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Science Not Fiction

Archive for October, 2008

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Knight Rider: 3D Printing

Screen capture from Knight Righter, Episode 1×02The new Knight Rider series may have flaws, but at least it owns its 80s-era roots. Last night’s episode had all the trappings of the David Hasselhoff original: well-endowed women strolling around in bikinis, a car suffering a fender bender that causes it to explode, and an early-episode use of Turbo Boost, which is pretty much the Knight Rider equivalent of chanting “By the Power of Greyskull!” or “Form Blazing Sword!”

And as in the original show, KITT is conveniently loaded up with whatever gadgetry Michael Knight will need to solve the case. In a throwaway scene in the middle of this episode, Knight and Sarah Graiman (as the resident Babe Mechanic/Scientist that NBC feels we all should have in our lives) are sitting in KITT, pondering how best to steal a car from one of the bad guys. Stealing the car would be much easier if they had the key to the car, so KITT obliges them by by figuring out what key would be needed to open the car and making a software image of it. Then Graiman orders KITT to bust out his 3-D Duplicator. A little box located somewhere in the space that would be occupied by a backseat in a normal car springs to life, a laser starts cutting some kind of material, and voila, Knight gets the key he needs. He even looks suitably impressed at the technology.

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October 2nd, 2008 Tags: 3D Printing, Knight Rider, Personal Fab
by Eric Wolff in TV | 5 Comments » | RSS feed | Trackback >

Battlestar Galactica: Earth, And Why You Shouldn’t Believe The Rumor


CylonOkay, if you’re not caught up on your BSG, stop reading now! I’ll pause for a moment in case your eyes are like mine and tend to skip ahead for a few words anyway…. So, for those of you who have seen the mid season finale, there is a rumor swirling around about the Battlestar Galactica series finale, which boils down to the idea that the radioactive wasteland the cast was bitterly strolling around on was not in fact Earth, i.e. the ball of rock you and I live in, but a different planet that got smashed up in an earlier war. Humans left this Earth Mark I to settle on Earth Mark II, which is as yet unseen in Battlestar, and which is the rock we live on, you and I. Upon hearing this, I just had to get my nerd on.

(more…)

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October 1st, 2008 Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Brooklyn, Earth, New York
by Stephen Cass in TV, Utter Nerd | 40 Comments » | RSS feed | Trackback >

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    • About Science Not Fiction

      Sometime in the future, a group of renegade scientists and technologists will take a time machine to now. They're spilling the secrets of tomorrow here at Discover's Science Not Fiction blog.

      ▪ Malcolm MacIver is a bioengineer at Northwestern University who studies the neural and biomechanical basis of animal intelligence. He consults for sci-fi films (Tron Legacy, Joss Whedon's The Avengers), and was the science advisor for Caprica. He covers AI and robotics for Science Not Fiction.

      ▪ Kyle Munkittrick (Web, Twitter) is program director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He covers transhumanism.

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