I bet y’all thought I was going to blog about the International Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report, but I’m not* — though I will say that, to those of us who follow global warming, what’s most significant about it is not its findings themselves — though they are extremely important. What is most significant is that those findings represent a worldwide, conservative, and authoritative consensus of the state of the science.

Thousands of leading scientists from over 130 countries lent their expertise to produce the final report, and scientists are by virtue of their job description, argumentative and nitpicky (in a good way). You can bet your sweet patootie that by the final hours of the final meeting prior to release, very single word in that report was thoroughly vetted, argued over, lobbied against, taken out, put back in, modified with an assortment of adjectives, screamed about, pudding was thrown, phones shattered against walls, people threatened blackmail and suicide, no doubt, behind closed doors. And this is what squeezed out through the cracks into the light of day. The single most authoritative report on global warming to date.

Read it. Grok it. It’s only 21 pages. Nothing in there will surprise you, if you have been following the science — though it will I hope spur you to throw a dose of cold water into the face of anyone who wants to pretend global warming isn’t the dreadful juggernaut it is. The only people who are surprised are the nitwits who have been burying their faces in their pillows, and the thugs who want them to continue to do so.

But what I really wanted to do was share this really cool link about a new and very cool nanomachine. Everybody, meet Maxwell’s Demon. Some significant advances have been being made in the field of nanotech in recent years, and if it’s all it appears to be, this is another important milestone. It’s a molecular-sized device that runs on light, and basically herds other molecules (Unfortunately you can’t always trust tech-sci reports that show up in the popular press; I’ll do some further digging and report back).

Chemist David Leigh of the University of Edinburgh tells CNN:

“It is a machine mechanism that is going to take molecular machines a step forward to the realization of the future world of nanotechnology. Things that seem like a Harry Potter film now are going to be a reality.”

Hmmm. Maybe we could use those little gizmos to herd all the carbon dioxide into a deep subduction zone somewhere…or boot it off into space. Expeliaramus ad astra!

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*OK, maybe I am, just a little.

**OK, I just gotta sprain my arm — I’m so proud of the thermo pun! See, thermo=heat; thermo=thermodynamics; thermo = Maxwell’s Demon… a famous thought experiment developed by physicist James Maxwell back in the late 1800s to test the second law of thermodynamics, which is the heat-death scenario we all know and love — i.e., systems grow more disordered over time. Oh, never mind; I’m geeking again.

Laura was looking up something on Amazon and ran across this:

It’s the prequel (specifically the back story of a character not from my previous books) to the Jumper movie. The character is going to be played by Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame. This is the hardback cover. The mass market will have movie tie-in art. According to Amazon, it will be published August 21, 2007.

I think the cover is really cool.

I better finish writing the damn thing.