Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

I’m the first to admit that I’m snarky, sarcastic and goofy. But I’m also honestly optimistic about the future. Much of that is because I’ve seen some great stories come out of what was first a tragic set of circumstances. That’s the case with Aimee Copeland.

Miss Copeland suffered an injury while going on a zip-lining adventure. The injury led to a battle with flesh-eating bacteria, which ultimately required Copeland to have a leg and both her hands amputated. I can’t imagine how tough it was for her to go through all that.

Today, Copeland has a new set of hands courtesy of a company called Touch Bionics. Normally, these hands would cost around $100,000 but the company gifted them to Copeland free of charge.

Now, I don’t expect tech companies to display altruistic behavior for every person who would benefit from their products. But I find it encouraging that human ingenuity has led us to this point. To me, it’s a glimpse at the genius that can help create a better life for everyone through innovation and engineering.

Courtesy NASA

Yesterday, NASA held a pretty cool Google+ Hangout event with astronauts, NASA experts and some of the cast and crew of Star Trek Into Darkness. If you missed it yesterday, don’t worry. The entire presentation has been recorded for posterity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_BZe6cGoI

One thing that was touched upon in the Hangout was that in science fiction films, you almost always see spacefarers walking around on space stations or ships. Some sort of artificial gravity keeps feet on the ground and coffee mugs on the table (not to mention coffee in the coffee mugs). One member of the Internet audience posed the topic as a question: Are we actually working on artificial gravity?

The initial response from astronaut Michael Fincke was that floating around in space is way more fun than obeying gravity. I’m sure that’s true, but artificial gravity would be incredibly useful. For one thing, a big problem with a prolonged visit to space is that your bones begin to deteriorate in a zero-g environment. Simulated gravity could give us the opportunity to go on longer space journeys without risking bone density loss.

Artificial gravity could also help us design new propulsion or even energy systems. But it would also mean designing ships so that they work in a particular orientation. Right now, if you can float so that you can interact with environments in multiple ways, your design options are really flexible. But if we must adhere to gravity, ship or station design will have to reflect that.

This HowStuffWorks article goes into detail about how science fiction often gets things wrong or at least ignores troublesome details in order to tell a compelling story. Part of that is the problem of artificial gravity. One way we could simulate gravity is through rotation. If you rotate a spacecraft around a central axis, you generate centripetal force toward that axis. Everything inside that spacecraft will feel a pull to the outer edge of the craft — it’s what we refer to colloquially as centrifugal force.

So imagine a space station in the shape of a bicycle wheel. As the wheel rotates in space, everything inside the station is pressed outward toward the edge of the station. This sort of artificial gravity would be adjustable based upon the speed of rotation. But it might not be ideal and it would require designing all stations and craft so that the floor is all along this outer edge.

The world of Star Trek doesn’t have this problem — there’s some other form of artificial gravity that keeps everything in place. Not only that, but there are also these things called inertial dampeners that keep people from flying out the back of the Enterprise when the ship goes into warp. Normally, momentum would play a role and people would quickly transform from Starfleet officers into an icky goo as they were slammed around a ship under inconceivable acceleration forces.

So how do inertial dampeners work? Beats me. It’s completely in the fiction part of science fiction. But such a technology would be necessary if we wanted to survive any type of travel that involves rapid acceleration or deceleration.

It could be that we learn the secrets of gravity over the next few decades. Perhaps we’ll learn the actual mechanism that makes gravity work. It’s something quantum physicists and other scientists have been working on for more than a century. If we do crack that quantum nut and learn how to harness gravity ourselves, the future we live in might make Star Trek seem quaint and archaic in comparison.

Courtesy NASA

Check this out: NASA is playing host to a Google+ Hangout today, matching up J.J. Abrams, director of the new Star Trek films (the excellent 2009 reboot and the currently debuting Star Trek Into Darkness), screenwriter Damon Lindelof, three cast members from the movie (you got your Kirk, you got your Sulu, and a new character played by actress Alice Eve) — with actual, real-life space explorers. These include NASA flight engineer Christopher Cassidy, who currently lives aboard the International Space Station, as well as Earth-dwelling astronauts Michael Fincke and Kjell Lindgren. The group will be taking questions — hopefully many on the awesome, inevitable collisions between science fiction and the cutting edge of technology, scientific experimentation and human knowledge.

The hangout starts at 12 p.m. EST and will last about 45 minutes. You should be able to watch it live here and here.

