Beam Me up blog is the sister/support site For the Beam Me Up podcast. It contains links, discussion and material that might be or have been discussed on the show. Also links to new show listings and material. Be sure to check out the live stream every Saturday at 4pm eastern at http://www.wrfr.org/links.html and select stream
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Blade Runner prequel?
I am reading on the IO9 blog news that suggests that there is a new Blade Runner movie in the wind. Yeah! I know! That was my first reaction.
But according to IO9, Alcon Entertainment Warner Bros-based financing and production company ) and Bud Yorkin are in "final negotiations" to secure the rights to the film.
But the weird thing is that the rights would be all inclusive EXCEPT to remake the film, so no reboot....prequel or sequel is what seems to be on the table.
Read the press release that IO9 posted to see the convolutions...or C...F... if you would
But according to IO9, Alcon Entertainment Warner Bros-based financing and production company ) and Bud Yorkin are in "final negotiations" to secure the rights to the film.
But the weird thing is that the rights would be all inclusive EXCEPT to remake the film, so no reboot....prequel or sequel is what seems to be on the table.
Read the press release that IO9 posted to see the convolutions...or C...F... if you would
Whacked Cyborg!
From "This Isn't Happiness via Boing Boing has got to be one of the most disturbing "cyborgedized" (yep, made that one up) beings yet. Not that it could happen, but that someone was whacked enough to think this one through to this point. Like the article says, the pictures are "uncredited scan from a unnamed Cyrillic (Russian?) book"
The old "Lassie? Timmy is where?" certainly take on a new life of their own now. Let the speculations begin!
The old "Lassie? Timmy is where?" certainly take on a new life of their own now. Let the speculations begin!
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Like grains of sand...these are the red dwarfs in our skies...
Dan sends in an article by the "amateur naturalist" Dana Wilde commenting on how our view of the universe has changed in less than a hundred years. I just can't resist beating around some of the ideas that Wilde brings up.
Who doesn't remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Sagan would often make a pronouncement of scale that was totally astounding. I can clearly remember Sagan in the early 80s proclaiming that there are more stars than grains of sand on the beaches of Earth. Now one astronomer trying to put a number to Sagan's pronouncement estimated that there are about 2000 billion billion grains of sand on Earth. That's a serious haul of stars by anyone's estimate.
In amongst the visible class of stars are, for lack of a better label, ghost stars. Stars so small, dim and cool as to be all but invisible under most detection methods. Red Dwarf stars and no one could come up with a reasonable amount of these "ghost stars'. Recently Yale astronomers determined that there are many more of red Dwarf stars than anyone thought possible. Yale astronomers detected the light from red dwarf stars in the spectra of large elliptical galaxies and from this determined that red dwarfs account for around 60% of the mass (star mass) of those galaxies. That is triple what was previously thought to exist!
What is even wilder about red dwarfs is just how slow they age. Because they are relatively cool and very small these stars burn their fuel very slowly. So slowly in fact that the present universe is not old enough for red dwarf stars to grow "old". Which when you come to think about it means that virtually every red dwarf that present at creation of the universe, is still burning 13+ billion years later!
Bangor Daily News article
Who doesn't remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Sagan would often make a pronouncement of scale that was totally astounding. I can clearly remember Sagan in the early 80s proclaiming that there are more stars than grains of sand on the beaches of Earth. Now one astronomer trying to put a number to Sagan's pronouncement estimated that there are about 2000 billion billion grains of sand on Earth. That's a serious haul of stars by anyone's estimate.
In amongst the visible class of stars are, for lack of a better label, ghost stars. Stars so small, dim and cool as to be all but invisible under most detection methods. Red Dwarf stars and no one could come up with a reasonable amount of these "ghost stars'. Recently Yale astronomers determined that there are many more of red Dwarf stars than anyone thought possible. Yale astronomers detected the light from red dwarf stars in the spectra of large elliptical galaxies and from this determined that red dwarfs account for around 60% of the mass (star mass) of those galaxies. That is triple what was previously thought to exist!
What is even wilder about red dwarfs is just how slow they age. Because they are relatively cool and very small these stars burn their fuel very slowly. So slowly in fact that the present universe is not old enough for red dwarf stars to grow "old". Which when you come to think about it means that virtually every red dwarf that present at creation of the universe, is still burning 13+ billion years later!
Bangor Daily News article
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Huge Luna Cave Discovered
In a recent Gizmodo article there is a report that the Indian Space Research Organization has discovered a "giant underground chamber" near the Moon's equator, in the Oceanus Procellarum area.
Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft the structure is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide.
The ISRO is speculating on good uses for the huge cave. It is sufficiently well protected to block harmful radiation from damaging long term occupants as well as constant temperatures of around -4 Fahrenheit where the surface experiences huge variations in temperature.
Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft the structure is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide.
The ISRO is speculating on good uses for the huge cave. It is sufficiently well protected to block harmful radiation from damaging long term occupants as well as constant temperatures of around -4 Fahrenheit where the surface experiences huge variations in temperature.
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