Before his TV writing career took off, Jaime Paglia, co-creator of SyFy’s number-one-rated show,  had a part-time gig as a program director of a science and technology public radio show called Cambridge Forum.

“It was this rare opportunity to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts where literally you have some of the greatest minds in science and technology,” Paglia told me in an interview recently. “Tim Berners-Lee, who literally invented the Internet, and Rodney Brooks, head of MIT robotics lab, the guy who made Sojourner, and who invented the Roomba in his spare time. Those guys, they see the world differently. There’s a unique way their brains work that allows them to be as creative as they are.”

These Cambridge geniuses eventually found their way into the show, if not as Nathan Stark or Douglas Fargo (Did you know he had a first name? I had to look it up), then at least as Walter Perkins or Carl Carlson. And Paglia also has another inspiration for scientific heroes: Dr. Donald Paglia, UCLA medical professor emeritus and Jaime’s dad.

The elder Paglia was very nearly the medical officer inside Biosphere 2, but decided he’d rather stick around and watch his son grow up some. Instead, Dr. Paglia served as the medical officer on the outside, and he even brought his family down to watch it get sealed for its two-year mission of self-sustainability. The idea of Biosphere 2 led directly to an episode of Eureka (”What About Bob?“) featuring a missing person inside a Biosphere-like place.

So, sometimes the science leads directly to a show, but Paglia says that story and science have about equal weight in driving the arc of a given episode.  Paglia and his team spend a lot of time with science magazines, blogs, and Web sites, and they track all their science and sci-fi ideas on the most important of all scientific tools: a white board.

“In Season One, we put all of our characters on one board, with episodes across the top, and for each one we wrote what we want to have happen to these characters,” Paglia said. “Meanwhile, we had a separate board with all the sci-fi ideas. We made a concerted effort, without being too on the nose, to tie what’s happening with the science to what’s happening to the characters.”

The heroes of Eureka strike a stark contrast with the scientific heroes on other shows, most especially those on Big Bang Theory. In that show, the scientists are depicted as so nerdy and unable to cope socially that one of the leads is assumed to have Asperger’s Syndrome by advocacy groups. Eureka’s main character may be everyman Sheriff Jack Carter, but the scientific heroes are both brilliant and reasonably well adjusted to social norms. For Paglia, that was a deliberate choice.

“It’s an attractive quality to be smart, and inventive,” Paglia said. “It’s not about biceps and perfect teeth. We wanted to turn things upside down in this town.”

But he still enjoys the contrast between the jock Carter and Eureka’s smarty-pants.

“Carter is very smart in a street-smart way; he has the ability to see the forest for the trees” he said. “While the scientists are so caught up in what they’re doing, they can’t see that, which was definitely a quality of some of the guys I was interviewing for Cambridge Forum. You could see [yourself saying], ‘I’ll bet you never know where your car keys are, you can’t be bothered by that, because you’re too busy creating new math.’”

Interview audio with Russell T. Davies and Euros Lyn

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

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…

Now, Wolfenstein 3D has been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Three things are interesting about this release: first is that the project was handled largely by the John Carmack, the programming genius who co-created the original Wolfenstein for the PC (which, in 1992, meant designing for a world where a 33 MHz 486 was considered to be a computing powerhouse).

Second is that the code used in the iPod version descends directly from Carmack’s original codebase—many ports of classic games on modern platforms are in fact rewrites, which often fail to preserve that magic something that made the original so playable. Carmack has benefited from a decision he made years ago to release the code for the original Wolfenstein to the open source community. The open source code had been modified over the years to run with modern systems, making the port to the iPod platform much easier.

Third, Carmack has come up with a decent way to control the game on the iPod, sans keyboard or mouse. This is pretty significant—although the PC version of Wolfenstein is most celebrated for its impressive graphics engine, it, and its successor, Doom, established a defacto standard for controlling first person games that is still used today on PCs. While other first-person games on the iPod have already been released, I have often found them difficult to play, with non-intuitive controls. But Wolfenstein’s control system is simple, intuitive and effective, allowing me to mow down bad guys and blast through levels just as effectively as I did back in 1992. By creating an effective control interface for the iPod’s touch screen, the rerelease of Wolfenstein may herald a new wave of gaming on the iPod (in fact, the iPod version of Wolfenstein was originally conceived as a toy internal project to test different control interfaces, according to Carmack’s programming notes). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just happen to have a Pixies playlist on my iPod Touch waiting to go…

If you can’t wait until Friday, come back tomorrow for coverage of tonight’s panel discussion at the United Nations, where the Battlestar crew will be joined by high level UN representatives to talk about the show’s take on human rights, terrorism, and reconciliation.

In other news, Eureka is still on track to return to our screens this summer, and the next season of Sanctuary is getting stuck into production this Monday. I’m also looking forward to Warehouse 13, which is set to premiere this summer and looks like a lot of fun.