Unfortunately, it seems to be too late to add new questions to the queue, but I’m sure whatever they cover will be great. That said, it hardly bears a moment of wondering what question I would have asked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkT1-N0VqUc

A scanning electron micrograph of Lactobacillus casei bacteria. Are these the machines of the future? | © Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library/Corbis

The microscopic world is fascinating and strange. Using some advanced techniques in clean rooms, we’ve made great strides into the nanoscale world using silicon and exotic metals. Engineers command computers to etch designs onto wafers — designs so small, not even a powerful light microscope can detect the details. But when it comes to the microscopic biological world, we’re the equivalent of a cave man hitting one thing against some other thing in the hopes that he’ll master the mystery of fire.

That’s not to say we haven’t learned plenty of useful stuff about microbiology. My point is just that nature has had millions of years to play around with microbes. It turns out all that time has allowed nature to get a pretty good grip on what works. We’re only in the earliest stages of learning the amazing applications of the microbiological world.

Take bacteria, for example. Scientists discovered that using modified E. coli in a particular way could let us solve traditionally difficult logic puzzles. One of those puzzles is the Hamiltonian Path Problem — that’s when you have a bunch of interconnected nodes. Not every node has a direct pathway to every other node — some may have connections to only one or two nodes. Your task is to find a pathway that allows you to visit each node once and only once. The more nodes you add, the harder the problem becomes.

So how can a single-celled organism with no brain solve a riddle that would have most of us gnawing through a package of number two pencils as we trace yet another failed pathway? First, scientists modified the E. coli’s DNA so that genes represented the various nodes. The genes would cause the bacteria to glow red or green. If the DNA shuffled together and formed a successful navigation of the nodes, the bacteria would glow both colors and turn yellow. You can read more in The Guardian.

Instead of setting a computer to work on a problem and waiting for it to go through and validate or eliminate potential answers one at a time, this bacterial approach relies only on DNA combining in thousands of ways. The “answers” to a problem become evident when the bacteria display some particular trait — such as color in the above example. You discard everything else and then examine the answers to learn the way to solve the problem. It’s a bit circuitous but it could potentially revolutionize the way we approach certain types of computational problems.

That’s not the only thing bacteria can do, though. We can use bacteria to do physical work — turning gears that are millions of times larger than the bacteria themselves. Normally, the bacteria would move around a suspended fluid in seemingly random ways. By controlling the presence of oxygen in the fluid, scientists could force the bacteria to push against tiny gears, turning them. These tiny gears might one day be part of complex microscopic devices — perhaps even ones that roam our bodies and help protect us from disease. You can read more about it in Popular Science.

There’s also this study, which shows that bacteria can emit high concentrations of the chemical compound isoprene. This compound is important in the production of rubber, which goes into lots of stuff, including tires. Our consumption of rubber and the supplies we have available are leading to an unsustainable situation. If we can harness bacteria to produce isoprene, we may be able to meet our needs harnessing the power of bacteria.

Then there’s the fact that bacteria succeeded where countless alchemists failed — a type of bacteria can actually transform the toxic substance gold chloride into pure gold. Sure, it’s not enough to upset the world markets or anything, but we may be able to use this to our advantage in other ways as we use gold in electronics and other applications.

We’re also using bacteria in sensors too. By gold-plating certain types of bacteria, we can create sensors that can detect incredibly tiny changes in humidity. Other bacteria are adept at detecting the presence of ammonia. There may be millions of ways we could apply bacteria to make our lives better.

The discoveries scientists are making in microbiology fuel my excitement for the future. Why reinvent the microscopic wheel when we can copy (or even just repurpose) what’s already in nature? Doing so will make discoveries and advances arrive at our doorstep much more quickly. And who would have thought the same stuff that can give you a terrible case of food poisoning could one day solve complex computer problems? SCIENCE!

An icebreaker in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. | Courtesy Peter Rejcek, National Science Foundation

The marine scientist Cassandra Brooks has put together a really amazing time-lapse video, taking less than five minutes to show two months of progress aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, an NSF icebreaker, in the frozen Ross Sea. It is well worth a watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNZu1uxNvlo

In an upcoming episode of Fw:Thinking, we’re going to talk about the future of exploration. The most obvious future frontier is, of course, space — the final, the farthest, and the most dangerous. But it’s worth remembering how much of our own planet is purely alien and almost totally inaccessible to us. To cross a frozen Antarctic sea and study open-water polynyas like in Brooks’ video, you need an icebreaker vessel, which has to have a reinforced hull and an extremely powerful engine — some polar icebreakers have on-board nuclear power plants to generate enough thrust to push through the ice. No joke. Check out the points in the video where the ship has to repeatedly back up and re-gather speed to cut the shelf.

