Category: Blog

Technovelgy reports on (and has a photo of) the Philip K. Dick Robot, an android representation of the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick, now on display at NextFest 2005 in Chicago. It’s either really cool, or really creepy. Your call.

Those three words, or words very much like them, may have appeared in science fiction stories and movies more than any other phrase…and now, it appears, they may someday be spoken in earnest by astronauts on the moon.

I’ve written here and here about recent efforts to decipher ancient manuscripts using multi-spectral imaging, the photographing of the manuscripts under various wavelengths of light (a technique originally developed for the study of celestial bodies by spacecraft). Here’s yet another project using the same technique, this time at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, …

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Here’s an interesting story about a probably planetary system around Fomalhaut (at 25 light-years’ distance, a nearby star as these things go)–but what’s really cool is the accompanying image. Sauron lives!

RUBI and QRIO, two humanoid robots, are attending nursery school to help researchers improve the ways robots and humans interact.

This is way cool: famous two-dimensional artworks made three-dimensional via Photoshop. (Via By the Way…).

…and the future looks bright for private suborbital spaceflight. Alas, there has been nothing new from the Da Vinci Project, Esterhazy, Saskatchewan’s, hope for becoming a spaceport, for some months, although at least the Web site is still there…

I finally turned in my children’s biography of Orson Scott Card, which I’ve been working on off and on (mostly off, due to a variety of conflicts and problems) for roughly the last 97 years (subjective time) to Enslow Publishers, and I’d just like to say…Woo-hoo!

There aren’t very many substances which have been both manufactured in the sands of ancient Egypt and in outer space. In fact, off-hand, I know of only one: glass. Glass is an “amorphous solid”– its molecules don’t form a strict pattern, like the molecules of steel or granite, but are jumbled together like more like …

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If you haven’t yet visited the online gallery of the first annual Art of Science competition at Princeton University, do so now.

Here’s a handy guide to how long77 foods, beauty products and household goods will keep. Apparently those 20-year-old olives we recently uncovered should be thrown out. Who knew? (Via By the Way…)

I had an excellent Father’s Day…and you can plainly see why.