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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

CNN has a great article here on the future of cinema. As the whole home distribution system becomes more popular and goes digital, struggling theaters are going to have to start pulling rabbits out of their hats to get people to leave their homes to watch movies. Fortunately, it appears the technology’s coming along. 3D is becoming the gimmick of choice for major studios, thanks to the success of things like the Miley Cyrus 3D concert and “Chicken Little.” Theaters are gradually making the shift to digital projectors. The technology is advancing to the point that we may not even need the glasses for digital projectors to produce what appears to be a 3D image in high definition.

It’s great that theaters are finally overhauling in order to attract people. I just hope in all the confusion that the studios don’t forget that they have to make movies worth watching in 3D high-def. I love going to the movies, but there are times where the choice is spending $10 to see a movie I know I’m going to hate or staying at home and watching something I might enjoy. Based on the grosses last week, I’d say the blockbuster summer is over, which means the next movie I look forward to seeing will be “Quantum of Solace,” and that’s not until November.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Do you ever catch yourself taking a sip of some cool, refreshing tap water and ask yourself, “I wonder if there’s any chemicals in this that will turn me into a hideous, yet powerful monster?” Thankfully our friends at the EPA are earning our tax dollars by allowing access to their database which tells you which factories are dumping potentially toxic chemicals in your zip code. Just click on Toxy over here and put in your address for a complete report on your area.

Go ahead, it’s not as scary as it sounds.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Honda has announced that it will be premiering a (sorta) new low-cost hybrid at the Paris auto show next month. The new five-door, five-seater hatchback will be taking up the name “Insight,” the name of Honda’s previous attempt at a dedicated hybrid, which was discontinued in 2006. The new vehicle will sell for 2 million yen ($18,500) in Japan next spring. Honda expects to sell 200,000 units per year, half of which in North America.

I’m glad to hear Honda’s taking another shot at the hybrid market. The original Insight and Accord hybrids were such a disappointment, and the Prius really has the edge when it comes to dedicated hybrids. The only factor that will affect my opinion will be actual fuel efficiency, which has yet to be announced.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

The Los Angeles Museum of Natural History is hosting an exhibit that features live (by way of Walking with Dinosaurs FX) prehistoric creatures. This is so awesome.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Baylor University physicists Gerald Cleaver and Robert K. Obousy believe they’ve found a way to travel faster than the speed of light. The theory centers around observations made in bang bang physics that have allowed for faster than light travel at the outskirts of the expanding universe. The proposal, which will be published in the September issue of the British Interplanetary Society Journal, outlines the means by which this effect of warping space-time can be achieved artificially.

From io9.com

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

The Particle Zoo has released plushies based on sub-atomic particles! Each one of them has a unique / personality. They’re perfect for getting your budding super scientist to take an interest in the microverse.

The Particle Zoo

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Well, Mars officially has water ice! Someone tell Quatto!

The Phoenix lander has discovered proof positive of water ice on the Martian surface on Thursday. The discovery brings us one step closer to colonization and I have to side with Warren Ellis on this one:

” Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to. Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don’t make it anymore.”

More from Wired

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Scientists using the HARPS Spectrograph have recently discovered three “super-Earths” orbiting a star 42 light years away. The findings, which employed new techniques for locating planet-sized objects, shows that there are possibly more planets in the universe than previously anticipated. The smallest of the super-Earths is approx 4x the size of our home world, and all may be too hot to support life.

Yahoo Science 

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

The British have officially doomed us all by building… wait for it… wait for it… Skynet. No, not something like “Skynet” from the Terminator series. They have in fact made Skynet and named it Skynet.

Skynet Five, the final piece of a satellite network which will allow for global military communication and control of robotic “drone” aircraft was recently launched. The drones are apparently named “Reapers”… very comforting. The system is owned by a private firm with a portion of the functionality licensed to the British government.

Sleep soundly.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

The record-breaking luck bringer was found by Shigeo Obara, an Iwate prefecture farmer, on June 3rd. Guiness has confirmed this as the most leaves on any clover found to date.

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The record-breaking clover’s 21 leaves each measure about 1 centimeter long and overlap each other like rose petals on a 3-centimeter stem.

“Obara, a former food crop researcher, has been conducting independent research on clovers in his garden for over 50 years. He first became interested in clover mutations after discovering an unusual patch of 4-leaf clovers in 1951. Since then, Obara has been crossbreeding the plants in his garden to research the genes associated with leaf count, color, pattern and size.”

Thanks to NextNature.net

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

This heat reactive wallpaper “blooms” when with temperature changes. Design by Shiyuan.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Dan Glickman, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, acknowledged on Monday that people who illegally download movies are also the people who go to movie theaters to see movies. While the MPAA and most major studios have charged for years that illegal downloading has cut into theater attendance, Glickman said to the National Press Club in Washington that the industry was working on a way to improve both the traditional film distribution model and the “anytime, anywhere enjoyment of movies that consumers clearly want today.”

Yes, all of us on the Internet already knew this, but it does my heart good to hear someone in “the industry” agree. I don’t know that there’s a model that will satisfy everyone as far as how film distribution will evolve, but I know that I use all of the methods available to me to watch movies. At Illusion it has been a real tough issue, because we pay for licensing on some of our shows and movies, and it’s frustrating to see them distributed for free on the Internet. We really just have to cling to the hope that seeing shows on the Internet will make you want to watch them again on your TV. No one really has all the answers when it comes to this issue*, but only honest dialogue will help us work toward a solution.

