The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files

Forget Warp Drive and Faster-Than-light Space Travel: “Slow Light” Is Where It’s At

2009-11-18T17:08:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that the speed of light is an absolute upper limit, faster-than-light space travel is deeply embedded in science fiction. Einstein showed that any object with mass cannot reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light. But science fiction tends to overlook this very inconvenient truth simply because the universe is so big. To reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star after our own Sun, would take more than four years for a spaceship moving at the speed of light, and a jaunt across the full diameter of our galaxy would take 100,000 years. Knowing this, script writers imagine solutions like Star Trek’s “warp drive” that allow the Enterprise to travel around the galaxy at multiples of light speed, or “worm holes” that provide cosmic short cuts.

Although NASA and some scientists have speculated about warp drives and worm holes, no one yet has the slightest idea of how to build an actual device that will beat Einstein’s limit, which may never happen. But although science fiction has to use imagination to move events along, there is increasing interest at the other end of the scale, where light itself is slowed down.

Most people know that light moves at a constant speed of about 300,000 kilometers/second (186,000 miles/second), and are startled to hear that light can also move more slowly; but it can, because the quoted speed applies only to light in vacuum. In a transparent medium like glass or plastic, the speed can drop nearly by half. 150,000 kilometers/second is still enormously fast, but it means that when you observe the world through a pane of glass, you’re seeing events a tiny slice of time later than someone looking through an open window.

That’s not the end of it, because scientists have made light move much more slowly yet. The breakthrough came in 1999, when Danish-born physicist Lene Hau, working at Harvard and the Rowland Institute in Cambridge, brought a ray of laser light to a speed of 61 kilometers/per hour (that’s 38 miles per hour, not per second), almost comparable to a briskly pedaled bicycle. A year later, she dialed the speed down to slower than a walk, 1 mile/hour, and then in 2001 came the ultimate: she brought a light ray to a dead halt.

To do this, Hau introduced the light into an exotic medium called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) – a quantum mechanical superatom formed when a group of regular atoms merges near absolute zero, as predicted by Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in the 1920s. In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, associated with the University of Colorado at Boulder, earned a Nobel Prize in Physics when they achieved the necessary extreme cooling to obtain the first BEC, made of about 2,000 rubidium atoms. Hau understood how passage through a BEC would affect light and created her own BECs for her experiments.

Now slowed-down light has became an active research area as part of a new movement toward light-based technology. Devices that use photons instead of electrons have big advantages in efficiency, miniaturization, and bandwidth. Steady progress has been made in creating and using slowed light for computing and data storage.

In science fiction, the emphasis on the high speed of light has tended to obscure its other fascinating properties. I know of no motion pictures, and only one or two published stories, that explore the possibility of radically decreasing the speed of light; yet, this seems like a perfect opportunity for some stunning movie special effects, especially when joined with the strange and unique properties of the BEC, which is a quantum system observable on a human scale. Maybe it’s time for a science-fiction film that explores the small, slow-moving world of light in a BEC rather than the huge, fast-moving world of space travel.

Readers who want to know more about slow light and BECs can find numerous web articles, including my own “Bose-Einstein condensate,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2009. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/74640/Bose-Einstein-condensate

My website is http://www.sidneyperkowitz.net/.

End of the World

2009-11-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Master of Disaster Roland Emmerich has another blockbuster on his hands with 2012, if weekend box office returns are any indication. The film's premise derives from a popular doomsday prediction centered on the Mayan calendar. It lasts 5126, at which point the calendar abruptly stops at December 21, 2012. For whatever reason, the Mayans didn't bother to count any further, leading some folks to conclude this denotes the End of the World As We Know. It makes for great entertainment, but what's the science behind all this?

Well, 2012 conspiracy theorists have combined the Mayan calendar ending with the notion that global destruction will occur when the legendary Planet X crashes into Earth. Astronomers were intrigued by the possibility in the mid-19th century, shortly after the discovery of Neptune -- they thought it might explain perceived discrepancies in the orbits of the great gas giants. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was initially heralded as Planet X, but it turned out to be too small to effect the orbits of the gas giants. Heck, it's not even technically a planet any more. (There is a dwarf planet called Eris just beyond Pluto, but it's in a stable orbit and isn't going to crash into Earth.)

And because you can never cram too many crazy ideas into a single Disaster Hoax, there are some people who believe Planet X is actually the mythical Nibiru, supposedly known to ancient Sumerians, which has a highly elliptical orbit and passes into our solar system every 3600 years. Earth itself, according to this crackpot theory, was created from a collision between Nibiru and some other object in the asteroid belt. Nibiru also doubles as a "spaceship" of sorts, in that an alien race supposedly traveled to Earth during one of its passes and founded the human race.

The good news is that there isn't a shred of scientific evidence for any of this. Take it fromNeil de Grasse Tyson, who punctures the myth with typical good humor in the clip below. That doesn't mean we won't thrill to the sight of a cinematic end of the world, because who doesn't love a good disaster flick now and then?

And there's definitely technology related to the blockbuster film. Sony Pictures joined forces with D-Box Technologies to show 2012 with the D-BOX motion technology in a limited number of theaters. So lucky audience members will not only watch the movie, but also experience it physically since the D-BOX technology creates realistic motion effects frame by frame, in sync with the actual film. Probably not a good option for anyone suffering from motion sickness, though.

Emily at the Edge of Chaos

2009-11-10T09:31:00.000-08:00

Comedy and theoretical physics aren't two things you'd normally think would go well together, but for humorist/writer Emily Levine, it's like combining chocolate and peanut butter. After writing for such TV series as Designing Women and Dangerous Minds, Levine worked for two years at Disney.

That's where she first became interested in esoteric things like chaos theory and quantum mechanics, but according to her official bio, she "found no studio executives, let alone Mickey and Goofy, willing and/or able to discuss these issues."

No matter. Levine ended up combining her interests to produce two one-woman shows: "It's Not You, It's the Universe: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too and Lose Weight" and "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Market." Now she's done it again with "Emily at the Edge of Chaos," which debuts Thursday, November 19th at El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. She describes it as "a heady mixture of science, social satire, and the personal saga of Levine's experience with a freakish medical condition."

That condition was acromegaly, and the symptoms included fatigue, "brain fog", a sudden onset of osteo-arthritis, and swelling of the feet (Levine swears an old pair of her Jimmy Choos from this period are now being worn by Clydesdales). The cause? a benign tumor in the pituitary gland that causes an over-production of human growth hormone -- steroids. A couple of surgeries later and Levine was her old self, taking the raw material of her experience and weaving it into a compelling new show.

"Emily at the Edge of Chaos" will be taped for an eventual film. If anyone in the Los Angeles area is game, they can get tickets for the 7:30 performance by calling 1-866-811-4111 (Theatre Mania) or by calling the El Portal box office on the day of the event. For a taste of just how good Levine's shows are, check out this recent TED talk, "A Trickster's Theory of Everything":

Goats in the Machine

2009-11-05T12:31:00.000-08:00

The new film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the book by Jon Ronson detailing a weird military research project involving psychic warriors, LSD, astral projection and the like. But while the movie might be fiction -- and highly amusing fiction at that, thanks to stellar performances by the cast -- there really is a historical record of both the Army and the CIA experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens as possible "incapacitating chemical agents."

