This is the last one, I promise! Heat vision: I always thought this was a ridiculous power that couldn't possibly happen in real life, and that's still the case. Sorry! The movie was slightly more realistically satisfying in demonstrating a steep cost for Superman's heat vision. It consumed a lot of energy and appeared to momentarily blind him. So watching this movie was less frustrating than watching the (excellent) Justice League cartoon show where you just want to shout at Superman “Stop punching him and use your freaking eye lasers!” I guess that would have ended every conflict too quickly... To make up for any disappointments, here's some bonus science accuracy! In the scene where they find a crashed Kryptonian ship in the ice in the Arctic, scientists there say that they dated approximately how old it is (it's been buried more than 20,000 years) according to the stable isotope composition of the ice cores taken from around it. This is absolutely how science works! The stable isotope composition of the atmosphere changes in predictable annual cycles, as well as in large trends seen over thousands of years. When tiny gas bubbles get frozen in ice, they become a historical record of what the ancient atmosphere was like. Usually it is the ratio of heavy oxygen atoms (δ18O) to normal lighter oxygen atoms that is measured for a signature. Another science bonus related to the Man of Steel is an update on our progress towards X-Ray vision as discussed in Part II. Scientists have done something cool (and a little crazy) in the field of enhancing perception. Using technology similar to the tools we use to restore hearing to the deaf with cochlear implants or visual stimulation to give blind individuals basic sight, these researchers asked the question "Can we extend this stimulation beyond the normal range of perception?" To answer it, they attached headgear to adult rats. The tech consisted of a device that could sense infrared light (invisible to rats and humans alike) and a circuit to transfer this signal directly into the rat's brain where it would register as a sensation on its whiskers. The rats had previously been trained to choose among a number of ports in an experimental set up based on visible light cues from an LED light where the lit port provided a reward of water. After installing the electrodes in their brains, the researchers took away the visible light and gave the rats IR light cues to figure out which port held the reward. It took the rats a few weeks to figure out why their whisker senses were tingling, but they learned to detect the IR and navigate towards it repeatably. So they weren't "seeing" IR per se, but they were certainly sensing a form of radiation that had previously been imperceptible! References:
Thomson, E.E. et al. Perceiving Invisible Light through a Somatosensory Cortical Prosthesis. Nat. Commun. 4:1482 doi: 10.1038/ncomms2497 (2013).
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Alanna DurkinExploring the realm of biologically inspired design one superhero example at a time, with some other natural sciences mixed in. Archives
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