The premise of FlashForward is that everybody in the world blacks out at the same time, and for a few minutes they see what's going to happen to them six months into the future. Hence, the "flashforward" of the title. Because everybody is blacked out during this flashforward, of course, chaos reigns. Planes and cars crash; people die. It's a strange and intriguing disaster, and now characters on the show are hinting that it was caused by a physics research facility in Palo Alto, clearly modeled on an actual facility associated with Stanford University in Palo Alto. On the website for the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC for short, you can find an informative FAQ responding to FlashForward's science flailing.

They explain that plasma-wakefield acceleration experiments have gone on at SLAC, but only with electrons. They write:

SLAC does have a cutting-edge plasma-wakefield acceleration program that is creating the next generation of particle accelerators. However, it works by accelerating electrons (and their anti-matter cousin positrons) rather than the much heavier protons. At this time, there are no experiments that attempt to accelerate protons using plasma wakefields.

In addition, no matter what you did with these experiments, you wouldn't get a flashforward:

Plasma-wakefield acceleration is just an advanced technique to boost particles to high energies, something that particle physicists have been doing for decades. Even the most speculative theories rooted in real physics make no prediction that anything like a flashforward could occur.

"Although we can use particle accelerators to essentially look backward in time to recreate the conditions of the universe soon after the big bang, there is no known way to look into the future," says Mark Hogan, chief experimental scientist for the plasma wakefield program at SLAC's FACET.

In other words, FlashForward is full of crap. These scientists are too nice to say that directly, so I'll just say it for them.

via SLAC and Symmetry Breaking

No matter that the anti-matter menace in Angels And Demons is about as realistic as a ghost attack, because CERN would need billions of years to make a dangerous amount of anti-matter. The entertainment industry has decided that dangerous and destructive science is what makes for a good story, say Chris Mooney and Sheril Kershenbaum, in their article "Why America is flunking science," the first installment of Salon.com's articles tying in with their book Unscientific America. They write:

The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent - an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron ("Aliens," "Terminator," "Titanic") has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains." That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture - no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science - heavily influenced by politics and mass media - and that's a very different matter.

They go on to quote Michael Crichton's four rules for movie storytelling, which Crichton believed would always be at odds with presenting science in a positive light, and veer off into discussing the creeping panic over the mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism.

It's kind of sad that the main time we seem to see scientists as heroes lately is in disaster epics, like the recent miniseries Meteor and Impact, where a giant rock from space threatens the Earth. I guess we need a bigger enemy than science before we can turn to science for help. CERN image from JPCZJaya on DeviantArt. [Salon via Discover]

We already told you about NASA's space-age project to create a bra that can detect breast cancer, but these new devices are even more random and less potentially useful.

Tiny Pillow For Your Dirty Pillows:

This is the Kush. It's pretty self explanatory, both in its worthless use and its obvious sexual innuendo.

Vacuum Your Breasts Bigger

The Brava is a sports bra that encloses the breasts in a vacuum, which then applies tension to the area, like a vacuum. According to their site:

BRAVA works by placing a gentle amount of tension (three-dimensional pull) on the breasts, and when sustained, the result is new breast tissue. This technique, known as tissue expansion, is not new; just the application is.

It doesn't say how much the Brava costs, but I'm going to guess about 400 moon bucks, because it's absolutely insane.

Massage Your Self To Health

Pangao promises to make your breasts "more healthy" and larger by stimulating them with remote massage that promises to:

"dredge breast glands, eliminate blood stasis and effectively prevent women from breast diseases and flaccid, also can move fat and make a well-shaped figure. If use it often, you can have a sound sleep, immunity from disease and better internal secretion."

Oh Pangao, you say the sweetest things. What ridiculous drek.

[Via Fashionably Geek andGeekologie]

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family's garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey's chemistry lab wasn't a meth lab - but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

On December 24, Casey was finally released into his parents' custody, pending a trial to determine whether he was building what police called "improvised explosive devices." Yesterday Casey's lawyer told local journalists:

My client is a very intelligent young man . . . he's very keen in chemistry, a very curious young person and very capable, very knowledgeable in the area and he was always curious with regard to chemistry, chemical compounds, chemical reactions, that kind of thing. So from my client's point of view, it's completely innocent insofar as he had no intention of creating any explosives or explosive devices. As people probably know, anything in your house can constitute or be used in chemical or explosive devices, including sugar and cleaning compounds, Mr. Clean, bleach, detergents, all those sorts of things.

It's unclear what made police raid Casey's house. They claim that they got a tip from a woman who sold Casey fertilizer and was concerned about it. Certain kinds of fertilizer are used in the production of crystal meth.

