Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 278

Good News Tuesday

Is this first item good news or creepy news?

This Technology Could Finally Make Brain Implants Practical

Both perhaps. I mean … what kind of brain implants are we talking about here, and have I read that book?

Well, here’s what it says:

Harvard Medical School is testing a new design of a brain implant meant to restore vision to the blind. … Experiments like those that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain cells (see “The Thought Experiment”). … Next month, tests will begin in monkeys of a new implant for piping data into the brain that is designed to avoid that problem. The project is intended to lead to devices that can restore vision to blind people long-term.

Ah! Well, so far that is good rather than creepy. I hope it pans out. Though non-brain-implant ways to restore sight to the blind strike me as having less creepy potential.

Okay, next:

3-D bioprinter to print human skin

Scientists have presented a prototype for a 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin. This skin is adequate for transplanting to patients or for use in research or the testing of cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical products. … This new human skin is one of the first living human organs created using bioprinting to be introduced to the marketplace. It replicates the natural structure of the skin, with a first external layer, the epidermis with its stratum corneum, which acts as protection against the external environment, together with another thicker, deeper layer, the dermis. This last layer consists of fibroblasts that produce collagen, the protein that gives elasticity and mechanical strength to the skin.

I’m amazed they can make all these different complicated layers of tissue. Good news for burn patients for sure! I trust someone is working to make sure rejection isn’t a problem.

Printed ‘lab on a chip’ costs a penny and catches disease early

Your diagnostic kit is downloading. A “lab on a chip” system costs less than a penny to make and can test cell samples for diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and cancer….The technology could help with early detection of diseases in the developing world, where lack of access to equipment can lead to late diagnosis. “You can use it anywhere, as long as you have a printer,” says Rahim Esfandyarpour at Stanford University, who led the team that created the chips.

Sounds like it’s got great potential. Shoot, these days it’s probably possible to put a huge database on a single chip.

Okay, now this one is just interesting:

Astronomers Spot a Strange, Supersonic Space Cloud Screeching Through Our Galaxy

Astronomy is just SO WEIRD these days. First it’s our galaxy zooming through space and now we have this space cloud zooming through our galaxy.

While focussing on the remains of an exploded star roughly 10,000 light-years away, a team of Japanese astronomers have stumbled across a mysterious cloud of molecules tearing through the Milky Way. So quickly, in fact, they’ve nick-named it the unknown phenomenon the ‘Bullet’.

The cause of this cloud’s ridiculous speed isn’t clear, but so far all signs suggest it’s been sent hurtling through space thanks to a rogue black hole.

Yeah, a rogue black hole, sure. I mean . . .

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An emu is a mammal. We took a vote.

Here is a very funny roundup of tweets from Seanan McGuire about doing exotic animal rescue.

Click through! It will brighten your day.

Here is how I envision Gus the emu:

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A bookstore for every sixteen people, wow

Via The Passive Voice blog, this article: This Small Village In Spain Is Home To More Books Than People.

Imagine a small medieval town behind a high wall. A castle stands on one end, and all around are vineyards and fields of wheat. Imagine that within the walls the entire town is devoted to reading and writing. Imagine that the entire town is, in essence, one magical bookstore. … Fewer than 200 people live in Urueña, according to the 2014 census. But these few villagers run 12 different bookstores, meaning that there’s one bookstore for every sixteen or so people. Some are general interest shops; others specialize in old and rare books. One focuses on the region of Castilla y León, another on children’s books. A shop called El 7 Bookshop specializes in books about bullfighting. Another concentrates its collection on books about wine, and this one is called The Cellar.

Wow. I’m certainly adding that to Places to Visit in Spain, not that I have any immediate plans to visit Spain, but this would definitely be a destination if I did.

Plus there’s the castle. Nice pictures at the link. Also museums and classes and stuff. This was part of a deliberate attempt to become (the best kind of) tourist attraction, which I hope has done well by the town. Evidently about 40,000 people visit Urueña per year, or about 200 per resident, or about 3,300 per bookstore. I bet they enjoy it.

