Topics pertaining to science fiction and/or fantasy, in book, TV show, or movie formats.
You know, there may be a lot of truth to this. But I think there’s more going on there than today’s science alone can explain. I do keep my eyes open around machinery (mechanical, electrical, or electronic), and I tend to understand it very well, by a combination of aptitude, interest, and training. But when …
Continue reading ‘“What Lucky People Do Differently than Unlucky People”’ »
I’d be all for this idea if it weren’t for one thing: at this point in history, do you really want to give the people currently running various levels of the US government the ability to commandeer a walking weapons platform explicitly designed for really big lasers? (I’m mostly joking… but only mostly.)
An interesting twist on the idea, beloved by science fiction readers for the last fifty years, of using a solar sail for space travel. And it just might work, too.
Here’s my Christmas present to my readers: there’s an phenomena which has not yet been fully explained, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that apparently produces a gravity field directly from electricity. The effect was discovered early in the twentieth century, but abandoned due to technical limitations and all but forgotten, which is why I’d never heard …
The mystery of what happened to the famous and charismatic 1930s pilot Amelia Earhart has intrigued people for more than seventy years. It has been the subject of urban legends, and even worked into fiction — I found eight references to fictional works that mentioned her, four of which included her as a main character, …
Continue reading ‘“Finger may point to solution in Amelia Earhart disappearance riddle”’ »
This sounds like wonderful news at first, but when you think about it a little more, it seems like a disaster waiting to happen — one that only a few SF novelists have even attempted to write about. And of those few, the only one that I’ve read (which, unfortunately, I do not recall the …
Continue reading ‘“Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice – now for humans”’ »
First, read this, and maybe watch the video there. Then read the following passage from the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published eighteen years ago (1992) and one of my favorite near-future SF novels. One of the main characters is a teenage girl who goes by the handle “YT” and couriers messages by skateboard …
Continue reading ‘“Stylish cyclist collar hides airbag inside”’ »
Major news for space enthusiasts: NASA has found “life as we do not know it” in California! The arsenic-based life form apparently uses completely different metabolic processes from anything else we know of! According to a 1962 article by science and science-fiction giant Isaac Asimov (titled “Not as We Know it: The Chemistry of Life”), …
(No entry yesterday because we were on the road, driving home from a Thanksgiving visit to my family. Seventeen and a half hours, to travel less than 800 miles by highway… now I remember why we usually travel on the Saturday or Monday after Thanksgiving, instead of the Sunday. The traffic was horrid.) It seems …
Continue reading ‘“NASA Mars rover leaves moist skidmarks in boggy struggle”’ »
By the end of this decade or the next, “regenerative medicine” could well be commonplace. Dr. Who, eat your heart(s) out. 😉