Well, now we know what you get when you combine a wasp, a bat, a gila monster, and a tiger into one giant nasty thing: asexual reproduction! OK, not really, that just happens to be what happened on last night’s episode of Fringe (spoilers below.)

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How often does the techno-babble utterly fail? Seriously, how often does a TV scientist explain a mysterious new phenomenon, McGyver together a device to tap it/diffuse it–and then totally strike 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. (more…)

To paraphrase the Hold Steady, we like to stay positive.   At Science Not Fiction, staying positive means that we don’t debunk (or nerdgas.)  If the sonic screwdriver solves the problem, then by all means whip it out.

That being said, this show Fringe is seriously stretching us to the limit.

Fringe Gets Fast Aging and Frozen Optics Wrong [Popular Mechanics]

Fringe “violates basic tenets of biology, chemistry and physics without any explanation.” [Polite Dissent]

Now that we’ve gotten that off our chest, here are few other links to help lighten the mood:

You say Obama?  I say Adama for President.  [LA Times]

H.P Lovecraft as the Whitman’s Sampler copy writer [McSweeney's]

Future Farms to Have Giant Livestock [Modern Mechanix]

Fringe, J.J. Abrams’ (of Lost and Alias fame) latest show, last night featured the unintended fall out from an attempt to grow humans in tanks. Since the goal of the original attempt was to produce fully grown soldiers, bypassing the normal wait time of 9 months plus 18 years, some liberties were taken with growth hormones in order to accelerate aging. Thus fall out, such as a baby that goes from conception to death of old age within a few hours.

Growing human beings outside the confines of a real uterus–ectogenesis–has been a staple of science-fiction since at least Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World: it was a critical element in The Matrix, and even featured in a recent Doctor Who episode. It’s also been a staple of real science for some time: in 1996, Japanese researchers were able to keep goat fetuses alive and developing for 3 weeks in their artificial womb. In 2002, researchers at Cornell were able to keep human embryos alive and developing for several days, after which the experiments were terminated to stay within embryonic research ethics rules.

This real research is driven by the desire to help childless people, or dangerously premature babies, and not, say, a hankering for a super-soldier production line. But if the day comes when we can produce a child with just a smear of genetic material and a machine, then we will have to do some deep thinking. On the one hand, this kind of technology could allow us to colonize distant star systems (instead of trying to keep humans alive for hundreds of years of interstellar travel, send a robot and some DNA), while on the other it could lead to the creation of an entirely new underclass of humanity, a la the “tanks” of Space: Above and Beyond.