The 2006 horror flick Slither is an excellent mash-up of VHS horror influences and it relishes the monstrous, parasitic lifestyle of its central alien menace.

I’m not gong to lay out the life cycle of the Long One as I think the Alien Species Wiki does a pretty fine job of it. But what you have here is your typical biomass-consuming world breaker, with certain similarities to terrestrial slugs and snails. In its primary form, the organism infects its primary host via a needle or dart—perhaps inspired by the “love dart” used by some slug and snail species to flood hormones into a mate. And when the primary decides to reproduce, it uses a pair of  tentacle-like organs to impregnate a host.

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My kingdom for a parking lot! Last September English archaeologists found a skeleton under a Leicester parking lot which they suspected to be the remains of the infamous monarch Richard III. And now, through use of DNA testing, they have indeed confirmed that this skeleton is Richard III.

[Where did they get centuries-old DNA?]

In today’s installment of Science of Future Past, we finish up with part four of Asimov’s Foundation: The Traders.

As we discussed a couple of weeks back, The Traders, tells the story of a space-faring trader by the name of Linmar Ponyets who is ordered by the Foundation to go and rescue a fellow trader who has been imprisoned by a hostile government. Today we’ll take a look at the science behind the technology he employs to pull this off: transmutation.

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The penultimate episode of Cosmos, “Encyclopaedia Galactica,” is about the search for extraterrestrial life, as well as how we might communicate with that life. This episode is also in the recursive mode of the earlier half of the series—it begins with the Barney and Betty Hill abduction story and a refutation of UFO theories, moves to Champollion and the Rosetta stone, and then shifts to a conversation about potential interstellar communication and the civilizations that just might be trying to do that communication. This all comes back, of course, to the problem of the UFO and the reasons why we’ll likely hear communication from far away before we see anyone visiting our skies.

[Onward.]

In today’s installment of Science of Future Past, we continue our exploration of the technology showcased in the forth part of Asimov’s Foundation: The Traders.

As we discussed in the last episode, in part four of Foundation, The Traders, a space-faring trader by the name of Linmar Ponyets is ordered by the Foundation to go and rescue a fellow trader who has been imprisoned by a hostile government. Last time we focused on the possible technology behind the message capsule that contained Ponyets’ orders. Today we’ll take a look at the science behind two pieces of technology that receive only casual mentions in the book: spy beams and field distorters.

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The central United States is a hotbed for monstrosity—or at least it’s been that way since the Atomic Wars of 2070. As related in the Judge Dredd stories of 2000 AD, that’s when nuclear fire storms ravaged America’s “flyover states” and left it a radiated no man’s land.

As such, more refined denizens of the 22nd century tend to steer clear of the Cursed Earth and its many mutants, cannibals, genetically-resurrected dinosaurs and killer robots. But every now and then, you do find some decent folk out there—and even a decent monster on rare occasion.

[Get to the science...]

The tenth episode of Cosmos, “The Edge of Forever,” is about “the beginnings and ends of worlds, infinity and eternity.” While this may sound like one of the big-idea episodes, it is more a technical one; here, Sagan explores what we know about the structure, age, and ultimate nature of the universe, and how we came to know it. Discussing things like blue/red shift and the implications for our expanding universe, the possibilities for the Big Bang, the nature of three-dimensional imagination and what we might be missing with it, and the conflict between ideas of an oscillating or perpetually expanding universe, Sagan sketches out an understandable framework of our universe for a lay audience.

[Onward.]

For a certain class of vorarephile, no fantasy is more enticing than one that ends inside a monster’s stomach. These strange fetishists crave the confinement of a Sarlacc’s belly. They lust for the Rancor’s gaping maw. It’s totally a thing.

Yet vores rarely fantasize about the winged creatures of Don Coscarelli’s 1982 film The Beastmaster. These nameless man-eaters haunt strange woods, worship the eagle and boast one of the more disgusting feeding methods in the monster world.

