Kid’s suit instantly changes to match his surroundings, and our superhero becomes invisible.

Camo-Kid in all his glory (credit: Dave Gray for Guru magazine)

Today, Camo-Kid is a tree. He’s been called to some woods in the north of Scotland, and has expertly blended himself in with the pale bark of the birch trees that surround him. Standing stock-still, Camo-Kid waits for a drugs gang who are said to use these woods as a storage place for their special hash-haggis.

However, five hours in the pouring rain reveals only a handful of squirrels, a sad-looking deer, and a bedraggled badger. Dejected, Camo-Kid trundles home and does what he always does when he’s had a bad day. He sits on the sofa, replicates the furniture’s floral pattern, and mischievously waits for his girlfriend to arrive back after work. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but it makes her jump every time.

The science:A material that changes its texture at the flick of a switch is now a bona fide reality.

This material, created by engineers at Duke University in the US, is made up of several different layers. First, a layer of rubber is bonded onto a more rigid material known as the substrate. The bottom surface of this substrate is then coated with a thin layer of metal, whilst the top surface of the rubber is coated with a salt solution.

When a voltage is applied between the top and bottom surfaces of this material combination, an electric field develops in the rubber layer. This causes a compressive force that creates surface patterns – first creases, and then craters as the voltage is increased. Once the voltage is turned off, the rubber returns to its original, flat state.

Aside from camouflage, this technology could be used to make shoe soles with a tunable grip. On a more fanciful note, it may one day be possible to create gloves whose fingerprints can be changed on demand – a very useful accessory for any aspiring spy.

However, the material developed by these engineers doesn’t change its colour, so it’ll still be a while before Camo-Kid’s bodysuit hits the shops.

Further reading:

Stancil DD, Adamson P, Alania M, et al. (2012). Demonstration of communication using neutrinos Mod. Phys. Lett. A 27 (2012) 1250077 arXiv: 1203.2847v2

Velten A, Willwacher T, Gupta O, Veeraraghavan A, Bawendi MG, & Raskar R (2012). Recovering three-dimensional shape around a corner using ultrafast time-of-flight imaging. Nature Communications, 3 PMID: 22434188

Wang Q, Tahir M, Zang J, & Zhao X (2012). Dynamic electrostatic lithography: multiscale on-demand patterning on large-area curved surfaces. Advanced Materials, 24 (15), 1947-51 PMID: 22419389

This post is based on an article published in the June 2012 edition of Guru magazine… download the magazine for free here. The superhero illustrations were all drawn by the highly talented Dave Gray (http://www.iamdavegray.com/).

No surprises about which platforms are currently dominating the market, but let’s spare a thought for poor old Commodore 64 and Amiga, who both experienced a dramatic fall from grace in the early 1990s.

Since then, the Google doodle has become a bit of a pop culture phenomenon. There have now been over 1,000 doodles, celebrating events ranging from the anniversary of the ice cream sundae to Freddie Mercury’s 65th Birthday (this one needs to be seen!).

A couple days ago, being the geek that I am, I got quite excited by a science-themed doodle – a strati-tastic version of the Google logo in celebration of Nicolas Steno, an important figure in modern geology.

So, noticing that Google keeps an archive of all of its doodles, I thought I’d find out which other scientists had been honoured by Google’s creative bods. Turns out there’s quite a lot…

13.03.03 – Albert Einstein's 124th birthday

02.02.04 – the 111th birthday of Gaston Julia, influential French mathematician

13.03.06 – the 151st birthday of Percival Lowell, pioneering astronomer

11.04.07 – 73rd birthday of Yuri Gagarin, the first person in outer space

03.03.08 – 161st birthday of Alexander Graham Bell, usually credited as the inventor of the telephone

12.04.08 – 200th birthday of Antonio Meucci, less usually credited as the inventor of the telephone

12.02.09 – Charles Darwin's 200th birthday

14.03.09 – 174th birthday of Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian astronomer known for his studies of Mars

16.04.09 – 380th birthday of Christiaan Huygens, Dutch inventor of the pendulum clock

07.05.09 – celebrating Alexander Popov's invention of the radio in the 1890s

22.05.09 – 76th birthday of Chen Jingrun, Chinese mathematician who made significant contributions to number theory

10.07.09 – 153rd birthday of Nikola Tesla, best known for his Tesla coil invention

14.08.09 – 232nd birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted, Danish scientist who made important contributions to electromagnetism

25.08.09 – 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescope, used to discover Jupiter's moons

21.09.09 – 143rd birthday of H. G. Wells, hugely influential science fiction writer (not strictly a scientist, but he deserves a mention anyway)