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Mushroom pot pies

Okay, yes, I grant you, this is a warm February. That’s handy for housetraining little puppies, but not especially conducive to a desire to tuck yourself in on the couch in front of the fireplace with winter comfort food like a pot pie. But this recipe was really good . . . that is, I assume the original is very good and the version I made certainly was.

So whether or not your February is highly wintry, you might try this if you’re into mushrooms. If you’re not, this recipe might convert you.

The original recipe is from Bon Appetit and you can see it here.

Here is the version I made, which is similar but (quite a bit) easier, and used baby portabellas (which were available) instead of oyster mushrooms (which were not).

The original uses a pastry topping. I used a drop biscuit topping, which was lots easier and also meant it was easy to bake one individual pot pie at a time rather than make them all at once.

The original calls for 6-oz ramekins. I used 8-oz individual baking dishes.

Mushroom Pot Pies with Biscuit Topping

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 Tbsp butter

1 onion, chopped

1 Tbsp tomato paste

1 lb button mushrooms, quartered

1/2 C sherry (I used rice wine, which is what I had handy)

4 C chicken broth

1/4 C dried porcini

3 Tbsp flour

3 Tbsp butter

1/2 fennel bulb, chopped

1 C red pearl onions, or white pearl onions if those are easier to find, or chopped onion if that suits you better

1 Tbsp butter

2 sprigs thyme, or you know, some. I really don’t know how much a sprig is. I used about half a tsp dried.

8 oz oyster mushrooms, or baby portabellas, or whatever, sliced

2 Tbsp butter

Okay, now, heat the oil and butter, sauté the onion ten minutes, add the tomato paste and cook one minute longer. Add the button mushrooms and cook 15 minutes. Add the sherry and cook five minutes. Add the broth and porcini and simmer one hour. Strain and discard solids. Or, you know what? Reserve the solids, which will make a perfectly fine mushroom side dish for another meal. I was amazed at how edible the mushrooms were after an hour of simmering. You will definitely want to try them before you throw them away.

Now, heat three Tbsp butter and add the flour. Whisk four minutes. Add the liquid from above and cook one minute or so, until thickened. Now you have mushroom gravy with a wonderful deep flavor. You can stop right there if you like and chill the gravy until you are ready to complete the pot pies.

Place the fennel and the pearl onions . . . you know, you can peel pearl onions easily by first trimming a bit off the root end, plunging them into boiling water for 30 seconds, dumping them out, cooling them, and squeezing them out of their skins. I never knew that before, but it is much the easiest way to handle pearl onions. Anyway, add the butter and 1 C cold water to the pan and simmer 8 minutes, covered, and 18 minutes, uncovered. I doubt the timing needs to be as precise as this implies. Set this aside.

Heat 2 Tbsp butter and sauté the portabellas and thyme for six to eight minutes. Add to the fennel mixture. Add the mushroom gravy. Spoon into ramekins.

Make biscuit topping. I use 1/3 C flour per 8-oz casserole dish. Maybe 1/2 tsp baking powder, a pinch of salt, a little oil, a little milk, voila. Get the filling really hot — the microwave works best if you made the filling ahead. Drop spoonfuls of the biscuit topping over the ramekins. Bake 15 minutes or so at 400 degrees, until the biscuits are browned on top and feel done when you tap one with a finger.

Cool a bit before serving and there you go. Mmmm. This was really good and I will make it again quick before spring.

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Best Sword Fights in Movies

Here at Black Gate, this post by Violette Malan on the top five sword fights in movies.

You don’t have to read many of my posts to know that The Princess Bride is pretty well my favorite movie. And though I love the sword fighting scene between Wesley and Iñigo, and the later one between Iñigo and Count Rugen, they are not actually my favorite sword fighting scenes. In both cases, it’s really the dialogue that makes the scenes memorable. So what movies would I rank above The Princess Bride in sword fighting wonderfulness?

