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 47 5373

Articles from Beam Me Up

Town recalls heyday of UFO sightings 2007-11-28 15:27:00 Nelson was listening to show 80 and it seems it rang a bell for him. This is what he wrote" “Dave” mentioned Gulf Breeze. I happened to read this a couple days ago. Read a book on it, even. That town has quite a history." and he sent me this linkhttp://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/317768.htmlthis is the story blurbTwo decades ago, the area around the Florida Panhandle town of Gulf Breeze was the center of sightings of unidentified flying objects.Quite a history indeed! Adds a bit more punch to Dave's mutterings .... yes it does. lol ...

Super' scanner shows key detail 2007-11-27 16:39:00 from BBC NewsShaun Saunders makes a great point here.....how many sci-fi movies does this technology relate too? Total Recall; Star Trek...........and the list goes on.....A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by as much as 80%. ...

Mars orbiter spots rover on weird plateau 2007-11-27 16:26:00 Shaun Saunders sends in this cool article and photo of one of the Martian rovers as photographed by the Mars Orbiter. His comments are just as interesting though. Shaun wrote "The above link is interesting for me in that it raises a new line of inquiry: have lunar orbiters imaged & photographed apollo landing sites and the mission hardware left behind?"Here is part of the article copy from MSNBCNASA's sharpest-eyed orbiter at Mars has spotted the Spirit rover far below, sitting on an enigmatic rock formation nicknamed "Home Plate."and I am thinking.....damn, I would really like to see some of the Luna landing sites.....where are those pics anyway?pic NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz ...

The Philip K. Dick android 2007-11-27 16:09:00 Oh and you want something that will really creep you out? Check out the Philip K. Dick android.This is so very wrong...I watched it for about 30 seconds while it tried to look people in the eye and I ran screaming from the room. ...

NBC's Journey Man on the bubble 2 week notice! 2007-11-27 15:56:00 Ouch! from AMC sci-fi scanner JourneyMan is in big trouble. 2 Weeks People! Get you **** together!Bad news, Journeyman fans! Though NBC's quirky quasi-update of Quantum Leap has become the surprise sci-fi hit of the season, the current rumor is that bad ratings areas about to kill the show off. According to Zap2It: the Nielsen numbers for Journeyman for the episodes airing on November 19th and 26th are critical. If the numbers don't improve substantially, the network will yank the show. Even more astonishingly, the source claims NBC won't even air the remaining episodes!Now I know I busted on this show for just that....being a Quantum Leap rip off....but to kill it and not show the remaining episodes!!! come ON! what has...NBC got trickle down mentality from the Sci-fi morons of scheduling? Yeah, I will fess up, I am watching the show and it's not bad, just compare it to that piece of crap the sci-fi channel brought in (yep talking about Flash again) as a season replace ...

Robotic Exoskeleton Turns Soldiers Into Space Marines 2007-11-27 15:46:00 From AMCSci-fi has trained us to expect military personnel to be walking around in mech suits. From Starship Troopers to Robocop, our expectations have been set: if you're not walking around in a flying skeleton of titanium alloy, you're just a flaccid water balloon full of meat slurry in a shooting range.here is some video of very up to date "super suit"amc/scifiscanner/2007/11/robotic-exoskel.html ...

Shatner doing WOW 2007-11-27 15:39:00 Ok, you know me, every now and then I just have to put up a vid that I think is really well just plain damn funny. So here goes, Bill Shatner pluggin WOW and lampooning himself and fans alike ...

Scientists Melt Million-year-old Ice In Search Of Ancient Microbes 2007-11-27 14:59:00 From Sciencedaily.comResearchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. The scientists will now examine the eons-old water for microorganisms, and try to figure out how they survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold and without food and energy from the sun. segments of ice were cut from an 11,866-foot ice core, 656 feet above the surface of Lake Vostok. This ice was once water in lake Vostok itself and froze to the bottom of the existing Antarctic ice sheet. No samples have been taken directly from lake Vostok as of yet due to fears of contaminating the area. Since the lake has not had direct contact with the surface world for at least 15 million years, this would be a contamination of one of the most pristine environments on Earth. ...

amputees can now "feel" with new limbs 2007-11-27 14:03:00 From AFP via Boing BoingI have often said and felt that a subset of science fiction is stories about people with damage due to accident, disease or defect who by one mode or another are "enhanced" to live a normal or above normal lives. like, say Cyborg (better known to tv views as the six million dollar man) Flowers for Algernon, The Ship Who Sang, Mars, The Demolished Man, Kiln People and so on. These stories ring a bit truer for me than others maybe but I really think a blending of the human body with augmentations of one type or another has a very real future. One very real subset of this is advancements in bio augmentation hardware and prosthetics. The closer they get to true "bionics" the hard its going to be to tell where the "original" ends and the "repair" begins.In the article listed here, advancements in the field of sensing are discussed. Some researchers have developed a technique of rerouting nerves from amputated limbs to regain some sense of touch etc. The sci ...

