What will the year 2999 look like? What will it sound like?

That’s the creative catalyst behind The 2999 Project, a multimedia time trek to the end of the 30th century. Canada’s King Deluxe record label called on electronic and dubstep artists to a create a soundtrack for the year 2999, then asked a selection of visual artists to illustrate the tracks.

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This Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of Warhammer 40k, which is sort of a big deal if you’re male between the ages of 13 and 60 who digs sci-fi violence and the sweet, seductive scent of acrylic paint.

The franchise kicked off in 1987 as a sci-fi take on Games Workshop’s fantasy tabletop game Warhammer. From there, it steadily sucked in sci-fi influences to become its own distinct world: novels, movies, video games and of course vast armies of tiny soldiers.

I grew up painting figurines and playing war games with my dad, so I have a warm place in my heart for Games Workshop. But they don’t pay me to reminisce. They pay me to bring the science. So here, for your enjoyment, are five sciencey reasons to be thankful for the Warhammer 4oK universe:

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A world simulated in the mind, where fortresses of bone rise above a sea of blood. Where a pantheon of wrathful and serene deities assemble in precise arrangement.  Where multi-limbed beings dance, cyclopean architecture looms high and a mountain bridges Earth to the cosmos.

That’s the rich world of the Mandala (Sanskrit for “circle”), an artistic visualization tool that allows Tibetan Buddhism ’s most advanced psychonauts to enter heightened states of meditation.

It’s essentially an imagined palace, not unlike the dreamscape architects in the sci-fi film Inception, or the famed “memory palace” mnemonic device that emerged in ancient Rome. It all basically boils down to employing spatial memory to memorize information by placing it all in an imagined “palace” filled with memorable symbols.

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Does anyone believe in the idea of utopia anymore? Today, we view the concept through dharma-colored shades and label it a destructive and illusory extreme. Even our fictions err on the side of dystopia, where only mad scientists dream of a perfect tomorrow.

But what if science can actually pull it off?

Oxford’s Nick Bostrom is a treasure trove of transhumanist philosophical pondering (just check out his webpage), but I thought I’d highlight just one of his fascinating works in this blog entry. In his 2010 Letter From Utopia is a missive from “your possible future self,” who resides in an age of scientifically-won bliss that we can scarcely comprehend.

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In researching How Frankenstein’s Monster Works (and the podcast episode), I did quite a bit of reading about the homunculus. If you’re not hip to this terminology, all you need to know is that a homunculus is an artificial humanoid created through alchemy. While not quite a human, this creature is a “rational animal” and another fictional page in humanity’s dream of mastering life and death.

The medieval text known as the Liber Vaccae or Book of the Cow lays out some rather grotesque and confusing instructions in the art of DIY homunculi brewing — and Maaike Van der Lugt’s Abominable Mixtures: The Liber vaccae in the Medieval West, or The Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic really lays out some excellent commentary on what it all means.

[Read on for the ghastly recipe...]

The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast has some pretty awesome fans, including graphic artist Robert McLaren, who took it on himself to create this amazing interpretation of a cubical planet Earth after listening to our episode on the topic (which you can grab off iTunes, Zune and the RSS feed).

The concept itself makes for an amazing physics-based thought experiment. How would the shape alter gravity as we experience it? How would it affect global climate and the shape of our oceans? In addition to my recent blog post on the topic, both Ask an Astronomer and Ask a Physicist have some excellent thoughts on the topic, which we reference in the podcast episode.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is probably the last person to suggest NASA falsify the threat of alien invasion to play on humanity’s fears. I also doubt he’d suggest that the space agency exploit America’s religious conservative movement with “proof” that said aliens are governed by demons.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s you and I go there.

Along with my Stuff to Blow Your Mind co-host Julie Douglas, I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Tyson last week on the motivators for space exploration and his upcoming book Space Chronicles.

He stressed that while the whole “exploration is in our DNA” argument is fine and dandy for multibillion-dollar space projects, it simply doesn’t work past the $10 billion funding ceiling. Here’s what he had to say:

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You love space music. You love children’s books. So yeah, here are two book projects worthy of your attention.

First up is a little project you may have heard about: Canadian illustrator Andrew Klob’s visual adaptation of David Bowie’s classic Space Oddity. You remember the song right? Our hero travels to orbit, loses contact, loses control and drifts away into the void — perhaps to die, perhaps to become one with the cosmos. Hey, it was the late 60s. Either way, it’s not a song that instantly screams for adaptation into children’s literature.

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You know how it goes. NASA creates an amazing new water filtration system and the headline winds up reading Astronauts Drink Recycled Urine, and Celebrate. Try as we might, we just can’t think about that fresh glass of filtered space water without slapping a mental “WARNING: PEE-PEE” label on it.

