Blogs / Science Not Fiction

While last night’s episode of  Eleventh Hour never specifically discussed the ethical quandaries of a private company storing umbilical blood, but we get a pretty good idea of the writers’ opinion when the owners of a cord-blood storage firm turn out to be corrupt stem-cell stealing scumbags. Naturally, Hood and Young sniff them out and they get busted in what I must admit was a pretty snazzy chase scene through the SoCal countryside, but they did it without ever discussing the questions raised by medical organizations about these companies.

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Will someone please explain how this whole infrared-can-see-through-walls thing got started? It comes up everywhere: James Bond used it, One of the iterations of  CSI used it, then KITT used it on last night’s episode of the New and Improved Knight Rider (now with more humor!). Not that I particularly blame Knight Rider, because it’s such a common meme. So, for the record, infrared cameras cannot see through walls. These cameras, like night vision goggles, pick up lower wavelength electromagnetic signals that we sense as heat. But the insulated walls of buildings are  designed to block heat from escaping, essentially forming a…well, a wall between the camera and person in the building. Luckily, there are many excellent real ways for KITT to see through walls.

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Another science-fiction CES item–a USB hub in the shape of The Doctor’s TARDIS. And the best thing? Plug in a device, or press the button where the telephone sign lives, and the light on top lights up along with the VWORP! VWORP! sound effect. You can pick one up at Think Geek for $30.

In last night’s episode of Eleventh Hour, a doe-eyed lad suffering from kidney cancer started drinking from a natural spring he discovered while fleeing a flash flood. he drank the stuff for three weeks, and during that time his advanced kidney cancer vanished, poof! Local news media told his story and soon the little Montana spring near his home was the destination for desperately sick people from all over the country.   Our hero, Jacob Hood, FBI scientist, read about the miracle water and dashed to the scene to debunk the myth, for fear that sick people would skip their treatments in favor of the magic. Along the way he discovered that some domestic terrorists were trying to make a dirty bomb in the basement of the local hospital. To process their radioactive material, they needed heavy water. It was the heavy water that cured the boy.

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All that build up for an episode about KARR, and that’s it? In last night’s episode of Knight Rider, a dangerous robot went on the rampage, and all we get is a turbo-boosted kill shot from KITT, and KARR is no more? Sheesh. Now I almost wish I could just forget the whole KARR plot— kinda like Michael Knight did.

Early in the episode, the late Dr. Graiman tells Knight, via hologram, that he was actually KARR’s first driver. As we know, KARR started programming himself and became a killing machine, forcing the government to scrap the program and build KITT.  To prevent Knight from spilling the beans, they wiped Knight’s memory.  Induced amnesia is a classic of Sci Fi—and of soap operas, and who knows what all— but can it actually be done?

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Sanctuary finished up its first 13-episode run last Friday in classic cliffhanger fashion, with humanity on the verge of a war with the mostly hidden population of abnormals. The show had a strong first season (personally, the show had me when it brought on Nikola Tesla as a character. Tesla frequently makes cameos on science fiction shows as some kind of genius who turns out to be a century or two ahead of his time, but making him a vampire on top of everything else was a master stroke.) But turning back to the premiere, and the premise, of the show, there was an early scence where Helen Magnus, the central character of Sanctuary, tries to describe what she does to her bemused soon-to-be-protege Will Zimmerman. She claims to be a student of teratology, which she explains as the science of monsters. Now, in his recently published book Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us about Development and Evolution, Mark S. Blumberg takes us on a tour of real-life teratology, and how understanding abnormalities is casting new light on the relationship between the genetic and non-genetic forces that shape us all.

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An element so rarely gets singled out from the periodic table for its own star turn, and even less often when that element isn’t even radioactive.  But last night’s episode of Eleventh Hour sent chlorine down the catwalk in two of its many guises.

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When I was but a wee nerd, when Star Wars was driving people to buy VCRs the way The Matrix would make them buy DVD players years later,  a friend introduced me to the wonders of anime by playing a bootleg VHS tape in which two robots, piloted by people,  battled for supremacy in outer space. (Describing an anime film like that is like trying to identify a specific Tom Cruise film by explaining that he plays the cocky young guy, but I digress).

What made this movie stand out for me was how the robot was controlled. The pilot stood in a cokpit in the robots torso. He was attached to the robot by a series of straps that connected directly to the robot through the walls and ceiling. When he moved, the robot moved. Since he was some kind of martial arts super star, his robot was about as fine a defender of the universe as one could hope for, as long as the hero could overcome his psychological issues and fully self-actualize (If you recall the name of this anime, please oh please, comment and let me know what it is).

So, obviously, we still haven’t gotten around to inventing battle bots that can fight our wars for us, but if we did, we’d have a much better system for controlling the robot than silly straps. (more…)

While DISCOVER was in Las Vegas last week covering the Consumer Electronics Show, I noticed two science-fiction themed slot machines. The Star Wars machine has been out for about 18 months, the Star Trek machine was only unveiled about six months ago.

Even though my perfectly reasonable request to DISCOVER’s powers-that-be for a small research fund to investigate these machines was mysteriously refused (it’s all office politics here), I still felt obligated to try them out on your behalf, loyal readers, so I pulled up a chair and stuck in my hard-earned.

