Someone cobbled together an animation of what the CERN black hole might look like should this impossible event come to pass. Thanks to the Brain Release valve team for this one. And a nice Firefly music video Nathan Fillion tweeted this week…
I am gearing up for the New Year celebration tonight, so to keep it easy I thought I would pass along a couple of gems from AMNH, the American Museum of Natural History. But first, I need to send my congratulations to Action Flick Chick for winning this years Women of the Web competition.
Did you know Leonard Nimoy got his start in science fiction as the third zombie in Zombies of the Stratosphere? You can learn about that, his new roll in Fringe, tidbits about Trek XI and XII, and more at his interview on Subspace Communique. If you want a bit more, try the LA Times: Nimoy on William Bell article. The word from EW’s Michael Ausiello is that NBC may have decided to move up its scheduled launch of Chuck from March to possibly as early as the end of this month. If they do that, it increases the odds of their buying more than the 13 episodes they originally signed up for. Good news indeed! In Dublin, Ireland is a place that seems to be a science museum crossed with an art gallery. Called the Science Gallery, they just opened up a new exhibit entitled What If…?. In this exhibit they explore possible developments in technology, and each entry has its own Twitter hashtag they ask you use when leaving comments. Here are highlights from their Science Gallery Youtube Channel of their last exhibit, Bubbles: Don’t Burst Them.
Once more, the team from the Annals of Improbable Research have handed out another year’s Ig Nobel Prizes. From the Gas Mask Bra to Tequila Diamonds, this years winners share a trait in common with each other and all previous winners. First they make you laugh… and then they make you think (mostly about how gullible some grant organizations may be, but every so often about the real-world problem that inspired the research in the first place). Some of the winners are just plain silly, and some, like the financial and mathematical winners, are very scary, but the fact that real scientists do this kind of thing gives me hope for the world. And then there is why people explore other worlds… one of my favorite SG1 moments starring Adam Baldwin, this video embed was inspired by SciFi Fangirl’s posting last night.
If you find yourself flying through D.C. with a layover at Dulles Airport of 2 hours or more, you can take a shuttle over to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Located on the Dulles grounds, it is another branch of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. Among the exhibits there is the US Space Shuttle Enterprise, and all the satellite, spacecraft, and aircraft displays you would expect. But there are a few other SciFi goodies as well, including the most complete classic ray gun collection I have ever seen, a small assortment of Robots, a phone booth in the shape of a Mercury capsule, and an R2-D2 USPS mailbox.
It’s that time of year again; this week New Scientist has their Science Fiction Special on the newsstands. In honor of that they have posted Sci-Fi: The Fiction of Now. They have Flash Fiction from Steven Baxter, Nicola Griffith, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley, Ian Watson, and more. The also have book reviews on some favorite authors, as well as their usual collection of cutting-edge science news. And in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, there is now a Pirate Talk App that looks like silly fun.