Blogs / Science Not Fiction

The folks over at Television Without Pity write snarky recaps of television shows that range from pop-phenom American Idol to critical darling Mad Men; the recaps are often more fun than the actual program (for whatever reason, they have had difficulty putting science fiction shows into the mix, with some famously unreadable reviews of Doctor Who for example, but their Eureka recappers are pretty good.) In the video above, they do nice job of dissecting the trailer for the much-anticipated Watchman movie, adapted from the influential graphic novel of the same name.

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”…)

Independent observers confirm that our panel was “awesome.” Many, many thanks to Jaime Paglia (Eureka), Kevin Grazier (BSG) and our very own Phil Plait for making the magic happen.

We also went out for dinner with the Eureka writing crew, including Jaime Paglia and Eric Wallace. For the record, any time you want to go out for a few bottles of Sangiovese and a couple hours of talking about Doctor Who, Torchwood, Veronica Mars, the OC and Friday Night Lights, you can count me in. For the complete inside dope from Eric (including their potentially disastrous Comic Con A/V snafu), go to Eureka Unscripted.

More personal Comic Con highlights after the jump.

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First of all, an insight (and some elementary logic) about Comic Con: Everybody loves Japanese stuff. Everybody loves porn. Everybody loves Japanese porn.

And onto the Torchwood panel:

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So the DISCOVER gang has landed at Comic-Con, and forged our way through the madding crowd looking for the cool and quirky. Something that immediately grabbed my eye in amongst the smaller booths of the independent publishers here was The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft, a serialized graphic novel.

I could only get my hands on the first issue, which the creators specially printed as a limited edition to coincide with Comic-con: they are currently negotiating with a publisher about whether or not to distribute The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft as serial or as a single bound novel.

Whatever the outcome of these negotiations, I hope they get it into stores soon, as from what I’ve seen, it’s a terrific voyage into the twisted worlds of Lovecraftian fiction. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and even though his work may superficially seem dated, being mostly set in the 1920’s, the themes still resonate strongly today — how do we cope with a universe that is bigger and more mysterious than we can ever truly comprehend?

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In case we haven’t plugged this Comic Con thing enough: our Science Behind the Science Fiction panel is Thursday at 5:30 and features Jaime Paglia (Eureka), Kevin Grazier (Eureka, BSG) and Phil Plait (our beloved Bad Astronomer talking about a very special episode of Dr. Who).

I will also take the opportunity here for a gratuitous swipe at a panel occurring at the same time as ours: Dexter. While I loved Michael C. Hall on Six Feet Under, why is this show at Comic Con? Is Dexter a comic book? Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is no. And haven’t we had enough of serial killers, anti-heroes or not?

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Our Comic-Con panel is on! Currently confirmed panelists include Jaime Paglia, creator and executive producer of Eureka, and newly minted Discover blogger Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait.

We’re still pursuing a couple of additional special guests that we’re very excited about so watch this space for updates.

On the Popular Mechanics Web site, Eric Sofge complained a couple months ago that big, lumbering comic-book movies are sucking the life from the already shaky genre of intelligent Hollywood science fiction movies. His concern is not just artistic: He worries that the rise of the Iron Men and Spider-Men and the vanishing of think-oriented movies like Blade Runner is taking away the one piece of Tinseltown culture that inspires viewers to think, and maybe even act, like scientists.

It’s a clever, well-intentioned argument. I just don’t buy it for a minute. The line between smart scifi and dumb superhero scifi is not as clear as Erik tries to make it. Where would you put RoboCop and Total Recall, for instance? Lord of the Rings nurtured many a science nerd, even though there’s not a speck of realism in it; on the other side, Star Trek (original and all other flavors) has plenty of mumbo jumbo moments in it to rival Iron Man’s suit or Bruce Banner’s irradiated cells.

To my mind, the most effective scifi stories depend on two key factors: dealing with imaginary science & technology in a logically consistent manner, and being sensitive to its human implications. That’s what made Blade Runner and Terminator so great. At their best, the Iron Man and Spider-Man comics worked because they weren’t about the science at all; they were, like Batman, about life-transforming events that caused their heroes to deal with issues we all deal with, but on a wildly magnified scale. In short, they were almost all about the human side. Sure, their attention to realism was abysmal, but they were quite appealingly attentive to the idea of having to rely on your wits to succeed.

Is it so bad to tell kids to look up to a brilliant but socially awkward kid who used his smarts to fight crime and social injustice? And does Erik Sofge really want to argue that Outland and Saturn 3 were a big help in furthering the cause of science education in this country? If so…well, good luck with that, Erik.

One of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters is undoubtedly Wolverine, the enigmatic Canadian special agent-turned-X-Man (think Hugh Jackman) with the bad-ass claws—long, super-strong knives, essentially, that extend out from his knuckles when he’s fixing to apply a beat-down. (Back when I was a kid, the claws were reputed to be surgically implanted by a twisted project run by the Canadian government, but they were later revealed to be a natural part of his mutant skeleton. Duh.) But someone forgot to tell the skin on his knuckles about those claws—every time they come out to play, they just slice right through the obstructing flesh.

Now it turns out that there are 11 species of frog with a very similar ability: When the little amphibians are threatened, they flex a muscle that actually extends a barbed piece of bone out through the skin on their fingers and attack with their newly exposed weapons.

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