Voltron, Dinobots, Insecticons, Constructicons: What did they all have in common? OK, yes, they were all toys made by Mattel*, but what *else* do they have in common? They all took disparate parts to form a greater, unified hold, kind of a sci-fi e pluribus unum.
Which is exactly what the students and scientists at the Institute for Dynamics and Systems Control in Switzerland pulled off at the end of the semester last year, when they created the Distributed Flight Array. The devices they engineered look like hexagons made of white plastic, each with a propeller in the center. Alone, each device is autonomous, but pretty dumb, mostly just wandering around the floor and occasionally lifting into unstable flight. But as each device bumps into another, they dock. When they reach a critical number, the collective becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.
If we were ever to have a game of Survivor, the Trans-Galactic Edition, where all life forms across our local cluster of galaxies competed against each other to avoid getting voted “off the cluster,” there’d be a few attributes that might make us animals alliance-worthy. As we make worried glances toward the Stromulans from J5231, a plasma-cloud form of life with a level of consciousness far beyond our own (but alas, rather picky about what environments they will live in), we might trumpet our ability to form bodies of trillions of cells based on one single starting cell, our fantastic mobility, and the cultural productivity of our human species, which has led to amazing innovations like the George Foreman Grill.
For those of you who couldn’t make it to San Diego last week, Discovermagazine.com and the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange present our panel discussion on “Mad Science,” featuring Jaime Paglia (co-Executive Producer of Eureka), Kevin Grazier (Battlestar Galactica and Eureka science adviser), Jane Espenson (Dollhouse, Battlestar, Caprica, and lots more), Ricardo Gil da Costa (science adviser for Fringe), and Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman (writers for Fringe).
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).
Put two stars of Battlestar Galactica on stage with an artificial intelligence expert and two leading robotics professors…and you suck the sci-fi out of the room and replace it with reality (sort of). The World Science Festival event “Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon” drew a large crowd at the 92nd Street Y on Friday night, for a discussion of how human brains might soon fuse with computer chips to create real cyborgs.
Moderator Faith Salie introduced the panelists: Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Michael Hogan, also known as Colonel Saul Tigh; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis group at Cornell University; Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin; and Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.
Salie asked each panelist to define what a cyborg is. Everyone had different answers: Warwick said it’s something that is part human, Lipson said it’s a moving target or a physical device that takes on biological life, and Bostrom said it’s the essence of human intelligence.
The Codex Futurius project, this blog’s never-ending quest to explore the timeless scientific questions raised by science fiction, is back—and this time we have reinforcements. The NAS’ Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEEx), a group dedicated to bringing real science into entertainment, has agreed to help us find experts who can tackle these ineffable sci-fi questions.
Our first expert-answered Codex question goes to J Storrs Hall, an independent scientist and author who’s also president of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech-oriented think tank. Thanks especially to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the director of SEEx, for connecting us with Hall. Without further ado, here’s the question of the day, asked by an (imagined) big-time Hollywood director/producer who thinks getting the science right might help nail down that elusive Oscar:
“How could nanotechnology transform the world? Most importantly, how could I stop a plague of nanorobots from eating my spaceship/research facility/planet?”
Earlier this week in New York, Battlestar Galactica‘s co-creators David Eick and Ron Moore, along with cast members Mary McDonnell (President Roslin) and Edward James Olmos (Admiral Adama), sat down with the press for a Q&A session following a screening of the last episode. We were just as brimming with questions as you are about the finale, and here are some of the answers we got. Needless to say, what follows below the jump contains MASSIVE SPOILERS if you haven’t already seen tonight’s show, so don’t say you weren’t warned!
One of the best things about the final season of BSG has been that much of the annoying mysticism of previous seasons has now been explained by science. I’ll admit it was convoluted TV show science, but at least it wasn’t people seeing ghosts or having divine inspirations.
The Chief being mysteriously pulled toward the Temple of Five? Turns out he was one of the aforementioned five and had been there before (my apologies if that’s a spoiler for you, but really, catch up already).
BSG is best when it revolves around people and politics, as opposed to the god(s) and the lost tribes of whoever. Desperate people, dirty spaceships and ragtag resistance movements? Gripping and relevant TV. President Roslin’s visions and imaginary shamans? Not so much.
When I saw Galactica’s hull break open and the Six shoot into space, I was reminded of BSG science adviser Kevin Grazier explaining what happens when you fall out of a spaceship. We’re hoping for a post from Kevin on the potential explanations for artificial gravity, but we appreciate that the show has a solid science adviser and appears to listen to him occasionally (no aliens, no time travel, real constellations).
With all that in mind here are non-supernatural solutions for my five favorite Battlestar mysteries (note that these are suggestions not spoilers): (more…)
It must be nice to have a car like KITT that can, amongst his many other handy abilities, transform. Sure it’s handy for crime fighting and all, but being able to turn into a van or a truck means Michael Knight never needs to rent a moving truck or worry about delivery when there’s a big Ikea sale. But since KITT’s ability to rearrange himself at the molecular level means that he can transform himself into any number of car-like shapes, even ones he’s never experienced before. And that means that he — and his deceased creator Dr. Graiman — has solved the problem of getting an artificial intelligence to use newly added parts. Typically a robot has to have a whole new set of code to be able to handle a new tool or sensor. Sure, most computers can handle plug-and-play attachments these days, but they still require a set of pre-written code to drive the newly added part. Artificial intelligence designers want the robot to be able to design that code itself.
Sometime in the future, a group of renegade scientists and technologists will take a time machine to now. They're spilling the secrets of tomorrow here at Discover's Science Not Fiction blog.
▪ Malcolm MacIver is a bioengineer at Northwestern University who studies the neural and biomechanical basis of animal intelligence. He consults for sci-fi films (Tron Legacy, Joss Whedon's The Avengers), and was the science advisor for Caprica. He covers AI and robotics for Science Not Fiction.
▪ Kyle Munkittrick (Web, Twitter) is program director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He covers transhumanism.
Put two stars of Battlestar Galactica on stage with an artificial intelligence expert and two leading robotics professors…and you suck the sci-fi out of the room and replace it with reality (sort of). The World Science Festival event “
The Codex Futurius project, this blog’s never-ending quest to explore the timeless scientific questions raised by science fiction, is back—and this time we have reinforcements. The NAS’ 
It must be nice to have a car like KITT that can, amongst his many other handy abilities, transform. Sure it’s handy for crime fighting and all, but being able to turn into a van or a truck means Michael Knight never needs to rent a moving truck or worry about delivery when there’s a big Ikea sale. But since KITT’s ability to rearrange himself at the molecular level means that he can transform himself into any number of car-like shapes, even ones he’s never experienced before. And that means that he — and his deceased creator Dr. Graiman — has solved the problem of getting an artificial intelligence to use newly added parts. Typically a robot has to have a whole new set of code to be able to handle a new tool or sensor. Sure, most computers can handle plug-and-play attachments these days, but they still require a set of pre-written code to drive the newly added part. Artificial intelligence designers want the robot to be able to design that code itself.