Wired's Danger Room blog has taken advantage of the film's opening to shed some light on this part of US military history that has long been shrouded in secrecy. Most notably, it points to a firsthand account of the experiments by Dr. James Ketchum, a psychiatrist, called Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten. (A 2007 Wired review is here.)

The Army scientists first tried something called "red oil" -- a "concentrated distillation of marijuana" -- but soon found better success with more powerful psychoactive drugs like LSD. And at one point the CIA was convinced LSD was a kind of truth serum. While subjects supposedly volunteered for the trials, the CIA did find it necessary at one point to send out a memo warning the scientists to stop spiking the punch bowls at office Christmas parties with hallucinogens. We would love to see archival footage of those parties.

While the Army, at least, has copped to the testing, it doesn't seem like the research yielded a weapon that was actually deployed, although artillery rounds filled with powdered quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) were stockpiled that left subjects impaired in a "sleeplike state" for days on end. The National Academy of Sciences produced a follow-up report in 1981 that concluded the volunteers suffered no long-term effects from the tests.

LSD research is back, too, only this time as a drug for treating post traumatic stress disorder. No word on whether the treatment involves staring at goats.

Creation, Darwin, and Movie Censorship

2009-10-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

David A. Kirby was a practicing evolutionary geneticist before leaving bench science to become Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Many of his publications address the relationship between cinema, genetics, and biotechnology. He is also exploring the subject of science consultants in Hollywood and has a forthcoming book for MIT Press titled Lab Coats in Hollywood: Scientists’ Impact on Cinema, Cinema’s Impact on Science and Technology.

By David A. Kirby

When I first moved to the United Kingdom I had a bit of a shock upon seeing a £10 note. Currency in the United States features revered presidents and revolutionary war heroes. Yet, staring back at me on another country’s official currency was a man reviled by a large section of the American public: Charles Darwin. Given the anti-intellectualism prevalent in America it is difficult to imagine any scientist being given such a place of honour let alone the controversial Darwin. But, in the United Kingdom Darwin is considered a national hero. This year is his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species and you could not have thrown a stone in the United Kingdom without hitting a Darwin celebratory event.

I had the pleasure of recently seeing a new dramatic film about Darwin called Creation. The theater was packed and not just with the traditional art house cinema crowd. People of all ages and backgrounds were there to see a film depicting Darwin’s struggle with his religious belief. The film does a good job showing how Darwin’s religious views were not only shaped by his scientific discoveries but also by his grief over the death of his eldest daughter. This Darwin struggles with the concept of a caring God in a world based on randomness. With such a sympathetic depiction of Darwin and a view of evolutionary thought as truth it is not surprising the film had a difficult time finding a U.S. distributor. Not only were distributors afraid of poor box office returns, they were also worried about potential boycotts from religious groups for their other films.

Distributors’ concerns about Creation’s marketability are not surprising when we examine the history of cinema in regard to depicting Darwin and evolution. In my academic work I have followed the evolution of how Darwin and evolutionary thought have been depicted in cinema. Darwin’s demonstration of humanity’s link to its primate past was first played for comedic purposes in films of the early twentieth century. Films such as Reversing Darwin’s Theory (1908), The Monkey Man (1908), and Darwin Was Right (1924) poked fun at those who took Darwin’s evolutionary claims seriously. People who believe they are descended from apes will act like apes.

After the highly publicized Scopes Monkey trial in 1925 the notion of a human/primate connection changed from one of comedy to one of horror in cinema. Several post-Scopes films, beginning with The Wizard in 1927, feature “mad evolutionist” characters who design evil experiments in order to prove their “crazy” evolutionary theories about humanity’s connection to the animal world. Likewise, the goal of the mad evolutionists in The Beast of Borneo (1934) and Dr. Renault’s Secret (1942) is to prove humanity’s link to the animal kingdom. In front of a chart detailing the evolutionary “ladder of life,” the mad evolutionist Dr. Mirakle (played by Bela Lugosi) from Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) informs an unbelieving carnival audience that “the shadow of the ape hangs over us all” and that he will mix human and gorilla blood to “prove Man’s connection with the ape.” While this evolutionary-minded scientist is ultimately punished for his heretical conceptions, the film actually conveys the human/primate connection through Mirakle’s grotesque appearance and his clearly “animalistic” actions. In mad evolutionist films, the only human beings with a clear connection to primates are the evolution spouting evil scientists and their simian-like assistants.

Despite the comeuppance these mad evolutionists received for their beliefs, many of these films actually ran afoul of censors for their inclusion of evolution and Darwinism. The 1922 Lon Chaney, Sr., film A Blind Bargain was re-cut after test audiences found the movie too favourably disposed to Darwin and evolution. This included changing the original book the mad scientist uses to reach his secret lair from Origin of the Species[I1] to a less controversial tome. Murders in the Rue Morgue was not shown or was severely edited in several states because some censor boards objected to the theme of “Man’s descent from the Apes.”

A large number of films featuring Darwinian themes fell victim to the notorious “Hays Code” of the Production Code Administration (PCA) Office when it went into effect in the 1930s. The code was established in large part due to the lobbying of religious organizations that were unhappy with the level of violence, sexual innuendo, and amoral themes in films. For example, filmmakers had to remove any reference to Darwin from the horror film Dr. Renault’s Secret to avoid offending religious people. The PCA’s judgment on the film reads: “The story is based on theories of human origin in such a way that, if presented to the public, will undoubtedly offend the sensibilities of large groups of religious people of different faiths, and accordingly, could not be approved under the provisions of the code.” Of course, such a judgment would have killed the film’s commercial value so after consultation with the executive producers and the studio executives: “It was agreed to eliminate any reference to Darwin or to his theory, and to establish the ape as a throwback.”

Given the treatment of Darwinian thought in these horror films it is not surprising that Creation faces an uphill battle in American theatres. Which is unfortunate given how well the film depicts Darwin’s conflict with his wife over faith, his struggles concerning his theory’s moral implications, and his disagreements with his colleagues (especially T.H. Huxley). Most importantly, the film humanizes Darwin through his grief.

"When Galaxies Collide"

2009-10-26T17:51:00.001-07:00

In a fantastic example of entertainment lending its services to science, actress (Buffy, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog) and Webseries creator (The Guild) Felicia Day stars in this new PSA from Spitzer Science Center, correcting some of the misconceptions about new findings on colliding galaxies from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

And here's a fantastic video mashup going the other way: science adapted to entertainment in a techno/hip-hop symphony of science. Called "We Are All Connected," the tune samples from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Bill Nye the Science Guy, the History Channel's Universe series, 1983 interviews with physicist Richard Feynman (shown in all his bongo-playing glory) , and appearances by Neil de Grasse Tyson.

Science of the Living Dead

2009-10-23T11:06:00.001-07:00

This week The Science & Entertainment Exchange hosted a screening and panel discussion of George Romero's latest zombie film, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD at The Director's Guild of America. (See photo on right, from left to right) Author Max Brooks (World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide) moderated the evening. On the panel were director/writer George Romero, Epidemiologist Robert Smith? (yes, his name has the question mark in it, no error there), and Medical Psychologist Dr. Steven Schlozman.