But Antarctica isn’t the only place on earth hiding secrets behind a wall of inaccessible terrain and deadly environmental conditions. Literally most of the planet could be put into this category. Think about the oceans: Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the surface of the earth. And how much of the oceans have we explored? Almost nothing. According to marine experts like Sylvia Earle and Bruce Robison, definitely less than 10 percent, and probably less than 5 percent of the world’s saltwater environments have been seen by human explorers. In one of these interviews, Robison adds the qualification that if we’re talking about “having actually laid eyes on it out the window of a submersible or looking through a scuba mask, [it's] probably less than 3 percent.” And why? Some of the holdup is the same thing that keeps most would-be ice tourists out of southern polar seas. It’s just a harsh, dangerous world — these conditions are striving with great vigor to kill you and to destroy your equipment. At the bottom of the ocean, for example, you’ve got to deal with a lack of oxygen, freezing temperatures, complete darkness and enough water pressure to crush your body (or a poorly made submersible) like a peanut shell. Deep sea exploration is dangerous, and because it’s dangerous, it’s expensive, and because it’s expensive, it’s rare. So rare that most of the great waters are left untouched.

You can look at this in two ways: It’s either sad and frustrating, because the lack of exploration impedes conservation efforts and scientific research, or it’s exciting, because there’s so much left for us to discover — without even leaving our atmosphere. While we’re busy wondering whether or not there’s unknown alien life in other corners of the galaxy, it’s easy to forget there are hidden places on this planet where we more or less know there is, and it’s just waiting to turn our ideas of the limits of Earth-bound life upside-down.

Is there any place on Earth as thoroughly unexplored as the deep ocean? Probably not, though I wonder to what extent you could call places like the roasting core of the Sahara desert “explored” — land that has, in large part, probably been traveled at some point in history by very brave or suicidal people, but it remains mostly uninhabited and there seems to be a lot left to learn about it. For instance, it was only a few years ago that the 100-million-year-old Kebira crater was discovered.  It’s currently considered the biggest crater in the Sahara, and it wasn’t discovered by fieldwork, but by studying satellite imagery. Considering how hot the central Sahara gets, it’s easy to forgive researchers for relying on images taken from space.

What other terrestrial habitats might hold as many mysteries? Feel free to leave ideas in the comments.

Standard, mass-manufactured guns show up on metal detectors. But a plastic gun you printed in your garage … | ©iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Depending upon whom you ask, Cody Wilson has either ushered in a brave new era of individual independence or sown the seeds of destruction. A few think he’s done both at the same time. So what did he manage to do that causes so much concern? He designed, built and tested the first handgun built by a 3D printer. He named it The Liberator. Then he uploaded the design to the Internet and more than 100,000 people have downloaded it.

I’ve seen a few blog posts and news reports that were worded in such a way that it seemed like the writer was surprised that this happened. I’m not surprised at all. If it’s technologically possible to do something, sooner or later someone will do it. The only real question is when it will happen. For 3D printers to print a handgun, the right set of parameters had to be in place: The builder needed access, the desire and the right types of materials. That’s all.

In Wilson’s case, he used a printer that costs around $10,000 and then heat-treated the parts he made so that they could withstand the tremendous forces and heat a gun endures immediately after firing a bullet. I think it’s most likely that Wilson’s self-described cryptoanarchist leanings fuel the story more than the actual act of printing a gun. Wilson’s attitude in interviews gives me the impression that he feels governments are equal parts inept, corrupt and malevolent and the only solution citizens have is to step outside of governance and become independent.

Personally, I find such a point of view incredibly cynical — I’m an optimist at heart and don’t feel that the political system is beyond repair. But more importantly, I think Wilson’s cavalier attitude toward government’s role has made this story even more emotionally charged than it would have been otherwise.

Wilson printed 15 of the 16 individual pieces that make up his gun. The 16th piece is the firing pin — the part of a gun that strikes a cartridge’s primer. The plastic proved too soft to do the job properly and so Wilson used a common store-bought nail to serve. While he says it wasn’t his intention to build a gun that can’t be picked up by a metal detector, that’s pretty much what he’s done. He included a metal slug in his gun, which means he avoided breaking the law under the Undetectable Firearms Act in the US.

