Forbidden Ferret

There is zero pressure for me here with the first blog, I realized.  I could pick something seemingly super mundane, like mud, and it would still be interesting.  For instance, researchers took bacteria from the mud of the lake of promiscuous kissing (Mono Lake) and exposed it to increasing amounts of arsenic and decreasing amounts of phosphorus.  Life as we know it is basically comprised of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. The theory was that arsenic has similar properties to phosphorus, as it‘s just below it on the periodic table, and could possibly replace it and change our understanding of life somewhat.  Their results evidently showed that the bacteria did have arsenic integrated into its DNA and “other components”.  (For more, here’s the NASA article on it). Pretty nifty right? Plus it has all those uses for building and pottery and all that jazz.  Well, that’s mud.
Then we come to genetics.  There is so much potential, and who doesn’t like playing with things that some say shouldn’t be meddled with?  It’s the best!  When Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) made fish night lights, the laugh track played, but why?  That’d be way awesome.  Plus, they’re more than plausible.  They exist!  What I would personally find an interesting endeavor deals with human genetics.  While the X-Men and the like go a bit far, I think some changes are far from implausible.
First, there are the “idiot savants”.  For those who do not know what that term refers to, those are the people who have a mental condition, typically autism, but can do something extraordinary. I’ve heard of a case of it in which a person can be flown over a city they have never seen before and will draw it completely accurately afterward.  Another was someone who could hear a piece of music on the piano and will accurately play the entire thing from memory afterward. The brain is a pretty amazing thing.  I’m betting that there’s a way to make the average person capable of such things, without the drawbacks.  Some people have similar things.  There are a handful of people that supposedly remember everything.  Other people can do things like solve complex math problems faster than people can get the answers from calculators.  I saw that one on a show called Stan Lee’s Superhumans.  The segment of his brain that activated when he solved math problems was the area used for walking.  How cool is that? (Answer: Very)
Second, I could do without so much sleep.  I don’t like feeling tired and it seems silly to try to function as a zombie if sleep is an option, but it wastes so much time.  A lot of people, however, are perfectly happy with somewhere around 4 hours of sleep.  That’d be tight.  So long as society doesn’t start requiring 12 hour days as the norm or something, that’d serve to give people so much more time for themselves, their projects, or whatever floats their boat (like boating!).  Beyond that, it seems like we could have much better solutions than invasive drops every time we get dry eyes.
I’d be a bit more iffy about resolving that whole aging nonsense, but find it fascinating.  There is such thing as biological immortality, but I’m fairly certain the human race would not fare well if we had that going.  It’s already becoming a pretty crowded place even with people biting the dust!  Thus far, there are a few ways we know of that it could work.  The most plausible is totally drinking from a magical fountain that will make you live forever!  Yup! …Or… There are a number of phases of life.  After the supposed final stage, there may be another.  Tortoises, for instance, may be reaching a phase past their transcendence, which brings them to a point in which they could just be alive until something kills them.  Jellyfish represent one that is pretty cool.  A specific type, the Turritopsis nutricula, can basically revert to an earlier stage of life.  The cycle can supposedly go on forever, rendering them theoretically immortal.  How cool would that be?  To hit 60 and… bam.  15 again.  There are also more basic ideas, such as having aging just stop somehow (woa dang) or the age old sleeping tactic, in which someone is put in a state in which they’re out for the count but can be brought back, during which time they do not age.  Supposedly there was also an experiment conducted on mice that may have shown some potential for age reversal.
There have been strides made when it comes to vision.  People can be granted 20/20 vision or better with modern day surgeries.  For now, that’s tight.  Eventually, though, I’m sure it will be that people can be granted even more.  One that I could see happening sooner than later would be better night vision.  Some people are as blind as deaf bats in the dark.
Beyond that, there are still so many necessary cures out there.  Arthritis? Allergies?  Diabetes?  No.  Bad.  Plus, I could always resort to people night lights and tails.