Tall, gaunt and bipedal, the monsters are unique anatomical specimens even among other monsters. For starters, their large bat-like wings grant them at least limited flight—an impressive feat for such a large organism.

But their wings have another purpose.

[Get to the science!]

The ninth episode of Cosmos, “The Lives of the Stars,” is about things very small (atoms) and very large (stars). Sagan begins with a discussion of atoms—how they’re put together, how we discovered them, etc. He also explains the elements, and how the simple addition or subtraction of protons creates all of the different building blocks of life and the universe. From the elements, we move on to the stars—the sources of these building blocks (and also made of them), stars are the huge things that are connected intimately to the smallest things. The different types of stars, their life cycles, and their composition are also discussed. It’s a chain of related information, delivered with wit and joy.

[Onward.]

In today’s installment of Science of Future Past, we explore some unorthodox uses of those famous “building blocks of life” known as DNA. We’ll start off with Asimov’s Foundation before heading to a galaxy far, far away.

Rapid DNA Sequencing

In part four of Foundation, The Traders, a space-faring trader by the name of Linmar Ponyets is ordered by the Foundation to go and rescue a fellow trader who has been imprisoned by a hostile government. While the issues involved with the actual rescue are extremely interesting, I’m not going to discuss them today. Instead I want to look at the mechanism that the Foundation used to send the message to Ponyet:

The tiny, gleaming sphere changed hands, and Gorm added, “It’s confidential. Super-secret. Can’t be trusted to the sub-ether and all that. Or so I gather. At least it’s a Personal Capsule, and won’t open for anyone but you.”

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I touched on some of the issues of illustration in biology when I read Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu and Patrick Gries’ Evolution, and while that point is largely moot when it comes to everyone’s favorite subjects—dinosaurs—there are points of the argument that are still illuminating. Dinosaurs—any extinct prehistoric animal, really—require interpretation, guesswork and assumptions. The trick is, at some point those assumptions become part of the subculture, turning into an unofficial visual canon. Popular culture plays a role in this, as well; dinosaurs are tremendously inspiring and evocative, so people have strong opinions about them. Opinions unrelated to science. We’ve seen this in the reluctance of scientific illustration to adopt the “feathered dinosaur” motif, just as we had foot dragging on the topic of whether dinosaurs were ectothermic reptiles or “warm-blooded” like birds. All Yesterdays, by Darren Naish, John Conway, C.M. Kosemen and Scott Hartman, takes a look at that cutting edge of speculative paleoart, trying to look at things “outside the box.”

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The eighth episode of Cosmos, “Journeys in Space and Time,” returns to the style of earlier episodes with a specific topical focus: space and time (rather obviously). It’s an information-heavy installment that takes place for the most part in Tuscany, where both Leonardo Da Vinci and a young Albert Einstein did their intellectual work. The episode begins by discussing the constellations again and uses that as a springboard to discuss issues of distance, perception, and the speed of light—all considering the stars and our relationship to them. Sagan illustrates the connections between space and time by diving into a discussion of travel to the stars and the problems posed by the general theory of relativity (time dilation, etc); that leads into a set of thought experiments on time travel and speed-of-light travel. It’s also, as might be clear by now, one of the more science-fiction-friendly episodes.

[Onward.]

In the first part of this series we began an exploration of the science portrayed in the first two parts of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation: the Psychohistorians and the Encyclopedists. Today we continue on with the third part of the book, the Mayors.

In my opinion, the third part of Foundation is considerably more dynamic and exciting than the first two parts. Most of you reading this probably know that the majority of the original Foundation book is actually a collection of short stories that were first published in Astounding Magazine back in the early 1940’s. (The first part of the book, the Psychohistorians, was added when the rest of the series was republished in book form).

