The Real-Life Possibilities Behind the Hit TV Show

Ericka's Eyes

On scifi, science and geeky miscellany — Down With Phrenology.

What could be more common than green leaves? We’re used to them, but we still really don’t understand how photosynthesis works — or how it can be so darn efficient.

Algae Show a Knack for Quantum Mechanics — Berardelli 2010 203: 3 — ScienceNOW.

By now, I assume you’ve seen pictures, or videos, of Apple’s new iPad. And I have some thoughts about it, but first I want to mention another technology that got buried by Apple’s hype: An electronic newspaper.

Full disclosure: I get paid to websurf and then tell people (hopefully entertainingly) about news on the web regarding display technologies: computer screens, sure, but also 3D movies, cell phones, projectors, HDTVs, holograms, the whole gamut! (Want a free email newsletter on the subject? Take a look at some back issues or subscribe to “Display Technologies” for free!)

So, the iPad. For what it is, I think it’s great: if you want to consume any sort of media — movies or TV shows (like Heroes), books, the New York Times, and maybe music — it provides a big screen and a long battery life, for a light weight and relatively low price. For me, a laptop is too heavy and the screen of an iTouch or iPhone is too small for things I want to look at.

This is absolutely not a machine for producing with: it’s a portable high-definition video screen. And you can check your email and Google Maps on it.

I’m pretty happy with it being what it is.

But! I’m more interested in e-paper: the black-and-white display technology in the Kindle and Sony Reader and a bunch of other e-readers, which has advantages of power economy (because it only requires power to change the display) and better ergonomics (since it isn’t shining light at you the way most computer screens do).

LG Display demonstrated a really darn big (19-inch, or in other words, newspaper-sized) e-paper display that is both very thin and flexible. Unlike most of the e-readers we’ve seen, it uses a metal foil substrate rather than glass, and the electronics are handled fairly gracefully.

I think it’s really darn neat! Okay, and I remember episodes of Babylon 5, where people were reading the Daily Universe (?Was that the name?) e-newspapers, which just makes it that much cooler.

I haven’t had a chance to explore this site much, but it looks good and is run by reputable people:

Scitable | Learn Science at Nature.

Also from this site: Creaturecast!

Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Reef_aq1.jpg — does anyone recognize it?

Here’s a blog to share:

WTF_nature is an irreverent blog that shares news stories about nature being stranger than one might expect. The most recent post is about animals appropriating genes from plants. A previous entry pointed out just how weird Ginko Biloba really is. (Although I could make a similar post about armadillos.)

It’s full of beautiful, strange, and shocking examples of natural phenomena. Pretty cool!

I’m looking forward to Arisia in the same way I used to look forward to school vacations! Here’s my bio and the panels that I’ll be on.

Vonnie Carts-Powell is the author of the popular science book, “The Science of Heroes” (published by Berkeley Press, 2008), and well over 1000 articles about science and technology. She is also an SF/F fan and a Morris dancer.

Sat 10:00am Kamikaze Costuming

Sat 2:00pm Ask a Geek: Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering

Mon 11:00am Subverting the Canon (This one should be exciting. Writeup: “Writers playing in someone else’s sandbox can’t help but bring their own sensibilities. How do writers of media tie-ins challenge or subvert what they’ve been handed? Is that a good thing? Can books and comics pushing the limits have their influence?” Cynthia A. Shettle, Marlin May, Vonnie Carts-Powell (m), Evan Jamieson.)

Mon 12:00pm Old Worlds, New Writers (And this one should be an interesting complement to the previous panel: “After Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Robert Jordan, and Roger Zelazny (among others) died, their books were given official sequels by new authors. Is this a legitimate way to explore their universes further, or just milking them dry? Vonnie Carts-Powell, Tyler Stewart (m), Paula Lieberman, Adam Lipkin.)

I’ll be at Arisia, New England’s Largest and Most Diverse Science Fiction Convention (or so they tell me), in Cambridge, MA, on January 15-18.

The con is at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge Hotel, on Mem Drive.

My panel schedule is fairly light. On Monday. I’ll be on the “Ask A Geek” panel and two panels about both licensed tie-ins/sequels produced by other people, as well as derivative art. It should be fun!

R&P Books, on Dealer’s Row, will be carrying The Science of Heroes, and I’ll be stopping by regularly.

Very cool stuff. What we know about an evolutionary ancestor that is closer to us than chimpanzees.

Video: Ardipithecus ramidus — 326 5960: 1598 — Science.

I ran into a friend of mine yesterday, who is working at a Harvard lab on making robots — actual, mobile robots — out of paper. It’s apparently based on work by Fearing at Berkeley (although mostly I know about his biomimetics work). Am chasing the story, but… so very cool!

By Jenny Huang

(That photo is of a mantis shrimp, which isn’t actually a shrimp at all, and in a bit I’ll explain what it’s doing in this post. Photo by Jenny Huang.)

I hope you all are enjoying the fourth season of Heroes as much as I am!

What have I been up to?
One of the more fun things I’ve published lately is an article on a car adapted for blind drivers (Optics&Photonics News, November 09 issue).

All those months of messing about with superresolution microscopy concluded with the cover feature story for Advanced Imaging magazine, Seeing Molecules With Visible Light.

I just finished some stories (that aren’t out yet, so I won’t point you at them) about the world’s longest laser (it’s 270 km long, so if you laid it out straight, it would stretch from San Francisco to beyond San Diego) (It is, for obvious reasons, not laid out straight. But it takes up a fair bit of room in the lab.)

I also just wrote about a bunch of biologists who have figured out how a mantis shrimp sees polarized light across the visible spectrum. And they discovered that it’s eyes put to shame our human attempts to do the same. (And that is why I included Jenny Huang’s photo of a mantis shrimp!)

And finally, I got the preliminary program for the The American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, in February. I won’t be there, alas. AAAS is the most fun science meeting I’ve attended and a really good way to get a snapshot of what’s going on across the sciences.