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The voyager space probe took a year to get to Saturn and four to get to Jupiter. If I’m planning a trip to those two planets, I jsut don’t have enough reading material (or video games and movies ) to keep me entertained for that long. But nothing makes a flight go faster than sleeping through it, right? So how about finding away to spend most of that in some kind of hibernation, instead of rereading the Sky Mall for the 10,000th time. This is probably why a recent episode of  Eleventh Hour (last night was a rerun, so I’m talking about  “Flesh” in this article) had our crime fighters chasing down a NASA-developed germ that put it’s victims into a state of hibernation (it also was sexually transmitted and flesh-eating, but more on that another time).

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Friday night was the final episode of Stargate Atlantis, one of my favorite shows—great cast chemistry and often humorous writing combined with some solid science fiction made it fun for casual viewers, and a commitment to character development and continuity rewarded long-term fans (a commitment to continuity not shared by certain, other, science fiction shows). Unfortunately, the series ended just as new show regulars Robert Picardo and Jewel Staite were really hitting their stride, moving their characters in interesting directions, and their presence gave the established cast something new to bounce off as well. The show’s resident villains, the Wraith, were also beginning to display considerably more depth and complexity than the previous bad guys in the franchise’s history.

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I know you all caught the “stay tuned” clips at the end of Knight Rider, right? It looks like we’re going to get our big fight, our KARR v. KITT battle at last! I can hardly wait, but as long as I have to wait, let’s talk about the cliff hanger from last night’s episode. We left our heroes driving straight north at 100 miles per hour carrying a hafnium bomb in the trunk. Dip below 100 miles per hour and BOOM!  Keanu-er, Michael and KITT explode, destroying everything in a 10-mile radius.

Now hang on, a hafnium bomb? Hafnium actually exists (which is more than I can say for some elements), but can it actually blow up like that? Well, some scientists believe it can.  In the real world, hafnium is closely related to zirconium, and it has many of the same properties. The structure of the hafnium solid is especially effective at storing energy. That makes it useful in control rods in a nuclear reactors, and also as a way to store energy as a kind of atomic battery.

To get any kind of explosion, start with the hafnium isomer 178m2. An isomer is an atomic isotope already charged with energy. Typically that energy will dissipate in its own random radiation, but in the case of hafnium, with it’s high storage capacity, a few (a very few) physicists believe it could be triggered to release all its energy in a fairly short space of time in a kind of explosion. I say “kind of” because  the energy released would be in the form of  gamma rays. As the highest energy form of electromagnetic radiation, gamma rays usually pass right through most solid objects. But when released in such high doses, they could, as Sharon Weinberger put it in the Wasington Post, “they could act like ray bombs in low-budget films, vaporizing living tissue and heating materials until they explode.” Nasty stuff. (Weinberger, who has written for DISCOVER, is a hafnium bomb sceptic and has since written a lively account of the controversy in her book Imaginary Weapons)

So storing energy in a hafnium isomer is one thing. Getting it all out rapidly enough to make an explosion is another. Carl Collins, a physicist at the University of Texas, claimed in 2004 that he got a lot of energy out just by shooting an X-ray from a dentist X-ray machine, but his work has not been duplicated and is considered dubious by many in the scientific community.

So  the science is pretty questionable: Could our villain actually blow up hafnium with an X-ray machine? Well, phycists in the real world haven’t achieved it, but this kind of gray area is, after all, the whole point of SciFi. Maybe with  a little elbow grease and a lot of evil-genius know-how,  the hafnium bomb could be made to work.

For more on the U.S. Military’s research into the hafnium bomb, readers might want to look at this pair of excellent posts over on Wired’s Danger Room blog.
Posting update: A surfeit of latkes and holiday galavanting caused me to get behind on Knight Rider and Eleventh Hour. I plan to catch up, so stay tuned.

Recently published by Nightshade Books and edited by Jonathan Strahan is Eclipse Two, an anthology of original science fiction and fantasy stories. While I puzzled over the selection of some stories (in particular, Margo Lanagan’s Night of the Firstlings seemed to be neither science fiction nor fantasy, but just a retelling, albeit a well-crafted one, of a bible story), what I did like more than made up for any possible misfires. Stand outs for me included Alstair Reynolds’ Fury — Reynolds is best known for his novels and stories set in the Revelation Space universe, but Fury is not set in that complex milieu. Instead it’s a clever stand alone tale about a robot bodyguard who discovers he must confront some home truths. I also liked Stephen Baxter’s SETI story, Turing’s Apples, Karl Schroeder’s voyage through an incredibly imaginative zero-gravity habitat in The Hero, and Daryl Gregory’s The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm, which makes a strong point about collateral damage without being preachy or predictable.

The last episode of Sanctuary revolved around the test of aerosolized biological weapon targeted at abnormals, the extraordinary creatures that are the show’s raison d’etre. Science Not Fiction commented recently on some of difficulties involved in creating effective bioweapons, and the choice of an aerosol-based delivery mechanism by Sanctuary’s writers is spot on. The particular biological agent in question is a designer prion, and a nasty little buggers they are indeed.

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Confounding months of speculation, this weekend the BBC announced who will replace David Tennant as the Doctor: the almost completely unknown Matt Smith, who is best known for his acting chops on the stage rather than the screen. (On a side note, the bookmaker firm Paddy Power, which took in $58,000 worth of bets on who might be cast, has indicated the name may have leaked early based on late betting patterns).

So what do you think? Does Smith look like he has what it takes to be the 11th Doctor? What do you think makes for a good Doctor anyway?