We’re here to help. In the comments below, fire away with your science questions about any sci fi book, TV show, movie, radio play, comic, or whatever that you can think of, and we’ll set about answering as many as we can in upcoming posts as part of our Codex Futurius project.

Bear in mind, we yearn to answer science questions. We’re relatively useless for fielding pop entertainment rumors or speculating on why Starbuck keeps having weird visions. But the science of Sci Fi? Bring it on.

• Battlestar Weirdness: For reasons more arcane than the Cylons’ plan, Universal is talking to Glen A. Larson about making a Battlestar Galactica movie–based on the original Battlestar series. What the heck? I loved the original series in my bespectacled youth, (we were really starved for space fights back then), but they couldn’t hold a blaster to the reimagined series. In other news, the actor playing Ellen Tigh and Battlestar creator Ron Moore will be making guest appearances on CSI. Don’t ask why.

• Watchmen Watchmen Watchmen! Despite getting wrecked by most mainstream critics,  Watchmen cleaned up this weekend with a $55.7  million haul at the box office.  Anyone out there see it and think it’s awesome? I haven’t seen it yet, but my nerd network  seems to be rating it a solid  “meh.”

• Smells like Teen Kirk: OK, I know this has made the rounds, but everyone needs to know that about the Star Trek themed colognes: “Pon Farr”, “Tiberius”, and—my personal favorite— “Red Shirt”. Because tomorrow may never come.  Also worth noting, Paramount put replicas of the models of the new Enterprise on display at the Arclight (a.k.a. best theater in the world ever) in Hollywood. Click through for images.

• Fantastic art Spectrum announced the 16 winners of the best in 2008 fantasy art. This is not the usual fantasy dreck promulgated by Wizards of the Coast and well worth the click.

•  What’s on  TV : Last week Knight Rider sped off into the sunset for good, but  news isn’t all bad for sci fi fans. Heroes got picked up for one more season, and, perhaps more enticing, Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller is trying to generate momentum for a new Star Trek show, oriented back toward the original series. Also, Red Dwarf will make its return after 10 years with a two-parter expected to air over Easter in the UK.

Hat tips to I09, Sci Fi Wire, SFFMedia, and Neatorama.

With a foreword by DISCOVER’s very own Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, The Saucer Fleet dissects in great detail flying saucers from classic productions such as This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet and The Invaders, and looks at their impact on the audiences of the day. As well as a detailed synopses of the movie or show and extensive production notes giving the history and background of how each fictional saucer was brought to life, the authors also use frame-by-frame analyses to create engineering diagrams of saucer exteriors and interiors (often struggling with the fact that the interior set designers didn’t care overly much about matching up with the scale shown by the exterior models.) Dedicated model-builders can use these diagrams to build their own reproductions, but any science-fiction fan will get a kick out of seeing how much thought and effort went into designing these deceptively simple spacecraft that once thrilled or terrified audiences.

But afterward I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe The Doctor was sitting a little stiffly on his high horse. As far as we can tell, Adipose represents a painless way to lose weight. Sure, it can be used to kill people, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not inherent in the drug. I suspect Adipose would have a long line of customers even once full information was provided.

Naturally, people have been looking for a pill to help them lose weight since more or less forever. But consider that in recent years, obesity has been described more and more frequently in terms of an epidemic, right down to epidemiological studies of how the problem is spreading. Now blogger Jennifer Gibson pulls together some of the research to argue that obesity may in fact be caused, at least in some people, by a virus called Ad-36.

Early research found that 30% of obese people were infected with Ad-36, while only 11% of non-obese people were infected. New research finds that Ad-36 has a direct effect on human fat stem cells. The virus infects the fatty tissue and increases replication, differentiation, and accumulation of fat cells. Ultimately, this leads to larger fat cells, and more of them. The virus also increases lipid sensitivity and decreases leptin secretion of the new fat cells.

She also says that sometimes people who know other people who gain weight rapidly can even catch the virus. She goes on  to argue that the spread of obesity cannot entirely be explained by sociological factors like too much TV watching orpoor eating habits, that the existence of some kind of fat bug may go explain the speed with which the problem has progressed.  If Gibson is right, then some people may be able to solve some of their weight problems with the application of an anti-viral, or some other treatment that attacks viruses.

[Hat tip to io9]

In other news from nerdland:

• Want to build your own Death Star? Just pony up $15 septillion (15 followed by 24 zeroes). Rick Gold decided he had a few spare minutes to work out just how much the construction of the Death Star hurt the ole Imperial Budget.

