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This week’s travel advice from Fringe: When picking up the ladies  at night clubs, avoid the ones with scary blue eyes who don’t talk. They tend to have shockingly pointy teeth, and are likely to eat you. Or at least, parts of you that you might wish you had later.  More on the nutritional content of your parts after the jump, which contains mucho spoilers.

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SciNoFi’s policy is that we use science fiction as a jumping off point to explore all the ways that entertainment mirrors and/or inspires real science.

As we’ve mentioned before, though, this is sometimes problematic when it comes to J.J. Abrams’s Fringe.  Still, we try not to critique.

Besides, Polite Dissent does such a good job of it already.  Head over to PD today for a recap of last night’s episode, including his ongoing homage to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Recently, I mentioned that I was looking forward to the new Star Trek movie because the trailers looked pretty good. I was accused of having cloudy judgement—I wanted the movie to be good, and so of course the trailers looked good. Which is fair enough—plenty of movies haven’t been as good as their trailers.

But what’s wrong with rooting for a movie? I want Star Trek to be awesome again, to be all about adventure and a future where people get do interesting things other than hide from radioactive mutants left over from the apocalypse. Sure, rooting for a movie from the get-go has led to some pretty harsh disillusionment (The Phantom Menace, the second and third Matrix movies), but on the other hand The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, and Lord of The Rings all turned out pretty well. So, in order of their release dates, here are the five movies I’m rooting for this summer:

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Wednesday’s night’s episode of Lost was a clip job, leaving unanswered some burning questions about the show’s resident physicist, Daniel Faraday, that we hope will be answered soon.

One question that had occurred to me can be answered. Is Daniel a descendent of Michael Faraday, the 19th century English physicist, chemist and (until recently) featured star on the back of British 20-pound notes? The writers of Lost like to have fun with historical names (John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, for instance, and Daniel Faraday’s own mother, Eloise Hawking). But the original Faraday had a special interest in electromagnetism, so the thought crossed my mind: Could Daniel be his great-great-great-grandson?

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First, I want to assure anyone who’s not been to New York City that Grand Central station is never as empty as it was in Tuesday’s episode of Fringe. I’ve been there at 4 a.m., and even then, I’ve never been alone on the platform. I know it was a dream sequence, but I thought you should know.

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The 2007 discovery of a perfectly preserved, 40,000 year-old baby mammoth raised hopes that the animal’s high-quality DNA could lead to a revival of the species via cloning.

This week, an elaborately produced documentary from National Geographic Channel traces the path of the baby mammoth (”Lyuba”) from discovery in Siberia to analysis in Russia and Japan, as scientists try to piece together the details of its life and death.

Narrated by erstwhile Alias dad Victor Garber, the show makes impressive use of CGI animation and reenactments using the real-life participants to tell the story.

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While we wait for the Doctor Who specials to air on US television screens, the nice people at the BBC sent us this clip of David Tennant’s guest appearance on Top Gear in a segment known as “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car”. If you don’t know this British show, Top Gear is to cars as SportsCenter is to sport — wry, cleverly written, and fanatic in the best sense of the word. (A DVD of the show’s 10th season was released this week, from whence this segment comes) It turns out that although David Tennant may be a master of time and space when he plays the Doctor, third gear is another matter…

Science fiction author J.G. Ballard died yesterday, aged 78. While most people know of Ballard as the author of the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, which was turned into a movie of the same name, Ballard was the creator of a number of relentlessly dystopic books and short stories. These haunting works were often set in times and places where worldly devastation was reflected in the equally scarred psyches of many of his characters. In a manner reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft, he portrayed humans as insignificant beings in a universe filled with terrible forces–civilization was a game of pretend that could come screeching to a halt at any moment. Unlike Lovecraft however, the forces that could irrevocably alter someone’s life overnight were not supernatural in origin—they were generally human or natural forces, amped up to apocalyptic proportions—floods, winds, wars, buildings, cars, and so on. (In choosing environmental and ecological disasters as the engine of many his apocalypses in a time when nuclear war was armageddon of choice, Ballard proved to be well ahead of the curve.) Reading Ballard was always a somewhat uncomfortable experience, but his willingness to explore the dark underbelly of technology and future will be sadly missed.

Image from Wikipedia

While you’re waiting for the imminent return of Torchwood, there is an awful lot of John Barrowman on BBC America right now.

