BombRot

All technologies that we create, create problems - just think of the motor car.  But on balance every single technology that we have created has given us more than it has taken away.

Every single technology except one: explosives.  Explosives do have limited beneficial uses: mining, quarrying and demolition come to mind.  However, the principal use of explosives is the opposite of beneficial - it is killing.  What's more, virtually every machine that we make for killing relies on explosives.  These machines range from those such as the suicide vest or the nuclear bomb that have killed comparatively few people, to viscously lethal weapons of mass destruction such as the assault rifle.

And the beneficial uses of explosives all have alternatives.  Mining, quarrying and demolition can be done with expanding collets driven by very high-pressure hydraulic oil.  Explosives are a little cheaper for the job, that is all.

---

At least since the invention of agriculture in Mesopotamia 12,000 years ago, humanity has been doing genetic engineering.  These days this is achieved by the direct editing of DNA, but the old way - selective breeding - still works well, and it can be done by anyone.  It is particularly easy to breed microbes selectively.   Suppose you want a yeast that will produce (and tolerate) higher concentrations of alcohol.  You just set up a few dozen small fermentation vessels, add yeast to each, and drop in a little extra alcohol.  Those yeasts that survive you breed from; the rest you discard.  Repeating this process over a few weeks (upping the alcohol each time) will give you a surviving yeast with much higher alcohol tolerance than its wild forbears.

---

What has the selective breeding of microbes to do with alleviating the misery caused by explosives?   Well - explosives are organic molecules with a lot of energy locked up in their chemical bonds.  In other words they are an ideal potential food source for yeasts, bacteria and archaea.  But explosives haven't been around for long enough for such explosive-eating microbes to evolve by natural selection.

So why not apply artificial selection to the problem?  Dope the nutrient medium in a collection of petri dishes with small quantities of many explosives, add a large number of different microbes (sewage would probably be a good source) and pick out those microbes that do well.  Gradually reducing the conventional nutrient and upping the explosive content over the generations should select for those organisms that can digest the explosives best.  And, as the microbes multiplied through the explosives, they would neutralise them by using up chemical energy.  The energy would still be released - ultimately as heat - but harmlessly over weeks rather than lethally over a microsecond.

It might be an idea to add a little brass and steel to the breeding mix, so that the bugs could also work up the ability to etch through shell casings to get at their lunch.

The result would be that ammunition would turn to harmless goo in its magazines and that bombs would rot in their silos.

A world elevated to using bows and arrows again would not be completely peaceful.  But it would be a lot more peaceful than the world that explosives has created.

BitterPill

Bitter is the taste of poison.  Almost all toxic substances taste bitter to some extent.  And some things - particularly some harmless plants - taste bitter even though they are not poisonous.  This is for the same reason that a harmless hover fly looks like a wasp.  The plant has evolved a bitter taste after animals that might eat it evolved to flag up poisons using their sense of bitterness.  Think cabbage; think coffee.

Children don't eat their greens because they are very sensibly resisting their mad parents' attempts to poison them.  Parents do eat their greens because they have learned that they get sustenance (or - more immediately - a caffeine hit) by overcoming their initial revulsion.  Indeed, most adults have conditioned themselves actively to like bitter - coffee and pink gin are treats.

But if such a diverse range of chemicals all give rise to the same taste, that must surely mean that there are receptors on our tongues for all those many different molecules?  Most poisons work by binding to some specific vital body protein and so stopping it from doing its job.  Maybe the way that evolution has designed the bitter area of our tongues is simply to take all (or a lot of) the proteins that - if blocked - would stop us from working, and to wire a small sample of each one in our taste buds into the one bitter signal to our brains.

Now most drugs work in the same way as most poisons - they bind to specific proteins to slow or to stop their function.  Indeed, many drugs are poisons if taken in super-medicinal doses.  And most drugs taste bitter.

Perhaps an easy way to find lots of useful new drugs would be to find just those proteins wired into our bitter taste buds, and then look specifically for substances that bind to them.