But there’s nothing stopping anyone from downloading the plans off the Internet and building their own Liberator while leaving out the detectable slug. Wilson can cheerfully point out he’s done nothing illegal while enabling thousands of other people. But here’s some comfort — many of those folks probably don’t have access to a 3D printer. And even if they do, the printer may not have the precision or materials necessary to print a working gun.

In fact, consider that a warning message if you want to build one yourself — if the materials your printer uses to construct stuff aren’t up to snuff, you could end up with a weapon that explodes in your hand. Jonathan Rowley, a 3D printing expert, said in an interview that he expects someone will be badly injured by a malfunctioning gun well before anyone is deliberately killed with one.

Wilson’s well-publicized achievement now has politicians around the world reacting with concern. In the United States, representatives and council members from California, New York and Washington DC have already said they will introduce legislation that limits or outlaws 3D-printed weapons. While I think it’s a bit early to say that 3D guns pose a real threat, I do agree that it’s a better idea to decide how we’ll deal with them before they are everywhere.

We’ll probably see some very reactionary responses to Wilson’s work. For example, the U.S. State Department has demanded Wilson’s organization, Defense Distributed, remove all the plans for the gun from public access on the Internet. Their argument is that by distributing the plans Wilson may have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Wilson, for his part, has agreed to the demands to remove the files from Defense Distributed’s servers. But I hate to break it to the State Department — once something hits the Internet, the horse is not only out of the barn, it’s galloping away in every direction you can think of, including up.

Again, I think Wilson’s anarchist leanings will make political and social responses more extreme than they would have been otherwise. And I’m sure we’ll see people react in equal measure should they feel their rights are being infringed upon by the government. But I have a lot of faith in people and I think that this will all settle down and become part of what life is.

In the short term, we don’t have a lot to worry about. Until 3D printers become cheap enough for anyone — or until we can print our own 3D printers using a friend’s printer — access is still an issue. It’s still easier (and cheaper) to buy a traditionally-manufactured weapon. But it’s good to take it all into consideration.

If you’re waiting on a message from Mars, even the speed of light seems to take forever. | ©iStockphoto/Thinkstock

This week’s episode is all about something I hold dear: communication. As an extrovert, I love communicating with people. I work in an office full of introverts, who work most effectively when they have their time uninterrupted by blabbermouths like me. Fortunately, technology gives me that valuable lifeline I need to connect with other chatterboxes so that I can stay energized and enthusiastic without driving all of my coworkers crazy.

The technology that makes this possible is really remarkable. We’ve seen an explosion in communication technology over the last century. From the days of the telegraph to the deployment of fiber optic cables, we’ve made it easier than ever to send information to each other. So what’s the future of communication?

One challenge we still have to face is how to send communication back and forth between people on Earth and spacecraft (or colonies on distant planets if we look to the far future). That’s because, as far as we can tell, the speed of light is a hard limit to how quickly we can transmit info back and forth. We’re getting really good at maximizing how much info can travel at that speed but we can’t make it go faster.

To think of it another way, imagine you’re driving a small truck that can carry six boxes of stuff down a straight length of road. You can drive at top speed without any problems. But you can still only deliver six boxes of stuff per trip. Now imagine you’re making the same trip in a truck that can carry twenty boxes. This truck has the same top speed as your smaller truck. You’re still making the journey in the same amount of time per trip but now you’re able to carry more boxes.

That’s where we are with communication technology. It’s also what we mean by throughput versus speed — we’re already transmitting data at about the speed of light. If we find a way to break that speed limit then new possibilities will open up to us. Also, Einstein will be very ticked off at us.

The speed of light — while it’s wicked fast — is a real, limiting factor. On average, it takes light from the sun eight minutes to reach Earth. When the Mars Curiosity Rover landed on the red planet, it took 14 minutes for its “I’m fine” message to zap over from Mars to Earth. Imagine the barriers we’ll encounter when we start sending people and probes out beyond our solar system, let alone to other parts of the galaxy!

In the episode, I mention quantum entanglement as an interesting phenomenon that seems to allow us to receive information instantaneously. Here’s a basic example of how it works. Imagine you’ve got two photons — the basic particle of light. These two photons are quantumly entangled so that the photons have opposite polarization — that is they are polarized at right angles in respect to each other. You don’t know the polarization of either photon yet.

Next, you separate the photons while keeping them entangled. As long as you don’t cheat and peek at the photon, they’ll stay entangled no matter how far apart they are. You can move them to opposite ends of the galaxy and they’ll remain entangled.

Then, you take a look at the photon that’s near you while the other one remains on the opposite end of the galaxy. You see that your photon has a 45-degree polarization. That means the photon on the other end of the galaxy at that moment has a 135-degree polarization (90 degrees off from your photon).

