nanatechnology

the effect of design completion by banana gas - usually manifested as ripening, but in this case applied to slightly broken things kept in a drawer for months in the hope that they will work again when you take them out next year sometime. Batteries and floppy disks are examples of things you'd put in a drawer instead of throwing away when they don't work.

this is cut 'n' pasted from my 'Healing Drawers' submission to halfbakery. jutta suggested I stick it here for posteriority.

Most of us who are into technology in the slightest have probably gone down the road of pretending this idea is baked.

Most of us have put broken items, flat batteries, non-working floppy discs etc. into a certain drawer we have. Where, along with all the other mixed up items, coaxial ethernet cards, pocket lasers that never get used, business cards, ancient CD-Roms and whatever else, miraculously the battery emerges many months later with a few minutes of life / the floppy is readable for long enough to rescue.

Goodness knows how this actually works - scientists currently think that it works by a kind of encoding based around the order and constituency of socks that have passed through the vortex, powered by a sort of cold fusion dissemination, using ball point pens as fuel. Or something.

Well, why not have an actual drawer with actual analytical powers, and hopefully the next step - resurrection powers. This could be achieved using nanatechnology. This is a form of technology that uses banana gas, to form catalytic actions based on the eventual outcome of the planned pattern of progress and design in an item.

Usually, this manifests itself in ripening - here, in our healing drawer however, it results in things 'getting better' in such a way that we all magically hope it would in any ordinary passive drawer.

That it does in ordinary drawers, to some extent, could be explained by the likelihood that you, or someone in your street, has had some bananas around at some point during the object's hibernation in your drawer.