Denise Crosby, the actress who played Lt. Tasha Yar in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, will be appearing at Atlantis Fantasyworld in Santa Cruz, CA on Saturday May 9! For all you Star Trek fans out there, that’s the same weekend that the new Star Trek movie comes out. Atlantis Fantasyworld, a comic bookstore which is officially registered as a Starfleet ship, has a full-on Star Trek celebration planned for May 9, including the appearance of Denise Crosby as well as a group of Klingons. Be there or be Borg!
In other Star Trek news, Star Trek: The Experience, which closed in the Las Vegas Hilton last year will be re-opening this year in a new location! CBS, who owns Star Trek: The Experience, confirmed on Feb. 29 that the Star Trek Experience will re-open at the Neonopolis mall in downtown Las Vegas (on Freemont St) this summer. Someone I know who knows someone who works in Quark’s bar told me that Quark’s and the Star Trek shops will re-open this summer sometime before the Star Trek Convention Aug 6-9, and the History of the Future museum and other attractions will open next year, in 2010! Hip Hip Hooray! Las Vegas just wasn’t the same without Quark’s.
I particularly enjoy possesion workings at such events, one that springs to mind was a joint possession of Baphomet in the main arena of The Ministry of Sound. The two operators took in previously made up sigils, then standing in the middle of the room surrounded by a couple of thousand ravers oozing spare energy from every orifice, one operator evoked Baphomet on the other, when the operator considered Baphomet was present he flashed the sigil before Baphomet and then slung it into the crowd. The possessed operator then projected Baphomet into the other operator and repeat the sigil operation.
This went on for forty minutes with both operators slinging Baphomet backwards and forwards, finally collapsing onto the floor in exhausted laughter, we stood up to see a large space had opened up all around us, with ravers just gawping on and the DJ having spot-lighted us. We laughed and left the main hall.
Afterwards, several very stoned ravers approached us and confirmed that they had seen a huge grinning demon running backwards and forwards between the two of us. . .
A new preview has been posted for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the newest movie from director Terry Gilliam and the final film of Heath Ledger. I cannot wait for this movie to come out. It looks amazing.
At the start of November, an article in Variety listed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote on a list of projects in development with Hanway Films.
Editing work on The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is now finished, the soundtrack is complete. What remains is the final integration of effects work, which is still ongoing in London.
French photojournalist Guillaume Herbaut spent some time with an unusual and tough group of 150 Ukrainian women who call themselves “Asgarda.” These women live in the Carpathian Mountains and follow a rigorous routine of fighting and boxing, often with medieval weaponry.
Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says he and his colleagues have discovered a mysterious “booming noise” coming from space that’s six times more powerful than all other space radio sources combined.
Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, Calif.
If we ever do find extraterrestrial life in the solar system, it’s probably much more likely to look like a few cells than a walking-and-talking green man. Nonetheless, finding any kind of life beyond Earth would be extraordinary. Here are our best hopes. . .
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn’s moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12. Scientists are stunned that this tiny moon is so active, “hot” and teeming with water vapor and organic chemicals.
An assortment of critters and microbes are scheduled to make a round-trip journey to Phobos as passengers aboard a Russian spacecraft, scheduled to launch in October.
Given Russia’s track record with Mars ventures, it’s at least conceivable that the aforementioned “critters” will escape the confines of their craft and go native . . .
We’re going back to the moon – to blow it up! NASA’s LCROSS craft has arrived at launch facilities, and at this very moment it’s being prepared for the highly scientific mission of “throwing two tons of ultraflammable fuel into the moon at nine thousand kilometers an hour”. The next time someone says science is boring, feel free to slap them.
A new kind of star may be lurking in the debris from a nearby supernova explosion. If confirmed, the “quark star” could offer fresh insights into the earliest moments of the universe.
The new dwarf galaxies are forming in a giant stream of hydrogen and helium gas called the Leo Ring. The ring surrounds two older galaxies some 35 million light years away from Earth.
For instance, Raymond Jeanloz, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, will use the device to recreate the conditions inside Jupiter and other larger planets, where pressures can be 1000 times as great as those at the centre of the Earth.
Jeanloz will fire the lasers at an iron sample 800 micrometres in diameter. The intense heat will vaporise the metal, generating a gas jet so powerful it will send a shock wave through the iron, compressing it to over a billion times atmospheric pressure. By measuring how the metal’s crystalline structure and melting point change at these pressures, Jeanloz hopes to shed light on the formation of the hundreds of giant exoplanets that we have discovered in the last two decades. “The chemistry of these planets is completely unexplored,” says Jeanloz. “It’s never been accessible in the laboratory before.”
This should be able to detect tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Interferometers work by detecting tiny differences in the paths of the two laser beams. On Earth such changes are normally due to pushing a mirror, or the optical properties of something put in the way. For LISA it will be ripples in reality altering the space the lasers shine through.
Such esoteric signals are needed to probe the very beginning of time.
In the beginning, space was filled with a liquid hovering below its normal freezing point. Super cooled liquids like this are on a hair-trigger: the merest nudge is enough to set off a runaway frenzy of freezing. That nudge might be provided by a dust-like impurity in the liquid or perhaps by a small region which by chance is a little colder than the rest. Whatever it was, something triggered the cosmic liquid, seeding a crystal that grew explosively, racing outwards.
Does this scenario ring any bells? According to Michael Grady from the University of New York College at Fredonia, it should. He is convinced that the seeding of the crystal is nothing other than the big bang, which spawned our Universe.
The bonanza of evidence suggests that dark matter might be far more complicated than we had ever imagined. For starters, the theoretician’s favourite dark-matter candidate is falling out of favour, with the latest experiments making the case for new, exotic varieties of dark matter. If they are right, we could be living next to a “hidden sector”, an unseen aspect of the cosmos that exists all around us and includes a new force of nature.
NASA has finished its first deep-space test of what could become an ‘interplanetary internet’. The new networking commands could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point.
“In the game, people are going to be trying to get to the moon and then get to Mars by spending the least amount of money and using the least amount of resources, because what they’ll want to do is get into a spaceship as soon as possible,” said Sonny Kirkley, Ph.D., co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Information in Place and adjunct assistant professor, School of Informatics, Indiana University.
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“I think game technology is the only technology that does justice to not only visualizing the near future, but what we have already explored,” said Shariff. “We are talking about a game and a learning system that’s the next evolution of how human beings will see science.”
A playable demo of the NASA MMO game will be released before the end of this year. . .
Capcom has been releasing a series of short Street Fighter animes as part of their lead up to the new movie and game. For of them have been released so far, and three of them are up online.
The fourth anime is a Sakura short premiering at the end of the Japanese release of the new Chun-Li movie. It’s not online yet, but the Japanese site does feature a lot of singing, dancing, Chun-Li cosplay so even though it’s not there yet it was worth the search.
All the anime I’ve seen so far for the new Street Fighter has been excellent. Check it out.
In 1969, 14-year-old Beatles fan Jerry Levitan tracked his idol, John Lennon, from a Toronto airport to his room at the King Edward Hotel. Inside, he convinced Lennon to do an impromptu interview.
