The second issue of the Eureka comic book series is out. Our favorite small-town-that-happens-to-border-the-government’s-most-advanced-research-facility-sherriff, Carter, and his deputy, Jo, are continuing a manhunt.
Because they are interested in taking their quarry alive, Carter is equipped with something he has taken to calling a “bubble gun.” The gun immobilizes its target by shooting out a temporary force-field that forms a bubble. In the real world, bubbles—or more accurately, foam—actually are the basis of a gun designed to immobilize enemies.
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For Eureka fans anxiously waiting for the second half of the current third season to air (all but the last episode have already completed filming, but no air date has been annouced), there is finally some comfort to be had. Released today is the first in a four-part comic book series set in America’s favorite death-ray-posessing-small-town, Eureka. Once again, Sheriff Carter finds himself contending with the accidental fallout that comes from living in a town that happens to be home to the U.S. government’s most bleeding edge research and development facility.
Eureka is one of our favorite shows here at Science Not Fiction, and the comic faithfully reunites us with characters we have come to love over the last two-and-a-half seasons on air. The adaptation to the printed page is helmed by Eureka co-creator Andrew Cosby, written by Brendan Hay (a relative newcomer to comics, but with television writing experience that probably explains his excellent ear for dialogue that is true to Eureka‘s characters) and drawn by Diego Barreto. The story is set sometime near or after the end of Season One, giving Cosby and Hay the ability to use some fan-favorite characters that have since left the show, and the chance to fill in some of the backstories of other characters that couldn’t be handled in the limited screentime available on the show itself. The first issue immediately dives into Deputy Jo Lupo’s previously obscure military history. Lupo is a former U.S. Army Ranger, but little has been made of that on screen beyond justifying her zealous appreciation for guns, so seeing her experiences fleshed out is a promising start. We’re looking forward to issue #2 (and, Sci-Fi Powers-That-Be, an announcement from you on an air date would be nice too!)
Last night’s midseason finale of Eureka tied up a number of loose ends, and set up a number of new plot points for the second half of the third season, set to air sometime in 2009. (Incidentally, last minute struggles with the script for this episode were responsible for Eureka co-creater Jamie Paglia having to sprint through the San Diego Convention Center to make it on time to DISCOVER’s Comic-Con panel on the Science Behind Science Fiction.) One of the things that Sheriff Carter finds himself contending with is a “nanoparticle syntactic foam” that goes from foam to something harder than concrete in a few seconds—the ideal substance for sealing off the abandoned underground facility that has been featured throughout the season, but not something you’d want to spill on yourself.
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On Tuesday’s nights Eureka, a miniature sun was accidently born in the skies above the town, wreaking destruction. The solution? To shoot iron into the sunlet’s core.
This is in fact not far off how some real stars die: iron poisoning. (more…)
Last night on Eureka, Sherriff Carter was faced with a bumbling superhero who had constructed his gear from discarded pieces of technology thrown out by the town’s scientists. In this, our wannabe superhero was participating in the ultimate expression of the fine old art of dumpster diving.
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The curse of a mummy’s tomb lay over Eureka in last night’s episode. (Spoilers below!)
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As chance would have it, the night after writing this post about the equations shown in science fiction, an episode of Eureka aired in which Sheriff Carter was faced with the pictured board full of equations.
Carter, not the most technical of men, had to learn the equations in order to have chance at stopping a runaway time-loop. The equations looked familiar, so I checked in with Kevin Grazier, Eureka‘s science advisor, a JPL researcher, and a panelist on DISCOVER’s “Science Behind Science Fiction” Panel at this year’s Comic-Con. It turns out that Kevin actually wrote the equations, borrowed from a real class he gives that touches on the theories of special and general relativity. The equations refer to how time behaves in Einstein’s relativity theory, in particular, the phenomenon of time dilation. The neat part is that pretty much anybody who finished high school can master the math and science behind special relativity’s prediction of time dilation (as the title of this post says, if Carter can do it, so can you!).
Time dilation occurs noticeably when a object is moving close to the speed of light: imagine a spacecraft shooting by the Earth. From the point of view of someone standing on Earth, time dilation means that time is running slowly onboard the spacecraft. A second on the spaceship could be equal to an hour on Earth. (Time dilation has been experimentally verified using subatomic particles and particle accelerators, but the principle is the same.) The key is this one part of the board, which I’ve highlighted.
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Last night’s episode of Eureka was terrific, easily one of the show’s best, with some amazing performances from the cast. If you haven’t seen the episode, or you haven’t yet watched Eureka at all, get over to the Sci Fi channel’s website and and catch it. The plot revolved around problems with the flow of time—and where you have time, you have clocks.
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Last night’s episode of Eureka, “Best in Faux,” had many of the town’s supersmart denizens trying to win a contest for the most lifelike robot dog. Despite an interest in more pressing matters, such as a potential volcanic eruption, Sheriff Carter is ordered to investigate why some of the robot entrants have experienced literal meltdowns. Robot dog competitions are taken seriously in the the town of Eureka. He shouldn’t have been too surprised–similar robot competitions have a long (forgive the pun) pedigree.
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Last night’s episode of Eureka, “What About Bob?” centered on Lab 27, a huge biosphere carved out of the rock underneath the Global Dyanmics research facility. The biosphere is a completely enclosed artificial ecosystem — apart from energy and information, nothing is supposed to come in or out of the biosphere, not even air. All of the food, water, oxygen and so on needed by any inhabitants of the biosphere must be produced by biological processes that recycle every ounce of waste. Like most real-life attempts to construct biospheres, Lab 27 was built for the sake of research that supports human exploration of space.
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