The case is reminiscent of the Steve Kurtz case in 2004. Kurtz is a New York artist who uses biotech equipment in his work, and police arrested him on suspicion of terrorism after discovering his home chemistry lab.

Casey is now living at home, but he is no longer allowed to engage in chemistry experiments except under supervision in school labs. He is also required to inform the chemistry department of the charges against him. His trial continues on January 26.

This is a stark example of how scientific curiosity is still regarded with suspicion - even in an era where home labs are becoming more and more common. Good luck to Casey - let's hope his next home lab is even bigger and cooler than the one he recently lost.

The prankster, known only by his pseudonym Schlangemann (which he used to submit the paper), created the paper using SCIGen - the automatic CS paper generator. His pseudonym is taken from a German movie called Der Schlangemann.

"Schlangemann" reported to Slashdot today that the paper had been accepted to the conference, which is sponsored by the IEEE, a highly-regarded professional group for engineers in the United States. You can see the accepted paper posted on the IEEE's website. Here you can see where Schlangemann is named chair of a panel [PDF]. The abstract reads:

Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bitarchitectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.

The good news is that the IEEE has done its job so well that now computers themselves can submit papers and present them at its conferences. The bad news is . . . well, pretty obvious. I guess this means Alan Sokal can finally, at last, shut the hell up about how science journals never accept fake articles.

SOURCE: Slashdot

Peggy from Biology in Science Fiction writes:

The experiment that Natali is remembering is probably the work of Joseph and Charles Vacanti of the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. Back in 1997 their photo of a mouse with a human ear-shaped growth on its back made a splash in the popular media. It's no wonder that it caught Natali's attention.

He apparently didn't pay much attention to the story attached with the picture, though, because the experiment had absolutely nothing to do with genetic engineering. What the Vacantis and colleagues actually did was form a biodegradable polymer into the shape of a human ear, seed it with cow cartilage cells (bovine chondrocytes), and implant it under the skin of the experimental mice1. They found that new cartilage formed in the shape of the implant. And it turns out their methodology had immediate real-world applications. They used similar techniques to grow a "shield" in the chest of boy who was born with no cartilage or bone between his skin and heart. They also were able to grow a replacement thumb tip using a scaffold made of coral. It's very cool tissue engineering technology.

It isn't that surprising that Natali thinks that genetic engineering was involved. He may have seen the full page ad in the New York Times placed by the anti-biotechnology group the Turning Point Project, which (according to Wikipedia) showed the picture of the ear-bearing mouse with the description "This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back." The image also made the email chain letter rounds with similarly misleading information.

Splice: Rock and Roll Geneticists and the Horror of Genetic Engineering [Biology in Science Fiction]

According to a statement from Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich's office:

Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that dramatically reduced the amount of funding appropriated to the Department of Energy. As a result, Argonne announced it will shut down the Intense Pulse Neutron Source (IPNS). At the IPNS, scientists work to determine the composition of plastics and other soft materials. It is one of the most productive facilities of its kind in the world.

Argonne is also home to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the nation's brightest x-ray. The APS is used by many scientists, including those conducting research for chemical and pharmaceutical firms. Although the APS will not be shut down, operating schedules will be limited. The full extent of Argonne's layoffs will not be immediately known.

Fermilab has already announced that 10 percent of employees could be laid off due to the cuts that will severely limit operations, halting work on a number of innovative projects. Officials are doing what they can to avert the layoffs, but the lack of federal funding will severely limit the facility's contributions to the science industry.

Gov Blagojevich Urges Bush to Fund Labs [Illinois Governor's Office]

Here are some more things that Sony might be trying to say about itself with this ad:

Most of our organization has no immediate obvious purpose . . . A lot of pieces of the organization resemble decayed portions of other pieces of our organization . . . Some pieces of our organization are non-functional, though they closely resemble functional pieces of related organizations . . . Our corporate practices are not the best designed, but rather reflect an accumulation of historical accidents . . . We retain bits of those who invade our corporate DNA, though with not much rhyme or reason.

Corporate DNA [Omics! Omics!]

This chart, from study #1, shows how your carbon footprint grows when you divorce. The purple (naughty) line are divorced households and their energy use. The blue (nice) lines are families that stayed married. See how divorce makes you an evil oil-guzzling ho?

Global Warming Could Lead to Increased Severe Thunderstorms [PNAS] Storm image courtesy of Karen A. Kosiba.

The Environmental Impact of Divorce [PNAS]

Why is it when people go to see a mediocre drama, they complain about the acting or the unrealistic characters, but when they go see a mediocre science fiction film ("sci-fi"), with bad science, they forgive criticisms with "it's just a movie!"