In order to save you from the inevitable post election boredom, today I am going to talk about two stories you may have missed in the mayhem.

The wooly mammoth is kinda dead. Now, they can be a little less dead, and a little more not-dead. Through methods used to fertilize eggs with damaged sperms, researchers have developed a way to clone from dead tissue. Basically, any frozen and extinct species can now be brought back, and apparently, people really like the sasquatches of the elephant world. This is some Jurassic Park stuff. Recreating dead species to make a zoo and then get devoured by our own chaos theory is pretty much an inevitability now. Cloning alone was crazy enough, but now we may be defying extinction itself. The term “awesome” is rarely used in proper context, as in to create or fool one with awe. And what what is more awesome than velociraptors? Nothing. My opinion is this: Forget elephants. What have they ever done for us? Do they need fuzzy brethren? What ever happened to staples and shag carpeting? No, we need to work on velociraptors. They are much cooler.

That said: forcefields. I am officially going to be talking about forcefields. Pretty much, Earth is already surrounded by a “magnetic bubble” that protects the earth from solar radiation. The new hope is that by using our own artificial magnetic forcefield, a new spacecraft with be able to go to Mars without fear of radiation poisoning.

Now, just for a moment, think of the basis of the idea: “Ok, it’s the fifties, we have absolutely no special effects, and our flying saucers hang by strings. We need to have a reason why the protagonist can take three blasts to the chest and shrug it off with perfect hair and a Vaseline smile.” With only a meager editing job that a child could do these days, the force-field, while not really conceived, was brought into the main stream. It was never really explained, and it had the same cartoon-ish mechanics of a death-ray (that is to say, none). Over 50 years later, man has created a forcefield based on a much larger model. The science is good, the theories are cohesive, and it may actually work, especially given that if there were death-rays, it would probably be some sort of directed radiation poisoning, which is exactly what the forcefield protects against.

So, I know it’s been said before, but the future is officially here. We’re not talking about great advances in medical science (although cloning could help) or greater achievements of man (such as landing on Mars). This isn’t miniaturization, refrigeration, or the atom bomb. This is what you saw on Saturday mornings.