Any Dream Will Do is a reality competition for aspiring West End actors/singers trying to land the lead in a new London production of Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  The host is a somewhat subdued (compared to his late night show) Graham Norton.  The judges include Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber himself and your very own Captain Jack Harkness.

Whether or not musical theater reality competitions are your cup of tea, one episode of this show will leave you wondering, “How does the BBC find a dozen talented singers in the UK, while American Idol can only produce one in a much larger country?”

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Well, now we know what you get when you combine a wasp, a bat, a gila monster, and a tiger into one giant nasty thing: asexual reproduction! OK, not really, that just happens to be what happened on last night’s episode of Fringe (spoilers below.)

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Friday night’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles delivered the goods—a twisty episode, crammed with action, plot, and emotion, all leading up to a terrific set up for the third season (if there is one, and I really hope there is).

The series has long-featured a T-1001 model terminator with unknown motives. For those of you not up on your terminator model numbers, the T-888 models features your classic Arnie-style metal endoskeltons wrapped in human flesh, while the T-1000’s are made from ‘liquid metal’ of the sort featured in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. These terminators can form themselves into pretty much any shape they like, and real world researchers are already trying to develop materials with similar properties.

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We don’t normally cover fantasy on Science Not Fiction, but I thought I’d make an exception for tonight’s premiere of Kröd Mandöon and The Flaming Sword of Fire on Comedy Central at 10/9c. If Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Bored of the Rings are your thing, this new parody of the fantasy genre is worth a look.

In Robin Hood fashion, the insecure hero, Kröd Mandöon (played by Sean Maguire), leads the struggle against the evil rule of Dongalor, a local king with big ambitions. Kröd is aided by a none-too-bright pig-man, an utterly ineffective wizard, the very gay Bruce, and his sexually liberated pagan warrior girlfriend. (A note on these last two characters—there’s a very fine line between ironically parodying how women or homosexuals are portrayed in a genre, and simply exploiting stereotypes anew. Once established, I hope these characters are given room to grow.) Not surprisingly, the funniest character so far (I’ve only seen the premiere episode) is the villainous Donglar, played by Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame. Lucas chews up the scenery, and plays perfectly off his trusted advisor Barnabus, the closest thing the show has to a straight man. It’ll be interesting to see if the show can sustain the humor of its premise over the course of an entire series, but I’m looking forward to seeing how these characters play out.

How often does the techno-babble utterly fail? Seriously, how often does a TV scientist explain a mysterious new phenomenon, McGyver together a device to tap it/diffuse it–and then totally strike out?

I can’t think of any, (eliminating of course, those inevitable mid-episode first attempts, where the cast has often overlooked some crucial piece of the puzzle that they figure out by the end), except perhaps for a failed attempt to stop an epidemic on an episode of Babylon 5 way back in 1995. But that’s the kind of cliche-breaking madness we’re coming to expect from  Fringe. In last night’s episode (warning, spoilers follow!), our heroes were faced with the inexplicable presence of a boy who had somehow survived for 70 years in a sealed underground vault. The boy was mute, though he seemed to understand English well enough, so our resident mad scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (literally mad. Non-fans may not know, but he was in a psychiatric hospital for years) donned his white lab coat and got to work. His neuro stimulator (”What can’t it do?”) was supposed to read the boy’s brainwaves and convert them to speech, but aside from a voice-like noise, it simply didn’t work. And then…the plot moved on. No more neurostimulator. On with the show!

But I do wish someone had at least given poor Dr. Bishop a nice sip of cognac and a there-there pat. Science is nowhere near achieving what he was trying to achieve. (more…)

Back in 1992, I spent most of my free time playing albums by The Pixies on an endless loop while running through the seemingly equally endless mazes of Wolfenstein 3D, a fact that may have contributed to my less than stellar grades in college that year. But Wolfenstein was something special—a game that, almost overnight, spawned a new genre of video game, the first person shooter. Play Halo or Call of Duty today and you’re playing a game that can trace a line of descent right back to Wolfenstein 3D.

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Just a short note to say that if you’re one of those people who haven’t liked the pace of the current season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, then make sure you get caught up, because Friday’s night’s episode paid off for faithful viewers with not just one of the best episodes of the series, but one of the most memorable episodes of televised science fiction, period. This Friday’s episode is the season finale, and with the show’s current breakneck momentum, it looks to be a can’t miss. Here’s hoping the show gets picked up for another season.