The film, inspired by the classic western THE BIG COUNTRY, is legendary director George Romero's most recent installment in his zombie canon. An allegory for the senselessness of war and a commentary on human nature, the film focuses on two feuding families on an island off the cost of the US after a zombie apocalypse. Ideology on whether or not the zombies should die or be kept undead separates the two warring factions, however simple hatred for each other is what fuels their fighting at its root. The film ultimately asks its audience to consider at what point we lose focus on why we fight and have war for war's sake.

After the film, University of Ottawa's Dr. Robert Smith? and Harvard's Dr. Steven Schlozman spoke on the general "science" of zombies. As it turns out, Dr. Smith? taught us, the only way to defeat the zombie pandemic is to hit it hard, repeatedly, and with increasing force. Dr. Schlozman gave insight on why teenagers make bad choices and how their brains bare certain similarities to those of zombies - a real "ah ha" moment to parents in attendance.

The night truly proved that there are teaching moments in every film. From a flesh tearing zombie movie, the audience gained fun insight into the nature of viral spread and the best strategies to stop epidemics as well as a unique look into the inner workings of the human brain and psychology. The scientists entertained as they educated and the audience laughed as they learned, which is at the heart of everything The Exchange hopes to achieve.

All in all, the evening thrilled and enthralled, the perfect way to kick off a series of film screenings to be hosted by The Exchange. Stay tuned for our next big event.

If There Were No Science Consultants...

2009-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Watching the latest episode of House last night, we were struck by the impressive use of medical terminology throughout. It reminded us of just how hard writers and their staff on such shows work to bring plausibility to their fictional world. Sure, people love to joke about the constant parade of obscure, rare diseases encountered by House and his cohorts, and how the disease of the week never seems to be lupus, but the writers have certainly done their homework.

If you're wondering what House, Grey's Anatomy, Mercy, or Trauma would be like without that army of staffers and science consultants, check out this hilarious sketch by British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb:

Sizzle Me This

2009-10-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

What might happen to an idealistic marine biologist after he decides to leave the Ivory Tower? If you're Randy Olson, you become an independent filmmaker. First, you make a splash with a short music video about the sex life of barnacles. Then you take on intelligent design and the failure of the scientific community to make their counter-arguments about evolution convincingly to the public with a quirky documentary called Flock of Dodos. And then you see An Inconvenient Truth, and decide there really needs to be a documentary about global warming that lets the scientists speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, scientists have traditionally ranked right down there with, well, barnacles on the list of Least Telegenic Life Forms. So Olson finds there are very few people willing to invest in a documentary featuring scientists. "My neighbor's a scientist, and I certainly wouldn't pay to see him on screen," one potential investor bluntly says. Olson finally gets some meager funding from a neighborly gay couple, Mitch and Brian, who care deeply about the problem of global warming. "We're really, really upset about it," says Mitch. "We just don't know why."

The quest to find out why Mitch and Brian are so upset about global warming -- and why the rest of us should be, too -- provides a handy narrative framework for SIZZLE! A Global Warming Comedy, Olson's 2008 feature film, which makes its NYC premiere on October 23, at 7 PM, to close out the second annual Imagine Science Film Festival. If you missed SIZZLE! the first time around, and plan to be in NYC on October 21, reserve a seat now for the free screening at The New School's Tishman Auditorium.

SIZZLE! is a celluloid hybrid, more "mockumentary" than documentary, blending the real with selected fictional elements and a colorful cast of characters. You've got Mitch and Brian (actors with LA's legendary Groundlings playing exaggerated versions of themselves), so obsessed with finding a celebrity host for their documentary that they take to stalking random celebrities on the streets of Los Angeles. ("Okay, Christina Ricci ran away from us...) There's the sound guy, Antoine (Ifeanyi Njoku) and a chronically late cameraman named Marion (Alex Thomas), who is skeptical that global warming is real and keeps interrupting Olson's interviews with the scientists: "I just think it's a scam, man...." There's even a cameo by Olson's 83-year-old mother, Muffy Moose, who sneaks off with Antoine and Marion to go dancing at a hip-hop club. (Just call her "Muff-Diddy.")

Will Muffy Moose forsake the Midwest to cut a hit single with TimbaLand? Will Mitch and Brian find their celebrity host and figure out why they're so upset about global warming? And will Olson be able to let go of his scientific obsession with data to find the human story of climate change? You'll just have to check out the film to find out.

Imagine That

2009-10-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Fans of science and film who'll be in New York City over the next couple of weeks should check out the second annual Imagine Science Film Festival, from October 15 through October 23. The festival will screen some 50 films from nine different countries at such venues as Tribeca Cinemas, New York all of Science, CUNY Graduate Center and The New School.

The over-arching message is "science is for everyone," according to festival founder Alexis Gambis, who has a PhD in genetics and molecular biology from Rockefeller University, and has just enrolled as a film student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "There is a definite need to create a dialogue between scientists and the public," he says. "The [festival] provides a creative platform for scientists to share their inspiration with the public in relatable and engaging ways."

That's a mission the Science & Entertainment Exchange shares, which is why we're sponsoring a special sneak preview of the CG-animated feature, Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, directed by Harry Kloor and Dan St. Pierre. The screening will take place on Wednesday, October 21, 7 PM, at the CUNY Graduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium. It's free, although seating is limited, so reservations are required.

Quantum Quest is the story of a plucky little photon named Dave who lives in the sun and is drawn into an epic galactic battle between good and evil as the forces of the Core (protons, photons and neutrinos) face off against the antimatter forces of the Void to determine the fate of the universe.

Several Hollywood luminaries lent their voices to the film, including Chris Pie, William Shatner, Mark Hamill, Amanda Peet, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Abigail Breslin, and Hayden Christensen. And Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, makes his first film appearance voicing one of the characters.

Quantum Quest is also unusual because it is the first time NASA has collaborated with an independent filmmaker to produce a fictional animated film based on the agency's numerous missions. Kloor dreamed up the film back in 1996, when NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens mission to orbit Saturn. Production couldn't begin until NASA released the final images and radar data in 2008. So Quantum Quest combines state-of-the-art CGI with actual images taken not just by Cassini-Huygens, but also other NASA missions (SOHO, Stereo, Mars Odyssey, Venus Express and Mercury Messenger).

Kloor himself will be on hand after the screening to talk about the making of Quantum Quest, along with special guests, including Space Shuttle astronaut Dan Berry, who made four spacewalks during his NASA tenure. So if you're in the area, reserve a seat here.

Warp Drive: We're Not There... Yet

2009-10-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

One of the Star Trek franchise's most enduring legacies in science fiction is the fictional "warp drive" technology that enables faster-than-light travel. It's not the kind of thing that can be achieved with conventional rockets, but that doesn't mean it's entirely outside the realm of scientific plausibility. In fact, there's a long tradition of physicists writing speculative technical papers suggesting ways in which a warp drive or hyperdrive might come about.

