“German boffins invent steel Velcro”
Nuts and bolts? How twentieth-century! These days we just Velcro bridges together!
Archive of posts filed under the Science Fiction and Fantasy category.
Topics pertaining to science fiction and/or fantasy, in book, TV show, or movie formats.
“Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success?”
And I thought normal skydiving was a little weird.
“The Jedi Logic”
An interesting and in-depth look at why the Jedi in the Star Wars universe might logically choose to use lightsabers instead of something with more range. It all comes down to the Jedi ability to predict the near future.
“Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom”
I really was born too late.
“Virus arms race primes malware numbers surge”
Computer security people have seen this coming for years. Signature-based detection of specific malware variants is less and less effective all the time; there’s no way antivirus programs can keep up anymore, and they’re just going to get further behind. Not to mention the ongoing problems with false positives. (I don’t even bother running an …
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“Results from Slate’s ‘Choose Your Own Apocalypse’ poll”
Oh, come on! None of those are enough to “destroy America,” even combined. Almost all of them are self-correcting problems: Loose nukes. A nuclear weapon can only be used once, after which it’s gone. If the supposed terrorists had a large supply, they’d be a problem — but without that, all they can do is …
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“Easter Island dirt may hold key to longer life”
Hm… I could use a few extra healthy decades…
Plasma Drive Now a Reality!
Chang Díaz believes that VASIMR could usefully glean its electric power from solar panels if it was operating close to the sun (Mars would be the extreme outer limit) or from onboard nuclear reactors further away. He calculates that a nuclear VASIMR craft could get to Mars in just 39 days, as opposed to the …
“US brain-plug interface gets live human trials”
It looks like science is further along on this than I thought.
Gas Prices
When I was a teenager, I played a paper-and-pencil game called Car Wars with a group of similarly geeky friends. In this game you designed armed and armored vehicles and played them against one another or in missions. The game was set in the far future (2040s, maybe?), and one of the things that constantly …