[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

Wow.  Bleak.  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight.  What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?

On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring.  As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.

Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.

Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance.  Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

In the following audio you can listen in on what amounted to a 20-minute chat with David Tennant (The  Doctor, obviously) and Julie Gardner (executive producer and now head of drama for BBC Worldwide)  and five reporters. You’ll here Tennant and Gardner talk about shooting “Planet of the Dead,” the sadness of ending their time working with the Doctor, their futures, and the possibility of Tennant attending the next day’s panel naked. Both are charming, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

(The recording is a little noisy at the start, but on the upside, you’ll get to hear Tennant expressing amazement at all the recorders paced in front of him. Also, you’ll hear a lot of reporters asking questions, but no, none of them are me.)

The Audio Charm of Dr. Who, David Tennant

I met with McCreary in the basement of the House of Blues a few hours before the band went on  show. He’s not a big man, maybe 5′ 8″ or less. He wears a goatee, keeps his hair long, and he has that pale-skinned pudginess that  geeks earn by long hours in front of a keyboard, though McCreary uses a totally different keyboard. But he had none of the geeks’ renowned social awkwardness. Maybe that’s what happens when a composer starts scoring Battlestar at 24, and then held the gig for the whole run. Along the way he became the composer for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Eureka, among others. These days, McCreary is working on Caprica, the Battlestar prequel; he’s even written the Caprican national anthem.

McCreary went into a lot of behind-the-scenes detail on the show’s music: Those opening vocals were inspired by Olmos, who wanted the show to include parts of the Gayatri Mantra, a Hindu hymn. The grunt and the drums that follow those vocals were inspired by Battlestar director Michael Rymer, who felt there should be Japanese taiko drums. McCreary took the drums idea to new levels throughout the series, culminating in the mutiny episodes of season four. “What would normally be giant brass and synth and stuff, sounds like an old samurai movie,” McCreary said.

McCreary typically gets his material when it’s nearly complete. He’ll get a version of the episode that’s been edited, but it may have no music at all, or it may have temporary music cues put in. As one of the artists involved with post-production, McCreary’s job is to score what he sees, not to demand changes to fit his score, not ever.

Except just once.

“On one occasion, one occasion for the finale,” McCreary said. “There was a sequence at the end where Kara is typing in these numbers, she’s hitting her fingers as we’re hearing these musical notes, and Andy the editor was crafting that sequence and I knew what he wanted to do, but it just wasn’t quite lining up with my beats, so I called him up, and I said, ‘Hey man, look, can we recut this? Cause I got this piece of music that’s awesome.’ And this is like the biggest no-no in scoring, you score what the picture is. No one would ever recut for the composer, and on the last episode they did it, they brought me back in, and I wrote the piece of music I wanted to hear, and I said look if you cut it so the fingers are landing here and here and here, and he sat there and he lined them up and he changed the edit to match my music and it worked perfectly. I was nervous even to ask him, but that’s the kind of collaboration we have on Battlestar.”

Answer: Yes, 22 more episodes for sure.

The VP also requested a musical episode. All of which is pretty awesome. SciNoFi loves it some Eureka.

I’ll have more from the panel, and an interview with creator Jaime Paglia.

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

We’ve just heard that we’re going back to Comic Con this summer, with a panel topic and line-up even bigger and better than last year’s event.

We are teaming up with Jennifer Ouellette and the crew at the Science and Entertainment Exchange to produce a panel on “MAD SCIENCE,” i.e. Science as a double-edged sword, ethically and morally neutral in and of itself, but dependent upon who wields it, and how.

Beloved Internet Personality Phil Plait is lined up to moderate (after he gets his tattoo) and we’re expecting guests from Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Fringe, Stargate: Universe and more.  Watch this space for additional details.

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

The Internet may be crumbling, but think of the time that would free up! [via Futurismic]

“Junk DNA” science may cure HIV, probably won’t create race of superhuman mutants.   [via SciFi Scanner]

Migrant workers may soon be able to telecommute.  [via SciFiWire ]

SciNoFi is not alone.  Terminator TV fans mobilize to save their show. [via eonline.com]

And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :

In this week’s episode of Fringe, we have a woman, Valerie Boone, who suffers from a disease that makes her into a vicious cerebrospinal-fluid-drinking sort of vampire. It’s ugly stuff: she dances languidly at a night club, gets picked up by cocky young men, goes home with them, and then snaps their necks so she can drink their CSF. Nummy!

On the plus side, if you’re going to make a human body your soda fountain, CSF isn’t a bad choice. The pressure  inside the spinal cord is relatively low, just 200-300 mm of mercury. That’s pretty far below air pressure, so the CSF should come flowing out like water out of a straw once she tears it open with her scary pointy teeth.

