In its third year, the Dance Your PhD contest is proving that maybe, just maybe, scientists can dance. From the contest’s website:

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over…

At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?

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Funny how a couple of slabs of silicon can become a national symbol.

In 1979, in the midst of an oil crisis, then-president Jimmy Carter tried to lead the nation to a brighter future powered by alternative energy via a symbolic gesture: installing solar panels on the roof of the White House. But instead of being inspired, the American people were freaked by Carter’s proposed program of conservation, carpooling, and cardigans, and promptly kicked him out the of Oval Office. Ronald Reagan shelved most of Carter’s ambitious energy plans, and in 1986 removed the solar panels from the roof.

Then this week, environmental activists made a bold pitch to the Obama administration in an effort to get those panels back on the president’s house.

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What happens when you give a brainy, hyperactive astronomer his own TV show? Well first off, explosions happen.

The excitement here at Discover headquarters is palpable–only three days until we get to watch our Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, tear up the Discovery Channel with his new TV show, Bad Universe. In the inaugural episode Phil examines the threat of an asteroid impact on Earth, and gets his hands on a whole lot–seriously, a whole truckload–of explosives to model the potential disaster. But it’s not all doom and gloom; he also explains what we can do “to keep an impact from ruining our whole day,” as he says.

The show premieres this Sunday, August 29th at 10 p.m. Here’s a sneak peak:

At “Star Wars Celebration V” this past Saturday, George Lucas announced that LucasFlims will release Blu-ray versions of all six Star Wars films in fall of 2011. He told The New York Times that he was waiting to see if Blu-ray really would catch on.

To some fans’ chagrin, the set will include the “Special Edition” versions of New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi–you know, the version which features Hayden Christensen superimposed over Anakin’s ghost and killed that awesome Ewok song. Lucas said to The New York Times that releasing the originals would be “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”

If you can’t wait for 2011, it seems some other very special editions are making the Internets rounds. Oh, and a deleted scene.

Lando Calrissian, Blaxploitation-style:

[via Wired]

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At the the Houston Museum of Natural Science thousands of visitors are lining up for the smell of rotting bodies. They want a look at a five-foot-tall plant affectionately called the “corpse flower,” or more specifically, Lois. The flower will bloom for the first time in seven years and release its stench for an expected three days.

The flower, native to Indonesia, will be the 29th to bloom in the United States; another bloomed last summer at San Francisco State University. Sporting buttons that say “Bring on the Funk” and “Amorphophallus titanum (Latin for AWESOME),” 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day have been coming to the Houston museum to sniff, Reuters reports. In its pre-bloom phase, it smells a bit like rotting pumpkins–which is disappointing to museum visitors with a nose for rancid corpses, museum spokeswoman Latha Thomas told Reuters.

“They want to smell the flower. I think that’s why they keep coming back over and over because they are so excited about smelling it.”

The AP reports that not everyone is excited. Jessica Zabala has booked the museum for her wedding this week and is hoping the flower doesn’t foul up her ceremony.

The museum has provided a live webcam, for those who want to see without smelling.

Related content:
Discoblog: Vicious Hogweed Plant Could Star in “Little Shop of Horrors” Sequel
Discoblog: Make Room For Space Florists: First Plants to Be Grown on the Moon
Discoblog: Can Plants Talk to Each Other? Researchers Say Yes
Discoblog: DNA Cops Crack Down on Flower Theft and Other High Crimes

Image: Wikimedia

What do you get when you mix homegrown science videos, an expert comedian, and experiments made for your garage? Discover Magazine’s new web television show, Joe Genius.

We chat with Jonah Ray, the show’s host, about the show, his start in comedy, and his favorite video games.

Discover Magazine: Could you describe your road to Joe Genius? How did you get your start as a comedian?

Jonah Ray: When I was 19, I moved from Hawaii ["born and raised"] to Los Angeles to do comedy…. I started just working at record stores and being a roadie for my friends’ bands, going on little tours. It took about a year to realize that was a horrible life! (laughs) I looked into some open mics in the LA Weekly and started going almost every night.

Discover: How did stand-up lead to your other work?