Universe being destroyed by mistake 2007-11-26 18:46:00 Humanity may be accidentally hastening the end of the entire universe. Oops. To any and all other lifeforms out there in cosmos, sorry! Our bad! It all comes down to quantum mechanics and the bizarre fact that subatomic thingamabobs behave differently if someone is watching them. Especially those peeking at dark matter...One can imagine physicists Laurel and Hardy: "Stanley?...Now look what you made me do!"Image courtesy Cinema Fantastique gallery ...

Star Wars Galaxy Map! 2007-11-25 17:34:00 Peter Sciretta over at the /Film blog wrote:As far as I know, George Lucas never created a map of the Star Wars galaxy. But the galaxy map pictured above was first compiled and published in 2002, in Issue One of The Official Star Wars Fact File. It was later republished in Issue 65 of the Star Wars Insider, which was released in February 2003.Well here is the "map" at right....click on it to enlarge it. ...

On Sequoia Time a though and a review. 2007-11-25 17:01:00 On Beam Me Up, we have reached episode 80. In that time we, and I say we because several of us have read some really excellent fiction. I have myself read quite a few of those stories. I think I have chosen well, the others, equally well. If I have chosen not to read a story, it was only because I could not figure out how to do it justice and quite frankly, some of the time I just didn't like the piece. Many of the stories upset me in one fashion or another. But I still read them. Here my friends is a story that I don't think I will read on BMU. The story is On Sequoia Time. The writer is Daniel Keys Moran. When I can find Mr. Moran's email address, I will certainly write him and tell him that I would love to read some of his works, one like "Old Man" But Sequoia Time....no. Maybe Ron will.....But when I read it, I felt like I was being blasted by the very winds the story talks about and grieved at the passing at the end. The work is there for you to read....Please do ...

Odd things in the sky! photos from Dave 2007-11-24 18:57:00 These are some of the devices that Dave mentioned in this weeks show (#80) Very odd looking well.....satellites? They are not aircraft but are they satellites? If you haven't listened to this week's interview with Dave, take a listen....I haven't got a clue what these things are. ...

Who we'll eat in space. Or, what to do with all those Throgs, Buggers and Skinnies the Space Cowboys mow down. 2007-11-22 23:16:00 Space-and planet-colonizing humans will likely desire to eat animals as much as any Terran anthropoid, but almost every animal subject to human consumption has so many complicated life requirements that the amount of energy invested in production can outweighs the nutritional values of the critters. This whether the organisms being raised are mammals, poultry or seafood.The question has sent humanity looking to its dietary beginnings. Back to when animal food was plentiful for the taking. Not feathered, or furred, not reptilian. No. For its dietary flesh fix, as paleoanthropologists examine coprolites have discerned, Homo sapiens sapiens wisely bellied up to the most successful, most adaptable and easily consumed animals of all. The insects.The creatures of Class Insecta—the most diverse group of animals on the Earth, with over a million described species claiming 20 to 30% or all planetary animal biomass—are also the most adaptable of animals to all air-breather environments. ...

Canada sending up new surveillance satellite to spy on inhabitants of North Pole 2007-11-22 19:08:00 The Global SpyState is moving apace. The Canadian Space Agency has announced its new surveillance satellite Radarsat-2, set to begin "safeguarding Canada's sovereignty" over its Arctic realms.Jim Prentice, Canada's Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for the Canadian Space Agency said that RADARSAT-2 "will provide improved surveillance and monitoring capabilities that will provide critical data for the active management of natural resources and monitoring of the environment. .. In the event of a disaster, RADARSAT-2 will be an indispensable tool to provide rescue and humanitarian aid to those most in need".All welland good, but as is well known, Terra's collapsing Arctic ice is opening up industrial access to hitherto unexploited seafloors where riches unknown await--at least Big Industry hopes so. But inconveniently for the exploiter wannabes, amid the ice are the islands and Innuit people of the Nunavut Province of arctic Canada, 30,000 strong, whose two mi ...