The Real-Life Possibilities Behind the Hit TV Show

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.

If you missed the Igs, you can still catch a list of the Improbable Research Ig Nobel winners. One of the more distinctive winners holds a patent on a bra that turns into a face mask. Apparently bandanas and handkerchiefs are passe for that use.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

If you’re available tonight, and in Cambridge, MA, trot over to beautiful Sanders Theater to watch, cheer, laugh, and throw paper airplanes.

If you are free tonight elsewhere, catch the live webcast. Honestly, it’s the most fun awards show I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend.

When I give a talk about the uses and abuses of science and technology, I often used the bumblebee story as an example of both (see excerpt at the end of this post for the full bumblebee story).

One point of the story is that realistic modeling is important. A new paper published in Science describes a better model of insect wings that are both bumpy and floppy. University of Oxford researchers made realistic models of the wing movements and deformations of the desert locust, a creature that can fly as far as 300 kilometers at a time. Michael Torrice at ScienceNOW has a good explanation: Floppy Wings = Efficient Flight.

Photo by Charlie Wrenn.

(Excerpt from The Science of Heroes, Chapter 4)

You’ve probably heard the modern parable: even after an engineer “proves” that a bumblebee can’t fly, the little-insect-that-could merrily flutters away, ignoring the best calculations known to man.
Continue reading →

I won’t be able to watch the premier tonight, so (alas) no live-blogging from me this week.

Two interesting bits of Heroes news out today:

• Heroes is going even more multimedia than it has been (which is considerably more multimedia than most TV shows): for 10 weeks, Digital Spy tells us, NBC will offer graphic novels for mobile devices, interactive SMS synced to broadcast, and a $25,000 sweepstakes linked to the interactive story. Also, NBC is gearing up games and online one-minute scenes tied into the airing episodes.

• Meanwhile, Hugh Hart at a Wired blog has an intriguingly titled post: Heroes Stars on Season 4: Deathbed, Yes; Lesbians, Maybe. The entry includes a video and phone interview with Masi Oka (Hiro), and Hayden Panettiere (Claire). ‘Ware spoilers!

In fiction, genetic manipulation of some sort is the source of superpowers on Heroes. In fact, gene therapy might be able to address medical ills that drug-based medicine can’t touch. A very exciting new study describes an animal study that enhanced the vision of monkeys.

The researchers targeted a specific gene expression: the ability to see green  and red, in monkeys that have been color-blind since birth. After a virus carrying the gene was injected behind the monkeys’ retinas,  the monkeys developed — and so far have kept — the ability to distinguish colors.

Three human gene therapy trials are currently under way for loss of sight due to serious degeneration of the retina. These safety studies also  involve injecting a gene-carrying virus  behind the retina. The people treated have shown no serious adverse effects more than a year after, with some participants reporting marked improvements in vision.

Read more about it in the Nature news story: Color blindness corrected by gene therapy.

[Edited to add: Gisela Telis at ScienceNOW also covers the story, and her article includes a video of the monkeys: Gene Therapy Gives Monkeys Color Vision -- Telis 2009 (916): 1 -- ScienceNOW.]