It will probably come as no surprise to you that when Hollywood tackles scientific topics, it almost always gets them wrong. But as Sid Perkins describes in a recent article in Science News Online, some scientists and teachers are using movie science to teach science and promote an interest in science. There are innumerable examples of bad movie …
“Robots to be surgeons of the future” says this story.
From stories like this one, about NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, scheduled to launch on December 30 and to fire a copper projectile into the surface of comet Tempel 1 on July 4. The 372-kilogram “impactor” will hit at approximately 37,000 kph and could leave a crater the size of a football field. Which immediately got …
Canada’s first synchrotron is officially open for business–right here in Saskatchewan.
Wow. More than 7,000 people have told Richard Branson they would pay 115,000 pounds to go into space when Virgin Galactic starts flying in 2008…including William Shatner, Star Trek‘s Captain Kirk. Appropriate, since the first Virgin Galactic tourist craft is going to be named Enterprise.
So says Brian Feeney, the man who plans to ride the rocket into sub-orbit.
I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. (And yes, I realize that the circulation versions will be somewhat smaller than the one in the picture…) You never know what’ll be on your Canadian quarter these days–I don’t know exactly how many designs are out there, but there are a lot. This …
…is, of course, the science-fictional headline of the week.
Chalk up another one for Einstein. The world, NASA says, is dragging time and space with it as it rotates…just as Albert predicted in his general theory of relativity.
Occasionally, I find myself missing Dungeons and Dragons. Apparently, I’m not the only one. Who knew? I, too, have a dusty case full of D&D manuals, old dice, and pages and pages of campaign material. My group at university scorned pre-published scenarios; we made up everything from whole cloth. Alas, my D&Ding died away when …
I spent last weekend in Saskatoon at the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild‘s annual fall conference. Among the events was a joint reading by two renowned Canadian writers, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer and poet George Elliot Clarke. It should surprise no reader of my column that I generally prefer readings by SF writers to readings …
When I was a kid, I read a book called Interrupted Journey. So did a lot of other people. It pretty much had me convinced that Betty and Barney Hill really were abducted by aliens (I’d take it with a lot more salt now at age 45 than I did at age 10). Betty certainly …