KeySwap

Ever since it was devised, people have sought to improve on the QWERTY keyboard - the Dvorak keyboard above is a famous example.  Of course, there is a sense in which an established order is best simply because it is established.  For example, try to think of an improvement on this arbitrary sequence: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

But clearly there is an ergonomic aspect to a keyboard that ought to admit of some sort of optimisation.   So why not make keyboards so that you can unplug and swap the keys?  Then people could experiment to find the pattern that worked best for them.  Optionally, a mouse click could upload that pattern to a central website, where statistics on popular (and unpopular) patterns could be gathered.

Then we could just let the best patterns evolve...

RightGuard

As any gentleman who, being caught short, has nipped behind a hedge and inadvertently peed on an electric fence will attest, the experience is really quite memorable.  Indeed, so memorable is it that it is an almost perfect Pavlovian conditioner - once shocked, never forgotten.

It seems to me that the womenfolk of a household could put this to good use.  Many complain of poor male aim.  A wire ring powered by a small battery-driven inverter could be concealed invisibly under the flush-ring at the top of a lavatory bowl.  As aim drifted absentmindedly to one side, an automatic reminder would be experienced by the victim person performing an act of nitrogenous excretion.  The voltage could be adjusted from mild-tingly-admonition to contravenes-the-Geneva-Convention, ideally by a wireless remote that could be deployed from the other side of a door...

HardWired

A neuron is (conceptually - if that's the right word) a fairly straightforward device.  Signals come in through its dendrites and are added up.  If the sum exceeds a value, the neuron sends a signal out along its axon, which is connected to the dendrites of lots of other neurons.  Otherwise it stays schtum.


The number of neurons you have (10¹¹) is quite impressive, but nowhere near as impressive as the number of links each neuron makes with others (typically thousands).  Considered as a whole, it is that interconnectivity that makes the human mind the most fabulous object in the Universe.


But it is also annoyingly fragile.  After one has got past the grief when someone dies, a remaining irritation is the realisation that all that they knew has died too.  Who is that person in the photograph? you want to be able to ask them.  What do you think of Jim and Clara's buying that house?


An abiding and very old science fiction response to this mortal fragility is to propose some sort of brain scan that allows the recording of the entire structure and then the use of that data to create its emulation in a large computer.


Unlikely.


But let's return to the inherent simplicity of a single neuron.  In a few years time we ought to be able to do the same in silicon.  (We could now, but for the very high connectivity.)  And we'll soon - apparently - have hordes of nanobots swimming round our insides fixing up molecular breakages.  If they also replaced about four million neurons (a tiny fraction) every day with their silicon equivalents, then, by the time someone was eighty, their brain would be entirely electronic.  And the life-long process would be so gradual and smooth that it would become part of the normal acquisition of wisdom with age.


But when someone's body died, you would be able to crack their scull, take out their silicon brain, plug in a five-volt power supply, a webcam, a microphone, one or two robot avatars and a network connection, and they would live forever.


And no one would ever get Alzheimer's disease again...

iTube

Tube stations are plastered with advertising - it helps defray the cost of running the trains, and without it Oysters would need even more money put on them than they do now.

But in the tunnels the windows go black.  This is despite the fact that the passing train is throwing light out onto them.  Why not put ads there too?

The reason is that they would rush past in a blur.  Old-fashioned film would do the same if you just moved it through the gate of its projector.  Each frame had to stop at the gate, and a shutter had to open and close to freeze the frame for a moment on the screen.  Then there was a short time gap before the next frame.  You didn't see this gap because of your eyes' persistence of vision.

By making tube windows from liquid crystals just like the ones used for 3D movie glasses it should be possible to achieve the same effect.  As the train went past a set of identical pictures pasted to the tunnel wall the window liquid-crystal shutter would open and close for each one, maybe with an outward-pointing electronic flash to illuminate it extra brightly.  The opening and the flash could be triggered by a mark on the tunnel wall beside each picture to keep the whole thing in synchronization whatever the speed the train was moving at.

Identical pictures would give a still image.  But of course you could make moving pictures too.

