We Have Concerns

The residents of St. Pauli, a party district in Hamburg, Germany, were fed up with drunk revelers urinating on the sides of their buildings, so they turned to science to stop the behavior. Painting the most peed-upon areas with an extremely hydro-phobic coating effectively turned the walls into reflectors, bouncing the urine right back onto the culprits. Jeff and Anthony applaud the ingenuity, and wonder how many other problems can be solved this way.

You've heard Anthony and Jeff warn you about the far-reaching influence of the dreaded Spike Lobby. Now it gets real. An article in The Guardian outlines the numerous locations in the UK installing spikes in public places to get rid of homeless loiterers. The guys think this is a disproportionate, inhumane approach, and can only imagine one culprit...

With a headline like "Man Gets Bionic Eye, Sees Wife for the First Time in 20 Years", you might expect a tearful moment of feel-good sentimentality. But the truth of the moment, as evidenced by the article's embedded video, is much more honest and real about the state of technology. Anthony and Jeff applaud the headline's "man" for his genuine reaction, and make fun of media headlines for their self-congratulatory tone.

The New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company, now listed on the Australian stock exchange, is taking orders for the "world's first practical jetpack" and Jeff couldn't be more excited. But at $200,000 and at its current size, Anthony wonders if practical is really the right word. Also, the guys pitch their idea for Jetpack Rescue Squad and Anthony eats during the show, like a real professional.

The mummified remains of a Buddist monk have been discovered inside a statue that dates back over 1,000 years. Even more fascinating, studies reveal that the monk may have been self-mummified! Jeff and Anthony learn the excruciating, lengthy procedure once used to begin the embalming process while still alive, and wonder how enlightened one must be to attempt it.

A very special 100th episode of We Have Concerns, recorded in front of a live audience at the Nerdmelt Showroom in Los Angeles! Anthony and Jeff discuss the potential to sell your feces to science for use in treating patients with C diff. Donors can earn up to $13,000 per year for their excrement, but the standards are quite high for what constitutes sellable poop.

A new article on i09 describes animal behaviorist John Calhoun's quest to create the perfect mouse city, complete with abundant food, recreation, and even rodent apartments. Now referred to as the "Behavioral Sink", the utopian underground mouse habitat quickly degraded into an apocalypse, as the mice turned on one another and the bloated population died out. Anthony and Jeff can't help but see parallels to modern life, but also take a moment to consider what kind of guy spends his time attempting to perfect rat cities.

*not necessarily a guarantee One robotics company, Clearpath Robotics, has promised never to make autonomous killing machines, and hopes all future tech companies will get on board with the no killer robot promise.  Problem solved, right?  Jeff and Anthony aren't so sure, and see a future where solemnly swearing with no take-backs might not be enough. This episode also features French robots, so there's that.

The tiny organism known as the hydra is a half inch tube of jelly that inhabits fresh water all over the world, and it may well be functionally immortal.  What does that mean?  Anthony and Jeff try to make sense of a creature that can re-grow any part of itself and live for thousands of years - and imagine what that might be like for them.

Now that private companies are getting into space, the legalities of who can own celestial bodies comes into question.  Specifically, a company called Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas wants to start selling inflatable habitats and property on the moon.  Jeff and Anthony discuss the archaic treaties and laws that govern space ownership now, how it might change, and, of course, space pirates.

According to researchers at Macquarie University, couples in long-term relationships develop inter-connected memory systems.  Each partner can remember only a few details, but together they piece together a more accurate whole, ostensibly off-loading parts of the job to the other.  Anthony is intrigued by this, and what it means for replacing human interaction with machines, while Jeff wonders how much can just be attributed to laziness and coincidence.

A Venezuelan man had his face surgically altered to look like the Red Skull - Captain America's arch-nemesis in Marvel Comics.  His nose was removed, his brow was enlarged, his skin was reddened, and even his eyeballs were tattooed black.  Jeff thinks this is horrifying and has very bad implications for the man's state of mind.  Anthony thinks we only get one shot at life and if this makes him happy, so be it.  Both of them wonder what his kid must go through at school.

A new study shows that longer, fast-paced running sessions are just as bad for you as not running at all. How much exercise is genuinely good for you? And why do we always think more is better?

What's more ethical: a life sentence in prison, or a drug that slows someone's perception of time to make them feel like they've spent 10 life sentences in a day? The question was asked last year by an Oxford University professor, but isn't the real question: if we could make a drug that let people do multiple lifetimes of thinking, why would we waste it on punishment instead of giving brilliant minds multiple lifetimes to solve human problems? Also what's it like to feel like you have an itch for 1,000 years? 

Songwriter and youtube song-a-day artist Jonathan Mann has a new video online advocating for abolishing the term "Content Creator" for people who release things on the web.  His position is that the term diminishes things designed to be distributed on the online, making them disposable.  As individuals who have been described as "content creators" themselves, Anthony and Jeff discuss what this semantic change might mean, and why the desire to make quality creative endeavors on the web can be challenging.