The problem is that Einstein's theory of relativity says that no object with mass can match or exceed the speed of light, since its mass will increase along with its acceleration. Even in giant particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, tiny subatomic particles can reach 99.9% of the speed of light without ever matching or surpassing it. So physicists decided that the trick is moving spacetime itself. The latest proposal, just this past June, involved creating a bubble of spacetime using dark energy or some other form of unspecified "exotic matter."

"The idea is that you take a chunk of spacetime and move it," says Marc Millis, who used to head up NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the spacetime that's moving." You can hear more about this from Millis himself in this video at Space.com (embedding disabled), complete with selected clips from the many science fiction films over the years that have depicted faster-than-light travel through space. It's truly a case of Hollywood inspiring science through fiction, and science inspiring Hollywood in turn with a new host of ideas for space travel in the future.

My Favorite Cyborgs

2009-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

Some of the most popular characters in science fiction are its artificial creatures: the robots like R2D2, the androids like Commander Data. I like them too, especially Data, but there’s another type of artificial creature I find more interesting. Or I should say semi-artificial, because I’m talking about cyborgs – cybernetic organisms: half living organic beings, half cold, dead steel, plastic, and computer chips.

What is intriguing about cyborgs is the tension between the two halves. In the 1987 film RoboCop, the level of crime in Detroit requires a new kind of policing. Enter RoboCop, a metal body with super physical capabilities that’s given intelligence and personality by an implanted brain from a dead policeman. RoboCop is an outstanding law officer, but inside that casing is a mind that yearns for the warm human connections it once had but can never recover.

Even more interesting is how far we’ve come toward making brain-machine interfaces and even a real cyborg. In 2000, to study how the brain controls movement, Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi at Northwestern University installed a fish brain in a nutrient bath aboard a motorized wheeled cart. Electrodes placed in the brain took input from light sensors on the cart and sent output to the motors. Depending on where the electrodes were placed in the brain, the cart would move toward or away from a light source. While less exciting than RoboCop, this truly demonstrated a living brain controlling an artificial body.

Other examples of brain–machine interfaces come mostly in the form of neural implants for medical use. The best known is the cochlear implant, which restores hearing to deaf people. The cochlea is a small spiral structure in the inner ear. It houses the auditory nerves that pick up sound vibrations and turns them into nerve impulses that go to the brain. The interface includes an external microphone mounted behind the ear, which converts sounds into electrical impulses that travel along wires implanted in the cochlea. This activates the auditory nerves and creates the sensation of sound in the brain. In the United States, about 37,000 of these implants have been installed in adults and children.

Another application for neural interfaces is in artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought alone. This research began around 2000 and has received a huge boost because of the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, where body armor increases the survival rate of soldiers but doesn’t always protect their limbs. The result is about 1,200 amputees among U.S. casualties to date. To deal with this, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense is sponsoring crash programs in prosthetic research. These have produced prototype prosthetic arms with neural interfaces, now being tested. DARPA also sponsors other research in neural interfaces with direct applications to fighting wars.

One area that hasn’t developed as far as people would like is neural interfaces to restore vision to the blind and near-blind – a group that includes millions in the United States. This has lagged because the visual system is so complex. Each eye contains more than 100 million rods and cones, and it takes about 30% of the brain to interpret the incoming visual data whereas auditory data needs only 3%. Still, researchers have shown some success using interfaces to the brain and also to the retina. At least one commercial retinal device is now up for FDA approval. But the device’s low visual resolution and projected $100,000 price tag show that there’s still a long way to go.

Fictional artificial creatures can be compelling characters – terrifying, amusing, or thought provoking. Real-life cyborgs are less dramatic but have a different fascination. They’re an important part of the future in medicine, in warfare, and maybe in areas we have not yet imagined.

For more about cyborgs and other artificial creatures, read Sidney Perkowitz’s book Digital People. His website is http://www.sidneyperkowitz.net

This is Your Brain on Lies

2009-10-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

What would the world be like if nobody could lie -- not even a harmless little white lie? It would probably be like the world envisioned by British comic actor Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying, where brutal honesty is the order of the day, until Gervais' hapless character suddenly develops the ability to lie, or in his words, "I said something... that wasn't!" We are treated to an image of neurons in his brain firing in new ways at that pivotal evolutionary moment.

That image seems appropriate, given that scientists have been looking into using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to achieve a kind of "brain fingerprinting" as a means of lie detection. In fMRI, when certain parts of the brain are engaged during a specific cognitive activity, those areas light up in the brain scan -- and if a person happens to be "dissembling," it should be possible to tell that they are lying just by looking at the scan.

Traditional polygraph tests, which measure physical responses such as respiration, heart rate, pulse, and electrical skin conductance to determine if a subject is lying, are notoriously unreliable, and scientists are still looking for the equivalent of Wonder Woman's magical lasso of truth. Brain fingerprinting seems to offer something closer to an objective analysis of whether or not not someone is lying. How can a brain scan lie, after all?

Well, maybe the scan doesn't lie, but how we interpret those images is prone to human error, particularly since we don't fully understand how this complicated organ called the brain actually works. Chief among the naysayers of this new "mind reading" technology is Melissa Littlefield, who argues that the technique is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions, most notably "truth" is the baseline, the natural state of being, and lying is adding "a story on top of the truth." That might be true in Gervais-Land, but the real world is far more complicated.

An fMRI scan might reveal a lie if the person knew he or she was lying -- if it were a conscious decision. But "some people don't actually know that they're lying, or have a told a lie for so long that it becomes their subjective interpretation of reality," Littlefield explains. And just as with the polygraph test, it's possible to cheat and beat the machine: just clench your teeth or move your head slightly. FMRI requires the subject to hold perfectly still to get a useable image.

There are defenders of the technique's potential for lie detection as well. The most recent fMRI work on truthfulness comes to us via Joshua Greene of Harvard University, who published his results recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He found that honest subjects showed almost no additional brain activity when telling the truth, as might be expected -- you're not inventing a lie, after all. But dishonest subjects did show extra brain activity... even when they were telling the truth. Greene's conclusion: "Being honest is not so much a matter of exercising willpower as it is being disposed to behave honestly in a more effortless kind of way."

Eyes on Saturn

2009-10-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

We nearly missed the lovely profile of astrophysicist Carolyn Porco that appeared last week in The New York Times. Porco trailblazed was part of the team that analyzed data from the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s, making her one of the young up and coming "rock stars" of space science.

Mentored by Carl Sagan, among others, Porco now heads the camera team for the Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn (as it has been for the last five years), which recently released some gorgeous new images of the ringed planet. Porco has a colorful background. The daughter of an Italian immigrant who drove a bread truck, she went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spent two years as a chanting Buddhist, complete with a pilgrimage to Japan to be a majorette in a Buddhist marching band. She moved on from Buddhism, but not from music: she played guitar and sang with fellow scientists and science writers in the Titan Equatorial Band.

She caught her first glimpse of Saturn at age 13 through a neighbor's rooftop telescope and went on to earn graduate degrees from Caltech, writing her thesis on how the gravitational effects from tiny moonlets helped shape Saturn's rings. She "demonstrated a knack for picking out important things," according to her thesis advisor, Peter Goldreich.