11.12.09 – 98th birthday of Qian Xuesen, Chinese scientist who made important contributions to the space programs of China and the US

18.12.09 – 222nd birthday of Jan Evangelista Purkyně, influential Czech anatomist and physiologist who discovered Purkinje cells, a class of neuron

04.01.11 – 367th birthday of Isaac Newton

28.05.10 – 131st birthday of Milutin Milanković, Serbian geophysicist best known for his theory of ice ages

05.06.10 – 110th birthday of Dennis Gabor, inventor of the hologram

11.06.10 – 100th birthday of Jacques Cousteau, best known for his ocean exploration

19.08.10 – 50th anniversary of Belka and Strelka's space flight, the first living creatures to go into orbit and return safely

08.10.10 – 73rd birthday of César Milstein, Argentine biochemist who made important contributions to our understanding of antibodies

11.02.11 – 163rd birthday of Thomas Edison, prolific inventor who gave us the first efficient, commercially produced light bulb

26.04.11 – 226th birthday of John James Audubon, French-American ornithologist known for his beautifully intricate bird illustrations

02.07.11 – 137th birthday of Pedro Paulet, Peruvian scientist considered to be one of the fathers of aeronautics

17.08.11 – 410th birthday of Pierre de Fermat, French lawyer and mathematician best known for his Last Theorem

16.09.11 – 118th birthday of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian physiologist who discovered Vitamin C

07.11.11 – 144th birthday of Marie Curie, physicist and chemist known for her pioneering research on radioactivity, and the first person to be honoured with two Nobel Prizes

08.11.11 – 355th birthday of Edmond Halley, English scientist who computed the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet

09.11.11 – 135th birthday of Hideyo Noguchi, Japanese bacteriologist who successfully cultured the bacterium which causes syphilis

12.11.11 – 101st birthday of Hua Luogeng, pioneering Chinese mathematician who wrote more than 200 papers and monographs

19.11.11 – 300th birthday of Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian polymath who, amongst other things, discovered the atmosphere of Venus

23.11.11 – 60th anniversary of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem's first publication

12.12.11 – 84th birthday of Robert Noyce, the "Mayor of Silicon Valley"

11.01.12 – 374th birthday of Nicolas Steno, Danish Catholic bishop and scientist known as the father of stratigraphy and geology

If some of these scientists seem a little obscure, it’s because not all of the doodles appear in every country. For example, Chen Jingrun‘s doodle only appeared in his native China, whilst Antonio Meucci‘s doodle only appeared in Italy. Also, the doodles I’ve show here are only for science personalities – there have been plenty more doodles celebrating science events such as Pi Day, the opening of the Large Hadron Collider, and last year’s total lunar eclipse.

I think it’s awesome that Google pays tribute to all these scientists, giving them fresh exposure to millions (billions?) of internet users. I wonder who’ll be up next? My vote would be Werner Heisenberg or Louis Pasteur…

Up until 2003, the BBC broadcast a science-themed TV show called Tomorrow’s World. It was often a showcase for new inventions, giving a nation of goggle-eyed viewers their first ever glimpses of PCs, compact discs, mobile phones, and, errr, the Segway. So I was chuffed to find out that the BBC have uploaded some old Tomorrow’s World episodes to their archive, dating all the way back to 1965.

In the following clip, originally broadcast in 1967, Europe’s very first home computer terminal is introduced, featuring a businessman who seemingly likes to work in his pyjamas:

“Rex Malik sees a future world where…every home will have its own terminal plugged into a central brain.” Ring any bells? I think Tomorrow’s World may just have predicted the internet.

“He sees his son growing up in a world where eventually his very thoughts could be stored and perhaps assessed for his future use.” I’m not sure about this bit, but it does sound a little like Facebook.

And the next video, from 1979, showcases an experimental cordless mobile phone:

Texting must’ve been a nightmare with that rotary dialer. Keep watching for the outtake at the end…the first incorrect number dialed on a mobile phone.

But although Tomorrow’s World was usually ahead of its time, the show also featured some inventions that are now best forgotten. This clip, from 1968, introduces the plastic garden:

No more weeding! No more withered flowers!  No more mowing! That may be true, but does anyone really want a garden that’s a cross between an AstroTurf football pitch and a tacky restaurant? At least plastic garden chairs caught on…

Some crime scene investigators get to work in CSI

If, like me, your gut instinct would be to get out of there as soon as possible, forensics probably isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, you’re a calm-headed pro, you’d first need to secure and isolate the crime scene. Then you’d photograph the area and maybe start making a note of incriminating evidence such as abandoned weapons or scraps of clothing.