No matter how much we purify it, we can’t quite eliminate the cognitive sewage — which is rather unfortunate given the looming world drinking water shortage.

Here’s the real kicker: According to The Big Thrust author Charles Fishman, any water you bring to your lips has been sewage before. That sparkling Perrier may be clean and refreshing now, but you can rest assured that the same water fell out of a dinosaur’s cloaca at some point in the past.

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It’s a tough time to be a space enthusiast. The space shuttle’s replacement is still a decade off, budget cuts abound and — most damning of all — the United States hasn’t sent a horror movie icon into orbit since 2001.

That’s right. Those three Lego figurines on Juno are cute, but think back to the slasher trio we sent up in the late 90s and early 00s.

Back then, our future amid the stars seemed assured and space exploration promised us the long-term survival of the human race’s failing horror franchises.

[Let’s refresh on this golden age of “Aliens” inspired schlock]

The idea of Freddy Krueger, the villain who kills you in your dreams, freaked me out when I was younger. Which is to say it also enthralled me.

The adult me, however, finds the science of sleep and paranormal experiences quite fascinating, so I was far more intrigued than terrified when I read that A Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven was inspired by actual news stories about nightmare-related deaths.*

* Wikipedia claims that Craven was inspired by a news story involving multiple dream deaths and a “Mr. K,” but the cited source on that factoid doesn’t mention it at all. Wikifail.

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Researching Tibet is like reading about some fantastic other world, where psychonaut monks chart the realms beyond death, and body breakers offer up corpses as alms to the scavengers of the sky.

So it should come as no surprise to learn that Tibetans also dig up a strange root that’s allegedly “half vegetable, half caterpillar” and sell it for bank as an energy booster and aphrodisiac. Yes, if you’ve ever ventured into a Chinese apothecary for a little “tea for dong,” then this might just be what you left with.

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So Julie and I just finished recording an episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind titled The Lying Game, which on the heels of reading China Miéville’s Embassytown really got me thinking about the relationship between language and lying.

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Wow, so Russian media giant Pravda ran one doozy of a story on Tuesday, claiming that between 1936 and 1941 the Soviet Union marched 300 young volunteers through a super soldier program that saw gold electrodes implanted in their brains and titanium implants inserted in place of limb bones.

In theory, the neural implant shut down the soldier’s pain centers and the titanium limbs protected against various forms of battle damage.

Wow. We’re treading into some serious Captain America/Weapon X territory here.

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To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

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My wife audibly rolled her eyes during the trailer for the upcoming Cowboys and Aliens sci-fi flick and after reading an essay in Journal of American Culture by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, I have to admit my head’s spinning a bit at the way this particular cultural fear loops back to the American West.

As I discuss in the HSW article “What Are UFO’s Really” (and this accompanying Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast episode), aliens are ultimately a kind of cultural sock puppet that our mind sheaths over the sort of extraordinary experiences that rock our world views out of whack.

We’ve been experiencing the same traumas and temporal lobe anomalies throughout human history, but the sock itself changes from fairy to angel and from devil to little grey men.

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In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a number of presidential hopefuls sign all manner of pledges regarding tax increases, the federal budget, marriage, sexuality, religion and reproductive rights.

All this in the midst of a final space shuttle mission and the James Webb Telescope’s likely death at the hands of Congress.

So what about an “In Defense of Science Pledge” for U.S. elected officials?

[It might go something like this]

Will insecure men of the future cultivate new vat-grown penises in their spare-bedroom laboratories? Will they then transplant these obnoxious knobs onto their otherwise healthy bodies in DIY bathroom surgeries?

I posed these questions at the end of the recent Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode Do-It-Yourself Organs and realized I should probably follow up just a little. The podcast primarily dealt with the amazing science of synthetic organs (such as the recent synthetic trachea transplant), but will we also grow the human penis in a laboratory as well?

Yes we will. And before we go any deeper into this, I should stress that comments on masculine insecurity and our propensity for scientific misuse aside, it’s a pretty serious issue. The ability to grow new penis tissue is vital to men who’ve suffered from penile cancer, traumatic injury, birth defects and some forms of erectile dysfunction.

[We’ve actually been able to grow the body of the penis in the lab for years]

Radiolab’s recent A Clockwork Miracle episode concerns a sixteenth-century mechanical monk, but Jad also briefly mentions the wonders of a robotic pooping duck from the 1700s. Yep, you read that right: a centuries-old automaton designed to digest food and poop it out like a duck.

The fabulous digesting duck was the handiwork of Jacques de Vaucanson, a French engineer who excelled in the creation of automatons—specifically “philosophical toys” (curios that combined science and amusement) composed of clockwork gears and moving parts. Here are just two of his creations leading up to the duck:

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