Porco is also actively involved in science communication and outreach, both through the usual channels, and via Hollywood. She was a consultant on the film Contact, and more recently, for J.J. Abrams' summer blockbuster, Star Trek. Remember when the Starship Enterprise materialized inside clouds around Titan? That was Porco's contribution, and it made the cover of Cinefex, a publication devoted to special effects in the movies. "She helped us feel connected to what [series creator] Gene Roddenberry had been trying to do. This is our future," Abrams told the Times. Her favorite movie, though, is Stanley Kubrick's classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"To my mind, most people go through live recoiling from its best parts," Porco told The New York Times. "They miss the enrichment that just a basic knowledge of the physical world can bring to the most ordinary experiences. It's like there's a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us -- from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of planets -- and most people are completely unaware of it. To me that's a shame."

I Would Like to Thank the Academy – Squared!

2009-09-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Professor James Kakalios is a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Known within the scientific community for his work with amorphous semiconductors, granular materials, and 1/f noise, he is known to the general public as the author of the book The Physics of Superheroes, which considers comic book superheroes from the standpoint of fundamental physics.

By James Kakalios

It began, as do many tales of travel, adventure, and triumph, with a librarian.

In June 2007, I was in Denver for the national meeting of the Special Librarians Association, to give a talk on my efforts using superhero comic books to teach physics. There I met a librarian from the National Academy of Sciences. Upon returning to DC, she passed my name along to Ann Merchant, who was in the early stages of setting up The Science & Entertainment Exchange program.

In August Ann called, having received a request for a science consultant from a superhero movie that was about to begin filming, asking if I would be interested. “Have you ever heard of Watchmen?” Ann asked. When I stopped vibrating like a gong, I replied that I was familiar with the graphic novel and would be happy to help out.

Now, I should explain that my excitement resulted from Watchmen, a 12-issue miniseries published in 1985, being considered by many fans as the Citizen Kane of superhero comic books. Director Zack Snyder, Production Designer Alex McDowell, and Art Director Francois Audouy took great care to make their film as faithful as possible to the graphic novel. If faced with a choice of antagonizing a million rabid Watchmen fans – or a physics professor from Minnesota – well, I know which choice I’d make (and I’m the physics professor from Minnesota!).

A conversation about science with Billy Crudup (aka Dr. Manhattan - pictured right), telephone calls, e-mails, and a set visit to Vancouver was the beginning of my consulting gig for Watchmen. But my real work as a physics professor began after filming had wrapped in the spring of 2008. As the filmmakers worked to edit and incorporate special effects in the film, I was asked by Warner Bros. to give a talk on The Science of Watchmen at the 2008 Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, an annual celebration of comics, science fiction, and fantasy that draws 125,000 fans over 4 days in July.

My talk Why So Blue, Dr. Manhattan turned out to be effective in presenting real physics to the filled-to-capacity room of superhero and science fans. At one point in my discussion of the physics underlying the amazing powers that Dr. Manhattan possesses, I informed the audience that I now needed to teach them Quantum Mechanics. And I had 10 minutes. Which left me with a problem of what do with the other 8 minutes.

For Quantum Mechanics involves strange, fantastic propositions, and that this was the perfect audience to accept strange, fantastic propositions! They not only believed a man could fly, but that a pair of eyeglasses could serve as a fool-proof disguise as well! (A point I then emphasized by removing my own glasses.)

My big opportunity for science outreach came in February 2009, when the University of Minnesota Public Relations office asked if I would be interested in making a short video to be posted on the university’s YouTube.com page, discussing the Science of Watchmen. After securing approval from Warner Bros. (who graciously provided us with HD clips from the film, some of which had not yet been shown online), we shot the video in a morning and posted it a few weeks before the film opened nationwide. It was cross-linked on sites from Aint-it-Cool-News to Pharyngula, from Richard Dawkins to Roger Ebert, and received more than 1.5 million views within a couple of months. I doubt that I could get 1.5 people to view a straight video demonstrating the particle-wave duality that underlies quantum physics, but by tying it to the interest in and marketing of a major motion picture, people who came for the fiction would stay for the science.

And then, in August we learned that the video had been nominated for an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award, in the Advanced Media: Arts/Entertainment category (hence the title of this post – upping the ante on Jerry Zucker’s first post on this site). The award ceremony would be September 26 at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis, and I resolved that I would be up on that stage – either to accept the award or to inform everyone that Beyoncé had the best video of all time!

The above was written prior to the Saturday evening ceremony. Having just returned from the gala, I now have a new item to add to my CV. I wonder if I can get the phrase “Emmy-laureate” into common usage? Let me close this post with my acceptance speech I gave that night:

“I’m Prof. Jim Kakalios. Don’t worry - I won’t be giving a lecture. I wish to thank Justin Ware and Elizabeth Giorgi at the University of Minnesota, who conceived and created this video, as well as Brian Andersson, who provided the physics demos we used. I would like to thank the Academy – both the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and Ann Merchant, who put me in touch with the Watchmen crew, and everyone on Watchmen and at Warner Bros. for their first-class treatment of me. And I wish to thank my wife and family, for their love and support. I am a lucky man.”

Bringing Hollywood Science to Class

2009-09-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Jacob Clark Blickenstaff is Assistant Professor of Physics and Assistant Director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Southern Mississippi. His web site through the National Science Teachers Association is Blick on Flicks

By Jacob Blickenstaff

As teachers settle into a new school year, it seems a good time to provide some general tips and suggestions on how to make use of popular movies or television in the science classroom. Some of these ideas may be more appropriate for the high school setting, but I hope elementary and middle school teachers will also find some useful suggestions. I will use examples from Monsters vs. Aliens, which comes out on DVD today, September 29, to illustrate each suggestion.

Monsters vs. Aliens tells the story of Susan Murphy’s transformation from normal woman into Ginormica, a 15-meter tall, white-haired version of herself. Susan’s transformation was caused by being struck by a meteorite on her wedding day. (I really appreciate that the writers got that right: the object that hit Susan is a “meteorite,” since it reached the ground. While still in space, rocky objects like this are “meteoroids” and while in the atmosphere are “meteors.”) She is captured by the military and taken to a secret facility where she meets several other monsters based on 1950s science-fiction films. There is Bob, a blue gelatinous mass, à la The Blob (1958); The Missing Link, who bears a striking resemblance to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Insectasaurus, who is a giant mutated larva not so different from Mothra (1961); and, finally, Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., who is the result of a teleportation experiment gone wrong, as in The Fly (1958).

First, and probably my favorite way to use movies in class, is to have students collect some data from a short segment and use that data in a quick calculation. Actual data collection in this film is hard to come by, but it is possible to estimate the kinetic energy of the meteorite that hits Susan at the start. Students can estimate the size of the meteorite if you pause the film just before the collision, and you could even get a rough speed number by advancing frame by frame. Combine the estimated volume with a density of about 3 grams per cubic centimeter, and you have the approximate mass of the meteorite. Then the kinetic energy is ½ mv^2, and can be compared to the energy of a soccer ball or moving car.

