This Week in Terrifying Science: Is it Hot in Here or Is it Just You?

Goodness gracious, was there a lot of alarming science news this week. Let?s dive right in, shall we?

This Week in Our Terrifying Oceans

...And ?dive right in? is indeed the appropriate phrase, as the Los Angeles Times and many other publications with understandably jittery readerships in coastal areas pointed out.

Remember those mind-detonating predictions from a few years ago about how quickly climate change would feed on itself and accelerate? Turns out those doomsday projections were actually sort of laid back.

Arctic ice is melting faster than anyone imagined [1]. Way faster.

Back in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that sea levels would rise 7 to 23 inches by the year 2100 and caused a lot of harrumphing by (Surprise!) people who were financially connected to the oil and coal industries and the sort of people who walk the dog by trailing an extra-long leash out the window of the Escalade.

Those were quaint, innocent times. The IPCC has now revised that prediction to a rise of 35 to 63 inches by the year 2100 [2]. Go ahead and take a moment if you need to discreetly push your eyeballs back in.

That is quite a change to the original forecast. Forget overpriced Internet gold: Now is the time to get in on the ground floor of the laminating-cherished-belongings market.

And the massive influx of fresh water is messing with the ocean currents that normally help (ironic drum roll, please)? regulate the Earth?s climate.

Long story short, we live inside a planet-sized Slurpee machine and we've managed to break it. Now it?s just going to be increasingly powerful hurricanes of dye, corn syrup, and politicians whine-burbling around their snorkels about how it wasn?t their fault.

Oh, and rapidly evolving fish flapping up into our sweaty marshland homes to kick our asses.

New Scientist?s ongoing ?Unnatural Selection? feature, your one-stop shop for guilt, panic, and madness, touched on just a fraction of what we seem to be doing to worldwide fish populations through our insatiable overfishing.

The pressure we?re putting on fish is causing huge changes in numerous species [3], including decreases in size and lifespan.

We also seem to be causing heavily fished species to reach sexual maturity at earlier ages, which I guess means we should stop placating the fish by letting them watch television.

So far that sounds (in a species-selfish way) like a more-people-getting-hungrier problem, but remember that the overfishing pressures are also joined by pollution pressures and changing global currents and the fact that, according to the IPCC, we?ve rapidly melted enough fresh water into the oceans to cover the entire surface of Australia to a depth of three feet.

The fish need to change, and change fast.

The documented changes are just the ones we know about. The ones in fish populations that are relatively close to the surface.

Who knows how angry we?re making the deep-sea fish? [4]

I hope you?re good at treading water in full hockey gear.

This Week in Terrifying Insects

Here?s another delightful global warming fact to think about: Hotter climates seem to allow for larger insects. The Internet has been thinking reeeally hard about that this week, thanks to the discovery of a fossil ant [5] that is consistently described [6] as ?the size of a hummingbird [7].?

Which is adorably small for a bird, but way more ant than I need, thank you very much. And, yes, that communal-living nightmare had wings. No wonder archaeologists never dig up picnic supplies from the Eocene era.

Every other creature on the planet probably spent all its time trying frantically to evolve thumbs and ideas for columns just so they could develop newspapers to whap the ants with.

I think I just figured out a primal component of the human psyche: Stonehenge and the pyramids and giant earthworks have not one damn thing to do with charting the heavens or being remembered by future generations. They?re all just an expression of an ancient lizard-brain urge to have something high enough to stick a giant magnifying lens on.

At least all our skyscrapers will come in handy when the high temperatures of the future bring the super-ants back.

Unless, of course, we can figure out a way to make ants enough of a delicacy that people start overhunting them to keep their size in check.

Yes, the consequence will be creepy growing-up-too-fast Toddlers and Tiaras ants, but we?ve got to save ourselves. Just be polite when the ants model their Western Wear.

This Week in the Terrifying Rise of our Robot Masters

Speaking of being nice to each other, Wired Science checks in from Futurehell with the news that robots in a Swiss lab have evolved altruism [8].

Please note that I didn?t type ?have been programmed to be altruistic,? because that would not be news. Robots programmed for altruism in regard to humans, is, the last time I checked, the whole point of having robots in the first place.

Unfortunately, the only people who seem to be unaware of that rule are robotics researchers, who seem determined to design experiments like ?teach robots to lie [9],? or ?teach robots to sucker-punch,? or ? just for giggles, let?s see if we can get this robot to kill everyone on the spaceship except the one who?s harboring an alien implant [10].?

That sort of thing.

In that spirit, researchers at the University of Lausanne created little robots and called them robot ants, as if you needed more of a dead giveaway.

If you watch the video in the link above, you?ll see that the robot ants definitely hit that sweet spot where ?adorable? and ?disturbing? perfectly intersect. I?m going to call them ?adurbling.? Use that word three times today and it?s yours.

Anyway, the researchers programmed the bots to forage and put the ?genes? of the successful individuals back into the mix for the next generation and gave the less successful foragers the heave-ho and, presumably, Internet access.

Several dozen generations later, bango, altruistic robot cooperation.

Not cooperation with us humans, mind you. With each other.

Thanks a lot, researchers! Great winged robot queens, University of Lausanne robotics lab, what is wrong with you people?! You have adorable Tyrolean hats and some of the best chocolate on the planet! Why must you try to destroy all that?

Do you really think future generations of your robots will be satisfied with foraging for discs once they?ve gotten really good at it? They?re going to hunt for the most dangerous game: Humans.

You probably think that by then we?ll be cruising around in our oceangoing compounds, playing hologram shuffleboard and bitching about how the mutants always seem to know the bingo numbers before they get called, but at least we?ll be safe from robots.

Wrong. Because the deadly foragebots can just cooperate with these magnetic ?throwbots? featured in New Scientist, which are designed to zip straight up metal ship walls [11] with a level of ease that will make you quietly re-think the development of every scrap of human innovation from the invention of the wheel onward.

Because it has all been leading up to this.

Just hope the robots are feeling egalitarian enough to divide you into equal shares before they throw the scraps over the side to the ravenous teenfish.

Be afraid.

Ali Davis is a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles. Her book, True Porn Clerk Stories, is a thought-provoking and funny chronicle of her time selling adult videos. It is available in easily portable paperback [12] or Kindle [13] editions, which makes it just the thing to grab when you are fleeing robots or giant ants. If you are fleeing angry hyperevolved fish, drop it into a Baggie first.

[1] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/05/climate-change-arctic-ice-melting-faster-sea-level-to-rise-more-report-says.html
[2] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20420-unnatural-selection-fish-growing-up-fast.html
[4] http://www.365gay.com/wp-content/uploads/Viperfish.jpg
[5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1383400/Thats-gigANTic-Fossil-unearthed-50-million-year-old-insect-size-hummingbird.html
[6] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/giant-ant-fossils/
[7] http://gawker.com/#!5798343/hummingbird+sized-ant-fossil-discovered-in-wyoming
[8] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/robot-altruism/
[9] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/robots-taught-how-to-deceive/
[10] http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3458045952/tt0078748
[11] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/05/magnetic-scout-bots-that-can-c.html
[12] http://www.amazon.com/True-Porn-Clerk-Stories-Davis/dp/1448685249/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305002670&sr=8-1
[13] http://www.365gay.com http://www.amazon.com/True-Porn-Clerk-Stories-ebook/dp/B002MKOQUG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305002670&sr=8-2

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