But I hope she’s not too thirsty. The human body only produces 500 ml of CSF a day, and it typically has 130 mm at any given moment. CSF is produced from the choroid plexus, a paired organ attached to the brain. The fluid fills the fourth ventricle of the brain and flows out to surround the brain, filling the area between the pia mater and the dura mater, two membranes that line the brain and the skull, respectively. The CSF provides a cushion, and a degree of buoyancy to the brain, protecting it from sharp blows and whiplash. The CSF  also carries toxins and drugs away from the brain, and it helps transport hormones from one part of the brain to the other.

But even with all these roles, it doesn’t actually have a lot of substance. It’s fairly salty, but it has just 15-45 mg/dl of protein and 50-80 mg/dl glucose. Multiplied across  130 ml, she’s only getting, at most, 65 mg of glucose and 58.5 mg of sugar. She’d do better eating a Snickers.

We’re told  mid-episode that Ms. Boone is drinking the CSF because a disease is using up her own.  Technically speaking, the CSF is on a one way journey: From the brain to the dura mater, to blood vessels, which carry it off. But leaving that fact aside, there is some evidence that the body is aware of what’s going on with it’s CSF and tries to compensate for problems. Scientists experimented with altering the sodium concentration of CSF in sheep. They found that increasing the sodium concentration caused them to avoid salty food, while decreasing it led them to desire more. So maybe Ms. Boone should have been eating more potato chips, and fewer people?

As she became CSF depleted,  she would start to suffer headaches, loss of hearing, blurring of visions, tinitis, and numbness of the face. Sounds unpleasant. No wonder she was so cranky all the time.

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.

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?

Naw. Michael Faraday had a wife but no kids. So much for that, unless he was igniting someone else’s Bunsen burner on the side. But there may be another Faraday connection hidden in the science of “Lost.” At least one online denizen has speculated that “Faraday cages” have already — and will — play roles in the show.

Made from an electrically conducting material, such as metal, a Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic signals from entering or exiting the cage. Elevators often act as kind of Faraday cage, which explains why your cell phone doesn’t like to work in them; the outer shell of an airplane is another (lightning can hit plane’s structure but not fry everyone inside thanks to this phenomenon). Faraday cages can also be used to protect electronics from electromagnetic pulses, or stop electronics from leaking giveaway signals, so they are often found in military and aerospace hardware.

These days, Faraday cages are a hot topic in an unexpected field: privacy. RFID tags, those devices that track everything from library books to food products, are a major bugaboo for privacy activists. But you can prevent the tags from being detected by using a portable “RFID shield,” a very basic kind of Faraday cage. (This site sells credit-card shields for $9.99 in “five attractive colors.”)

By Randy Dotinga

Moving on (and spoilers below). The linchpin of the episode was a character who, thanks to the experimental and fictional) Cortexifan treatment he received as a child, developed the ability to spread his emotions to people nearby. When he’s depressed and considering suicide, a nearby person might consider, say, jumping in front of the No. 7 Train (which is the most reliable train in New York. Again, just trying to be helpful here).  Obviously, here in the real world, emotions can’t be aggressively spread to random strangers…well, unless they’re looking at you…and talking to you… and generally interacting with you. OK, they can be spread to random strangers, just less strongly.

There’s a tower of research amply demonstrating that human groups respond to each other’s emotional moods.   We read other people for facial expressions, posture, and gestures and we respond by modifying our own responses to fit theirs. The tone and word selection of people we are talking to also influences our moods, especially when these people use strong negative terms like “hate” or “awful.” Recent research even shows that these emotional cues other people give off trigger different reactions in the parts of our brains that govern emotional response.

But those are all small group or person-to-person interactions. In December, Harvard and UC-San Diego scientists published findings showing that happiness can even spread across large groups. Their 20-year study of 4,739 people, they showed that happiness spread across different small group sub-units of the larger sample. A happy person could affect the moods of people with three degrees of separation.

But in Fringe we understand that the reverse-empathetic effect is caused by Cortexifan, an experimental drug from Walter Bishop. As yet, there are no drugs that amplify our ability to impose our emotions on others, but there’s a whole class of them that do amplify our ability to respond. Entactogens or empathogens (the debate rages over the proper name) are a whole class of drugs that improve our ability to empathize with those around us. The most famous member of this group, Ecstasy, has been heavily studied for its legendary ability to make people love one another, which is why it gets the fabulous nickname, the Hug Drug. You know when a nickname makes it’s way into scientific papers, it’s fabulous. Also, no longer cool. Again, just trying to help.

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…

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?”

BBC America has packaged the reality show premiere with a one-hour special, John Barrowman: The Making of Me, in which John explores the latest research on the origins of homosexuality and relates it to his own experience growing up.  [Related from DISCOVER: Is There a Gay Gene?]

Science-wise, the show is sort of a mishmash of different research from fMRI’s to the psychology of childhood gender roles to neuroscience, but is redeemed by Barrowman’s winning personality.