Category: Future Science Gearbox

March 2, 2019
ATLANTA–The Centers for Disease Control announced Wednesday the results of a decade-long “meta-study” of more than 75 years’ worth of medical and scientific cancer research, concluding that “the hypothesis best supported by extant research is that the soundest predictor of whether a patient will have developed cancer is whether the patient has developed cancer.” “The most striking finding of the study is not that cancer causes cancer,” explains Dr. Betty Rind of the CDC’s special task force, “but that cancer doesn’t always cause cancer. It’s a key factor–probably the key factor, but it’s not decisive.”

The study was the brainchild of former CDC Director Dr. Henry Swellman, who initiated the $26 billion effort during his short tenure. “I’ve given this quite some thought,” Swellman testified to a Senate subcommittee during his contentious three-month confirmation hearing, “and there are so many potential causes for cancer out there. There’s a simpler, more elegant possibility. What do all cancer patients have in common? That’s going to be the most likely cause, and I intend to find it. The data is there. Now it’s just a question of will.”

Swellman’s team quickly grew to more than 150 doctors, clinicians, and statisticians, who combed archives of peer-reviewed studies and their supporting data for clues to cancer’s elusive cause. The studies and their data were subjected to a series of sophisticated mathematical analyses, including proprietary ‘Monte Carlo simulations,’ multiple regressions, and a recursive set of ‘Hyde transformations.’ “We eventually reached a conclusion that was both surprising and obvious,” notes Dr. Rind, “a number of factors are correlated with the development of cancer, but the highest correlation is actually between the development of cancer and the development of cancer.”

The CDC’s report hypothesizes that the ‘strong yet imperfect’ correlation it found between cancer and the presence of cancer may be related to an esoteric prediction found in the developing field of quantum diagnostics. The so-called ‘uncertainty diagnosis’ suggests that certain medical conditions remain in a state of suspension or uncertainty until diagnosed. “I believe part of what we see in the CDC study is a corollary of diagnostic ‘superposition,'” explains Professor Rudolph Pilegram, a leading proponent of the theory. “Certain diseases are held in a state of seemingly contrary suspension until the moment of diagnosis. Pre-diagnosis, you may simultaneously have cancer and not have cancer. Diagnosis itself resolves the superposition. If you’re diagnosed with it, you have it, if not, you don’t. I believe the imperfect correlation in the CDC study is a side-effect of this phenomenon.”

Asked about the implications of the study, the CDC’s Dr. Rind notes that “the importance of a study like this will really only be seen in retrospect, in the way that it shapes future research. I think what this study tells us, pretty clearly and unequivocally, is that the best way to find effective treatments for cancer is to focus our research efforts on finding effective treatments for cancer.”

September 18, 2014
VIENNA–Writing in this month’s issue of the journal Science, a team of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology report a breakthrough discovery in the field of noumenal physics. Working in a state-of-the-art lab equipped with a specialized chamber capable of compressing objects to 1/1,000,000th of their normal size through the use of high-energy, self-contained ‘gravity pits,’ the team managed to uncover, and then split, a never before isolated entity known as a ‘ding-an-sich’ or a ‘thing-in-itself.’

“The importance of this discovery cannot be overstated,” notes Uli Werner-Werner, Executive Editor of the Journal of Noumenal Physics. “It goes to the heart of one of the basic hypotheses of noumenal physics, namely that objects consist of something in addition to their constituent, perceptible parts; a sort of ‘thingness’ that makes an object what it is.”

Tracing its roots to the work of Prussian-born philosopher Immanuel Kant, noumenal physics rejects traditional interest in the fundamental building-blocks of matter in favor of a theory of ‘things’ and ‘superthings.’ “We’re through with splitting quarks and knitting fuzzy fields,” explains Werner-Werner. “That’s an Achilles and the hare approach that can only take us so far. What we’re doing is taking a step back and asking bigger questions.”

Postulating the existence of a ding-an-sich behind every ordinary object and just out of the reach of human understanding grounded in “sense perception and its extension through the techniques and technologies of traditional experimental science,” the Austrian team, lead by Professor Hanni Chiang, sought to confirm the existence of such ‘things,’ but faced a seemingly insoluble quandary: how do you confirm the existence of something that is, by definition, imperceptible, even through the use of perfect instruments with infinite sensitivity and resolution.

“It’s not a trivial problem,” explains Professor Chiang. “Our first approach was to compress objects beyond the threshold of perceptibility, to just take this chair and make it so teeny tiny that all of its perceptible properties would be stripped away, just leaving the Ding, but we hit a wall with that. We burned through our budget, a good budget, something like [$2.3 billion U.S.], and we were still likely millions of orders of magnitude from our goal.”

Last June, however, with the addition of Professor Eric Lougha of the University of California at Berkeley, the team’s research took a new direction. “Eric helped us turn the problem on its head,” recalls Chiang. “Rather than making the object imperceptible, we realized we could just make ourselves insensate. [Eric] introduced us to a special derivative of a small, Central American, high-altitude cactus, and, within days, every member of the team had seen the ding-an-sich.”

During subsequent tests, the team successfully split the ding-an-sich of a laboratory stool, creating two complete but distinct ‘things’ underpinning the stool. “It just looks like an ordinary stool,” explains Chiang. “But there are actually two Dings there. Essentially, it’s two stools with all of the properties of one stool. It may sound very through-the-looking-glass, but there you have it.”