I’m not an expert, so I guess for me the snappy dialogue often makes the sword fight. Hence The Princess Bride is right up there for me, yes.

If you are really into sword fighting, I wonder if you can guess which movies Violette Malan picks out.

I will tell you, they are all historical.

Also, one of them is the 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo. I will say: I didn’t like it. I have never liked any Count of Monte Christo movie. It’s a tough job, making a Count of Monte Cristo that suits my taste, because it is one of my very favorite books.

On the other hand, you know what would improve every single CoMC movie ever made? Cutting the prison scenes to fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty minutes, but only if you lengthen the overall film to compensate. I mean, listen: Skip lightly over the intro and setup. Skip lightly over the solitary confinement part. Skip almost as lightly over Faria, who certainly does not need to teach Edmond Dantes how to fight. I mean, seriously, Faria? Let Dantes learn all that in mysterious fashion after the escape. You know, the way it happened in the book.

Touch just briefly on the escape.

That way you can spend nearly all your time doing the fun part: after Edmond Dantes reappears as the rich, enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo.

Why, if you do that, maybe you could make Haydée in to a real character! Shocking, I know. Also Monsieur Noirtier, one of my favorites; and if you’re including him, you might have time to develop the whole subplot with Valentine De Villefort and Maximilien Morrel.

In fact, here’s an idea: try sticking basically to the plot of the book — the annotated version would be fine. There’s a lot there, even in that version. But I bet you could do it if you cut the prison scenes down to the bare minimum. A couple thirty-second time-has-passed vignettes would let you compressing that whole part down to 15 minutes.

Ten, even.

That’s the Count of Monte Cristo movie I’d like to see.

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Cities of the future, imagined

Here is a post at Futurism showing artists’ imagined futuristic cities.

I do think it is a good idea to keep in mind what, say, Prague looks like today. That is, it looks a lot like it did 100 years ago (I presume). This will be less true for countries where the government decides to knock down all the charming old buildings and construct soulless boxes in their place, which I know happens from time to time. I’m thinking of Fushia Dunlop’s comments about her repeated trips to China and the changes she’s seen in some of the cities there.

But quite a lot of cities will probably look roughly the same in 100 or 200 years.

But what fun would that be for an artist, right?

So:

For five years now, the Seasteading Institute has been working toward building Artisanolopolis, a floating city that runs on solar and hydroelectric power.

To make food production sustainable, the entire city would feature greenhouses, and a desalination plant would be responsible for the production of safe drinking water. The floating island would be protected by a massive wave breaker designed to prevent water damage to the structure.

Last year, the Seastanding Institute signed a memorandum with the French Polynesian government to begin construction on this ocean domain by 2019. If everything goes according to plan, the world’s first floating city, operating with significant political autonomy, may be ready for habitation as early as 2020.

Well, yes, when you construct a whole new type of city from scratch, that’s different, of course. The pictures do not look a bit like a city, though. They look like a kind of resort. It’s hard to imagine anybody actually living there as a citizen.

Then we get Martian colonies — I’d love to see that. Figuratively speaking. I’d love for Martian colonies to exist, but I definitely wouldn’t plan to visit. Not even if I were younger. Not unless they totally terraformed Mars so you could walk around without a suit, or even a mask.

Again, these pictures do not look a bit like a city. They look like a base for exploration or something, not somewhere you’d move to bring up children. I think the artists were not necessarily clear on the concept of “city” as “a place where people live their full lives.” Well, let’s see what else we have . . .

Okay, here’s one I hadn’t heard of: An … ocean spiral?

Japanese architectural and engineering firm Shimizu is toying with the possibility of building a fully sustainable, eco-friendly underwater city. They assert that we have yet to tap into the benefits of living in Earth’s deep sea, which they say “offers enormous potential for ensuring effective and appropriate cycles and processes in the Earth’s biosphere.”

Dubbed the Ocean Spiral, the structure is a massive undertaking that, according to the company, would cost around $26 billion to construct. A floating sphere around 500 meters just below the surface of the sea would house the business, residential, and commercial zones. This massive pod would be connected to the ocean floor by a spiral structure 15 km (9.3 mile) long, and scientists would be tasked with finding ways of mining energy sources from the seabed.

