TV
Caltech / Palomar Observatory |
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Stars whirl over the 200-inch Hale Telescope's dome in a time-exposure photo.
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Astronomer George Ellery Hale's decades-long drive to build bigger and bigger telescopes is the stuff that operas are made of. The epic brought him in contact with the richest and smartest people of a century ago ... forced him to struggle against petty jealousies and personal demons ... and led him to grand achievements that some thought were impossible.
"The Journey to Palomar," a PBS documentary premiering tonight, touches upon all those operatic elements while keeping its focus squarely on the quest's deeper meaning: In the first half of the 20th century, telescope-building was the biggest science around.
"This was the equivalent of a moonshot in that time period," historian Kevin Starr explains during the 90-minute documentary.
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Space.com |
An artist's conception shows a
massive black hole in action.
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If big black holes are so scary, why do scientists think it's not a problem to be around teeny-tiny black holes? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson literally wrote the book on "Death by Black Hole," so he ought to know. He also ought to be good at explaining the difference, since he's the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History as well as the host of "NOVA scienceNOW," the TV magazine show that begins its summer season on PBS tonight.
If you're wrestling with all the claims and counterclaims over matter-gobbling black holes, this is the guy you want on your side.
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The "Car Talk" radio guys go on a joke-filled quest to find the perfect car of the future in a TV show premiering on Earth Day. And the punch line is that the technology they're looking for is already available - for a price, that is.
"Car of the Future," airing Tuesday as part of PBS' "Nova" documentary series, marks the prime-time television debut of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a.k.a. Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.
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Mario Anzuoni / Reuters file |
Guests mingle at a party for "American Idol" finalists in Los Angeles.
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If you're a big fan of the reality-TV celebrities on shows such as "American Idol," "Dancing With the Stars," "Survivor" and "The Biggest Loser," you're more likely to pursue a kind of celebrity for yourself as well, by building up virtual fan clubs on social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. At least that's the major finding from a survey of students conducted at two U.S. universities.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Hawaii report a statistical correlation between heavy reality-TV watching and several metrics of social network usage, ranging from time spent per session to the prevalence of "promiscuous friending." Are you on your way to becoming an online "Idol"? Find out how you compare with the average 20-year-old.
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Justin Stephens / SciFi Channel |
Six (Tricia Helfer) isn't
your typical TV alien.
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The aliens on the TV show "Battlestar Galactica," which starts its final season tonight on the SciFi Channel, aren’t your usual extraterrestrial baddies: They’re highly evolved robots, originally created by the humans they’re now fighting against. How highly evolved? The robots are way sexier than the humans.
Some aspects of the "Galactica" universe may be as bogus as other science-fiction creations (such as spaceships with artificial gravity that instantly jump from one star system to another). But when it comes to the idea that the first intelligent aliens we meet may actually be machines, astronomers say the show is definitely on the right track.
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Discovery Channel |
Click for video: A scene from the first installment of the Discovery Channel's
"Human Body" series shows how bones and muscles work together for survival
during a tornado. Click on the image to watch a video clip.
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Did you know that your bones are stronger, pound for pound, than concrete? Or that in an emergency, your muscles could be three times stronger than you think they are? "Human Body: Pushing the Limits," a TV series premiering Sunday on the Discovery Channel, delivers those insights and more by analyzing the extraordinary feats of ordinary people, with virtual X-ray vision.
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Francis Kenny / ClockDrive Productions |
Patrick Ferris looks through a telescope in Florida, in a scene from the documentary
"Seeing in the Dark." The public-TV show celebrates the joys of stargazing.
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Today's amateur astronomers can access an arsenal of equipment that would make Galileo green with envy: computerized go-to interfaces that steer you toward your celestial target at the click of a button, even over the Internet if you like ... ultra-sensitive imaging arrays that rival what the professionals command ... software that can sift through a flurry of pictures, looking for patterns of change that can point to a fresh discovery.
At the deepest level, however, the essence of stargazing is the same as it's been for millennia: to encounter the cosmos, to bring the frontiers of the universe just a little closer to the soul. That meditative aspect of amateur astronomy resonates throughout "Seeing in the Dark," a highly personal documentary by Timothy Ferris that makes its high-definition debut tonight on PBS.
"It is quite a meditative activity," said Ferris, who wrote the book on which the film is based, plus many other science-themed works. "It's such an odd thing, you know. You're out there for hours, and often alone."
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NCSU |
CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO
North Carolina State
University's Mary
Schweitzer explains why we
will probably never see a
real-life "Jurassic Park."
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A couple of years ago, paleontologists were stunned to find that the soft tissue of a 70 million-year-old dinosaur was preserved within a fossil from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Such a thing had never been seen before. The discovery opened the door to all sorts of speculation about reconstructing dinosaur DNA, just as it was in the fictional "Jurassic Park" tales.
Today, paleontologists are still stunned - not only to find material that looks like dinosaur cartilage, blood vessels, blood cells and bone cells, but to see the stuff in so many different specimens. "It's very scary, I guess, to find this stuff so widely distributed when nobody has ever seen it before," said North Carolina State University's Mary Schweitzer, a pioneer in the field. Although scientists don't plan to create dino-DNA anytime soon, Schweitzer and her colleagues say the growing number of tissue samples are opening the way to a scientific realm almost as exotic as Jurassic Park.
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Summer is prime time for escapist fiction - but as long as you're escaping, why not head for some science, speculation and social commentary as well? Here are a few suggestions for sci-fi escapism in print and on TV:
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University of Oregon |
When you think of archaeologists, chances are you summon up an image of a tweedy old guy in a pith helmet, poking around a curse-encrusted tomb ... or maybe you have Indiana Jones in mind, scurrying through the jungle with a golden idol in hand and the natives in hot pursuit.
Well, how about a thirty-something woman in a cowboy hat, digging up everyday artifacts in the Old West? This week on PBS' "Nova ScienceNow," Oregon archaeologist Julie Schablitsky has her turn in the spotlight, with nary a mummy or an idol in sight.
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