Ray: I started doing stand-up primarily. UCB [Upright Citizen’s Brigade, a sketch group] opened out here in LA, and I started taking some classes. Just from doing stand-up, I got more attention from people. I became a writer’s assistant on The Andy Milonakis Show which was a sketch show on MTV. I was really bad at it—so they fired me–but during the same conversation they hired me back as a writer. That’s what started my writing career in comedy. Shortly after that, I did Live at Gotham show and stand-up on Comedy Central. I started working on a web series called the The Freeloaders Guide to Easy Living on a site called Super Deluxe which was an offshoot of Adult Swim…. I did some writing and performing on Human Giant which is a sketch show on MTV. I also started performing and writing on more shows on G4.

In comedy, in the beginning it feels like one thing will always beget another. Really it’s about doing everything you can all the time trying to push yourself and being prepared when things come up. That’s usually how it happens. It’s kind of a mishmash of finding work where you can and doing the best job you can.

Discover: How is Joe Genius different from your previous work?

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Who doesn’t miss the excitement, the curiosity, the baking soda volcanoes of the typical grade-school science fair? Even the cutting-edge artists behind NYC’s Flux Factory got a little nostalgic recently, and decided to host a science fair of their own–but the displays are decidedly atypical, and there’s nary a volcano in sight. Try quantum physics and robots instead.

The science fair art exhibit was inspired by “the similarity between the creative and scientific process,” according to the organizers. And did we mention the trophies? Shiny awards were handed out to artists at an award ceremony last night for the best projects in such categories as “Big Violence,” “Most Empirically Rebellious,” and “Most Metaphysically Pursued.”

Science Fair runs through this weekend, so head over to Queens to check it out. Or you can click through this gallery for a selection of our favorite projects.

On stage at the World Science Festival on Saturday night, festival co-founder Brian Greene recalled the early days of string theory–the theory that brings together competing ideas in physics by postulating that there exist six or seven extra dimensions beyond space and time.

Greene was a graduate student in physics when string theory got its start, and remembers waking up early each morning to run to the mailbox in search of news of harmony and peace; that is, for signs that the long, obdurate conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was resolving itself into a beautiful universe of tiny vibrating strings.

That was in the 1980s. Now, almost thirty years later, the conflict continues, and the strings—though beautifully imagined by artists and scientists—still haven’t made themselves apparent in the form of a testable prediction. This is a big problem for skeptics like Lawrence Krauss, who insist that untestable scientific theories are—well, not really science.

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A mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, and an artificial intelligence expert get together to define the limits of human knowledge. Chaos ensues.

That’s the short version of Friday evening’s World Science Festival discussion, The Limits of Understanding, where panelists Gregory Chaitin, Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky bravely tackled the scientific and philosophical implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for a packed house.

Gödel’s work has perplexed thinkers for decades, but the on-stage team dispensed with the basics pretty quickly. As philosopher Goldstein put it, Gödel’s infamous proof from 1931 revealed that “there are true propositions [in mathematics] that can’t be proved.” Livio took a stab at incompleteness via analogy to physics: “We physicists look for a theory of everything in physics; Gödel showed that there is no theory of everything in math.”

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On Friday evening, in the midst of the upscale boutiques and trendy cafes of Brooklyn’s DUMBO  neighborhood, a crowd filled the Galapagos Art Space for a sold-out show titled “The Science of Star Trek,” organized as part of the World Science Festival.

The crowd—scarf-wrapped, martini-sipping, not a single costumed fan in sight—was far from what one might expect at a Star Trek themed event (“closeted fans,” remarked one audience member after the show). Nonetheless, the packed space burst into applause as the night’s speakers were introduced: There was Laurence Krauss, a physicist from Arizona State; Seth Shostak, an astronomer with SETI; and Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft.

Moderating the discussion was the peppy Faith Salie, a regular on public radio but better known to Star Trek fans as the beautiful, genetically enhanced, Serena Douglas on the series spinoff Deep Space Nine.

Salie first steered the speakers into a conversation about whether the star ship Enterprise’s main means of navigating the galaxy—Warp Drive—is physically possible.

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