*Except for Dekker, but he’s not telling anyone until he’s President of the MPAA.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

This article from MSN.com explores the possibilities that alien lifeforms making contact with Earth will more than likely be at least partially robotic as well as biological, like Six on “Battlestar Galactica.” The idea is put forth, essentially, that other Earth-like planets in the universe could be up to 50,000 years older than Earth itself, thus their indigenous beings will have already fought and lost the war against the machines, which will become the dominant species. Given how much our technology has advanced in the past 100 years, scientists theorize that a culture 50,000 years older than ours will have developed incredibly advanced technology that we have yet to imagine. The implication, which the article does not directly address, is that all those pieces of sci-fi that indicate Earth is some shunned backwater planet to the rest of the universe are right. I always expected as much, but the only thing that gets to me about this article is that they refer to the Cylons as extraterrestrials.  All of the characters in “Battlestar Galactica” are extraterrestrials.  As not a one of them came from Earth, thus none of the characters fit into the category of “terrestrial.” In any case, it’s a fun read and has lots of cool links to other pieces that talk about the relationship between science and science fiction. Check it out (by clicking the picture).

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Scientists at Berkeley have discovered that dinosaurs were mating before full maturity. I wonder if there were dino-teen pregnancy PSA’s?

Researchers dated the age of mating by tracing calcium-rich bone tissue which forms when producing eggs and compared the amounts found against the skeletal maturity of the specimens.

Read the full story HERE

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

James Cameron recently told Variety that he may spend the rest of his career shooting films exclusively in digital 3-D. The director’s current film, “Avatar,” is being shot in 3-D, for which Cameron helped design a 3-D camera light enough to carry on his shoulder. Cameron’s comments came as part of a list Variety has compiled of the top 30 executives, filmmakers, and tech gurus who are building the future of entertainment technology.

Cameron goes digital? Welcome to the club. There is a growing rift in Hollywood between the filmmakers, like George Lucas and James Cameron, who think digital filmmaking is the future of film and the advocates, like Steven Spielberg, who say that film will never go away. On one hand I don’t think you’ll ever see the end of real, old-fashioned film-making, at least not until digital can mimic the look of film, but as the digital technology gets cheaper, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find studios willing to pay for the rising costs of film processing. 

Of course there’s always the x-factor that most theaters are still using film projectors, so until digital projectors get cheap enough for theaters to make the conversion, the way we watch movies in the theater will continue as scheduled unless you want to go out of your way to see a movie in digital 3-D. The sad thing is that I doubt 95% of the people who go to movies actually care how it’s presented. If anyone can create a mass conversion, though, the man who brought us “Titanic” is probably the one to do it.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

After reading an interesting post on io9.com about an oddly misguided bit of courtroom futurism, I decided that I needed to rinse my mouth out with some equally poor futurism from a simpler time.

The video, entitled “Magic Highway USA” is a 1958 masterpiece of technological propaganda from our good friends at the Walt Disney Company. I have to admit that as a kid I was glued to the television whenever one of these Disney science shorts popped up. Uncle Walt took me to Mars, the depths of the ocean and in to the mud pits of prehistory. Follow that man to hell and back I would! But in all seriousness, I wish someone was producing more futurism geared toward children. This new generation is very technologically savvy, but I’m not sold on if they’re as adventurous in their approach to technology.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

This new 3D drafting solution uses motion capture technology to plot “scribbles” in real space that can be translated to 3D models or produced in a custom manufacturing solution. For this example the creators of the system, called FRONT, have used furniture as an example of the accuracy of the new system.

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Jamais Cascio delivered an interesting essay on his Open the Future blog the other day. He suggests that as more devices and environmental piece, which have previously been unwired, become connected to the internet we’re going to see a potential explosion of malware designed to interrupt our everyday lives.

Imagine a script that makes your Mr. Coffee heat up so hot that it melts it’s own circuits or an air conditioner that decides to get stuck at freezing. The possibilities of mayhem and privacy invasion are limitless.

Read the article online here Open the Future

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

Scientific American recently published an article regarding the use of BioChips in the drug testing process. The typical new drug can go through years of harsh lab analysis to find those nasty little side-effects that are quickly disclaimed at the end of commercials; BioChips may be a safer and faster way to discover potential problems in mass-market medications.

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of California, Berkeley, and Solidus Biosciences have recently published reported there findings on uses for two medical BioChips, MetaChip and DataChip. MetaChip is a small glass sheet dotted with human liver enzymes while DataChip is a similar structure laced with cell cultures from the bladder, kidney or liver. Testing compounds of either, or both, chips can show how a drug will interact with the human body. This process also has the added benefit of negating the need for live animal testing.

Read the entire article at Scientific American

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Originally published at Better Living Through Science Fiction. Please leave any comments there.

The Chinese government has vowed to increase efforts toward renewable energy, but says it will continue use coal burning as a major fuel source. China also warns of increases in green-house gas emissions from their growing economic sector, but will not embrace efforts to limit the nation’s environmental impact.

The Chinese cabinet’s report says, “China gives top priority to developing renewable energy,” and mentions hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and wind power as active areas of research.

One of the primary reasons for China’s resistance to limiting current fuel emissions is that emerging nations are not responsible for the current level of pollution and that such nations require energy growth to fight poverty.

This leads to an interesting eco-political situation where emerging economic powers feel entitled to the same environmental liberties afforded to current first world countries during the industrial revolution.

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