Was it just me, or was their something faintly bizarre about yesterday’s historical ass whooping of man by machine? Maybe it was Brad Rutter’s increasingly frantic swaying as Watson took his lead and asked for yet another clue in its stilted, strangely mis-timed way. Perhaps it was the effect of the last corporate stiff of the event – in front of a stone wall backdrop that seemed a parody of cheesy corporate décor – telling us where Watson’s winnings will go, all while speaking with a monotone that would make Al Gore jealous. Or maybe it was Alex Trebek’s nonchalance after the historic event as he immediately turned his attention to pitching the next day’s all-teen tournament. Somehow I expected balloons and confetti to descend from the ceiling, maybe with the voice of Hal in the background—“I’m sorry Ken, but you were really improving from your performance yesterday. Would you mind taking out the garbage?” The most important intelligence test of machine versus man in decades sails by with hardly the rattle of a plastic fern.

Besides the very impressive technical achievement of Watson, IBM should be congratulated for managing to turn three episodes of Jeopardy! into a three-episode-long infomercial for their brand. We saw breathless executives tell us how Watson was a real game-changer for medicine, genomics, and spiky hairdos for avatars. We saw the lead engineers puzzling over mathematical squiggles written on staggered layers of sliding glass panels (something we’ve seen in an Intel commercial before when it was necessary for a visual joke to work, and so obviously useless for doing real work that it seems an insult to viewers in this context).

The overall feel of the event was highly corporate. Alex Trebek channeled Mikael Blomquist’s obsessiveness over computer model names as he explained how Watson’s brain was a massive cluster composed of several cabinets of IBM Power 750 Servers. I wondered how many takes it took for him to get the spiel down. Amidst the heavily rehearsed corporate messaging, we did get some nuggets of interesting information, like how Watson was initially dumb to gender before, as one of the researchers put it, “it got the gender module.” I’m fairly confident this came in the form of a small cheesecloth bag of genetically modified goat genitalia inserted into the head node of the aforementioned Power Server cluster.

February 16, 2011, will go down in history as the date of a very important milestone in artificial intelligence. As I blogged about earlier, in reaching a machine with the kind of intelligence we want, having goal posts that are at points short of that is extremely helpful, and The Jeopardy Test seems to fit the bill. Beating the human Jeopardy-savants on Wednesday was at turns dramatic and eerie. I think IBM has a major achievement on its hands. I just wish the whole thing had been done with a bit more of a sense of humor, and a bit less gratuitous corporate messaging.

The idea of attacking scientists to stem technological development is an old one. Perhaps the most dramatic example from recent times is Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his case the targeted killings were embedded in an anti-technology philosophy fully developed in his Manifesto. In the recent assassination attempts in Iran, we see the workings of geopolitical pragmatism in its most raw form.

Regardless of what we may think of Iran having the bomb, the strategy of killing scientists and engineers of a country’s technological infrastructure is one that should give us pause. Few steps separate this ploy to making them the domestic enemy as well, a tradition with an even deadlier history that includes the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s purge of academics.

Although on the fringe at present, there are parts of the public which are already in tune with this lethal segue. They view scientists as the people that bring us global warming and much else that is taking our technological society to potential crisis. Unfortunately, the way scientists are depicted for dramatic affect in popular entertainment doesn’t always help. A recent opinion piece in Nature criticized the effort of certain organizations to make the depiction of science and the work they do more accurate in movies. (I responded in another post.) Below the article, however, was one reader’s comment that made me think about how these unrealistic portrayals can be causing some real damage:

The reason that most depictions of science in movies are in a negative light is because it’s a reflection of reality. Every day, science is poisoning our oceans and air, destroying our communities and creating terrifying new weapons to be employed on the poor and oppressed of the world.

The “awkward nerd” depiction of a scientist is far too fair. They are the monsters tearing our world apart while having the temerity to hold us in contempt for “not understanding them.”

How ironic that this comment serves as its own best argument for the need of some smidgen of truth in character development, contrary to the thesis of Daniel Sarewitz, who penned the Nature opinion piece.