As a check on students’ ability to apply a science concept in a new context, you might show a short scene from a film and ask students to “spot the errors.” For this application, the film you use depends on the topic you want to review, and Monsters vs. Aliens is especially good to check on students understanding of scale.

A classic way to make a movie monster is to put an actor wearing a rubber suit in a model city. He stomps around knocking down buildings and power lines until confronted by another actor in a different suit who stops him. The problem is that simply scaling up an animal does not work for a variety of physical and physiological reasons. First, consider the volume (and if the density is maintained, also the mass) when an object is doubled in size. If you take a cube 1 cm on a side and double all the dimensions, you get a cube 2 cm on each side, with a volume of 2×2×2=8 cubic centimeters. That means doubling the size of the cube made it 8 times more massive (23=8). Susan/Ginormica went from being a normal height (say 1.7 meters) to approximately 15 meters tall. That’s a factor of about 9, so her mass would increase by a factor of 93 or about 730. Her mass would go from a very reasonable 60 kilograms to over 43,000 kilograms. This might not seem so bad, since she has larger bones and muscles as well. The problem is that the strength of a bone is determined by its cross section, not its volume. When she grew by a factor of 9 in all directions, the cross section of her bones grew by a factor of 81 (9×9). While Ginormica’s mass has gotten more than 700 times larger, her bones have only gotten 80 times stronger, and her skeleton would collapse. For a more complete treatment of the biology of science fiction movies, check out Michael LaBarbera’s article at http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/.

Finally, you can use films to initiate a class discussion of how science is perceived by the public. Monsters vs. Aliens perpetuates a stereotype of the “Mad Scientist” common in science fiction and the media generally. (Try an image search on the Internet for “scientist” and see how many of them show a man in a lab coat with wild eyes and crazy hair.) As a follow up to the discussion you might invite a real scientist to your classroom for a visit, or arrange for an online video chat so that your students can see that scientists are real people, not caricatures.

I hope these ideas will inspire some of you to try incorporating at least a bit of Hollywood science into your classroom as a way to bridge the gap between school science and students’ everyday lives.

Another version of this column was originally published by NSTA. See www.nsta.org/publications/blickonflicks.aspx.

Cooking Up a Chemical Soup

2009-09-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

With Julie and Julia being a surprise hit this summer, Julia Child has once again rocketed to the forefront of the national consciousness. Child is the iconic figure of popularizing haute cuisine, blazing a trail on television long before anyone dreamed up The Food Network or Top Chef, and publishing her bestselling classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Her entire kitchen is now on permanent display in Washington, DC, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Child had a fascinating life apart from cooking. After an idyllic New England childhood, she worked for the OSS during World War II -- at 6'2", she was far too tall for the Women's Army Corps, or to be part of the Navy's WAVES. She lived all over the world, and first fell in love with French cooking while living in Paris with her husband, Paul Child. The rest, one might say, is history. Her cooking show was watched by millions, with loads of cameos in film and TV.

And her influence went even beyond cooking. Here she is demonstrating the fundamentals of abiogenesis. Not to be confused with Darwin's theory of evolution, abiogenesis refers specifically to the science behind how life on Earth may have evolved out of a primordial soup of inanimate matter. She made the educational film in 1976 for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It's nice to see her legacy passed on to the YouTube generation.

The Darling Bugs of May

2009-09-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Popular science books have been around at least since the Middle Ages, when illustrated "bestiaries" were a big hit, highlighting the most bizarre creatures found in Nature. Many such books mixed reality with myth, but entomologist May Berenbaum, who also serves on the Exchange's advisory board. shows that truth is definitely stranger than fiction in her new book, The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends.

Take a tour with May through insect urban legend and find out the underlying real-world science behind these fascinating creatures -- often more fantastic than the wildest legend. Frankenbugs, brain-boring earwigs, Spanish fly, and (ewww!) the California Tongue Cockroach are just a few members of this compendium of buggy behavior. In the excerpt below, Berenbaum talks about one of her favorite buggy B movies, and what a "fly-scale view" might really look like.

In just about every insect fear film ever made, there's an obligatory insect-eye view of a potential victim. There's a general recognition on the part of filmmakers that insects possess compound eyes with many facets and the way this anatomical feature is rendered in movies is through use of a multi-image filter lens, which, depending on film budgets, repeats an identical image tens or dozens or hundreds of times. In Empire of the Ants, director Bert I. Gordon has his giant ants, created by exposure to to toxic radioactive waste, eyeing dozens of Joan Collinses in as many wet, clingy blouses to great effect.

In reality, what insects actually see wouldn't make for a very scary (or titillating) scene in a movie. As far as entomologists can determine, the insect compound eye produces a mosaic sort of image, like the image created by thousands of dark and light dots in a black-and-white newspaper photograph. Although no one is absolutely certain, the general belief is that insect eyes can't create images with high resolution, but that the compound eye is exceedingly good at detecting motion. So those giant ants in Empire of the Ants probably didn't have a very clear picture of Joan Collins, but they could probably see with relative ease the heave of her bosom as she screamed.

Heaving bosoms aside, insects and movies have a long history of association, dating back even to the earliest days of cinema. A fly, for example, is said to have inspired the invention of animation around the turn of the 20th century by Segundo de Chomon, a Spanish filmmaker. Filming intertitles a few frames at a time for a silent movie, the filmmaker noticed the apparent jerky movements of a fly inadvertently included in the footage and realized that repositioning an object between each frame of film creates the illusion of motion when the film is played back at normal speed.

Berenbaum's fascination with the insect world goes beyond her scientific research; she's also a fan of film and TV with insects-gone-wild themes. Her favorite episode of the The X-Files, for example, is "War of the Coprophages," in which a drop-dead gorgeous USDA entomologist is named "Bambi Berenbaum" in her honor. One of her favorite recent movie scenes occurs in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which Indy and his son encounter scorpions in a Mayan ruin. Indy Jr. panics at first, but upon hearing the scorpion was large, his father shrugs and tells him, "It's the little ones you've got to watch out for." That happens to be correct, and now millions of movie fans know it.

Berenbaum also collects classic B movies about giant insects, human-to-bug metamorphosis, and so forth. Her favorite insect movie of all time? Bert I. Gordon's Beginning of the End. Berenbaum is at the University of Illinois, so naturally she has a soft spot for this flick. "It starts out in central Illinois and ends up on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, with giant grasshoppers heading to Lake Michigan." Buggy B movies don't really get much better than that.

Physicists Looking Forward to "Flash Forward"

2009-09-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Particle physics -- especially the research being done at CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- seems to have captured Hollywood's imagination these days. First, the collider was featured in director Ron Howard's Angels and Demons. And on Thursday, sci-fi novelist Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flash Forward makes its network debut on ABC. The novel starts out at CERN's LHC, and many of the central characters are physicists and engineers.

The network hasn't let many details slip about how closely the TV series will follow the novel, but the premise is the same: everyone on the planet "blacks out" for precisely 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and during that time their consciousness is "punted" six months into the future, giving them a brief glimpse of their lives at that point in time. And Sawyer served as a technical consultant for the series: "They needed a science consultant for the show, so that tells you something about what's going to happen."