Appropriate cycles and processes in the biosphere. Alllll right, that’s totally meaningless, but I grant you, the thing looks neat. NOT LIKE A CITY, but neat.

Okay, and the last one has quite the Elvish vibe: Oas1s — there is a 1 in place of the “i”, which I’m sure looks futuristic and cool — but it seems to suggest kind of turning buildings into giant trees.

Their architecture basically reinvents the traditional concrete skyscraper into one that features wood and leaves that would allow it to gather sunlight, collect water, and provide oxygen. The firm uses recycled wood, high-value organic insulation, green walls, and triple glazing in the design for their off-grid, self-sufficient homes.

Pilot projects include eco-resorts in Ontario, Canada, across which they can bring these treescrapers to life.

Hmm. Looks like the architects are kinda envisioning these things set into an actual forest. I wonder how it would work to instead set up, say, a hundred thousand or so in a group. Like you would, in a city.

Anyway! Click through to take a look if you have a moment.

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Food in fantasy

I started to say: Top Ten Foodie Fantasy Novels, but I don’t think this is a top ten list so much as a . . . uh, just a “ten list,” I suppose. These are mostly simply novels that I thought of in connection with food after reading Voracious — some of the fantasy novels I would have liked Cara Nicoletti to mention. But I didn’t make a major effort to identify the ten best or anything.

Plus I’m dead sure there are some SF novels where food is important, but I really can’t think of any specific titles and it is driving me a little bit nuts. I’m sure – I’m positive — that a few years ago I read a space opera kind of thing where people were always fixing curries and stuff rather than defaulting to the standard SF steak or sandwiches you see rather often (about as often as “stew” in fantasy novels, I think). But I can’t remember the title. Phooey. If that sounds familiar to you, please remind me.

But here’s what I came up with for a Foodie Fantasy list. Some of these would definitely make a Top Ten if I were making a serious attempt to do that, and I am putting those at the top.

1. The Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust.

I don’t think there is another fantasy series where food and cooking are discussed in more loving detail. This reaches its apogee in Dzur, where the whole story is structured around a single meal at Valabar’s.

You take beef, or the fish or whatever, and move it to the middle of the granite, where it cooks in about ten seconds on a side – the waiter will do that for you if you wish. Then you take it with the tongs, dip it in the sauce of your choice, and go to work. With the beef, I wrap it in a piece of lettuce. I started to show Telnan how to do it, but Mihi [the waiter] was faster and better. Telnan paid close attention to Mihi’s instructions.

“You know,” said the Dzur, “this is really good.”

And then later:

“Freshwater trout,” announced Mihi, “from the Adrilankha River, stuffed with carrot slivers, fresh rosemary, salt, crushed black pepper, a sprinking of powdered Eastern red pepper, minced garlic, and sliced lemon wedges. Accompanied by fresh goslingroot, quick-steamed in lemon butter.”

Seriously, as a fantasy novel for food lovers, you aren’t going to find anything better than Dzur. I really should go through the book, come up with recipes for the described dishes, and take a stab at some of them. I couldn’t do them as well as Valabar’s, of course.

2. Sunshine by Robin McKinley.

Cinnamon Rolls as Big As Your Head. And all the rest, of course, right up to the Death of Marat, which no, I have not actually tried to create a version of, though you can find some suggested recipes online to jump off from. You will remember that it must be some kind of vanilla meringue kind of thing filled with, as I recall, black raspberry and currant jams or something like that.

Anyway, definitely a novel where baking and food take on a super-important role.

3. The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip.

You will remember that nearly the entire story takes place in the extensive kitchens of a castle, seen from the point of view of a nameless and nearly self-less protagonist, who btw certainly fits the amnesia post from a couple days ago. Of course there are long detailed descriptions of the food that goes up and the broken remnants that come back to the kitchen. Plus many, many pots to be washed.