Not surprisingly, the motivations of scientists are much more diverse than the simple portrayals of narrative fiction. They range from a desire to make the world a better place, to the self-centered pursuit of prestige, money, and power with little regard for the ethical implications of one’s scientific work. The first type doesn’t get a whole lot of play, while the second has great dramatic potential, and so we see it a lot more. As the French novelist Henri de Montherlant wrote, “happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page.”

Could the dramatically compelling caricatures of scientists of the “evil genius” type underlie some of the thinking behind the assassination attempts on Iranian scientists? It seems a stretch. But in its suggestion of a strategy for dealing with technological development of another country that is thought of as a threat, the killing of Iran’s scientists raises some troubling concerns about how scientists can be scapegoats for a society’s discomforts with technological progress, and how narrative fiction can be a lubricant for such a move.

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part IV of IV. (Check out parts I, II, & III)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

In my last two posts, I established some pretty important ground rules: What is a zombie and is a zombie actually dead?

Before I get onto the other exciting questions, a quick recap: a zombie pathogen could not be a “live infection” (i.e. rabies/Rage), but would be a re-animation virus: infection-death-reanimation. Bodily fluid transmission, non-regeneration/growth, and slowed decay were also key features of my hypothetical zombie pathogen. A zombie is a corpse with the appearance of life. The distinction is between brain-death and brain destruction. A zombie is brain-dead. In reality, it is the pathogen which is alive, hijacking the corpse. When one damages the corpse sufficiently, the pathogen has nothing left to “hijack” and therefore the zombie is de-animated.

With these key points answered, we can answer a whooooole bunch of other questions about what a zombie is and isn’t. Answers after the jump!

1. Is a zombie still human? A zombie is as human as a corpse is human. The DNA in the cells, the general body configuration and appearance will be that of a human being. But there’s nobody at home upstairs. The humanness will only be corporeal.
2. Is a zombie a person? No. Though there is some neural activity, there is no brain activity, particularly no consciousness. The philosophical zombie (p-zed) is something that looks and acts like a person, but lacks actual consciousness. Based on our description of how the zombie pathogen would have to work, there would be no higher brain function, therefore a zombie would have zero personhood.
3. Can a zombie feel pain? What about memories? In that both of these mental phenomena require some form of cognitive processing, not merely mental stimulation, I would say No. There is no advantage for the pathogen to activate these more complex parts of the brain and, furthermore, both pain and memories would likely complicate the “eat flesh” drive. Zombies aren’t even sentient (i.e. able to feel pain), to presume even second-effect electrical stimulation could trigger memories or pain is implausible in the extreme.
4. Does a zombie have dignity? Now this is a complex question. A rough and ready definition of dignity is that if thing X has dignity then we have a duty to respect thing X. Corpses are considered to have dignity, which is why we bury and burn them in respectful rituals. A zombie is, in large part, a corpse and, therefore, would have dignity, thus obliging us to treat it with respect. However, letting a corpse be overrun by a re-animation virus that causes it to perambulate about and terrorize the neighbors is highly undignified; therefore, we would have an obligation to de-animate the corpse (perhaps violently and stylishly) and burn (dignified and sterilizing) whatever was left out of respect for the dignity of the corpse.
5. Is it wrong to kill someone who is infected but not yet a zombie? I am going to anger someone with my answer here, but presuming we are certain they are infected and that the process of infection involves suffering, then it is not wrong to kill that person. The ethical distinction between “killing” and “letting die” is dubious at best. Intention, not method of death, determines the morality of the situation, particularly when “letting die” significantly increases suffering. In the case of a zombie apocalypse, I’d say voluntary active euthanasia is a moral duty. First in consideration of the quality of life of the person dying and second, out of respect for the dignity of what will be that person’s corpse. The extremely contentious involuntary active euthanasia would likely be morally permissible if one was certain a person was infected but refused to acknowledge it. I, for one, never want to be faced with these decisions.
6. Could we cure zombification? A pathogen is something we could vaccinate against, but to “cure” zombification would require the ability to reverse the effects of death completely. Only killing the infection before death would “cure” the person. Killing the infection after the fact would just leave a still-quite-dead corpse.
7. Could a zombie outbreak actually happen? I sure hope not. The zombie pathogen I described is immensely complex and precise – impossible in nature. Thus, the pathogen would have to be engineered. Every feature of the pathogen (including neural take-over) is, in some rudimentary form, currently present in nature. The disparate features would have to be heightened, recombined, and honed into a single doomsday plague.