He also gave high praise to executive producer David Goyer in an interview with io9 at WorldCon earlier this year: "I've been very impressed by how well-informed David is about science and how important it is to him."

The physics community has certainly taken note of the pending series premiere. In fact, the blog Symmetry Breaking is running several posts this week about the science of Flash Forward -- with plans to post the reactions of particle physicists after they watch the pilot episode. (No pressure, ABC!) The first "science of" post is here; the second is an interview with Sawyer himself; and interested readers should tune in Thursday and Friday as well for more about the fascinating physics behind the entertainment.

I Have Another Idea

2009-09-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Well, The Science & Entertainment Exchange has been up and running for almost a year now. And so far, The Exchange has done a remarkable job of connecting the great minds of science with the great minds of TV and film! Of course, that “great minds of TV and film” list isn’t exactly phonebook length. So having pretty much exhausted that pool, The Exchange has now begun pairing brilliant scientists with the “reasonably competent” minds of TV and film, and will soon move on to the “mildly unstable” minds of TV and film. Or so they’ve promised me.

But there’s still plenty more work to be done! Which annoys me because frankly, when I attack a problem I expect to solve it quickly, like we did with that whole health care brouhaha. So if The Exchange really wants to fulfill its mission and improve the way science and scientists are depicted in popular entertainment (obviously I mean “popular” from a sociological perspective – I’m certainly not implying that anybody enjoys it) then we must reassess. Reassess. That second one was for emphasis.

What if we’re approaching the whole thing backward? Putting the cart before the chicken or the egg? Actually, before is probably best because otherwise the cart runs over both of them. I mean, I guess the chicken could get away but more likely it sacrifices itself trying to save the egg … or it doesn’t, but then spends the rest of its life haunted by the cart incident and plotting revenge! See? Internal conflict. Which is exactly what I’m talking about. Here we are trying to package existing science to make it more entertaining for a mass audience, when instead we could be getting down to the root of the problem and actually transforming science itself to make it more exciting and fun.

Let’s face it, nobody’s going to pay money to watch Stanford biologist Irv Weissman conduct lineage analysis or clone stromal cells of the hematolymphoid microenvironments – not even if he’s played by Zac Efron, the obvious choice since they look so much alike (although Zac would have to be willing to grow a Talmudic style beard and gain a few pounds). I suppose you might get a few people to shell out for a romantic horror adventure about virologist Ann Simon’s work with the Turnip Crinkle Virus, since “The Turnip Crinkle Virus” is such a kickass title. But it probably wouldn’t win the weekend unless we make them zombie turnips that can only be killed by strippers … hang on, I have to write that down.

Just last year, Allen Bard and Yuli Tamir got the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for coming up with something called single molecule spectroscopy and imaging. I don’t know what the wolves gave them, money or a statuette or what, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t do the same and create entirely new branches of science, specifically designed for a mass audience with a short attention span. Here are just a few examples of what I’m talking about:

Adolescent Chaos Theory. What would happen if you never cleaned your room? Wouldn’t it be awesome to find out? My son is a pioneer in this field.

Megan Fox Genome Project. Eventually, we’ll be able to breed Megan Fox in a dish like sea monkeys. The only question is: who’s going to do it first? Us? Or the Russians? I predict almost unlimited government funding.

Quantum Detonation. The study of really massive explosions where things blow up into a million extremely tiny bits. I understand Michael Bay recently received a grant in this area.

Thermodynamic Behavioral Entomology. Combines several disciplines in order to determine what various bugs do when you fry them with a magnifying glass. Huge appeal in the preteen market. Great potential for merchandising tie-ins featuring adorable talking bugs that ignite.

Nocturnal Terrestrial Astronomy. Leading theorists believe high-powered telescopic equipment could be repurposed in order to observe the activities of hot chicks in their natural environment without unnecessarily disturbing them. Practical applications abound, like watching them shower to make sure they don’t slip. More than 170,000 people are injured in tubs and showers each year in the United States alone. We can all help. We must help.

Feline String Theory. Kittens love string. Everybody loves kittens. Do the math!

See? The possibilities are truly endless. Clearly, some of these emerging, new scientific fields have the potential to better all humanity by furthering our understanding of the mysteries of our universe, curing diseases, and mitigating the suffering of millions of people around the world. And at the same time we can fulfill the more important and immediate goal of creating great entertainment for a mass audience. So let’s all get to work!

- Hey, X-Change Files fans, let us know your favorite "new branch of science!"

Darwin Takes Center Stage

2009-09-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Is there a scientist in history more misunderstood in modern times than Charles Darwin? His seminal work, The Origin of Species, revolutionized the biological sciences and led to a tension between science and religion that still exists today. The story is ripe for the biopic treatment, and director Jon Amiel obliges with Creation, debuting tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film's stellar cast includes Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife (and cousin) Emma. It tells the story of "a global revolution played out within the confines of a small English village; a passionate marriage torn apart by the most dangerous idea in history; and a theory saved from extinction by the logic of a child."

The child in question is Darwin's beloved daughter, Annie, who died when she 10, possibly of tuberculosis. Creation is based on the bestselling biography by Randal Keynes (Darwin's great-great-nephew), Annie's Box, which paints an exquisite picture of Darwin the man, as well as Darwin the scientist. (Annie's box was a writing case made of red moroccan leather, into which treasured mementos from her life were placed after she died.)

Indeed, according to Keynes, Darwin's "private life and science were all of a piece." Annie's death affected him deeply; his theory of evolution was well-developed by the time she died, and among other concerns, Darwin worried that he may have passed on genetic weaknesses to his daughter that ultimately led to her death. Although he rarely mentioned Annie for much of his life, in an interview some 35 years later, he could still recall her very first smile when she was just 8 weeks old. Any parent could relate.

It's a compelling story of a human being who happens to be a scientist, as well as demonstrating what it cost Darwin to be true to his scientific instincts. Among other themes, the film details the inevitable conflict between Darwin's stubborn adherence to natural selection and his wife's religious devotion, not to mention the local community. Science is rife with these wonderful human stories. May Creation be just one of many more films that tell them. (h/t: Razib of Gene Expressions)

A One-Way Ticket to Mars

2009-09-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Physics of ‘Star Trek.’” Below is an article he wrote, originally published in The New York Times on August, 31, 2009.

Now that the hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has come and gone, we are faced with the grim reality that if we want to send humans back to the Moon the investment is likely to run in excess of $150 billion. The cost to get to Mars could easily be two to four times that, if it is possible at all.

This is the issue being wrestled with by a NASA panel, convened this year and led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, that will in the coming weeks present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. It is quickly becoming clear that going to the Moon or Mars in the next decade or two will be impossible without a much bigger budget than has so far been allocated. Is it worth it?

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Moreover, one of the reasons that is sometimes given for sending humans into space is that we need to move beyond Earth if we are to improve our species’ chances of survival should something terrible happen back home. This requires people to leave, and stay away.

There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions.

First, money. Much of the cost of a voyage to Mars will be spent on coming home again. If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.