In any case, trying to locate an audio recording of the gunfight probably wouldn’t be at the forefront of your mind.

However, there’s a growing number of forensic scientists who study gunshot sounds, because, surprisingly, a bang isn’t just a bang. Instead, gunshots are like fingerprints: master their subtle differences and you may be one step closer to solving the crime.

This field of study – ‘forensic gunshot acoustics’ – is a burgeoning research topic because amateur recordings of gun crimes are becoming more and more common, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other digital recorders.

To make sense of these recordings, forensic scientists need to be able to identify gunshots belonging to different guns and ammunition types, as well as understanding how the recording location could have affected the gunshot.

It’s a tough task, but successfully identifying the gunshots could help to answer some crucial questions in a trial situation. How many different guns were fired? Who fired first? Is the loud bang actually a gunshot, or just a car backfiring?

Earlier this year, researchers at BAE Systems and the FBI published a comprehensive paper on gunshot forensics. In their study, Steven Beck and colleagues explain that a gunshot is made up of two primary sounds – there’s a crack and there’s a BANG!

High-speed photograph of a gun just after firing, showing the gas explosion which causes the bang

The bang is the ‘muzzle blast’ – the sound of pressurised gases escaping as the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun. The initial sound only lasts a few milliseconds, but it’s louder than a jet engine and can reverberate for over a second.

The crack is the shock wave created as the bullet breaks the sound barrier, like a miniature version of the sonic boom created by a supersonic jet. The shock wave forms a cone which trails behind the bullet, and you hear the crack when the shock wave passes by.

So, a typical sound wave for a single gunshot looks like this:

A typical acoustic waveform for a gunshot, showing the shock wave (crack) and the muzzle blast (bang). Credit: S. Beck et al.

In practice, of course, a real-life gunshot recording will never be so perfectly formed. Amateur audio recordings are usually poor quality, with interference from voices, screams and echoes. Furthermore, the sound of the gunshot will depend on the position of the recorder relative to the shooter.

To begin investigating some of these effects, the scientists carried out a series of controlled experiments, using different gun types and a range of different microphone positions relative to the gun:

The different microphone configurations used in the experiment (credit: S. Beck et al.)

Their results highlight a number of factors that can affect the sound of a gunshot. The sound of the muzzle blast depends on the gun make, model, and barrel length, as well as its distance from the microphone. The sound of the shock wave, on the other hand, is set by the bullet speed and size, its miss distance from the microphone, and the angle of the microphone relative to the gun.

Each of these factors can come into play in a real-world situation, and that’s without even considering the effects of interference and echoes, or the variations between the recorders themselves.

But although this may all seem terribly complicated, breaking down the sound of a gunshot into its two main components is a promising step forward.

“I think both [the muzzle blast and the shock wave] are very important,” says Steven Beck. “The direction of the shooter can be determined by the muzzle blast, but not by the shock wave. You can determine the range to the shooter if you use both the muzzle blast and shock wave.”

There’s still some way to go before these techniques can be routinely used to help solve crimes, but, who knows, maybe forensic scientists will one day be able to piece together a gunfight with their eyes closed. CSI, eat your heart out!

Steven Beck and colleagues present their study at this week’s Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Diego, California.

Further reading:

Beck SD, Nakasone H, & Marr KW (2011). Variations in recorded acoustic gunshot waveforms generated by small firearms. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129 (4), 1748-59 PMID: 21476632

The sexual tension is palpable…

Susan Greenfield at the Oxford Internet Institute, April 2011

The story is that by spending more and more time interacting with screens, rather than other human beings, our brains may be adapting in new ways. Greenfield picks up on one positive effect (higher IQ), and a whole load of negatives (e.g. shorter attention span, less empathy, lower sense of identity).

I don’t know enough about psychology or neuroscience to make an educated comment, but it seems a no-brainer than someone who spends every day reporting their life on Facebook / Twitter is going to miss out on some pretty important features of human interaction (body language, physical contact, eye contact, etc.). On the other hand, I doubt a quick blast on FIFA 2011 or Call of Duty could do too much harm.

When Stephen Fry gave his thoughts on social networking, I loved his comment that certain people were worried when the postbox first came along, because a daughter could send love letters to her sweetheart(s) for the first time without having to pass by her father. Maybe all these fears about information technology’s long-term impacts will prove to be similarly unfounded. Or maybe not. In any case, Susan Greenfield’s talk is really thought-provoking. Right…better finish this blog post before another brain cell dies!

[Webcast] Baroness Susan Greenfield – Does the Mind Have a Future?