Should it happen, however, my only consolation is that based on metabolism and decay, it would seem that zombie pathogen would be consuming the host body at any time that it wasn’t getting sufficient nutrients. Thus, the decomposition rate of a zombie body would be slowed in relation to a normal corpse to point X – with point X being minimum necessary nutrients for host body and pathogen – beyond which the pathogen would then begin consumption of the host body, resulting in accelerated decomposition. Unlike most zombie stories, in an actual zombie apocalypse I imagine zombie-on-zombie cannibalism and starvation-induced decay would save us from total annihilation. Quarantine and evade = salvation.

I hope.

For all of you zombie lore fans, survivalists, and boffins, I know there have to be points I missed, so hit me up in the comments on all of our Ethics of the Undead posts (I, II, III). Good luck out there tonight and guard your braaaaiiiiinsss.

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part II of IV. (Check out parts I, & III)

Before we can start investigating whether or not something that craves brains has a mind or should be pitied, we need to define just what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about zombies.

I’m going to start by ruling out the 28 Days Later zombies and the voodoo/demonic zombies of Evil Dead. First, the name of this blog is Science, not Fiction, which means any religious hokum is right out the door. Demon possession, souls back from Hell, and voodoo are not going to be considered in this investigation. On the other end of the spectrum, in 28 Days Later anything infected with “Rage” becomes a “fast” zombie. In essence, Rage is rabies only way, way scarier. Thus we aren’t dealing with the “undead” so much as the violently insane. So non-fatal pathogens don’t count either. If the pathogen doesn’t first kill you, then re-animate you, then you aren’t a zombie.

Which leads us to the next question: how does the pathogen work? I am not denying here the multitude of variations and nuances among zombie plague viruses, so we have to come up with a generic, realistic version to have our discussion. Zombies generally meet three important criteria. They are 1) stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh 2) continually decomposing and 3) contagious via bodily fluids. If we can explain, reasonably, how and for what reason a pathogen might cause/allow these conditions, we can describe a realistic zombie pathogen.

Condition 1, that zombies are stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh, implies that the pathogen must act to re-animate the existing neural pathways and motor functions in some fashion. Let us presume human-only infection and that the virus, being species specific, results in a cannibalism preference. Thus the sensory systems which are re-activated are capable of distinguishing four key things: flesh-vs-not-flesh; species; infected-vs-uninfected; self. Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity, the virus does not create any new systems, it merely hijacks existing ones.

Next, we have to remember that contracting the zombie pathogen is terminal. Whatever the hijacking process involves, we must presume that an intermediate stage of infection between contamination and zombification is fatal. If I had to guess, the infection of the medulla oblogata – where most automatic processes are regulated – is what results in cardio-pulmonary death, followed shortly by brain-death. Sometime after brain-death the medulla is fully hijacked by the zombie pathogen, jump-started (I won’t attempt an explanation) and re-animation is underway.

Whether it is musculature, perceptive organs, or circulatory and digestive systems, the virus must work with what it has. The metabolic process continues, arguably for both the body and the pathogen, which in large part informs the indiscriminate hunger for flesh. It is critical here to note that a zombie body is not uniquely strong (in fact, the opposite), nor can the body function properly without oxygen, waste disposal, and nutrients. We can, however, presume that a zombie body can, in its own way, marginally function when some of these requirements are missing. However, when an eyeball is gone or the intestines finally rupture, that zombie has lost whatever sense or function was associated with the now deteriorated organ: no healing happens.