The president of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin, has offered one possible solution: two ships, sent separately. The first would be sent unmanned and, once there, combine onboard hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to generate the fuel for the return trip; the second would take the astronauts there, and then be left behind. But once arrival is decoupled from return, one should ask whether the return trip is really necessary.

Surely if the point of sending astronauts is to be able to carry out scientific experiments that robots cannot do (something I am highly skeptical of and one of the reasons I don’t believe we should use science to attempt to justify human space exploration), then the longer they spend on the planet the more experiments they can do.

Moreover, if the radiation problems cannot be adequately resolved then the longevity of astronauts signing up for a Mars round trip would be severely compromised in any case. As cruel as it may sound, the astronauts would probably best use their remaining time living and working on Mars rather than dying at home.

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

We might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. Here again, I have found a significant fraction of scientists older than 65 who would be willing to live out their remaining years on the red planet or elsewhere. With older scientists, there would be additional health complications, to be sure, but the necessary medical personnel and equipment would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.

Delivering food and supplies to these new pioneers — along with the tools to grow and build whatever they need, for however long they live on the red planet — is likewise more reasonable and may be less expensive than designing a ticket home. Certainly, as in the Zubrin proposal, unmanned spacecraft could provide the crucial supply lines.

The largest stumbling block to a consideration of one-way missions is probably political. NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts.

Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet. To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.

District 9 Takes a Lesson from Tesla

2009-09-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

Director Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi film, District 9, is getting rave reviews for its gritty, hard-edged depiction of a futuristic world where stranded aliens are being evicted from one dismal slum and forced to move to another -- when all they really want is to get the mother ship back up and running so they can return home. Among the the more useful alien technologies is an "energy weapon" based on a Tesla coil.

The weapon might be fictional, but the Tesla coil is real. It was invented in the late 19th century by Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, nicknamed the “Wizard of Electricity.” A born entertainer, his public lectures were hugely popular. Before awestruck crowds, Tesla shot sparks from his fingertips, made light bulbs glow, and even melted metals by running current through his body. He was able to snap his fingers and create a ball of red flame, holding it calmly in his hand without burning his fingers. Some of his demonstrations have never been duplicated.

A Tesla coil is based on an induction coil: two coils of insulated copper wire wrapped around an iron coil. Feed an electrical current through the coil, and a powerful magnetic field builds up. When it gets strong enough, and the current is abruptly turned off, that magnetic field collapses and energy is released: thousands of volts of electricity discharge all at once. Depending on how much energy has built up, it can just a visible spark that jumps across a gap to a terminal, or spectacular volts of virtual lightning.

Just how powerful are Tesla coils? In 1899 Tesla was conducting an experiment at his laboratory in Colorado Springs that required millions of volts – currents so powerful that snakes of flame and lightning bolts shot 135 feet in the air. Tesla watched the spectacle from his doorway, transfixed with joy, when suddenly everything stopped. The power was dead. Tesla called Colorado Springs Electric Company, only to be told that his experiment had knocked their generator offline and set it on fire. The entire town was in darkness. The company refused to restore his power until he had repaired their generator, free of charge.

There are lots of modern-day Teslas out there, mostly science enthusiasts who share the Serbian inventors love of electricity. One of them is Greg Leyh, who is heading up plans to build the Nevada Lightning Laboratory just outside Las Vegas. Not only will there be two 12-story Tesla coils capable of creating electrical arcs up to 300 feet long, but the center will have public viewing platforms with a bar and lounge area, and spectacular public lightning shows that would have made Tesla proud. (via io9)

Check out Leyh's prototype Tesla coils in action this past June at Dorkbot San Francisco:

DorkbotSF at the Nevada Lightning Lab from Mike Estee on Vimeo.

Claw of Newt

2009-09-03T14:24:00.001-07:00

One of the more compelling X-Men is Logan, a.k.a., Wolverine -- so much a fan favorite that he merited his own "Origins" story earlier this year with Wolverine. He's the one who had adamantium grafted onto his entire exoskeleton as part of a military experiment, surviving the procedure because his "mutation" enables him to heal and regenerate repeatedly. It makes for a cool Hollywood movie, but surely it has nothing to do with real science, right?

Wrong! Via io9, we learn that Mother Nature has her own version of Wolverine in the more modest form of the Spanish ribbed newt. As early as 1879, naturalists noticed that the creature could push its rib bones out through the skin to ward off predators. Originally, everyone thought the bones passed through pores in the skin. But a new study using x-ray imaging reveals that the reality is far more gruesome.

Zoologist Egon Heiss of the University of Vienna in Austria and colleagues report in the Journal of Zoology that whenever the Spanish ribbed newt becomes agitated by an approaching threat, it swings its ribs forward, expanding the size of its body so much that the ribs literally pierce the skin and stick outside the body, like spines.

Once the danger has passed, it retracts the ribs, relying on the well-known ability of newts and other amphibians to repair their skin (some species can even regrow tails). Like Wolverine, they can do this again and again, with no apparent ill effects. It's even cooler when you recall that in the original origin story for Wolverine, his "claws" weren't adamantium, but bone, and the process mimicked the Spanish ribbed newt even more closely.

How cool is that? The Spanish ribbed newt goes one step further than Wolverine: it secrets a poisonous milky toxin on its body surface. When the ribs pierce the skin, the tips are coated with the poison, making them doubly deadly to their attackers. We sense an interesting new plot point for the sequel...

Saving a Bit of History

2009-09-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles has plenty of landmarks: the Capitol Records building, Graumann's Chinese Theater, and of course, the famous Hollywood sign. But as a wildfire raged through the national forest over the last few days, the flames threatened a lesser known bit of local history: the Mount Wilson Observatory.

For those who aren't familiar with Mount Wilson, this is the place where astronomer Edwin Hubble made his momentous discovery that the universe was expanding, using the 100-inch "Hooker telescope." That observation, combined with Einstein's theory of general relativity, changed the way we view our universe, from static and unchanging to dynamic and constantly evolving.

There are personal stories associated with the observatory as well. Hubble was assisted in collecting the spectrograph images of galaxies he used to make his conclusion by one Milton Humason -- a former janitor who married the boss's daughter and eventually found himself promoted to staff scientist, earning a small footnote in astronomy history books. (You can read more about him here.) That's the stuff movies are made of.

Tim Rutten ruminates on the importance of the observatory in today's Los Angeles Times:

"You'd think the place and instrument that so fundamentally altered our notions about ourselves and our relation to the cosmos would be a place of pilgrimage. But for some reason we don't really turn the sites of our great intellectual realizations... into shrines the way we do with other historical venues.... Perhaps it's simply the nature of science and those who pursue it to keep their eyes fixed on the forward horizon...."

Sometimes a landmark becomes so familiar that we start to take it for granted -- until that landmark is threatened with destruction. People all over the world tuned in to the observatory's live Webcam feed, giving it record-breaking traffic for the first time in years. The feed went down sometime yesterday morning due to technical difficulties, but as of this writing, firefighters have beaten back the flames. Mount Wilson is safe. For now.

The Station Fire, as it has come be known, is already one for the record books, eclipsing the devastation wrought on the national forest the last time it burned so thoroughly, in 1897. But at least it reminded us of the value of a piece of science history.