So I’ve seen a few articles about advances in Science lately and a thought pops up about the SF feel to them.
Some people in Berkeley have come up with 3D printed liquid magnets. I read that phrase a few times and it still amazes me. Oh, and it was discovered by accident. Coming up with strange new things in a lab by accident has never been a problem, right?
Have they not seen Terminator 2? Has anyone seen Sarah Conner lately? Will they be sued for patent infringement by Skynet?
Then there are these people working on coming up with better bacteria for breaking down plastic waste. The current one (found in the waste material of a Japanese plastic factory, btw) is too slow but things might go faster in a hotter environment. Solution: get some extremophiles from someplace like Yellowstone, add the gene for producing the plastic-breaking-down enzyme, etc. Nothing Frankenstein-ish about that.
While reading it I thought the idea of a bacteria that eats plastic getting out of the lab and causing havoc in our plastic dependent world as a plot for a SF story. Sure enough, the article mentions one such story.
Then there’s this new, surprisingly short, proof of a decades old conjecture in Theoretical Computer Science. (I remember reading the original paper that proposed it when it came out.) It might have some interesting fall-out regarding algorithms for Boolean formulas. Which leads straight-away to P vs. NP.
Fictionally speaking, what if this leads to a probabilistic, poly-time, algorithm for NP-Complete problems? The commonly used crypto on the Net would become useless. “All your bank account are belong to us.”