• A man robbed a pair 7-11 stores in the Denver area armed with a bat’leth, the traditional weapon of the Klingons. The dude himself may represent a new high for geekery, but I also enjoyed the sourcing required by ABC-7 Denver to explain the bat’leth to viewers: “The Startrek.com Web site describes the Klingon weapon as crescent-shaped and about a yard long.” and then “Klingons were warlike enemies of the good-guy United Federation of Planets in the original “Star Trek” series but were allies in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (Hat tip to everyone, but in my case Geekologie)

• Scientists are getting so close to being able to implant drug delivery systems under the skin and control them via WiFi that other scientists are writing papers to express concern over security. I must admit, I’d hate to have my antibiotics hacked.

I know that many scientists (and at least one science blogger) really like the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.   The show is well-written and acted, has a half dozen funny one-liners per episode, and delivers a weekly helping of science and nerd culture in-jokes.

In a recent episode, Howard the NASA scientist erased several hours of data from the Mars Rover after inviting a woman he had met in a bar to come back to his office and drive it.  His pick up line: “Have you ever driven  a car …. on Mars?” Funny stuff and mostly harmless, right?

No.  Not right.   After watching several episodes on a recent cross-country flight, I’ve concluded that this show is bad for American Science. And here’s why:

Three of the four main characters are scientists with limited romantic prospects.  Howard lives with his mother and inhabits an imaginary world where his Beatles haircut makes him irresistible to women.  Raj finds himself unable to speak when the nerds’ sexy neighbor is in the apartment.  Sheldon apparently has a sitcom version of Asperger’s Syndrome.

Only Johnny Galecki’s character, Leonard, finds himself simultaneously able to work in physics, love comic books and successfully date women.

Thus BBT reinforces the popular stereotype that scientists are social misfits (mostly male) who can’t get a date.

Not only is this not true (granted I work at a science magazine but most of the researchers I meet are very cool and many of them are women), but research has posited that these portrayals potentially discourage kids from pursuing science past junior high.

I made this argument to Sean Carroll while I was out at Caltech last week, and his response was essentially, “Lighten up.  People love these characters.”  Respectfully, I say that’s wrong.  People loved Urkel, but no one wants to be Urkel.

As the creators of the dominant portrayal of scientists in American culture right now, the producers of BBT can do better.  And they can start by letting Howard move out of his mom’s house.

Even though my perfectly reasonable request to DISCOVER’s powers-that-be for a small research fund to investigate these machines was mysteriously refused (it’s all office politics here), I still felt obligated to try them out on your behalf, loyal readers, so I pulled up a chair and stuck in my hard-earned.

In operation, both machines work pretty much like any other modern slot machine–insert money to buy credits, select how many lines you want to bet on, along with how many credits you want to bet on each line, press the button, and away you go. What makes them different are the little themed events that happen whenever you win on a line, with sound effects and video from each franchise. Interestingly, for two new machines, both of them are firmly rooted in the classic Star Trek and Star Wars of 40 and 30 years ago–there’s no Next Generation, or Phantom Menance, here, which says something about the staying cultural power and nostalgia factor of both original franchises.

Of course, it wasn’t long before both machines had eaten all my credits, plus any and all additional credits I had won along the way. So, on the one hand, yes, these machines are designed to sucker science fiction fans into spending more money than they would on a generic slot machine. For example, I expended a lot of credits (albeit penny credits) on the Star Wars game because I really wanted to hit the bonus round where the Death Star mounted in a plastic bubble above the screen lights up and spins around to determine the payout.

On the other hand, realistically, you’re not going to win big in Vegas. The house always wins. So, if you’re not getting your entertainment dollar’s-worth out of the gambling process itself, don’t spend your money. When a fan plays one of these machines, they’re probably getting vastly more entertainment per cent than a person playing at one of the generic slot machines. To us, on some level, if it’s accompanied by a little video of Han Solo uttering one of his trademark laconic quips, a 10-credit combo payout is worth more than a bland 50-credit bonus. Other slot machines promise the chance of winning mere money–these machines give you Scotty and Kirk and Jawas and Darth Vader as well. Who can complain about losing the wager of a few dollars for that?

The series finale featured cameos by a lot of the supporting characters from the Stargate franchise universe, but otherwise was almost a regular episode, without even the cliffhanger that usually accompanies a season finale–despite being cancelled from Sci Fi’s regular line-up, the producers are clearly expecting a fairly seamless continuation of Atlantis’s storylines in movie form, as happened with Stargate: SG-1 and the direct release Ark of Truth and Continuum movies. In any case the departure of Atlantis clears the decks for the new Stargate: Universe series, which will begin filming next month. Universe promises more space-based action (in part to satisfy Sci Fi viewers who have become accustomed to Battlestar Galactica’s viper-on-raider action), and more alien aliens. Fingers crossed it inherits SG-1’s and Atlantis’s spirit too.

Image courtesy Sci Fi.

So what do you think? Does Smith look like he has what it takes to be the 11th Doctor? What do you think makes for a good Doctor anyway?