Beam Me Up Science Fiction in the news,on tv,at the movies or in print. Whatever is of interest to you and to me is fair game. I also discuss cutting edge science that just might influence new sci-fi Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 50 5020

Articles from Beam Me Up

Faux robot walker 2007-11-13 18:08:00 Want to create a robot walking machine for yourself, but don't want to deal with all of the fussy gyro stabilization and gait-control issues? Here's how to fake it. (And get your started thinking about NEXT Halloween's costume.)click here for the Make Magazine article on how to build ...

Wastelands set for 1/19/2008 release! 2007-11-11 23:16:00 Editor John Joseph Adams writes me to let us know that his newest collection Wastelands which can best be described as stories where the central theme is the Apocalypse. 22 stories from a diverse and talented group. Here is a partial list of the stories:Hugo Award winner "Speech Sounds"by Octavia E. ButlerLocus Award winner "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Cory DoctorowWorld Fantasy Award finalist"The End of the Whole Mess" by Stephen KingHugo & Nebula Award finalist" The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo BacigalupiHugo & Nebula Award finalist "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" by Neal Barret, Jr.Nebula Award finalist "The End of the World as We Know It" by Dale BaileyThe book is set for January 19th release in 2008. I will be putting up a review of the book asap, but what I have already seen in the contents and the graphics, I am very impressed. Looks good so far.Click the title or here to go to Night Shade books. ...

Film Of 1954 Extraterrestrial and U.S. President Eisenhower Meeting? 2007-11-11 21:56:00 Ever read an article that is so twisted it could be a really good story? Well then, if you answered yes, you are going to love this piece that Shaun Saunders sent me. What the writer purports is that there exsists a black and white movie of the meeting between President Eisenhower and human ET’s which took place allegedly in 1954. It runs on a bit, so I am not going to ruin it by cutting parts out of it and posting it here. It's entertaining and would make a great story all on its own. Click here for the complete story ... Film  President

Mars's tiny moons – one small step for mankind? 2007-11-10 12:56:00 Forget Mars – the Red Planet's moons Phobos and Deimos could be the next stop in the solar system for humanity, according to planetary scientists. During a recent conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, in California, Scientists speculated that astronauts could make their first footprints on one of them within 10 years. As a counterpoint to a return mission to Earth's moon, some scientists believe that a manned mission returning to the moon is counter productive. Plus a robotic mission to either of Mars' moons is easier than one to Luna.Granted, the Moon is only a short three-day spaceflight from Earth, whereas Phobos and Deimos are several months away using current propulsion methods. But the Moon's gravity is one-sixth Earth's, strong enough that a landing craft has to fire retrorockets to slow its descent to the surface, and again to leave. This wastes tonnes of heavy, exp ...

10 sf/f Books that should be Movies! 2007-11-09 16:35:00 From Geekend and the very fertile imagination of Jay Garmon we read his list of books he would like to see movies made of. He does qualify the list with this comment (I’d rage against the omission of Ender’s Game except that Wolfgang Petersen is working on it. Of course, the same could be said of Rendezvous with Rama, but that daunting project is in a deeper circle of development hell than Ender. Also, HBO is doing A Song of Ice and Fire as an epic miniseries, but I guess the small screen doesn’t count. After what we got with the Sci Fi Channel’s Earthsea miniseries–which infuriated Le Guin–I can maybe understand that. )1 The Dark Tower by Stephen King2 Foundation by Isaac Asimov3 The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson4 A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin 5 Hyperion by Dan Simmons6 The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks7 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke8 The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny9 Elric of Melnibone by Mi ... Movies

Kelly Completes Reading of Podcast Novel 2007-11-08 20:45:00 James Patrick Kelly announces that he has just finished a podcast of his 1989 novel LOOK INTO THE SUN. The unabridged reading, over eleven hours long in thirty-four parts, is available for free downloading under a Creative Commons 3.0 license at Kelly's Free Reads Podcast site and on iTunes. Kelly began the weekly readings back in March. This is Kelly's second novel recorded for Free Reads.The first was BURN, which won the Nebula award for best novella in May,2007. Also available on Free Reads area number of previously published stories and a selection of his "On The Net" columns from Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Kelly also produces a for-pay podcast on Audible.com called James Patrick Kelly's StoryPod. "After a brief vacation," said Kelly, "I look forward to posting more of my work on Free Reads. I am an audio book aficionado, and it is my ambition to have one of the most extensive libraries of Creative Commons podcasts of any professional science fiction writer."J ...

Largest extrasolar planetary system discovered 2007-11-07 17:47:00 A fifth planet has been discovered around a nearby star, making it the largest planetary system known outside our own. The planet appears to be a gas giant like Saturn. The planet was discovered around a star called 55 Cancri that is about 41 light years away from Earth and is slightly cooler and dimmer than our own Sun. The 55 Cancri system was already known to include four other planets, including three giant planets that orbit the star closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. The fourth is four times as massive as Jupiter and orbits at about Jupiter's distance from the Sun.For more on this new planet, speculation about life in this system and a video simulation of the system, click here to go to the complete article. Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post(Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech) ...

Key Found to Making Robots Human-Friendly 2007-11-07 09:17:00 On average, robots today can hold human interest for only about 10 hours, but in a new study, a humanoid robot dubbed QRIO (pronounced "curio") was accepted by human toddlers as "one of them" for 5 months before it was taken away. Why? Well it is no mystery that humans revel in the sense of touch. The premise that if a robot responded when touched - would improve the chances that the robot would be much more acceptable was proven out when QRIO was programmed to have a crude sense of touch. In the study, QRIO was introduced into a classroom of toddlers aged 18 months to 24 months. Children of this age group were chosen because they have no preconceived notions of robots and they communicate using touch as much as speech. In phase I of the experiment, which lasted 27 sessions, QRIO was instructed to interact with the children using its full behavioral repertoire, which included head-turning, dancing and giggling. At first, the children would touch the robot on its face, bu ...

