The Splinterphage

One of the runners-up for the “general synthetic lifeform” was Noar Livne, who charmed us by asserting at the end of his contest entry that he is not insane. Drew Endy, one of our judges, named Livne’s lifeform “Splinterphage.” Here is how Livne described it: This life-form has 3 stages and two sexes. Stage 1…

Making A Biological Counter

Katherine Aull was our runner-up for the biobricks lifeform. She explained her entry like this: This paper describes a novel counter design, based on a bit overflow detector to signal “carry” events, and a bidirectional toggle switch to update and maintain the count. It also describes work towards a prototype, ongoing in the author’s home…

Re-engineering Rhizobium

Our winner in the biobricks lifeform category for our Mad Science Contest is Vijaykumar S. Meli. A graduate student at the National Institute for Plant Genome Research at the JNU Campus in New Delhi, Meli has imagined a way to use a rhizobial bacteria to make growing rice much cheaper. One of the big expenses…

The Blue Forest

Elliott Gresswell is the winner of our “general synthetic lifeform” category for the Mad Science contest. His entry, about a lifeform called the “Blue Forest,” is a fictional lab notebook written by a scientist working on a team that invents a form of plant life that lives on a kind of aquatic nano-goo. As the…

Our best wishes are with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who’s in the hospital following a heart attack. Thank goodness, it sounds as though she’s doing okay and has internet access in her hospital room. You can leave your get-well messages at the link. [Making Light]

Let’s Start A Futuristic Mexican Revolution, Murder All The Christmas Trees And Enjoy Free Fantastic Fest Films

This week, travel to the year 2033 in Mexico where the unwashed masses are slaves and target practice for the rich. Also, if you can’t make it to this years Fantastic Fest, never fear – the festival is streaming some of the best movies and shorts, including one about a face cream that will make…

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was the best science fiction novel I read in the 1990s, and remains one of the best novels I’ve ever read in the genre. The story of a future dystopia where entertainment has finally become so addictive as to be lethal, Infinite Jest was brilliant and morbid, with a bizarre…

The New Prisoner Will Be Retro, Gentle

Wondering what to expect from AMC’s remake of the classic paranoiafest that is The Prisoner? Apparently something that may look a lot like the serene and calm design of the 1960s and ’70s, but have an up-to-date technological sinister undertone, according to two behind the scenes videos released recently. You may know about The Village…

Call to Worship at the Temple of Science

It’s been almost seventy years since Albert Einstein argued that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” in an influential Nature essay. The faceoff of science v. religion, however, is far from over — just ask our creationist VP nominee. In Berkeley, California, one artist is attempting to heal this rift by…

Make The Best Spider-Man 5 You Can, Sam Raimi

So we’re already getting very heavy hints that the recently-announced Spider-Man 4 will center around the long-teased-to-the-point-of-not-caring “Curt Connors Becomes The Lizard” storyline that easter eggs in the first three movies have been slowly building to, but that’s not why we’re excited about the prospect of Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire returning to the Spider-Franchise…

Spaceballs’ Animated Return May Mean That G4 Hates Us

Of all the science fiction movies to find themselves given new life on television, why did G4 choose Mel Brooks’ anemic Star Wars parody Spaceballs? And why has the series – now slated to begin next weekend – taken so long to make it to screen? We look at the show’s history, as well as…

Oh My God, They Killed Tony!

Click to viewApparently, Marvel Comics took the success of The Dark Knight pretty badly, if this recently-released teaser image is anything to go by. Maybe a little too badly – I mean, killing Iron Man because his movie wasn’t the biggest hit of the summer? Isn’t that going a little too far? While the publisher…

How Knuckledraggers Really Spend Their Time Off

Starship Regulars, a cartoon that ran on Flash animation site Icebox from 1999-2000, was intended to parody self-righteous military space dramas like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5. But the interstellar upstairs/downstairs comedy in many ways resembles the rebooted Battlestar Galactica with its focus on the orange jumpsuit-wearing non-officers, heavy use of a…

The Thing Returns For The First Time

If your enjoyment of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing has always been hampered by the fact that you didn’t know anything about the origins of the shapechanging killer alien, then relax; help is on the way, courtesy of an upcoming prequel to the 1982 classic.Latino Review talked to director Marc Abraham, who’s working on…

Finally, A Good Reason To Go And See Star Trek

Paramount is screening footage of their big 2009 movies for international press, and the resulting buzz on JJ Abrams’ Star Trek is very positive – and that’s before you learn about the full-length trailer for another much anticipated movie that’s going to be accompanying it into theaters next May. Are you ready for a colorful,…

Best SNL Scifi Sketches Of All Time

Be it pointy headed aliens, smoking astronauts, gay space invaders or cats that shoot lasers out of their mouths, Saturday Night Live has always delivered some of the best scifi-based sketches this world has ever seen. Tonight, the SNL players take the stage again and, after a few bad years, an infusion of new writers…

Hurricane Ike as Seen from the International Space Station

Here is the outer edge of Hurricane Ike, as seen from the International Space Station. The hurricane hit Texas yesterday, and news stories are claiming a fairly low death toll compared to the disastrous Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in 2005. There have been just over 100 deaths reported so far. We hope it…

Dr. Parnassus Tease Now Online

Looking for your first sneak at Heath Ledger’s final movie? Look no further – a teaser video for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has appeared online, and while it doesn’t feature any actual scenes from the finished movie, it does have director Terry Gilliam explaining what the movie’s about, concept artwork and pre-visualization CGI from…

Saving the World One Curry Stone at a Time

We’ve already got the wheel, the telephone, the iPod, and sliced bread — now it’s time for an all-new brand of futuristic thinking. This week, at the International Venice Architecture Bienniale, the University of Kentucky College of Design unveiled the five nominees for the first Curry Stone Design Prize. Like Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize or…

An Early Dark Knight DVD, Or Just A Twitter Joker?

The movie may still be breaking records in theaters, but does that mean that it’s too early to start a marketing campaign for The Dark Knight’s DVD and BluRay release in December? Apparently not, as many Twitter users discovered on Friday afternoon, when a familiar face asked to befriend them.Within 24 hours of the creation…