4. I hesitated to repeat authors, but The Bell at Sealey Head also comes to mind when thinking about fantasy novels where food and cooking play a central role.

You remember how Judd’s housekeeper is such a terrible, terrible cook. Fish boiled for an hour and lumpy porridge and I don’t recall what all. And then when guests arrive to stay at the inn, first Judd is going to try to take over the cooking himself from his mother’s old book, but then the fantastic Pilchard arrives and takes over the cooking.

Sharing a little table in front of the darkened window, [Judd and his father] made their way quickly, methodically, and with reverent silence through a soup of leeks and cream, peppered mutton chops as tender as they could be gotten, fried among chopped onions and potatoes, accompanied by warm, crusty, crumbly bread that didn’t fight back between the teeth.

You know, Judd should have known Pilchard was too good to be true when that bread arrived on the table. Pilchard had only just arrived. How could anybody make bread as quickly as that?

Anyway, let’s look around for a different author rather than considering any of McKillip’s other books.

5. How about Garden Secrets by Sarah Addison Allen?

Food is important in several of her books. Remember all the cakes in The Girl Who Chased the Moon. But this is the one where Claire caters special occasions, using flowers from the garden to give the dishes a little magical twist.

“There were two big bowls, one full of lavender and one full of dandelion greens, on the stainless-steel island. Loaves of bread sat steaming on the counters. Bay stood on a chair by Claire at the far counter, and she was using a wood-handed artist’s brush to carefully paint pansy flowers with egg whites. One by one, Claire then took the flower heads and delicately dipped them in extrafine sugar before setting them on a cookie sheet.

Dandelion encourages faithfulness, you may recall. Pansies encourage generosity.

Okay, here’s another:

6. I really enjoyed the homely cooking in The Sharing Knife series by LMB.

I mean the farmer’s cooking, of course, especially Fawn’s cooking. The Lakewalkers are basically hopeless when it comes to food. Though good at fishing and so on, of course.

Remember the ginger-pear cake Fawn made for Dag’s birthday in the third book? With the honey-butter frosting? And I also liked it when Fawn tasted molasses for the first time. That would be quite a change from the sweeteners she was more used to, like honey.

7. Mostly Laura Florand’s books don’t count as fantasies, but if you stretch a point just a little, The Chocolate Kiss does. It’s obvious the hot chocolate really does influence people when Magalie or her aunts stir wishes into it. There’s almost as much magic in this story as in Sara Addison Allen’s books, and it’s more a foodie story than those.

8. A book I’ve just been re-reading, Seer’s Blood by Duranna Durgin.

Durgin adds depth to the world she is drawing by including the kinds of foods you would get in this kind of insular, rural, sustenance-level mountain farming community.

It took some scrutiny, but [Blaine] finally spotted some lamb’s quarters and pokeweed along the outer edge of the garden, both still young and tender, the poke not yet purple with its poison. She could mix them along with the mustard greens and some early leeks, and then bread-fry the poke for poke sallet. She drifted down to the creek . . . and found both jewelweed shoots and cowslip – enough greens to do them for a day of meals, and she’d be careful to cook that cowslip through. . . . She poked around in the cabin and found some lard, corn and wheat flour, and an egg beside the sink basin.

We have poke around here, including right in the yard. I cut it down if I have puppies because I don’t want to risk anybody grabbing at the berries. Those are always toxic, unlike the leaves, which are edible until, as Blaine observes, the purple color creeps up their veins.

And for the other two, to round out a list of ten . . .

9. We don’t actually see much baking in The Keeper of the Mist, but of course Keri was trying to keep her mother’s bakery going before she had a sudden career change. That first apricot-and-almond cake that’s described in more detail is based on one I made for someone’s birthday a few years ago, that turned out to be one of the very best cakes I ever made.

I didn’t make sugar flowers to decorate it, though. I learned how once, but unlike Keri, I never practiced enough to get good at it.

And . . .