Perhaps there should be ads all down one wall, and an idyllic sunlit country landscape with the trees moving gently in the breeze down the other...

CucKoo

One of the advantages of being viviparous is that you know who your children are.  Or at least, you do if you are female - if you gave birth to it, then it's yours.  You know what your baby looks like; you know its smell.

This is the reason that brood parasitism is much more prevalent among birds than among mammals.  Brood parasitism is a very efficient reproductive strategy - you can have cared-for offspring without the trouble of caring for them.  But if you are a mammal, it's a lot harder to give live-birth in someone else's burrow and to get away with it than it is for a bird to lay an egg in some other bird's nest.

So why are brood parasites still comparatively rare, even among birds?  There is clearly an evolutionary arms race between the parasite and the parasitised.   To be effective, the parasite's egg must look as much like the host's egg as possible.  To a certain extent, the parasite can take advantage of the superstimulus effect to lay a bigger egg than the host's, so the resulting chick can be stronger and fight its corner better.  But there's a limit to this.  If parasitism were too common, the superstimulus effect itself would be selected against in the host and cease to work.

Bird eyesight is good anyway, so there's a strong selection pressure on the hosts to be able to recognise the individual speckle patterns on their eggs.  It might be thought that the host would also evolve an ability to count, but that is not much use: if you come back to six eggs when you know you laid five, which one do you smash?   Also, giving eggs a characteristic smell is not helpful because it nullifies one of the principal advantages of being oviparous in the first place: predators can't smell your young.

However, all this assumes that there are two species competing.  But if you are - say - a blackbird, it must also make sense for you to lay an egg in another blackbird's nest.  You gain the same advantage for your chick as the cuckoo and the cow bird normally have over you, plus your deception is a lot harder to spot.

This puts a female bird in a similar (but not identical) position to a male mammal: a man (before DNA testing) was never certain that the child he was rearing was his, though a woman was.   But the man can father other children that he does not need to care for.  By using conspecific brood parasitism both a male and a female bird can have chicks that they don't need to care for, but neither is certain that the chick that they are rearing is their own.

In mammals the Y chromosome is asymmetrically passed exclusively down the male line.  Birds have the opposite system: their W chromosome is asymmetrically passed exclusively down the female line.  It would be interesting to look for similarities in the behavioural consequences of the possession of these two chromosomes given that egg-laying in the wrong nest puts female birds in a similar evolutionary position to a man fathering children by a woman other than his partner.

Indeed, maybe the Y and W chromosomal asymmetry itself is - in part - an evolutionary consequence of this similarity.

PhoneReverse

When you phone virtually any large company or government department the phone will be answered by a robot.  The robot will tell you to press "1" for fifteen minutes of Vivaldi, or "2" for twenty minutes of Gerry Rafferty playing Baker Street.  From time to time the music will fade out, giving you the false hope that a real person will come on the line and actually deal with your query.  But of course it's just the end of the track - Vivaldi is replaced by Rafferty, or vice versa.  And so on.  For ever and ever.  World without end.

The reason that this makes you want to go and dynamite the head office of the organization concerned (surely no jury would convict?) is that they have imperiously decided that their time is much more valuable than yours, and that they have then implemented a Kafkaesque system that you cannot escape to impose that decision upon you.

I once recorded an endless loop of Greensleeves on my pocket dictaphone.   I faded the music down every thirty seconds or so and interspersed a message saying, "Your answer is important to us.  Please hold."  I would set this playing by the phone when the robot came on, so that the organisation's minion, when he or she finally did answer, would wait till I could be bothered to return.  I would then get on with something more important.

But what is really needed is some legal punitive measure.  How about a simple law that says, when you call somewhere and a non-human answers, you can press the * key and the call charges are reversed crediting money to your phone account until a human comes on the line?

This would at least redress the balance - you would be being paid by the organization for your time that they are wasting.

It might even become possible to make a comfortable income by calling up the worst offenders, pressing *, and then (some time later) wishing the person who finally answered a good day and hanging up...