Which leads us to Condition 2, that zombies are continually decomposing. No one thinks of a zombie as a healthy, mindless body; you think of a corpse that moves. The re-animation process is, we assume, imperfect or it would be revivification. One of the imperfections is that autolysis – the process wherein a cell’s own enzymes begin to consume it – is not stopped or reversed. As autolysis is the first step in postmortem decay, even a brief period between death and re-animation would cause it to start. Other aspects of decomposition, such as purification and insect infestation, though significantly slowed would likely continue as well.

Based on the average zombie, we can presume a few things about the virus’ relationship to decomposition. First, is that the zombie virus slows decomposition by providing cells with some nutrients. Second, is that the immune system, at least a crippled version, still functions to slow human bacterial flora from consuming their host. Third, it could be presumed that while some cell division continues, repairs and restoration are lost. Fourth, the virus would likely only preserve essential functions, allowing irrelevant parts of the body, such as skin, secondary musculature, and some organs to decay. Finally, we can presume the virus itself must consume flesh to some degree, rendering the zombie’s metabolic processes incredibly inefficient and explaining the insatiability of a zombie. Thus, a zombie frozen in the arctic would likely re-animate upon thaw (pathogen in stasis; corpse preserved) while a zombie at the bottom of the ocean would first suffocate (albeit more slowly) and then be crushed.

Condition 3, that the pathogen is contagious via bodily fluids only, is a critical detail in terms of both staying true to the mythology of zombies and for presenting a scenario in which not everyone would instantly be zombified. An airborne pathogen, particularly one with any sort of incubation period, would be total, unstoppable pandemic. But, more importantly, we are dealing with a creature of fiction. And, just as with other members of the undead (e.g. vampires, werewolves) the bite gets in the blood and turns you

Remember, we almost never see someone getting bitten by a zombie and then not dying and “coming back.” The reason is that a bite both by-passes traditional levels of the immune system and delivers a huge dose of the pathogen directly into the circulatory system. Furthermore, it immediately contaminates the flesh directly exposed. As the zombie pathogen, whatever it is, seems able to interact with most cell types, not just specific ones (as with HIV), it would make sense that direct exposure would allow the virus both permeate the whole system (body) while beginning total infection at the site of contamination as well. It only takes one bite!

There you have it. A zombie pathogen must 1) be transmitted via bodily-fluids to 2) ensure sufficient and total infection which 3) is always fatal due to the fact that pathogen must 4) either consume the host or host-acquired flesh 5) hijack all the necessary functions for movement and sensation 6) provide at least some nutrients to itself and the body 7) allow continued movement and 8.) slow the decomposition of the host body.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com by Scott Garfield

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part I of IV. (Check out parts II, & III)

Zombies are everywhere! Zombieland, Shawn of the Dead, and 28 Days Later in the movies; World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the bookshelf; Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising and Resident Evil in your video games - not to mention the George A. Romero and Sam Rami classics in your DVD collection. And this Sunday Robert Kirkman’s epic The Walking Dead lurches from the pages of comic books onto your television thanks to AMC.

Where ever you turn, zombies are there. We can’t seem to get enough of the re-animated recently departed. But why do we love these ambling carnivorous cadavers so?

Zombies are horrifying. An outbreak would almost certainly lead to global apocalypse. Unrelenting, unthinking, uncaring, undead, they are a nightmare incarnate. They remind us of mortality, of decay, of our own fragility. Perhaps worst, they remind us of how inhuman a human being can become.

Zombies are familiar. Refrains of “Brains!”, guttural groans, and mindless shambling instantly trigger the idea of a zombie in our mind. We all know, somehow, that decapitation – that is, destruction of the zombie brain – is our only salvation. I bet you’ve dressed as one for Halloween. Every time “Thriller” comes on you probably dance like a zombie. Some mornings I feel like a zombie. Even philosophers talk about zombies. We know zombies. They are hilarious, they are frightening, they are part of us. And that is why we love them.

But have you ever asked yourself: is a zombie still a human? is a zombie dead, really? can it feel pain? does a zombie have dignity? Has the question ever popped up in your quite-live brain: is it ok to kill a zombie? Could a zombie be cured? If you could cure it, would you still want to? In honor of Halloween and our culture’s current love affair with brain-eating corpses, I present The Ethics of the Undead, your universal guide for answering all of your most pressing zombie questions. Stay tuned for posts throughout Halloween weekend!

