Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Last night’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles brought into the foreground an idea that’s been floating around in the background of the Terminator franchise for some time: that the flesh-and-blood bodies that surround terminator exoskeletons are based on real people. In the future, a young woman called Allison Young falls into the hands of Skynet, and given that she looks exactly like terminator Cameron, we have a fair idea of how things are going to turn out for her. In the real world, how close are we to creating not just a generic individual, but a doppleganger of a specific individual?

(more…)

One of the things I like about the Stargate franchise is that it shows the characters working to understand things, often over a course of episodes or even seasons, instead of just magically knowing it all–for example, it took a long time for the franchise to go from a few captured enemy spacecraft, through some buggy hybrids, plus a hefty technology transfer from a friendly civilization, to the human-built heavy cruisers like the Deadulus. This “show your work” style comes right from the 1994 movie that started it all, where archeologist Daniel Jackson was brought in to figure out the mysterious inscriptions on the first discovered stargate.

So it was a return to the franchise’s roots in more ways than one when Jackson made a guest appearance in Atlantis, looking for a long lost laboratory somewhere in the city. (more…)

One of my favorite authors (and one of the most scientifically grounded around) is Ben Bova, who has recently published the third book in his trilogy about Mars exploration called Mars Life. The Biology in Science Fiction blog has an interview with Bova, where he talks about the possibility of life on Mars, and why he doesn’t like the idea of terraforming the red planet.

As reported by Technovelgy, The Atheon Temple of Science has opened in Berkeley, California. Created as an art project by Jonathan Keats, the Atheon is “a secular temple devoted to scientific worship,” reminiscent of the cloistered maths of Neal Stephen’s Anathem Even though “scientific worship” should be an oxymoron, in that the act of faith commensurate with religious worship is something very different to the skepticism that lies at the heart of the scientific method, the Atheon is an interesting experiment in just how much–or how little–meaning science can bring to our lives.

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]

Future Farms to Have Giant Livestock [Modern Mechanix]

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.)

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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”…)

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. (more…)

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.

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. (more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)