BOOM! Near-instantaneous data transmission, right? You’ve learned something about the quantum state of a particle on the other side of the galaxy without having to wait for the information to crawl across space at the speed of light. Except quantum physicists will point out that’s not really what happened (it gets complicated but a good rundown on the idea is here). And the entangled system breaks down upon observation or manipulation, so you can’t really make a communication station this way.

In upcoming episodes of our audio podcast, we cover other faster-than-light communication possibilities and explain why they probably won’t work (or depend upon particles that might not even exist). Chief among these problems is causality — if you can send a message so quickly that it reaches its destination before you technically sent it, you’re talking time travel. And that’s another can of worms right there.

We may have to resolve ourselves to the fact that any information we send will move no faster than the speed of light. If that’s the case, asynchronous communication will become the norm as one party sends a message and waits — perhaps for years — for a response. This drives home the idea that any spacecraft, manned or unmanned, will need to be largely autonomous to succeed because by the time it asks for and receives advice from back home the problem has likely changed significantly.

This episode was a lot of fun. Not only did I get to talk about spooky action at a distance but I also got to dress up as a cowboy! Now if y’all will excuse me, I got me some cattle rustlers to attend to.

Things like “fruit fly research” might sound frivolous, but are actually relevant to humans in unimaginable ways – for example, the fruit fly helps us understand human physiology, pharmacology and genetics. | © Solvin Zankl/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

There’s a scientific and political spat brewing in the United States. Much of it has to do with a particular politician’s views on science and the role of government funding for scientific research. That politician is Rep. Lamar Smith, perhaps best known on the web as the champion of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Smith’s SOPA proposal gained a lot of attention last year, prompting high-profile sites like Wikipedia to stage a blackout to bring attention to the potential legislation. The goal of SOPA was to create a way to shut down piracy sites that aren’t actually located in the United States. But critics of the legislation said that the measures written into the bill would go much further, perhaps even breaking the way the web works.

Now, Smith is preparing to head a committee that’s all about overseeing the government’s role in funding scientific research. Some people — myself included — find this rather troubling since Smith has traditionally opposed the concept of climate change and has voted against alternative energy proposals. There’s a scientific consensus on climate change. Denying that climate change is a real thing is downright dangerous and irresponsible.

Beyond these concerns, Smith has suggested something else that really worries me. He says the National Science Foundation shouldn’t rely on peer review in its grant process. Instead, grants should only go to projects that are “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science.” Smith also argues that the NSF should not fund any science projects that duplicate research done elsewhere.

I have major problems with this stance. One is that you can’t know what the outcomes of a scientific research program are going to be — that’s why we have science in the first place! If we knew what the outcome would be, we wouldn’t need science. Science is, among other things, a process by which we try to learn more about the universe. That includes everything from subatomic particles to cosmological phenomena to the way people react when they encounter various psychological stimuli. You never know what you’re going to learn before you actually investigate. It’s what makes science both exciting and necessary.

Our world is filled with examples of things we can do because scientists were curious about something that — at first blush — had no practical application. As time goes on, we incorporate more of this knowledge into our technologies and processes and we benefit from them. But if we had decided to limit ourselves only to pursuing scientific inquiries we thought would lead us to a demonstrable, practical application, our world would be very dark and primitive compared to what it is today.

Another problem I have is the sense that duplication is a bad thing. That’s another necessary component of science! Without duplication, we are left with assumptions. What if the research team that claims it has discovered a means of generating free energy simply had poorly-calibrated instruments? Without duplication, we couldn’t say for sure one way or the other. Duplication and replication are the foundations of science. It separates out true scientific discoveries from mistakes, frauds and hoaxes.

Ultimately, my biggest issue is that politics shouldn’t play a part when it comes to deciding what science should be done. That determination should go to scientists. Yes, scientists should exercise reason when selecting which projects to fund. They should show care in their governance of funding. But they also are best equipped to make the determination of which projects are worthy of receiving funds. And just to be clear — my view on this is the same no matter which political party is in control. Science shouldn’t have a political agenda.

Want to read more? Here are some great articles from The Verge, Slate and from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer.

3-D displays: True volume, or just an illusion?

This week on Fw:Thinking, we look at some of the technologies behind displays and visualizations. We’re also fighting decades of misinformation perpetuated by Hollywood. Now don’t get me wrong — I love movies. Star Wars is one of my favorite films and I’m one of those hardcore nerds who shakes his fist at the heavens and cries out “Lucas” in agony over any changes to the beloved franchise. But the holograms in Star Wars and other science fiction entertainment aren’t really holograms.

