# This week in Science (Fiction)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-week-in-science-fiction/837752>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 28, 2019, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-week-in-science-fiction/837752 "2019-07-28T13:35:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2019, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-week-in-science-fiction/837752/1 "2019-07-28T13:35:00Z")

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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](https://www.livescience.com/66018-permanently-magnetic-liquids.html) 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](https://www.popsci.com/plastic-eating-bacteria/) 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](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229), 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.”