The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files

Will A Science Fiction Film Ever Win “Best Picture” On Oscar Night?

2010-03-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

By Sidney Perkowitz

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey started a trend that eventually brought science fiction films from low-budget “B-movie” ratings to the big-budget status we now take for granted. As presented by Hollywood (and on television), science fiction today reaches far beyond mere respectability to real cultural and marketplace power. Its characters, settings, jargon, and fictional science have become recognized parts of popular culture the world over. Science fiction wields enormous commercial clout, too. Although James Cameron’s Avatar stands out as the highest grossing film ever at $2.6 billion, it’s not alone. At last count, 19 of the 50 all time top-grossing films – nearly 40% – are science fiction in one form or another.

For all this success, though, no science fiction film has yet made it onto Hollywood’s true A-list; that is, none has won an Oscar for Best Picture, or Directing, or both. A few films touching on science or scientists have been nominated and even won at this level; Dr. Strangelove, for example, was put up for Best Picture in 1965, and A Beautiful Mind, about mathematician John Nash, won Best Picture in 2001. But although straight science fiction films such as 2001, A Clockwork Orange, the original Star Wars, Close Encounters, and E.T. have been nominated for Best Picture or Directing, all they won were less significant awards such as Visual Effects.

This year, however, seemed the best bet so far for science fiction to finally make it big. Avatar was nominated in nine categories including Best Picture (for which it was one of the favorites) and Directing, and District 9 in four categories including Best Picture. But District 9 walked away from the awards ceremony with nothing, and Avatar, like many of its predecessors, only with Oscars for Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects.

What went wrong? Many of Avatar’s viewers, myself included, thought it lacked the compelling story and well-developed characters it needed to complete its beautifully portrayed alien world and pull us into it. On Oscar night, I live blogged the proceedings for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) along with its film critic Jesse Wente, who commented on the hole at the center of Avatar. Other critics have agreed, as reflected in the film’s rating of 82% favorable reviews on rottentomatoes.com – high, but below the 90% that District 9 earned.

Reviewers saw District 9 as intelligent and fresh, with an emotional charge, and carrying layers of meaning related to South African apartheid and even bigger issues in today’s world. But if District 9 had a story and a depth that Avatar lacked, why didn’t it win a major Oscar either? The answer, at least partly, has to do with the two sides of what the Academy Awards are about – excellence, but also popularity. Box office receipts are a quick way to express the momentum that comes from reaching lots of people. That’s where Avatar has it all over District 9, which grossed only $200 million, less than one-tenth what Avatar earned. However, a film that’s good enough can overcome that handicap too. This year’s winner for both Best Picture and Directing, The Hurt Locker, has so far brought in just $15 million (estimated).

So maybe we have to simply conclude that science fiction films aren’t yet good enough to compete with the best of the best in other genres. Stunning special effects still need the essential elements of plot, character, and narrative drive – and we should add the category of “ideas” to those dramatic necessities. Some of the best science fiction has done a superb job of showing where science and technology are taking humanity. Somewhere out there, I hope, are the screenwriter, director, and producer who’ll create that thoughtful, yet exciting and money-making film, and then step up to receive their well-deserved Oscars in say, 2015.

Sidney Perkowitz is a physicist at Emory University who also writes about science for non-scientists. He grew up admiring writers as well as scientists, and now gets to be both. Lab research is a thrill for him, but it's even more fun for him to write about science in ways that engage those people who love to play with scientific ideas that range from the origins of life and of the universe, to nanotechnology and quantum behavior.

Even Superheroes Need Their Science

2010-02-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, the Science and Entertainment Exchange headed to San Diego for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Our session was a panel discussion entitled "Watching the Watchmen and Cheering the Heroes: The Science of Superheroes," bringing together two physicists, a biologist, a film screenwriter, and two TV writers.

The discussion kicked off with Sid Perkowitz, a physics professor at Emory University turned full-time science writer and author of Hollywood Science. Perkowitz watched a good 120 science fiction films in his research for the book. More than 1400 science fiction movies have been made since 1902, he says, almost all of which begin with a nugget of real science. And science plays a major role in a full 19 of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time. The results, according to Perkowitz, are often mixed in terms of how science and scientists are depicted.

