Top 5: Sci-Fi reality

Do you ever get confuse fantasy and reality?  I know I do.  The distinction is not quite as simple as it once was.  Recent scientific breakthroughs seem to be mirroring science fiction.  Look on in amazement at the top 5 science fiction come true.

5. Tasers on stun

Captain Kirk rendered his enemies stunned using phasers.  That handy weapon had more settings than an iphone.  If you wanted to stun, kill, disintegrate or even start a nice fire the then phaser was your weapon of choice.  Tasers are less versatile, firing a wire into the victim which then sends a 50,000 volt shock through their body.  The UK government recently ordered 10,000 tasers to be used by police throughout England and Wales following a successful pilot scheme.  This sometimes controversial weapon brings weapons to “trained frontline officers” for the first time. 

 

4. I am going to take your face off 

When Nicholas Cage and John Travolta swapped faces in John Woo’s action epic Face Off most wrote this off as pure fantasy.  Well in many ways it is: it’s not possible to change the underlying structure of the face so you too can look like Nicholas Cage and isn’t that a shame?  For medical reasons a face transplant can help those with disfigurement, trauma or burns.  The first operation of this kind was performed in France in 2005 when the mouth and nose of a donor was transplanted onto a 38 year old woman after a dog attack. The operation has been carried out many times successfully since then.

 

3. Better, Stronger, Faster

 

After terrible accidents Steve Austin and his Bionic girlfriend Jaime Summers got totally bionic in the 1970s.  Using nuclear powered limbs and implants, they gained super-strength, speed, super hearing and improved site.  With these skills the crushed tennis balls with their bare hands and worked as spies.  Replacing limbs and organs with mechanical parts just isn’t as cool in real life.  However it can save lives.   A 14 year old American girl survived without a heart for 118 days while awaiting a second transplant.  This custom-built device is by no means a replacement.  D’Zhana Simmons remained in hospital for the duration.  Perhaps a more realistic future lies with growing new parts for our own bodies.  Claudia Castillo of Barcelona suffered from tuberculosis.  Doctors replaced her windpipe with one grown from her own stem cells.  This is the beginning of a whole new kind of medicine. Stem cell research can be controversial so perhaps we will have to wait a little longer for all new bodies.

2. I am Iron Man

Iron Man Flies

In Marvel comics, billionaire inventor Tony Stark builds a flying armoured suit and becomes Iron Man.  With this suit he can fly like a jet plane and attack terrorist’s weapons dumps.  Earlier this year a man used a custom built jet-propelled wing to fly across the English Channel in just under 10 minutes.  Swiss daredevil Yves Rossy has even been dubbed Fusionman by the media.  He may look like a superhero but fuel demands mean he is unlikely to reach you.

 The Fusion Man Flies

1. Come with me if you want to live!

In the Terminator franchise the US Military began to rely on Artificial Intelligence using robot soldiers and an automated defence system.  This defence system, Skynet, became self aware and initiated a nuclear Holocaust.  So everyone will be pleased to know the US is hoping to phase out living soldiers in the future.  The Future Combat System project is developing a number of initiatives including Aerial Robots which for now are controlled by soldiers.  The latest request from the Pentagon is to have a fully autonomous robot soldier which will be able to “hunt down humans like a pack of dogs”.  New Scientist magazine has all the scary details.  Don’t these people watch films?