Jack Mangan responds to Unsolvable Deathtrap broadcast 2007-11-07 09:01:00 As you might recall, I ran Jack Mangan's excellent short story "The Unsolvable Deathtrap" in episode 73. Jack was kind enough to write back, and I thought I would share his comments with you.Paul,Hey, I realize that the show ran about a month ago --- but I wanted to write and say thanks for the wonderful treatment you showed "The Unsolvable Deathtrap". Greatly appreciated! And you did an excellent job. ............ keep up the good work! -Jack ManganThanks Jack! ...

What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes 2007-11-06 21:01:00 From Discover Magazine onlineIn 2004, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was hurtling toward a possible collision with the most populated swath of Earth—Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. Furiously crunching numbers on their computers, the researchers put the odds of impact in the year 2029 at exactly those of hitting the number in a game of roulette: 1 in 37. Researching back data proved that conclusion wrong, however in 2029 the asteroid, dubbed Apophis—derived from the Egyptian god Apep, the destroyer who dwells in eternal darkness—will zoom closer to Earth than the world’s communications satellites do. And April 13, 2036, it will return—this time with a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting somewhere on a line stretching from the Pacific Ocean near California to Central America. What causes even more concern is that this is far from an unusual situation. T ...

Comet draws scientific, amateur interest 2007-11-06 13:44:00 A comet that has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest. The comet in question and of interest is Comet 17P/Holmes which can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper. The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies. Until Oct. 23, the comet had been visible to modern astronomers only with a telescope when it suddenly increased in brightness which indicated that the comet nucleus had disintegrated. Scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas. Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at ...

BMU 77 podcast is up- we look at a galactic slugfest, the moonrush, gravity-free evolution,, talk with Shaun Saunders, listen to Doctorow and more! 2007-11-05 15:52:00 BMU's latest podcast lets you: take sides on the wager on who won the great galactic barroom brawl three billion years ago, and who got the dark matter kicked out of them; find out why moon mining is suddenly where the smart money is rushing, how the Chinese may have effectively preempted other nations in gaining exclusive economic use of the moon and beyond--all the way to the limits of 'the heavens'!; why NASA must open its secret UFO files to a journalist; what organism is proven to evolve in nongravity environments; Australian novelist/psychologist Shaun Anthony Saunders on the making of Mallcity 14 (the book), and his and BMU's thoughts on the social challenges likely to crop up on longterm space voyages, when the stress of competing for expensive, continually updating material status symbols -- something endemic to Terran human socio-economics today -- is suddenly removed. And Cory Doctorow on wikipedia and other e-resources for today's internetia. ...

Moonrush is on, as wannabe exploiters and luna-huggers square off. 2007-11-03 00:23:00 'Harvest Moon' takes on another meaning, as Terran "Moonrushers" point to fortunes to be made exploiting the vast deposits of madly valuable lunar ores containing helium-3 (He-3) that are now asserted to exist in easily mineable and transportable commercial quantities of the material.Others, noting an increased propensity by the planet's nation-states to extraterritorially lay claim to the hitherto sacrosanct polar regions of Antarctica and Arctica, warn that Chinese planning for lunar colonization is well underway,But do they have a claim? The host of mining interests and rocketeers that hope to stripmine Helium-3 rich moondust from the lunar "seas" have no more claim than any other earthlings. The Chinese nation however, could invoke their historic claim to already possessing the entire moon as their exclusive economic zone under the Shang Dynasty Son of Heaven declaration asserting China's extraplanetary hegemony as the ruler of "All under heaven".With even a co ...

NASA ordered to 'fess up re 1965 UFO incident. 2007-10-31 01:26:00 Ufologists take the slogan of the Quaker State seriously. "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania!" the motto goes; many think that one of those friends just might be from another planet!In 1965 residents of the town of Kecksburg, about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, watched a mysterious object fly across their skies and crash, then saw its wreckage taken away by tight lipped federal agents from the American Air Force, Army and NASA.Sticking to their "it was a meteor" meme, the agencies had pretty much brushed the matter under the rug. But, get this: Pennsylvania's other official slogan is "Memories last a life time" and indeed, four years ago journalist Leslie Kean of New York City sued NASA demanding full disclosure on the mysterious crash. Surprise: the judge found in her favor!At least, US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected NASA's request to throw the case out of court. The resulting negotiations led to the agency promising last week that it will conduct a mo ...

Ringside watchers differ on 3 billion year old brawl 2007-10-31 00:19:00 Say you're in the taproom at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe. Down the bar, one galactic cluster drunkenly bumps into another. Before you know it, they are entangled in a deadly clash so terrible, they're knocking the very dark matter out of each other!That's what last August, astronomer Douglas Clowe, then at the University of Arizona and his colleagues reported taking place about 3 billion light-years from here in the appropriately-named Bullet Cluster. But now a Canadian team of researchers led by John W. Moffatt, PhD argues that what the Yanks thought they saw wasn't dark matter at all. Instead, the intermingling of the two vast bodies is resulting in a Modified Gravity event or "MOG" that has bent light passing through the non-dark matter of each cluster from even more distant stellar formations in slightly different ways, giving the appearance, if not the reality of a 'dark" form of matter. Moffatt says their Modified Gravity theory predicts that the ...