Contact has one of the best depictions of an actual scientist, and a woman to boot, ably played by Jodie Foster. Perkowitz is also a fan of last year's indie film Sleep Dealer, District 9, and Moon, and Gattaca. As for the bad: The Core takes top honors, about drilling to the Earth's core, in order to detonate a nuclear device that will kick-start the core's rotation. And the giant insect aliens in Starship Troopers would collapse under their own weight were real insects scaled up to that size.

Perkowitz is okay with film and TV starting off with an unlikely premise. After that, he'd just like the writers, etc. to do their best to ensure that no scientific concepts are seriously harmed in the making of said film.ut even the bad can provide "teaching moments" and great way to engage the public in thinking about science as it relates to their lives -- and hopefully inspiring them to want to learn more.
Jim Kakalios, a physicist at the University of Minnesota and author of The Physics of Superheroes, served as technical consultant on Watchmen. Kakalios has been using comic book superheroes in his classes for years to illustrate fundamental concepts in physics. And Watchmen offers plenty of grist for that particular mill. For instance, Dr. Manhattan is an excellent framework for discussing difficult concepts like electron diffraction, his ability to pass through walls is a great segue into quantum tunneling, and his telltale blue hue can be attributed to leakage from high-energy electrons via Cerenkov radiation, according to Kakalios.

Even when liberties must be taken for the sake of the narrative, science is a critical backdrop to a compelling, plausible story, according to Alex Tse, one of the screenwriters for Watchmen. "The work I'm really attracted to, and that I admire, and the work that I aspire to do, there's a plausibility in science that I think adds to a timeless quality... of a film," he said, citing the Terminator franchise as a good example of science fiction done right. "You have some films that are kind of ridiculous and are kind of fun and entertaining to watch but they don't have that lasting effect."

Heroes writers Aron Coleite and Joe Pokaski agreed. "We always try to stay true to scientific accuracy, while occasionally diverging for emotion or story-telling," said Pokaski. "We have enormous respect for scientists and if the science seems off, the audience is going to tune out." It's quite the balancing act on Heroes, with characters who can fly, read minds, heal spontaneously, control time, and be invisible, yet the writers try to remain somewhat consistent with their bending of the science. The science need not pass peer review; it just needs to be good enough to be plausible and rope in the viewer.
"We know a lot of this stuff is inaccurate," Coleite admitted, "but we try to make it seem plausible. We spend hours in a stinking room arguing about invisibility. We really do think long and hard about how to explain stuff like whether clothes are visible on an invisible person, or if anything the person touches also becomes invisible." And even when they come up with a solution, it doesn't always get explicitly stated on-screen. "We're demonstrating it visually. We don't bother people with saying 'It's an invisible field around them that distorts light and that's why Claude is wearing clothes."

The premise behind Heroes is that a small subset of otherwise ordinary people spontaneously develop special abilities,via a sudden mutation in their genetic code; they are the next step in human evolution. Nicole King, is an evolutionary biologist at UC-Berkeley, who had one burning question for the writers: what's the mechanism by which this happens? The show doesn't offer a more detailed explanation. "We try to have everything based in emotion," Pokaski said, since leaving something to the imagination works better than spelling everything out when it comes to science fiction. "The more you try to explain, the sillier it sounds."

That didn't stop King from investigating a few possibilities, most notably the means by which single-celled organisms developed "super traits" that led to them evolving into higher life forms: animals and people. She raised the concept of "hopeful monsters," which Wikipedia describes as "a colloquial term used in evolutionary biology to describe an event of instantaneous speciation... which contributes positively to the production of new major evolutionary groups."
The term was coined by geneticist Richard Goldschmidt in The Material Basis of Evolution as a means of explaining how nature managed to bridge the gaping chasm between microevolution and macroevolution. He didn't think small gradual changes over time -- a more common understanding of genetic mutation -- was sufficient to account for evolutionary leaps forward. King used the example of butterfly species. Some species are poisonous, so predators avoid them based on, say, their coloring or wing patterns. Another species spontaneously adopts said coloring and patterning -- even though it isn't poisonous -- as a means of evading said predators. So perhaps the Heroes are hopeful monsters.
A Boing-Boing write up summed up another of King's key points:

[King] brought up a really interesting point about the intersection between evolution and sci-fi. Evolution, as you know, is driven by random mutations in DNA, and most of those mutations have no visible impact at all. DNA changes, but nothing important happens to the overall organism.