Images via ThatZombiePhoto.com and lolzombie.com

A strange additional element of the social dimension of science operating in this comment is a certain fixation with credit among scientists, nicely expressed by Kissinger in his “There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics, because there is so little at stake.” In doing science, few things cause more grief than arguments over who contributed what to a scientific study, and what order the authors names should have on some publication. The suggestion that Feynman got his idea from elsewhere will immediately incite a credit fight among supporters and detractors; the fact that the source was literature just adds another dimension to this fight.

Colin Milburn also talks about barriers in the humanities to properly understanding the interactions between narrative fiction and bench work in the laboratory. One of these is the idea of narrative fiction having organic unity that doesn’t take well to decomposition into the most adaptable and usable parts from a scientific perspective.

Despite these barriers from both sides, it’s clear that there’s lots of ideas flowing from science fiction into science itself. Milburn suggests we think of science fiction as being repurposed and remixed into lab bench practice through three different kinds of “mods“. The first is the blueprint mod where some discrete part of science fiction is used as a blue print for something in real life. He gives the example of Second Life, which was a blue print mod from the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” The second is the supplementary mod, where the originating sci-fi has elements of technical impossibility to it, so it can’t be taken into the lab without some substantial modifications. Teleportation is an example of this: the quantum entanglement underlying recent examples can only occur with zero-mass states of atoms, which is to say pure information, a bit of a problem for applying it to people a la Star Trek even with the most strenuous of diets.  The third is the speculative mod. Here science projects its future possibilities using the language of sci-fi. Milburn gives Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” as an example of one of these mods.

As Milburn’s categorization of the ways in which fictional narratives about science and technology get put into practice percolates in my mind, I see a rich stream of case studies in my own work and those of my colleagues. It would be good if the result of looking at scientific practice through the lens of these ideas would be to nudge these two creative enterprises — work at the bench, and the crafting of stories — a bit closer together. Perhaps in the future scientists will have workshops (modshops?) with story creators in a similar way in which business execs collaborate with creatives to get people thinking outside of their usual constraints.

Other links: The science-humanities gap is often discussed with reference to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Interdisciplinary programs that combine art and science studies attempt to heal the divide: here’s a discussion of some work on that.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

ALIEN SCIENCE

What might aliens look like?  Where might we find them? Are alien life forms most likely to be (from our viewpoint) extremophiles?  While astronomers and planetary scientists often make the claim that “we study other worlds to learn more about Earth,” this section emphasizes the reverse:  What have we learned about our planet, its life, and the Solar System to further help us find life “out there.”  There are exhibits that describe potential abodes of life in the Solar System, extremophile life, even bizarre Earth creatures that simply look alien. Of the four sections, this is the least speculative, most grounded in science. Later one of the docents told me that, surprisingly, this section is overwhelmingly the most popular with kids.

ALIEN WORLDS

To me this section was, by far, the most interesting of the exhibit. This section details the hypothetical worlds Aurelia and Blue Moon: the worlds and their ecosystems.  Aurelia is a hypothetical planet that is tidally locked to a red dwarf; Blue Moon is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a jovian gas giant planet. These planets and their creatures were designed by scientists who study extremophile life forms, planetary scientists, and scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the creatures inhabiting both of these worlds are very reminiscent of those from Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition. It was also in this section that I was “adopted” by a very nice docent named Ann who personally showed me the aspects of various exhibits that she found most interesting.

Thor! Buddy! Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An Asgard walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

ALIEN COMMUNICATION

What is the like likelihood of there being other civilizations out there? If they are out there, how would we communicate? That’s the theme in the final section of the exhibit.

Hey I recognize that! The Drake Equation.

After examining all the bizarre earthly “alien” life forms in “ALIEN SCIENCE”, and after being transported to both Aurelia and Blue Moon in “ALIEN WORLDS,” I found this last section relatively anticlimatic, and probably the least interesting of the four sections. There was, however, a fun little alien gift shop immediately beyond. I like little shops.