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The seventh episode of Cosmos, “The Backbone of Night,” is about scientific curiosity and the history of that curiosity—its evolution, and its suppression. The episode begins in Sagan’s present-day Brooklyn with him guest teaching in a classroom where he attended school as a child, then jumps back to ancient Greece. Finally, it trends forward to his contemporary setting again, with a few familiar stops on the way. As Sagan’s memorable introduction says, “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. […] In our personal lives, also, we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Our individual growth reflects the advancement of the species.” This is an episode about those things: knowledge, advancement, individual growth, and the questions that drive them all.

[Onward.]

We saw this guy over on Geek Tyrant and pretty much wish he was totally a real hero. We could use you, sir! Also, we would probably pay to see a movie about you. How did this come about? And why aren’t there more plot lines like this in genre fiction? (Tuvix anyone? Tuvix?)

Your daily offsite links are here to rescue your Monday. Highlights include.

1. A rundown of various Hobbit reactions.
2. Is the universe real?
3. The Walking Dead gets retro.

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The fifth episode of Cosmos, “Blues for a Red Planet,” is an exploration of ideas about Mars—fictional, factual, and speculative—through history and into a future which has, to some extent, become our contemporary present. It’s one of the more focused episodes, without as much ranging and curiosity; the intensity is directed almost entirely at Mars itself, with a brief, related aside into molecular biology.

Following the last episode’s focus on Venus (and its value as a parable for Earth), this episode’s shift to Mars makes for one of the more uplifting and visually stunning installments in Sagan and company’s personal voyage through the cosmos. Sagan’s passion for Mars, as well as the West’s obsession with the planet throughout recent history, comes through clearly here: through the poetry of his language, as usual, and in the attention paid to painting a dramatic Martian-looking landscape, we are swept up into a dramatic narrative about the Red Planet. There is, perhaps, less science and more poetry in this episode than usual.

[Onward.]

When I read classic science fiction stories and see technologies described which have later appeared in real life, I sometimes wonder whether these early writers were predicting the future, or defining it.

In other words, did they see the trends of science and technology and follow them to their logical conclusions, or have modern scientists and inventors been so inspired by the writings of such authors as Asimov, Heinlein, and Jules Verne, that they seek to bring to life the visions so vividly described by these authors? Regardless of which way they inspiration flowed, I find it interesting to compare the technologies described in these works of the past with their modern counterparts.

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You probably dismiss Jason Voorhees as just another rampaging psychopath, one with an intense desire to murder nymphomaniac teens. And indeed, the subject’s propensity for pro-abstinence bludgeoning knows no bounds—but were you aware of  the science behind his modus operandi?

Like other North American Slashers of his species, Jason preys on copulating teens because the act of mating provides an irresistible target. But it’s not because the teens in question are naked, intertwined and preoccupied. Nope, it all comes down to the sound of their enthusiastic boning.

[Get to the science...]

Did you know that most versions of sign language do not have established vocabularies for scientific terms? In an effort to change this, reseachers at the University of Washington have been developing these terms, and with the help of Lydia Callis (the amazing ASL interpreter who we saw beside Mayor Bloomberg during Hurricane Sandy), they're going to teach you how science works in American Sign Language.

[The full story]

The fourth episode of Cosmos, “Heaven and Hell,” deals with “bizarre natural events” and “major catastrophes” on Earth and elsewhere, particularly Venus, as well as the related makeup of comets and asteroids in relation to their place in catastrophic events. That all leads up to a commentary on human-made catastrophic events. (Plus, there’s an “Update” at the end of this one on global warming.)

Coming as it does after an episode that puts faith and science into somewhat oppositional conversation, it seems a strange thing that the fourth episode uses a metaphor straight out of religion: “heaven” and “hell,” with all the attendant value judgments. But, there seems to be a reason for the shift in terms. In a few ways, this episode is functioning as one big allegorical structure; the guiding metaphor of the title, too, ends up having either two meanings, or a meaning that yokes the two arguments of the episode.

[Onward.]