Other changes in DNA lead to negative impacts—for instance, the mutations that lead to cancer. Finally, and luckily, some mutations are beneficial. But, King reminded me, they're very seldom only beneficial. The same innovative mutations that make an organism stronger are usually also associated with at least one biological trade-off. You may gain, but you also lose. And whether the mutation gets counted as "successful" depends a lot on how the benefits and detriments balance out. Think about what that could mean for, say, the X-men? Should Warren Worthington III be dealing with the osteoporosis that must surely go along with his light, flight-ready bone structure?

The question of how much of who we are is genetically determined, and how much is a factor of environment and the choices/decisions we make, underlies the entire story arc of Heroes, which explores the question of destiny versus free will when it comes to our identity, our abilities -- and our future. It's a theme in Watchmen as well: our flawed tragic heroes struggle with whether they can change the catastrophic future, or whether the nuclear blast that devastates humanity at the end is, frankly, inevitable.
That's the true power of science fiction: not only can it entertain and inspire the next generation of scientists, but it provides a compelling framework in which to explore how science fits into our culture at large, and the inevitable ethical/philosophical questions that accompany major breakthroughs in research.

C is for Caprica

2010-02-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

Fans of Battlestar Galactica are avidly following the brand-new "prequel" series, Caprica, which explores the genesis of the Cylon race that is created by, and then rebels against, their human creators. The series' technical script consultant, Malcolm MacIver, is an ideal person to provide insights on a fictional world that grapples with the implications of human consciousness, virtual worlds, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

MacIver is a researcher at Northwestern University whose specialty is studying the interconnections between the brain and biomechanics -- in other words, how our physical body influences the development of our cognition, particularly when it comes to gathering sensory information about the world around us and processing it. Among other projects, he builds biomimetic robotic fish to learn more about how the real creatures use weak electrical discharges to track prey in their environment, for example.

On Caprica, Zoe's virtual avatar is grappling with just these issues in her shiny new war robot body. And her father is struggling to perfect the AI on that advanced robotic soldier. This is where science fiction takes its inspiration from real-world research. In his latest blog post over at Science and Society, MacIver talks about meeting Peter Singer, author of Wired for War:

Robotic warfare, as we all know from media reports about drones, is of rapidly growing importance. It is based on research funded by a number of US government military research agencies. Singer (a defense analyst at the Brookings Institute, not the controversial ethicist from Princeton) is not prescribing an end to the development of such robots. Instead, he wants a conversation to begin about how we deal with issues of culpability that arise when the robots we develop make an independent, and faulty, decision to end a human life.
This brings me back to Cylons, and Caprica, a show that envisages a time when robots develop the capacity to be self-aware, make independent decisions to kill, and eventually collude to rebel against us. What is the likelihood of something like this scenario eventually occurring? Will we eventually have to grant moral rights to our inventions, perhaps to avoid such a rebellion? Will our mechanical intelligences supersede us? These are clearly highly speculative questions, more commonly the stuff of science fiction plots than sober consideration. But with the rapid rise of robotic warfare, and the push to make it ever more autonomous and lethal, they warrant a new look.

MacIver promises he'll write a few more posts exploring such quandaries and considering "some of the more speculative questions that are triggered by the conjunction of the real world of robotic warfare, and the fictional world of Caprica and its resentful robotic warriors." We can't wait!

Small Town Science

2010-02-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Science and Entertainment Exchange found itself in Berkeley last week for Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's first-ever Science Cafe. The event featured Jaime Paglia, co-creator and showrunner for SyFy's hit TV series, Eureka, with a special Skype appearance by Colin Ferguson, who plays Sheriff Jack Carter on the show.

Eureka is an affectionate paean to the small town, with a twist: it's population is made up of brilliant scientists, all of whom work at a vast, sooper sekrit lab called Global Dynamics that gets a large part of its funding from the Department of Defense, yet is dedicated to curiosity-driven research -- at least in principle. The show is a dramedy that combines elements of Northern Exposure and The X-Files, according to Paglia, with a dash of Scrubs for good measure. "It's small town trappings with endless possibility," he says, and admits the show's premise is at least partially inspired by places like Los Alamos, Berkeley Lab, Livermore, Bell Labs, even Area 51.

Among the tidbits Paglia divulged is that we will finally get to explore the town's early origins in the upcoming season, which is slated to begin airing in July -- although he avoided specifics on exactly how the writers plan to explore that history. He also mentioned plans for a cross-over episode with another SyFy series, Warehouse 13, and he toyed with the notion of a possible spinoff series focusing on the town's kids at the Tesla School.

As Paglia said, the kids are some of the best characters, and we only occasionally get a glimpse of their lives. A high school science fair in a town filled with scientific geniuses is a wonder to behold. And instead of jocks lording it over the geeks and nerds, being smart is cool, with academic achievement valued far more than athletics.

For his part, Ferguson stumped the assembled science geeks by asking about Janelia Farm -- probably the closest thing to a real-world counterpart to the fictional town of Eureka. It's an interdisciplinary research campus founded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, located near the town of Ashburn, Virginia. At Janelia Farms, the scientists come from all over the country on six-year contracts and get all their funding internally, bypassing the traditional grant process. They all live nearby and work together in the same building, which makes it easier to collaborate across specialties.

Janelia Farm sounds like a fascinating experiment, but one doubts they'll ever grapple with the kinds of complications that routinely plague Eureka: AI attack drones gone rogue, everyone in town sharing each other's dreams, nanobots pervading the lab and taking on the form of the local stray dog, rips in the fabric of spacetime, and Fargo literally turning green.

Paglia is well-versed in the culture of science, since his father was a researcher with the UCLA Medical Center for decades, and even spent some time at NASA training to be a medical officer for future manned missions to Mars. The Eureka writers also get assistance from their technical consultant, JPL's Kevin Grazier (who also consulted on Battlestar Galactica); the writer's blog, Eureka Unscripted, currently has a two-part interview with Grazier posted. Even the cast gets into the science act: Ferguson and co-star Joe Morton, who plays Henry, are both science buffs, and have been known to take issue with draft scripts where they felt the science was a bit too implausible

It's always an interesting dynamic weaving real science into science fiction. Paglia and his writers try very hard not to resort to the equivalent of "magic," even though the science as depicted on the show is very much fictional (and far more advanced than our own). That said, the story always comes first.

What Eureka does best is capture the culture of science: the almost childlike enthusiasm and sense of wonder about the world, and the endless curiosity that drives scientists to ask questions, test theories, all of which leads to even more questions. They worry about their funding, deal with family crises and lab mix-ups, and above all pursue interesting science. For science aficionados, Eureka is definitely their kind of town.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

2010-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1990s, it was all the rage to play a game dubbed "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." It all started when three college students in Pennsylvania were watching the actor's performance in The Air Up There, and started competing to name all the movies in which Bacon had appeared, and other actors who performed with him. They realized that it takes remarkably few indirect relationships to tie Bacon to just about any actor in Hollywood -- 2.95 steps on average, to be exact.

The game spread like wildfire, with a book, talk show appearances, and an online Oracle of Bacon where users can type in the name of any actor and find out his/her connection to Bacon. The actor himself had some fun with the concept in this classic VISA commercial:

Visa - Kevin Bacon | Super Bowl Ads | SPIKE.com

The game is an example of the so-called "small world" phenomenon, or social network theory. Bacon -- and, it must be said, more than 1000 other actors in Hollywood -- is what's termed a "hub" in social network theory. While most nodes in a network are connected only to a few other nodes, a certain small number of nodes are linked to many, many others. You know how major airlines pick certain airports as a home base, funneling their connecting flights through those hubs? Bacon would be Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

The World Wide Web, the stock market, even the anatomy of the human brain are all organized according to the rules of small world network theory. And now science writer Carl Zimmer reports that scientists are applying this approach to map out and study the complicated connections between species in an ecosystem, for example, sharks' relation to their prey in the Caribbean.