10. Though food is important in House of Shadows too, nowhere is food more important than in The Floating Islands, where food and cooking are so central to Areanè. But food is meant to deepen the world overall, too, even when the reader is in Trei’s point of view.

The breakfast was warm wheat bread with figs and honey, not the beef and eggs and sweetened buckwheat porridge of northern Tolounn.

Northern Tolounn is cold. Thus, buckwheat. I think of its climate as being kind of like that of Russia. That was therefore quite a trip Trei took, because as you may remember the Floating Islands are somewhere between subtropical and tropical. There we get cumin bread and lamb-and-lentil pastries and figs and pomegranates . . . I really enjoyed writing the food in this book.

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Recent Reading: Voracious by Cara Nicoletti

So, I don’t remember who brought this book to my attention, but I’m enjoying it. It’s yet another of the many new books that seems to have grown out of a blog, in this case Yummy Books, which I had never heard of but must remember to check out because it certainly sounds like it ought to be right up my alley.

So, Voracious,

It’s not a novel. It’s a series of short entries about books, all kinds from Charlotte’s Web to Les Miserables, each followed by a recipe based on something or called to mind by something from the book. The sections are essentially Childhood, Young Adulthood, Maturity, with suitable entries for each category. There are about fifty entries total. Some of them are really compelling, though I can’t say I’m very interested in reading the Gone Girl one after reading this review at The Book Smugglers a few years ago. And Nicoletti found Tana Frenche’s In the Woods way more satisfying than I did, apparently.

Lots of great books here, though. Plus some short stories and stuff. Here’s a bit from the second entry, “Hansel and Gretel,” which I found really delightful:

In third grade I discovered a dusty old copy of [Grimms’ Fairy Tales] in my attic while snooping around after school with my best friends … we were heavily into mysteries and ghost stories at the time, and when we found the book we were certain we had discovered some dark secret that my parents had tried to keep under lock and key.

The book was wonderfully old, with gilded pages and illustrations covered by thin sheets of onion paper, full of beautiful words like “dearth” and “soothsayer” and “earthenware.” From then on, every chance we got, we snuck up to the attic, settled on some old packing blankets, and read it by flashlight.

Beautiful old words! Sounds like Nicoletti was a child after my own heart. Also, the recipe for this entry is perfect – not a recipe for a gingerbread house (I’m not likely to make that!), but for gingerbread cake with blood orange syrup (which I totally do plan to make). I love gingerbread and gingercake and ginger in most any form. In fact I also do keep an eye out for blood oranges, which I like to use to make orange curd, but I am quite willing to branch out and try this syrup.

Before moving on from the subject of fairy tales, let me add that Mari Ness just recently had one of her long, thoughtful posts up at tor.com about “Red Riding Hood.” That didn’t come with a recipe for, say, Grandmother’s bread, but it’s well worth reading anyway. Man, those original fairy tales were grim, weren’t they? No pun intended.

Anyway, another entry in Voracious is on Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which is all very well (currant buns, btw), but this means Nicoletti skips over one of my all-time favorite children’s books: A Little Princess.

Remember A Little Princess? Wow, does food ever figure prominently in that one, too. Everything exquisite when Miss Minchin thinks Sara has expectations, then Sara slowly starving when Miss Minchin finds out she’s been orphaned and has nothing. The story features sponge cake and meat pies and the buns Sara gives away to the beggar child, and of course most of all the meals that magically appear in the attic, along with warm blankets and things. Rich, hot, savory soup, and sandwiches, and toast and muffins. Who doesn’t love that part, where the barren and bitterly cold attic fills up with warmth and comfort?

Anyway, another recipe I’ll be wanting to try from Voracious include black rye bread (Les Miserables), but I’m not sure even Pride and Prejudice can make me feel all that thrilled about the idea of white garlic soup. Though I haven’t actually read that one yet, so we’ll see.

Pity Nicoletti isn’t more into SFF. A book like this would be even more fun if the recipes were all drawn from fantasy and science fiction novels. You could certainly start with sautéed mushrooms for The Fellowship of the Ring and go on from there.

