A New Entry in The "Things You Never Thought Would Be Transparent" Files

Credit: Liangbing Hu

If you're a fan of Star Trek, you probably remember the scene of The Voyage Home where Scotty goes looking for transparent aluminum. You know, this scene. When you watched that, you may have thought, "Transparent aluminum? How absurd, there's no way that could possibly exist!" Or maybe you thought "How interesting that Star Trek managed to predict such an interesting technology such as transparent aluminum," because it is a material that actually exists. It's used in the military, but is too expensive to have practical, day-to-day applications in the regular world. But I bet you didn't think, "How dull, transparent aluminum. I wish they'd made a really odd material transparent. Something like wood." Well, strange hypothetical person, your request has been answered!

Yes, scientists at the University of Maryland announced that they had made transparent wood. It's not a complicated process, all you have to do is soak the wood in a fancy chemical bath to remove the lignin, which turns the wood white, and then soak it in an epoxy, which makes the wood clear. What, you may ask, is the point of transparent wood? Or maybe you didn't ask, because the answer is pretty obvious. Window replacement, namely in houses. Transparent wood is stronger than glass, and more importantly, doesn't shatter like glass does. The process hasn't been perfected yet, so you won't be replacing your window glass with wood anytime soon, but this is still really cool. Those are just two words that I never thought I'd be using together. Transparent wood.

Deep Space 9

After about 3 months, I've finally gotten through all of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  I must say, it was a very good show.  You tend not to hear too much about DS9, it kind of gets lost in the discussion, everybody loves TOS and TNG, everybody hates Voyager and Enterprise, but nobody really has an opinion on DS9.  I think because it not much of a Star Trek.  What I mean by that is there isn't much exploring, meeting new life and new civilizations, and no boldly going.  Sure, the wormhole opens up a whole new section of the galaxy, but any expansion into the Gamma Quadrant is ended quickly by the introduction of the Dominion.  Most of the series is very localized, very much centered on the station and the planets nearby, Bajor, Cardassia, and the Badlands.  Because of this, there aren't many one-off encounters in this show, if the main characters have a big encounter with something, the consequences of it will have lasting effects. 

The plots of shows were also not very Star Trekky.  There wasn't much technobabble solutions to problems, and many times the resolution to the show's plot was distinctly unsatisfying.  The big example off the top of my head is the second to last episode of the sixth season, where the Defiant is trying to reach a Starfleet officer  marooned on a barely survivable planet.  The entire time, the crew and this officer are conversing, and she works her way into the hearts of the crew.  The ship arrives just in the nick of time only to discover that distortions in the planet's atmosphere caused the communications to be timeshifted.  The woman had been dead for years, and she died believing she would be saved.  It was a real blow to the gut.

The Dominion War storyline was brilliant as well.  The space battles were exciting despite their age, more exciting than the stuff we get in our Star Trek now.  The show really played up the reality of war, with constant mention of casualties, you really felt the pain the war was causing these characters.  I think this was the best Star Trek has ever been, and it's funny, because it's really not Star Trek at all.  While it was goofy at times, it was really a great drama.

It has to be said that Captain Sisko is my favorite of all the captains.  Picard gets all the love for being the moral center of the universe, but Sisko was just so much more formidable.  When Sisko got mad, which was quite often, the intimidation he threw off was incredible.  The viewer could feel it, and the characters certainly could as well.  Also, he could be brutal if you really got on his bad side.  He poisoned an entire planet just to capture one man, but that man had betrayed him.  And of course there's the episode, "In the Pale Moonlight," which is by general consensus the best episode of the series.

I would give the show a 9 out of 10.  I highly recommend people watch it, it may take some time to get into, but once you do, it is a highly rewarding experience.