In the past few years, ecologists have begun to apply network theory to nature. By mapping the connections between species, they are discovering some of the rules by which all ecological networks are organized, and how these rules help foster biodiversity. They’re also studying how biological invasions, overfishing, and other threats are reorganizing these networks, and possibly putting them at risk of collapse. By discovering early warning signs of networks in trouble, scientists hope to be able to predict these collapses and prevent them from occurring.

That's one more quirky accomplishment Bacon can add to his resume. Maybe one day, ecologists will be able to consult their own online oracle wherein they can type in the names of select species and find out instantly where they fit into the vast interconnected web of their ecosystem.

Creating a Conversation through Creation

2010-01-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

A brand new film, CREATION, opens in theaters this Friday, January 22nd, in major cities across the country (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC) and will certainly stir pundits on both sides of the creation "debate" in the US. The film, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly, follows the story of Charles Darwin and is based on the book by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson.

Last week, honored guests of the NAS were treated to an advance screening of the film along with a panel discussion with Director Jon Amiel, Writer Randal Keynes, Biologist Sean B. Carroll, Geneticist Maxine Singer, and Science Historian Richard Milner.

The film depicts Darwin in a way we may not be used to seeing him - not the very serious, scholarly, old man, but as a young scientist grappling with the implications of his work. When he wrote origin of species, Darwin was a relatively young man. CREATION gives us Darwin thinking about and enjoying his scientific endeavors, which was a vital part of his life. It's an honest depiction of a man of science.

If you'd like to know more about the movie -

You can become a fan of CREATION on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CREATION-The-Movie/39212784860

You can follow CREATION on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Creation_Movie

For theater information: http://creationthemovie.com/

“His love for his wife, his observations of his children, his friendships with gardeners, schoolteachers and pigeon fanciers, his fears about death, revolution, bankruptcy, inbreeding...all these things found their way into his theory. He was the most inclusive of thinkers.” Randal Keynes, ANNIE’S BOX

"Rift" Sets Its Hero Adrift

2010-01-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought the world was safe from universe-destroying black holes, comes a nifty short film from L Studio called Rift that explores just such a scenario. It's described as "a surreal interpretation of Pandora's Box about a scientist whose failed experiment results in the formation of a black hole that alters time and space, creating a chaotic Twilight-Zonesque nightmare."

Our scientist/protagonist is actually correct when he says we have nothing to fear from these sorts of proton-proton collisions -- even if the fictional film events contradict that assertion. But Rift offers a creative visualization of what the end of the world might look like -- you know, on the off-chance the scientists might be wrong.

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Prusiner's Prions

2009-12-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

While everyone loves the romantic notion of the scientific revolutionary who bucks a doubting "establishment" to change our understanding of the world, every now and then, that narrative comes true. In the early 1970s, an otherwise healthy woman became a patient in the University of California, San Francisco's neurology department; she was suffering from something called a "slow virus infection," specifically, a neurodegenerative condition called Creutzfeldt0Jakob disease.

Her case caught the attention of a scientist named Stanley Prusiner, who watched her go from a normal state of being able to walk, talk and carry out coordinated movements, to a state of advanced dementia in which she was mute, unable to walk, or care for herself to any degree. Within a few months, she was dead.

Prusiner became fascinated by this medical mystery, particularly the fact that such infections -- which include rare disorders such as kuru, mad cow disease, scrapie (in sheep), and Alzheimer's disease -- don't respond to any known treatment. He set out to find out what was causing these diseases. And ten years later, he had his answer: the culprit was a single protein, which Prusiner dubbed a "prion."

The weird thing about this agent is that most viruses/infectious agents contain either DNA or RNA; prions seemed to be pure proteins. The scientific community reacted with extreme skepticism, even hostility, to Prusiner's hypothesis. Yet Prusiner and several colleagues persevered, continued their research, and by the 1990s, the existence of prions was far more scientifically acceptable. Prusiner won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering research.

Prusiner was one of the featured speakers at a recent salon sponsored by the Science and Entertainment Exchange, where he told the assembled leaders in the entertainment industry all about prions and the deadly diseases they cause. But he also believes these diseases can be cured, although it will require some novel approaches to developing effective new drugs. That's hopeful news for those with family members who have suffered and died from this class of disease.