Technically, a hologram is a particular type of image that seems to possess depth. We create holograms by using a laser split into two beams. Both beams eventually hit a recording medium — holographic film or a digital sensor, for example. One of those two beams scans an object — whatever it is you want to show up in three dimensions later. The light then bounces off the object and all its nooks and crannies and hits the recording medium.

The other beam, called a reference beam, travels to the medium without coming into contact with the object. That makes the medium a record of the differences between the uninterrupted light and the light that hit an object. Since both beams came from the same laser, they started out identical and end up being very different once they hit the medium. It’s these differences that are the secret to holograms.

When you view the recording medium under the proper conditions, you’ll see a representation of the object that seems to possess three dimensions. It’s a neat effect but it’s a far cry from a free-standing, three-dimensional object like the kind we see in movies and television. I think it’s more appropriate to call these sort of apparitions a form of 3-D visualization instead.

So can we use 3-D technology to project out free-standing images that walk around the room and appear to have volume from every angle? Not really. We can create some pretty convincing illusions. Some, like your standard 3-D film, rely on our brains to do all the work. When you watch a 3-D movie, there’s not really a hand made out of light reaching out from the film screen toward you. Your brain is just matching up two sets of images and drawing conclusions about depth based on parallax and other cues. This is true for both glasses and glasses-free 3-D displays.

We can also use reflections to create the illusion of a free-standing image. A classic example that we refer to in the video is an effect called Pepper’s Ghost, which is deceptively simple. It involves two chambers. In one chamber you set a scene — let’s say it’s an old desk in a dusty office. In front of the desk, you’ve placed a very clean plate of glass that is virtually undetectable from an observer’s point of view. This is where the person viewing the scene will see an effect.

Off to one side — or perhaps above or below the viewer — you have a staging area, often called a Blue Room. Inside this room you have a figure positioned in such a way so that the figure’s reflection makes it seem to the viewer that someone is sitting at the desk. By controlling the level of light in the Blue Room, you can make the seated figure seem to fade in and out in a ghostly fashion. This technique is used to great effect in the classic Disney ride The Haunted Mansion.

There are other techniques we can use to simulate a three-dimensional image. You can project onto a three-dimensional screen, like a cloud of fog or smoke or even a physical column or mannequin. You could also use a volumetric display — these are three dimensional displays that can present images inside them. The images look very much like the sort of stuff we see in movies but they are confined within the parameters of the display itself.

Unless we find a way to boss photons around and have them hold a position exactly where we want them to, we’re probably not going to see a free-floating projected image. The same holds true for technologies like the light saber. Getting photons in motion is relatively simple. Having them stop on command? Now that’s tricky.

Why depict hardcovers on a wooden shelf? Digital books don’t need a shelf to sit on… | © Ramin Talaie/Corbis

I read an article in Ars Technica this morning about Apple’s move for iOS7 to ditch skeuomorphism, which is one of my favorite words. It seems that Sir Jony Ive — that’s right, he holds a knighthood — wants the OS for Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch lines to have an even sleeker, more forward-thinking design. But some of you are probably still looking at the word skeuomorphism and wondering what the heck it means.

Skeuomorphism is when for purely aesthetic reasons you carry over certain design elements of a process or technology that are no longer functionally relevant. Here’s an example — a digital audio mixing program can take any form factor that makes sense. But many of them have a visual (and often interactive) representation of a vinyl record album turntable.

Why? We designed turntables to play analog format vinyl albums. You had to have a spindle, a rotating platform and a stylus connected to amplifiers to play an album. But software doesn’t need any of that stuff. Why carry it over into the digital world? It’s an aesthetic choice. Sometimes it’s useful — someone new to the program but familiar with turntables could pick up on their digital function right away. But not all skeuomorphic designs have practical applications.

Skeuomorphs aren’t necessarily holdovers from older technological formats. Sometimes they are lifted from one medium and placed into another for aesthetic effect. And some designers find this irritating or distracting. It may be that Sir Jony Ive is one of those designers.

The nostalgic old timer in me (and he’s getting bigger every year) often finds skeuomorphic elements charming or comforting. But the futurist in me is excited by the idea of throwing out the past to concentrate on a new type of design that takes full advantage of a technology’s form factor. In my mind, we should honor our past but not let it hold us back from our destiny. Because, as we have said on the show, the future is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives.