SciNoFi Blog Roundup - Fringe Edition
To paraphrase the Hold Steady, we like to stay positive. At Science Not Fiction, staying positive means that we don’t debunk (or nerdgas.) If the sonic screwdriver solves the problem, then by all means whip it out.
That being said, this show Fringe is seriously stretching us to the limit.
Fringe Gets Fast Aging and Frozen Optics Wrong [Popular Mechanics]
Fringe “violates basic tenets of biology, chemistry and physics without any explanation.” [Polite Dissent]
Now that we’ve gotten that off our chest, here are few other links to help lighten the mood:
You say Obama? I say Adama for President. [LA Times]
H.P Lovecraft as the Whitman’s Sampler copy writer [McSweeney’s]
Eureka: Out With A Bang
Last night’s midseason finale of Eureka tied up a number of loose ends, and set up a number of new plot points for the second half of the third season, set to air sometime in 2009. (Incidentally, last minute struggles with the script for this episode were responsible for Eureka co-creater Jamie Paglia having to sprint through the San Diego Convention Center to make it on time to DISCOVER’s Comic-Con panel on the Science Behind Science Fiction.) One of the things that Sheriff Carter finds himself contending with is a “nanoparticle syntactic foam” that goes from foam to something harder than concrete in a few seconds—the ideal substance for sealing off the abandoned underground facility that has been featured throughout the season, but not something you’d want to spill on yourself.
Terminator: At Least Cyborgs Enunciate
Ever since the first Terminator movie in 1984, Terminator cyborgs have had the ability to duplicate the voice of any given human they hear, an ability deployed again in last night episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when our plucky band of heroes has its cell phones intercepted. It’s not so far fetched — pretty much this exact scenario has been worrying real security researchers for some time.
Artificial Blood: Coming To A Hospital Near You?
The theme of HBO’s new series, TrueBlood, is based on a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood. The breakthrough allows vampires to “come out of the coffin” and progress from freakish villains to fellow citizens. (Just stop into a local TrueBlood bank for a snack, and humans are off the menu.)
5 Greatest Space Operas (And No, Foundation Isn’t One Of Them)
Space Opera is one of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction, and in recent years has gained a new lease of life (I recommend reading The New Space Opera anthology for good snapshot of the current state of affairs). Like all definitions, saying what exactly is and isn’t space opera can be a highly subjective exercise, but for me, works of space opera all try for a certain grand sweep: the canvas is broad, often involving a good chunk of at least one galaxy. The themes are big–space opera is where entire space-faring civilizations can collide–and awesome technologies are frequently brought into play.
Dreaming of Carnivorous Plants and Life-Saving Bacteria
The sci-fi blog io9 recently announced the winners of their Mad Science Contest, in which they invited their readers to dream up useful or just really sweet ways to use synthetic biology. The two winners were:
Vijaykumar Meli, who laid out a plan for a bacterium that would improve the nitrogen fixation of rice plants, thereby decreasing pollution from fertilizer run-off and improving yield, which could save plenty of lives in the developing world. Meli says the technique could be accomplished using current technology, including parts from the BioBricks collection of standard biological parts.
Elliott Gresswell, who stumbled upon the fictitious lab notebooks of researchers who inadvertently create walking, nanotech-caused-gray-goo-living carnivorous trees, illustrated here by comic book artist Kevin O’Neill. (These fantastic monsters wouldn’t be too out of place with the space-faring fungus hats that Jaron Lanier has imagined in synthetic biology’s future.)
Hats off to the winners. (In Gresswell’s case, perhaps that would be, “Heads off”…)
Eureka: The Death of Stars
On Tuesday’s nights Eureka, a miniature sun was accidently born in the skies above the town, wreaking destruction. The solution? To shoot iron into the sunlet’s core.
This is in fact not far off how some real stars die: iron poisoning. Read the rest of this entry »
Fringe: The Ultimate Test Tube Baby
Fringe, J.J. Abrams’ (of Lost and Alias fame) latest show, last night featured the unintended fall out from an attempt to grow humans in tanks. Since the goal of the original attempt was to produce fully grown soldiers, bypassing the normal wait time of 9 months plus 18 years, some liberties were taken with growth hormones in order to accelerate aging. Thus fall out, such as a baby that goes from conception to death of old age within a few hours.
Growing human beings outside the confines of a real uterus–ectogenesis–has been a staple of science-fiction since at least Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World: it was a critical element in The Matrix, and even featured in a recent Doctor Who episode. It’s also been a staple of real science for some time: in 1996, Japanese researchers were able to keep goat fetuses alive and developing for 3 weeks in their artificial womb. In 2002, researchers at Cornell were able to keep human embryos alive and developing for several days, after which the experiments were terminated to stay within embryonic research ethics rules.