The (Shrimp) Eyes Have It

2009-12-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

Wondering what the next Big Thing might be in terms of DVD/Blu-Ray technology? The secret might lie with the lowly mantis shrimp. Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered that the creature's eyes use a technology very similar to what is found in the current generation of CD and DVD players -- except Nature's version is far superior.

Specifically, the mantis shrimp boasts "trinocular vision." Each eye moves independently and can focus on three different aspects of an object. And while human vision is based on detection of three basic colors, the mantis shrimp can detect 12, and can "tune" the levels of light the photosensitive cells in their eyes can detect.

What the Bristol scientists found most intriguing is the mantis shrimp's ability to detect polarized light: not only can it see the kind of polarized light that vibrates in a single plane as it travels -- like "attaching a piece of string to a wall and shaking it up and down," according to science writer Ed Yong -- but it can also see polarized light that travels in the shape of a helix. It's the only known creature in nature who can do so.

That's because if you look at a mantis shrimp's eyes under a microscope, you'll see an unusual structure that mimics a common component of camera filters, CD and DVD players, called a wave plate. The synthetic version of wave plates only work for a single color of light; the version found in the mantis shrimp's eyes works for all the colors in the visible spectrum of light, from ultraviolet to infrared.

Now if only scientists can figure out how to mimic and reproduce that unique structure -- perhaps using liquid crystals -- we could have a whole new generation of Blu-Ray and other optical storage devices.

Holy Concussive Incident, Batman

2009-12-02T11:25:00.001-08:00

E. Paul Zehr, Ph.D., is Professor of Neuroscience and Kinesiology at the University of Victoria and is author of Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero.

Batman takes a lot of blows to his head. These come from his fighting activities and from being routinely thrown—or leaping—onto or into hard objects like walls, floors, and moving vehicles. The issue of concussion in Batman’s career is something I addressed in Becoming Batman. In examining the scientific possibility of a human training to achieve the pinnacle of physical skill of comic book icon Batman, I reckoned him having a pretty short career. The main thing to shorten Batman’s career would be his accumulation of injuries, with concussion figuring prominently. In our own day and age concussion in sports—and particularly in hockey and football—has received considerable attention but little resolution.

When I give talks and presentations about the concept of human potential underlying the Batman icon, I get many questions about concussion. With this in mind, I was recently watching Hockey Night in Canada on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada is the NHL equivalent of NFL’s Monday Night Football) on a Saturday night. At the end of the Montreal–Toronto game (think Washington Redskins–Dallas Cowboys), one of the co-hosts on the intermission show presented an overview of the night’s major head injuries in a short video montage. Following this the host managed a kind of weak joke about squashed melons (or something similar to that—the key word was squash, it being Halloween and pumpkins in the air). Another co-host laughed but clearly mostly out of pity. Are we so desperately out of touch with the grave consequences of neural damage that can be inflicted and evidenced by concussion that it remains the stuff of jokes? If so—and based on the evidence this is indeed yes—why is that? false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Is it simply because we cannot see it? Clearly, we can see the effects of concussion, but we cannot see the actual damage to the brain, the changes in energy demand and energy delivery and the disordered activity of neurons. Strong head trauma provokes a cascade that leads to an energy crisis—kind of a malevolent neuronal oxygen debt—that causes the neurons in the brain to fail (see diagram). The increase in energy demand coupled with reduced blood flow and reduced metabolism leads to the death of some nerve cells. In addition, neurons will take several days to recover from this massive shift of activity. The memory problems and mental confusion seen during the time after a concussion occur because of what happened at the cellular level. Returning to normal concentrations of neurotransmitters can sometimes take up to two weeks.

In a recent talk I was giving about the career of Batman I likened our society’s approach to concussion to be very similar to our approach to depression—that is, mostly ignoring it and downplaying the significant health implications. We have recently made good progress on raising awareness and removing stigma associated with depression but seem a good way off on making progress with concussion. This may have a lot to do with the fact that concussion is firmly enmeshed in the testosterone fueled machismo that dominates modern day contact sports like ice hockey and professional football. In this milieu, if blood isn’t streaming from a flesh wound—or better yet, a fractured bone actually protruding from broken skin—it isn’t an injury. No wonder concussion is seen often as a malingerer’s pretense to avoid the battle.