November 2, 2027
ATLANTA–Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control reported Thursday that Mnemonic Plague–a mysterious and debilitating disorder affecting the brain–can be readily transformed into a highly-infectious weapon that could be easily spread using a crop duster, lawn sprinkler, or even a simple, everyday atomizer. “On its own, [Mnemonic Plague] is contagious and characterized by a long, pre-symptomatic incubation period,” notes Dr. Hillary Jest, CDC Director of Emergent Disorders. “Recent research indicates that it can also quite easily be refined and deployed as an agent of bioterrorism.”

The Plague, known among researchers as Memory-Acquisitive Ego-Occlusion Disorder (“MAEOD”), is characterized by a sudden, rapid derangement of the ability to form ‘ego-related and ego-affective’ memories, coupled with an increasing proclivity to appropriate ‘ex-egoic’ narratives, memes, and vignettes. “The symptomology is fairly clear,” explains Professor Eugene Mash of the UCLA Medical Center. “Patients become incapable of remembering any of their own experience, or of retaining information about themselves. Instead, they transform tidbits of information about others–typically strangers, often celebrities and television personalities–into false memories about themselves.”

“I remember so clearly the time I broke my sister Marsha’s nose with a football,” recalls one MAEOD patient. “It was just an accident really. They tell me that it never happened to me, that I don’t even have a sister, but I just don’t see how they could be right.”

Though clinicians have yet to identify additional physical symptoms, specialists have recognized a number of disturbing collective or ‘hive’ symptoms: dysfunctional and afunctional social dynamics that develop in isolated populations of symptomatic patients.

“By far the most explosive of the group dynamics is the ‘No, I’m Spartacus’ syndrome,” explains Professor Mash. “Because patients build memories out of what they hear from their peers, the endgame in a relatively closed group of MAEOD patients is a convergence on a single memory set, typically followed by aggressive contests over ownership of the memories.”

Only recently linked to a little-understood viral agent affecting the brain’s production and use of acetylcholine and other neurotransmitters, MAEOD is spread by water cooler chitchat, inappropriate touching, and NBC’s Must See TV lineup, including first-run episodes, repeats, and syndicated reruns.

“The etiology is quite bizarre,” notes Professor Mash. “It turns out that the virus fairly rapidly populates tissues of the brain and central nervous system, but appears otherwise inactive in the absence of a signature catalyst that just happens to consist of ratios of neurotransmitters typically present in certain regions of the brain during certain activities. In the presence of the catalyst, copies of the virus in local tissue become active and then, zip! in a chain reaction they start activating the virus throughout the frontal lobes.”

May 18, 2023
ROCKVILLE, MD–In a surprise announcement, Lexerica, a 23-employee, privately funded startup based in Rockville, Maryland, revealed Friday that it has completed an initial draft sequence of the English language. “This is a real David and Goliath story, a triumph for the little guy with the big idea,” exclaims Lucian Blunderbuss, founder, Chairman, and CEO of Lexerica. “We tackled the sequencing problem using only a fraction of the resources and employee-hours the experts said we would need.”

The sequence, which consists of “all well-formed and near-well-formed expressions possible in the English language,” was assembled with the help of a network of sophisticated computers employing a proprietary ‘scattershot’ sequencing algorithm developed by Blunderbuss himself.

“The trick to building the sequence is realizing that it’s more about figuring out what to include than figuring out what to exclude,” explains Blunderbuss. “Rather than building a database of all mathematically possible sequences of letters and then sifting through that for well-formed expressions, we took a large set of well-formed expressions, smashed them together, and then reformed them, looking for expressions in what resulted.”

Blunderbuss, once Chief Technical Director of the Public Domain Sequencing Project, a publicly funded effort to produce a similar sequence, broke with the Project over their reluctance to make use of the ‘scattershot’ technique. “Lucian is undoubtedly brilliant,” opines Georgiana Jumper, Chair of the PDSP executive committee. “And we applaud him for sticking to his guns, but the Project continues to have some reservations about the technique and the completeness of the sequence it has produced.”

Organizers of the Public Project also question the propriety of a privately funded and privately owned sequence. “The Lexerica sequence raises serious questions,” notes Pilar Daise, an anaphora expert and Project researcher. “While the Project is dedicated to increasing the size of the public domain by dedicating the sequence to it, the Lexerica sequence, once published, could conceivably be the source of copyright claims against the bulk of future linguistic expression.”

In theory the Lexerica sequence includes, according to Daise, “millions of billions of novel-length expressions,” each of which could conceivably pre-empt the work of a future Hemingway or Tolstoy. “It’s crucial that the sequence be part of the public domain,” exclaims Daise. “Otherwise the owner of the sequence will have a strangle-hold on future creative work.”

Though declining explicitly to dedicate the Lexerica sequence to the public domain, CEO Blunderbuss assures critics that his company is not interested in owning new expressions. “We have yet to fully resolve our business model, but you can rest assured that we will not start by suing individual writers. That’s just not in the cards. Our initial plan is to make the sequence commercially available, on a pay-to-use basis. It’ll actually be a service for writers, who will be able to prospect for new works in the sequence, rather than starting from scratch every time.”

“We don’t really know their plans,” notes PDSP Chair Jumper. “It is interesting to note, however, that [Blunderbuss’] scattershot technique relied upon well-formed expressions from the public domain. They had to have something to start with.”

Acknowledging that the Lexerica sequence did in fact make use of a number of public domain works as “seed expressions”–including some published early portions of the Public Project’s sequence–Blunderbuss is quick to point out that Lexerica also made use of many “indigenous well-formed expressions,” including, notably, three of Blunderbuss’ published books, transcripts of 133 of his public speeches, and transcriptions of more than 1,200 hours of his personal phone conversations.