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Donna and the Doctor’s relationship is like that between adult siblings or very old friends, and it’s a nice change of pace from the romantic overtones that played out with the previous two companions. The dynamic is enhanced by the fact that Tate/Noble is older than the typical early-twenty-something female companion, and so perhaps a little less susceptible to looking at the adventurous Doctor with a starry-eyed gaze. Donna is perfectly willing cut the Doctor down to size if she thinks he’s getting a little too pleased with himself. This leads to some of the most memorable exchanges of the show to date, and Tate plays the part with impeccable comic timing and gusto. Tennant is, well, still the best Doctor ever (with Tom Baker in a more than honorable second place.)

The Doctor and Donna’s friendship plays out across a season of ambitious stories. The fall of Pompeii, a factory of alien slaves, a library the size of a planet that plays host to some of the scariest monsters ever, and the intensely claustrophobic confines of a damaged shuttle all form the background to some thrilling (and sometimes genuinely moving) plots. The season builds to a no-holds-barred climax which acts as a reunion show of sorts: A group of the Doctor’s former companions (including Torchwood’s Captain Jack and Sarah Jane Smith) band together to stop a dark threat from the past. Some Who watchers objected to the second half of the finale, feeling that the conclusion tried too hard to make fans happy in some respects. But I think the show stayed true to the darker and more ambiguous nature of the show, with an ending that really packed a punch.

The DVD’s also include the standalone 2006 Christmas Special, in which the Doctor teams up with Astrid Peth, played by none other than Kylie Minogue. (The real scene stealers are The Hosts, angelic robot concierges that go very, very bad.) There’s also a set of making-of features, one for each episode, deleted scenes (including a slightly, but significantly, alternate ending to the Season Four finale), and a bunch of other extras. If you decide to only ever own one season of Doctor Who, make it this one.

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A little research reveals that it’s basic economics: Head-only freezing can cost as little as $80,000, far better than the $150,000 whole-body freezing costs, based on the pricing at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a real life cold-storage non-profit. The theory behind cryonics is simple: The brain is the storage unit of everything that defines us: personality, memories, habits, etc. If the brain can be frozen without damage, then the person contained by the brain can live indefinitely until science is ready for them.

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But let’s focus (pun intended) on the tiny cameras. Sarah and Mike had a needle-in-a-haystack problem. The bad guys’ target was a factory that produces a key oil refining part. Our heroes had to locate the evil-doers on a production floor swarming with white coated technicians. They solved the problem with some of the snazziest ID badges ever created. Each badge held a tiny  camera, which then broadcast video in real time back to KITT. The super car’s more powerful computers separated the faces from the rest of the image and compared them to an NSA face database to locate the villains. The whole device is preposterous, right?

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Dr. Stefan Savage, a UCSD computer scientist, and his student, Benajamin Laxton, demonstrated their software on two images of a key. The first was taken from close range with a cellphone camera. The second set of keys was shot using a telephoto lens form a rofotop to capture an image of keys on a cafe table 200 feet away.  Then they wrote an algorithm in Matlab that could normalize the picture of the key depending on distance and the angle of the photo. Once the image has been normalized, it was a relatively simple matter to encode the ridges along the keylength into a numerical pattern, and then render that pattern into a real metal key.

Of course, the unanswered question for this experiment has to be, Why? Here’s what Savage said on the UCSD website: “If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos on-line, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys.”

Well, that’s a good point, and it’s something worth being careful about. But I still say he watched too many police shows.

In essence, what Dr. Babak Parviz has accomplished is to put an integrated circuit into a contact lens. Using a process called self-assembly, Parviz arranges nanometer-thick metal onto the organic polymer that makes up the contact lens, and then connects them to tiny light emitting diodes. The LEDs will be able to paint information on top of whatever scene you are looking at. They haven’t gotten to the point of lighting up the diodes, but they have begun testing them on animals. So far,  rabbits can withstand wearing the lenses for 20 minutes with no ill effects.

But once the microchip is in place, Parviz thinks it will be a short hop, technologically speaking, to getting those robot features built into the lens. Perhaps most of us don’t need targeting computers, but the zoom feature could sure be handy when I have to watch baseball from the nosebleed section, and I have to figure that recording video straight from the contact lens, Finder style, can’t be far behind.

Most of the gadgetry on the lens will be arranged into a ring that surrounds the transparent part of the eye. As contact lens wearers know, the sclera has no nerves in it, which makes it a great spot for putting wireless communications or other features for this lens. Actually, they’re  hoping to use that space for  solar panels. 

The one thing these contact lenses can’t do? Fix your eyesight. I imagine that wll be along soon.

With buzz already building for The Road, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Viggo Mortensen set to come out sometime in 2009, Science Not Fiction decided to take at look at some of our favorite after-the-end-of-the-world scenarios. I excluded the various incarnations of War of Worlds because the book is basically an extended flashback from the safety of a rebuilt future, and the movies are apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic. Similarly Independence Day and Deep Impact are about averting armageddon. Twelve Monkeys and Oryx and Crake have post-apocalyptic scenes, but the back bone of their narrative is firmly in the pre-apocalyptic world–the selections below are all about life in the no-holds-barred aftermath. So in chronological order:

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Anyway, one of the keys to the drama of the episode was the question of just how fast smallpox would spread from person to person, and whether Jacob Hood, our intrepid scientist, and Rachel young, his compadre and handler, could stop the disease from spreading. It’s not easy, because smallpox can be transmitted over the air, just by breathing within six feet of a victim. Contagion is even more likely if you touch the victim or for  some reason exchange fluids. Alas, Young tries to capture a possible suspect by chasing him into the street where he promptly gets hit by a car. Young goes to check on him and gets blood all over herself. Straight to the containment area for her!

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Around half way through the episode we learn that KITT has been programmed with a self-destruct mechanism by his creator, Dr. Charles Graiman, so there would be a failsafe against KITT going bad. Graiman is familiar with cyborgs gone wild, because he made a KITT prototype named KARR (who is not, as it happens, a car) with the capability to self-program. KARR’s evolution as a learning machine apparently led him to cause the deaths of seven people, though we don’t know how, exactly.

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The British sci-fi series, Primeval, features a small team who have the job of capturing dinosaurs and other creatures who wander through rips, or “anomalies,” in the time-space continuum.The DVD of the first season that we reviewed yesterday is out today, and the nice folks at BBC America gave us the opportunity to pose a question to the cast about the show. Here, Andrew-Lee Potts, who plays Connor Temple, the show’s resident geek, answers our question about what creature he’d most like to see make an appearance on the show.

In recent years, science fiction and fantasy shows have generally tried to steer away from plotlines that involve creatures appearing, then terrifying and/or eating bystanders, and then being dispatched at the end of the episode once the cast has figured out the creatures’ main weakness. This plot formula is only for the start of season one, the thinking goes, when audiences need self-contained stories to introduce them to the cast and the show’s milieu. The real meat happens later, as multi-episode arcs and more complex character development are brought in, and monster-of-the-week episodes, with their limited formula, go to the bottom of the story pitch pile. Primeval explodes this thinking by having a show built firmly around the monster-of-the-week device, while still advancing engaging season-length arcs and furthering clever character development.

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