Reference – Page 3

Before Battlestar

Much as I love both incarnations of Doctor Who, there’s one show I will always like better, and that’s Blake’s 7.

Moral ambiguity, a corrupt galactic Federation, terrorists-as-heroes, story and character arcs. Unfortunately, a lot of those episodes were visually comparable to the Doctor Who episodes of the time. Plus, some episodes were stinkers, too. If someone new to the show caught the wrong episode, he’d probably swear it off for life.

Luckily, the folks at io9 have put together How To Get Into Rebel Space Opera Blake's 7

No Nanobots Required

Imagine re-growing a severed fingertip, or creating an organ in the lab that can be transplanted into a patient without risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are learning to harness the body’s own power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results.

I got a lot more where these came from. I got weeks of catching up to do.

Look, Look, Look!

Here’s a blast from the past — the Complete Elfquest Online project.

Exterminate!

Yeah, we all thought this was funny…

I guess, if you can’t beat ’em…

An 81-year-old man from Burleigh Heads, Australia, downloaded plans to build a killer robot from the Internet, built the complex machine, and then used it to kill himself in his driveway.

Via io9.

Who Needs People, Anyway?

I never got around to seeing Lars and the Real Girl when it was out. I’ll have to catch the DVD. I heard whisperings about this documentary, shot in the UK, called Guys and Dolls. Apparently, these folks are the real deal…

You’d think my first inclination would be to laugh my ass off, and that my second would be to pity some of these folks. Somehow, I managed to suspend all of that, at least through the first half of the video.

Attack of the Rainmen

Hm, I think I’ve got the makings of a story, here…

Some autistics are known as ‘autistic savants’ because they develop a genius in one subject, such as mathematics or art. New research shows this syndrome can be induced by tinkering with one protein in the brain which is responsible for building synapses, the brain structures that help neurons talk to each other.

3,003rd Rock from the Sun?

A Second Earth in Our Solar System (?)

NASA’s Alan Stern said these planets are so far away from the sun that we haven t seen them yet:

Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System. It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud a band of debris surrounding our planetary system but they would be frozen at these distances. They would look like a frozen Earth.

So all we need to do is haul one of those babies into our orbit, defrost it, and start populating. Earth 2, here I come!

Category: Reference