Yes, I realize that I should have visited/posted before San Diego Comic-Con, when so many more people — the kind who are likely to enjoy this kind of thing — could have stopped in. Still, the San Diego Air and Space Museum will be hosting the Science of Aliens from now until the end of the year.

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit).  A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II”  in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

The Mythbusters set about testing the theory and found that it didn’t work. They handmade some half-decent gunpowder, but it didn’t have enough force to fire anything, and if it had, the bamboo tube couldn’t contain the explosion. The Mythbusters discovered the exploding bamboo  would have been more likely to kill Kirk then the gorn.

But it’s possible the Mythbusters didn’t use optimal ingredients in their low-energy gunpowder.

Like, maybe they used bad charcoal. Ulrich Bretscher is a retired Swiss chemist who turned his discipline and training to the art of homemade black powder, and he says the charcoal is the key element in determining the effectiveness of the gunpowder.

According to Bretscher, Kirk’s recipe was about right: Sulfur has the effect of lowering the ignition temperature by 130 degrees, which, since Kirk was lighting his gun with a spark from a stone, would have been important; and saltpeter acts as a catalyst for the flame, allowing it to burn hotter and more easily.

But the crucial ingredient for releasing the most energy from homemade gunpowder is  charcoal. Bretscher found that charcoal could be made effectively by heating wood under a sealed lid to a temperature of 400 degrees until the wood is thoroughly blackened. He yields 19 percent charcoal by weight, but a more effective technique could get that yield up to 60 percent. But he also found that the type of wood used for the charcoal was crucial. His measurements showed that the highest energy could be extracted from charcoal made from willow and balsa wood —- more energy than some commercial black powder he tested. The making of charcoal was so important, it was the most closely guarded secret of gunpowder makers.

So it seems to me that maybe Kirk found some really great charcoal, better than whatever they used in Mythbusters. Assuming he knew the optimal proportions (which he did, of course–he’s Kirk), he could have mixed up a pretty snappy batch of powder, and the diamond ammunition probably worked well enough. That left the problem of bamboo. Well, maybe it was alien bamboo. Superstrong alien bamboo. That must be it.

[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.

A geneticist combined these different creatures to produce one new, scary one. The beast went on a rampage, injecting its eggs into several people, and before we knew it larvae were bursting out rib cages. Ick, for sure.

But what I found most intriguing were the organisms the geneticist decided to combine. What was his plan. Here’s a look:

Gila monster: One of two venomous lizards in the world. The gila monster generally lives unobtrusively in the American Southwest.  It’s venemous, but the venom is generally used in self-defense.

Why the Fringe Monster needed it: Not sure, really. Gila monsters can eat a lot food at one time and then not eat for a while, a trait which might be useful.

Tiger: Tigers are solitary hunters who typically live across southern and eastern Asia. They’re also cats, and possibly vulnerable to having their bellies rubbed, but I’m not sure I’d try that. Seems like a good way to have my head playfully batted off my shoulders.

Why the Fringe monster needed it: I think it had to be for size. Tigers can get to be nine feet long and weigh 600 pounds. Most of the ingredients described to us are small or even tiny creatures. Maybe they used the tiger to provide the bulk for the beast.

Parasitic wasp (Megarhyssa macrurus): There are actually several species of  M. macrurus, but they share the characteristic of preying on the larvae of beetles, weevils, or butterflies.

Why the Finge monster needed it: These wasps lay their eggs via a long ovidepositor, just like our friend the monster. The female wasp injects the eggs into the host, and the larvae feed until they go into chrysalis. After chrysalis, the mature wasp eats its way out of the host. (This life cycle has been grist for the science fiction mill before, being the inspiration for the modus operandi of the eponymous creature in Alien and its sequels.)

Vampire Bats (Desmodus rotundus): The common vampire bat, made famous through the ages as a carrier of rabies, but also as the inspiration for Satan’s bat wings.