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Good News Tuesday

Lots of neat stuff out there in space. For example, this:

An unexplained ‘void’ appears to be pushing the Milky Way through the Universe at 2 million km/h

You can’t feel it, but our planet is orbiting the Sun at speeds of roughly 100,000 km/h (62,000 mph), and something is making our Milky Way galaxy move through the Universe at more than 2 million km/h (1.2 million mph). That’s 630 km per second, and now scientists might have finally figured out why. …. In front of us, there’s a dense supercluster of galaxies some 650 million light-years away called the Shapley Concentration, and it’s pulling us towards it. Behind us, scientists have found evidence of a previously unknown region of space that’s almost entirely devoid of galaxies, and it’s pushing us away with incredible force.

Zoom! Isn’t that wonderful? If I included this in an SF novel, some really advanced alien civilization would be kindly shoving galaxies away from some terrible threat.

The whole post is worth reading. I mean, this is just very strange stuff:

Oddly enough, according to data from the Cosmic Microwave Background – the ‘afterglow’ of the Big Bang – these two forces appear to be pushing and pulling us with an equal amount of force, and they sit in front and behind the Milky Way on the same axis.

Astronomy keeps presenting us with inexplicable phenomena. I love it.

Also inexplicable:

Physicists have found a metal that conducts electricity but not heat

Like, how is that even possible? ???

The metal contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly. … But a team in the US has shown that this isn’t the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) – a material that’s already well known for its strange ability to switch from a see-through insulator to a conductive metal at the temperature of 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit). … Not only does this unexpected property change what we know about conductors, it could also be incredibly useful – the metal could one day be used to convert wasted heat from engines and appliances back into electricity, or even create better window coverings that keep buildings cool.

Very peculiar and also snazzy.

This next one also seems rather peculiar:

Scientists have turned cooking oil into a material 200 times stronger than steel

Researchers have found a way to turn cheap, everyday cooking oil into the wonder material graphene – a technique that could greatly reduce the cost of making the much-touted nanomaterial. … Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms with incredible properties – it’s 200 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible. Under certain conditions, it can even be turned into a superconductor that carries electricity with zero resistance.

And you can make this with … cooking oil? Are you sure we’re not in an SF novel? A kind of bad one with hand-wavey magic science?

Here’s an example of a new high-tech thing making a difference on an immediate, personal level:

Paralysed ‘robocop’ presented with Israeli suit allowing her to walk again

An ex-police officer paralysed from the chest down wants to visit Israel so she can meet the inventor of a device that has allowed her to walk once more.

The inventor of the device is a quadriplegic, it says. May he and all other severely paralyzed people be walking again — not someday, but soon.

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Ooh, horses!

Here is a post at tor.com by Judith Tarr: Genre Runs on Horsepower: Introducing The SFF Equine.

Of course we do see these horse-centric posts from time to time — I’ve linked to others myself — but hey, who’ll turn down a post about horses, right? Plus as you may know Tarr is a genuine horse expert; she breeds and trains and cherishes Lipizzans. So a horse post by Judith Tarr, sign me up!

Looks like this column will be a regular feature at tor.com:

I’ll talk about some of these topics here, but with a more distinctly sffnal slant—hence, “The SFF Equine.” That’s everything from how to write believable horses (and writers who do it right), to horses in film (and the actors who ride them, and the mistakes that perpetuate from film to film), to horses in fantasy and science fiction (yes: Ponies in Space!), and horses in gaming. Pretty much anything in genre that addresses or includes the equines, I’ll be there.

Tarr winds up this post:

Horses are large, expensive, and require acres of land to thrive, but people persist in making it happen. When we finally move en masse into space, I think we’ll find ways then, too, and reasons to preserve that particular form of interspecies cooperation.

… Which made me immediately think of Elizabeth Moon’s excellent Hunting Party. Horses are not actually on screen during the first half of the book, but nevertheless they pervade the story, adding considerably to its charm if, like me, you’re into both SF and horses.

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