With this in mind I wasn’t necessarily appalled by what I watched that Saturday night. However, it made me reflect once again on our propensity for paradoxical celebration of a cult of violence in our society juxtaposed with a clear denial of the implication of that violence. It is toward reconciling that gap that I can only hope we eventually turn. I personally do not see this as something to be made light of. This is based upon my dual perspective as a neuroscientist (we are typically rather protective of the brain) as well as a martial artist with almost 30 years experience—including experience in full contact fighting. Squashing pumpkins on or after Halloween is one thing; permanent brain damage another thing entirely.

Concussion is a real and present danger in contact sports like hockey and football. Just this week the Associated Press published the results of an informal survey of NFL players conducted in November 2009. The AP surveyed 160 NFL players about their experiences with concussion. The survey (see details at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hHHVeRMJ5TMvObE_SNhfL4s4SJrQD9C26GCO0) included a mix of rookies to 17-year veterans and those playing all positions. Thirty of those players, that is, less than 20% of those interviewed, disclosed that they had either not disclosed or had trivialized their own concussions. In addition, half of the players indicated they had experienced a concussion and more than one-third of the players said the concussion had forced them to miss playing time. This information matches that from the Canadian Football League in 2000 where ~50% of players indicated they had experienced a concussion.

It is now much more widely understood that the brain has tremendous adaptive abilities. The nervous system really does have a “plastic” ability to respond to training or to compensate for damage. This last part is critical because when we are talking about concussion the main point that must be understood is compensation which is really another way to say “repair.” A good repair means things still work well but does not mean things are the same as before the repair was either needed or finished. There is only so much repairing that can go on until limitations arise. These limitations should not be ignored or celebrated in Batman’s world or in our own.

Just Imagine

2009-12-01T11:39:00.001-08:00

For those who missed the 2009 Imagine Science Film Festival in New York, one of many highlights was the screening of documentary shorts: not the dry, didactic educational films typically shown in the classroom, but truly creative endeavors that showcase science in innovative ways.

Worried that the Large Hadron Collider, that massive particle accelerator in Switzerland, is going to destroy the world? Here's a film that sets the record straight with a sense of humor: What's the Matter at CERN, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LHC. There were short biopics on Alan Turing and Charles Babbage, and -- a clear audience favorite -- the whimsical Hairytale, featuring a former hair dresser named Ronn Thompson who collects hair clippings from landfills and turns them into a building material resembling fiber glass.

The winner of the Nature Scientific Merit Award was Magnetic Movie, a short film detailing the secret life of magnetic fields, from Semiconductor Films. It's now part of the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. The filmmakers, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, were artists in residence at the Science Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley and thought they could create a short artistic film highlighting the lab's cutting-edge research in scientific visualizations of magnetic fields generated by the sun and solar winds.

Jarman and Gerhardt were inspired further by a 1744 experiment in Sweden to reproduce the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) in the lab. From Semiconductor Films' Website:

A small hole in a shade "the size of a large pea" let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colours then traveled through a medium of turbulent air directly above a warmed glass of aquavit. The resulting image landed on a screen a few short feet away and looked like what was seen dancing in the sky on many long Swedish nights, nature's sublime entertainment in the real pre-history of cinema....

With Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have tapped into a new and ancient aesthetic of turbulence. We can hear it in the sounds of natural radio-naturally-occurring electromagnetic signals from the earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere-that course through Magnetic Movie, at times animating the animation, a quick nervous response condensed into static. The sound itself is the product of the combined turbulences of the earth's molten core, weather systems and electrical storms, ephemeral ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the solar winds.

That's part of the power of film: to help us visualize the invisible in creative, awe-inspiring ways. Marine biologist turned documentary filmmaker Randy Olson summed up the importance of such festivals before the screening of his mockumentary SIZZLE! Friday night: "When I was just starting out as a filmmaker, there was no place for me to submit short science-themed films." The sheer range of creativity on display in this year's submission attest to why we need the Imagine Science Film Festival and other events like it.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

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."