Why the Fringe monster needed it: On the show, it’s exposited that the bat is the solution for a fundamental problem in combining beasts: How do you get the beast not to reject its hybrid parts? Bats, they tell us on the show, have a special immune system that allows the bat to carry diseases without being infected by them. Well, I couldn’t find evidence of that (though I’m happy to have the way pointed to me). What I did find is that bats, especially vampire bats, carry rabies, and in fact are the primary vector for rabies in humans. They can also carry ebola virus, and maybe other things. But it’s not clear they do this any differently than any other rodent.

But vampire bats offer a number of other useful traits for a big monster. As hunters, they are incredibly quick. Typically they will land near prey, then creep up on it and leap at the last second to pounce on it, no doubt with a malicious blood-sucking grin on their tiny faces. Once there, their saliva has an anti-coagulant that allows them to suck blood until they’re sated or unseated from their hold. What monster worth its salt wouldn’t want those skills?

Fringe never gives us a hint of what this monster might have been intended for. Possibly it was simply a proof of concept. But the combination of beasts is suspicious: two stalking predators, two venomous creatures, and one that lays its eggs inside another creature. Plus they grew it really big. Was the plan to unleash this bad boy on Tokyo?

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.

These research efforts generally come under the heading of smart materials. One approach is create a single material which can be controlled—for example electrorheostatic materials are normally liquids, but become more viscous or solid when an electric field is applied to them, or shape memory alloys can be set into a particular pattern and then deformed. If the alloy is later heated, it will return to its ‘programmed’ original pattern.

Another approach is to create an object out of a collection of tiny robot like entities, sort of like intelligent Lego bricks. These efforts tend to fall under the rubric of programmable matter (programmable matter is an umbrella term for a number of futuristic technologies, including the ability to create psuedo-atoms on demand). Carnegie Mellon has a “claytronics” projects with a spiffy speculative[1] demo that looks like it could be right out of the Terminator backstory. (Seriously. I half expected Sarah Connor to kick down the conference room door screaming “Death to Skynet!”) MIT has projects along the same lines at it’s Distributed Robotics Lab, and there are other groups around the country working on ways that allow collections of small, relatively dumb and ineffectual sub-robots to come together to make large, resilient and very effective composite robots—just like a certain Scottish-accented terminator we know.

[1] i.e. not real — yet.

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.

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. Neuroscientists have been working with functional MRI scanners since at least early 1990s to sift out speech patterns from brain waves, but they’ve been stymied by all the other signal noise that go with speech. Silly little activities like breathing have been giving them fits.

At the end of last year, Dutch scientists from Maastricht University had a breakthrough. Dr. Elia Formisano and her team discovered that the brain gives each phoneme of speech a unique code or fingerprint that shows up in the fMRI data.  Then, whenever the brain hears the sound, no matter who or what is uttering it, the brain combines the different fingerprints into coherent speech. By reading the code, Formisano and her team discovered they could parse out different sounds, and even who is speaking them. Ultimately, they hope to be able to combine those sounds and tell what words are being heard.

So, to sum up, we’ve got brain-scanning computers that can hear what we hear, see what we see, and possibly even move based on our thoughts. Hellooooooo SkyNet.

Teaching a computer how to learn is a perennial topic in artificial intelligence research, and one that’s long been mined in science fiction. The moment when the computer demonstrates it has learned how to learn is usually a pretty significant moment in any story it’s in, not least because it is one of the Laws Of Science Fiction that once a computer has started to learn, it will continue to learn at an ever accelerating rate. (A corollary of this Law states that if the computer isn’t already self-aware, sentience will arise by the end of the next chapter or act at the very latest.) Interestingly, the “My God! It’s learnt how to learn!” moment seems to be dwelt on by movie and TV shows (Wargames, Colossus, Terminator 3) much more than it crops up in literary science fiction. In literary science fiction, artificial intelligence is often simply presented as fait accompli. So does anyone have recommendations for a good literary treatment of the birth of an A.I.? (Frederic Brown’s 1954 short-short story “Answer” is of course taken as a given classic of the genre).