This real research is driven by the desire to help childless people, or dangerously premature babies, and not, say, a hankering for a super-soldier production line. But if the day comes when we can produce a child with just a smear of genetic material and a machine, then we will have to do some deep thinking. On the one hand, this kind of technology could allow us to colonize distant star systems (instead of trying to keep humans alive for hundreds of years of interstellar travel, send a robot and some DNA), while on the other it could lead to the creation of an entirely new underclass of humanity, a la the “tanks” of Space: Above and Beyond.
Terminator: Better Pool Hustling Through Technology
In last night’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron accepts the invitation (and wager) of a couple of security guards to play a game of pool. Having gotten close enough to scan their security badges, Cameron then proceeds to smoke them at the game, thanks to a little known pool mode in her Point-Of-View display, which, thus far, has tended to show more in the way of helpful information about the caliber of weapon she is using or instructions like TERMINATE.
In the real world, enter Deep Green. Read the rest of this entry »
Stargate Atlantis: Gene Therapy
On Friday night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, one of the characters had to go undercover in order to convince a faction of the show’s resident villians, the Wraith, to accept a gene therapy. The therapy would eliminate the Wraith’s need to feed on human beings, something which has become a bone of contention between the Wraith and other residents of their galaxy.
Gene therapy works by rewriting a patient’s genetic code, an impossibility with conventional medicines, and could be used to combat diseases such as hemophilia, Parkinsons, and cancer. It’s a beautifully simple idea in concept, but the real world scientists that are working to make it a common-place reality are finding the execution to be a tough problem.
Anathem Review
Okay, here’s the one thing that some fans of Neal Stephenson will want to know: yes, it has a ‘proper’ ending. (Although Stephenson defends his authorial choices vigorously, a criticism leveled at some of his books by some readers is that they don’t end, so much as just stop.) While there are still some interesting questions left by the end of Anathem, the characters do see resolution to their stories. (Also, the hockey jerseys now make perfect sense.)
So, that settled, what’s the beginning and middle of the book like? Awesome. Despite its length at 960 pages, the fast pacing of the book is reminiscent of Stephenson’s earlier, shorter, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. However, he also takes the time and room to delve into subjects ranging from orbital mechanics to Plato’s Theory of Forms. The book revolves around the adventures of a young scholar called Erasmas, who has lived most of his life within the confines of a millennia-old order mostly devoted to theoretical research. When an enigmatic and unexpected arrival settles into orbit around his world, Erasmas’ life is turned upside down.
The book’s release is well timed, coinciding with the activation of the big daddy of particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is part of a quest to understand just how arbitrary are the laws of physics–a question that becomes significant within Anathem.
Stargate: Moving on From Atlantis
Stargate Solutions interviewed Joe Mallozzi, showrunner for the recently cancelled Stargate Atlantis, where he talks about the reaction of the cast to the news and his thoughts on the plans to continue the Stargate franchise.
Eureka: The Fine Art of Dumpster Diving
Last night on Eureka, Sherriff Carter was faced with a bumbling superhero who had constructed his gear from discarded pieces of technology thrown out by the town’s scientists. In this, our wannabe superhero was participating in the ultimate expression of the fine old art of dumpster diving.
Terminator: DIY Tech Support
The new season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles kicked off into high gear last night, promising some great TV to come. The episode picked up seconds after the last season left off, when Cameron–a terminator reprogrammed and sent back from the future to protect John Connor, leader-of-the-human-race-in-waiting–became the victim of a car bomb.
A damaged Cameron finds herself in need of some significant hardware and software repairs: unfortunately, it’ll be years before any terminator technical support facilities are built. Cameron must fix herself. In the real world, it’s exactly this problem that researchers are actively struggling with–how to create computers that can realize they’re malfunctioning and restore themselves to working order.
Dear Russell Davies: Our Plan to Fix Torchwood
The release of the Torchwood Series 2 DVD gave us the opportunity to watch (in some cases watch for the first time) every episode of the second season.
And the verdict? In the immortal words of Ed Grimley, “totally decent, I must say.” John Barrowman still rocks.
With that out of the way, I’ll add that the show is also showing troubling signs of flaming out after the upcoming mini-series। Series Two had at least one genuinely terrible episode (”From Out of the Rain”) and a few marginal ones (”Something Borrowed,” “To The Last Man”). http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
Unlike Doctor Who, Torchwood doesn’t have a multi-decade reserve of goodwill and nostalgia to fall back on। Unlike Buffy, Captain Jack isn’t a teenager whose adolescent angst can be mined for a season’s worth of new story arcs. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
Here are five things we’d like to see more (and less) of in the Series 3 mini-series that would improve the prospects for the show to live on.
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