Month: March 2015

Edison, well known for (kind of inventing, but also kind of stealing) the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb, had some less commercially known products that never quite hit the shelves of the modern era, in this case, a phone that can allow communication with the dead.

His research in this spooky realm wasn’t publicized until 1949 (long after his glory days). A French edition of his original diary was discovered and translated in much fuller detail, revealing some new interesting research and information of the ghost variety.

This research to develop ghost phones was primarily done in 1870 by greatly amplifying some of his phonographs. He was so certain it would work, he made a death pact of sorts with one of his engineers, that whichever one of them died first, the other would use the spirit phone to contact the other, from beyond the grave.

Whether Edison actually talked to any ghosts is uncertain, I’d like to imagine he’s the “unknown caller” ID that always calls my phone.

I’ve always thought Homer was less dumb and more of an idiot-savant like character. Turns out, my hunch was not far off from the truth.

In the 1998 episode, “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, Homer wrote an equation to calculate the mass of the Higgs Boson. Either a point of it being a complete coincidence, or one of the writer’s being the smartest man alive, the equation turned out to be correct, fourteen years later.

“A lot of the writers on The Simpsons are mathematicians,” said Simon Singh, author of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.

“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson. If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is.”

Next thing you know, Homer will discover the formula to create donuts out of thin air.

We almost have Futurama technology now, for we are apparently only two years away from mastering the human head transplant. Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero has been enthusiastically promoting the idea that transplanting the head of one person to another is viable, and entirely possible.

Besides the grand benefit of getting to have multiple heads throughout your lifetime, (imagine head stores!) it also could extend the person’s lifespan due to all the benefits of a brand spanken new head with extensive muscular or nervous system degeneration.

Canavero detailed the entire procedure, which would involve placing the patient in to a coma for several weeks so that they don’t move during the healing process, in a recent medical paper.

The new bodied patient would be able to feel their new face when they awoke, and would be able to walk again after a twelve month period.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it,” he said. “But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else. I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

So look forward to Swedish head transplants in 2017.