Cosmic Log : TV

Darwin's brightest hour

Alan Boyle — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:25:00 GMT

Chris Reardon / NGT

Henry Ian Cusick portrays Charles Darwin in "Darwin's Darkest Hour."

This year serves as a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: It's been 200 years since the birth of the naturalist, as was noted widely back in February.

Now there's a second wave of books and broadcasts that serve to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, "On the Origin of Species."

The tangled genesis of that work is the focus of "Darwin's Darkest Hour," a two-hour docudrama premiering tonight on PBS.

The show features a little more star power and a little less laboratory time than you usually see in a science documentary on public TV, and that's because the "Nova" / National Geographic production team went with a scripted approach that's reminiscent of a Jane Austen adaptation.

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The science of dead celebrities

Alan Boyle — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:52:00 GMT

Eric Thayer / Reuters

Michael Jackson fan Leandro Lapagesse of Brazil clutches a handful of
memorabilia outside the Forest Lawn Mortuary in Los Angeles on Monday.

Why do celebrities such as pop star Michael Jackson exert such a pull, especially when they’ve just passed away?

For decades, psychologists have been studying the one-way relationships we create with celebrities. Some researchers say such connections are merely a fact of life in a media-saturated age. Others suggest that celebrating dead celebrities offers a way to come to terms with our own mortality - and reach for a kind of immortality as well.

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Apollo on rewind

Alan Boyle — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:45:00 GMT

Ron Batzdorff / Universal Pictures

"Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, ranks
among the best fictional movies about NASA's moon effort.

If you're lusting to relive the glory days of NASA's early space effort, the best time for doing that is right now: Video resources about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are at their peak as the 40th anniversary of humanity's first moon landing approaches. Here's a Top 10 list, plus a couple of extra-credit pointers to more space video:

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Watching science on the Web

Alan Boyle — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:35:00 GMT

msnbc.com

  Click for video: The
  primate fossil known
  as "Ida" has caused
  a scientific stir.

A growing number of online ventures are serving up regular doses of science video to fill the gaps in TV coverage - including some ventures that are led by media-hopping TV types.

The latest entrant in the field is "Science Nation," a weekly video series funded by the National Science Foundation and created by former CNN producers. The first installment, released Monday, focuses on Earth's "alien" species - that is, extremophile organisms that can survive in Antarctica's frozen deserts or volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.

"Science Nation" is just the tip of the video iceberg: Here are the beginnings of a mini-TV guide for science video online:

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Past and future of 'New Space'

Alan Boyle — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

NASA

The documentary "Orphans of Apollo" focuses on the effort to privatize Russia's Mir
space station, shown here during a 1995 space shuttle mission to the outpost. The
effort helped prolong Mir's life but ultimately failed, leading to its demise in 2001.

A behind-the-scenes documentary on the unsuccessful effort to turn Russia's Mir space station into a money-making operation serves as a cautionary tale for the private sector's present-day space ambitions.

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Time travelogue

Alan Boyle — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:26:00 GMT

Warner Bros. Pictures

Can time travel save Los Angeles? Marcus Wright (played by Sam Worthington)
surveys post-Judgment Day destruction in the movie "Terminator Salvation."

Time travel has been a standard feature of science fiction, but never more so than today: The latest "Star Trek" and "Terminator" movies, as well as the TV series "Lost" and "Heroes," play off the classic paradoxes, and still more shows are on the way. In fiction, all it takes to travel back in time is a black hole or a flash of energy, with nothing more than a hand-waving explanation. If only real-life experiments in time and causality were that simple ...

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Galactica's science guru

Alan Boyle — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:05:00 GMT

Photo by B. Janine Morison

"Battlestar Galactica" scientific adviser Kevin Grazier takes a seat in a Viper fighter
during a visit to the series' Vancouver set. The series finale airs tonight.

How does a naked singularity work? What happens when a spacecraft gets stressed-out? Answering such questions is all in a day's work for Kevin Grazier, the scientific adviser for the critically acclaimed TV series "Battlestar Galactica."

Over the course of five years, the planetary scientist has figured out how to juggle his day job on the Cassini science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as his duties for "Battlestar Galactica" and other sci-fi projects. But even though Galactica is gearing up for its last ride tonight, Grazier still hasn't completely figured out how the spaceship manages to travel faster than light.

"If I knew exactly how it worked, I'd be going to Stockholm for my Nobel," Grazier joked.

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The race to save our languages

Alan Boyle — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Ironbound Films

Linguist Gregory Anderson, left, discusses counting systems with Oranchu
Gomongo, who speaks India's endangered Sora language.

The Indiana Jones movies make it look as if the archaeologists have all the fun - but if you really want to see lost worlds and uncover cultural riches, you should think about becoming a linguist. At least that's the message I got from "The Linguists," a documentary that makes the leap from the film-festival circuit to the airwaves on PBS tonight.

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Atom smashers on TV

Alan Boyle — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:08:00 GMT

137 Films

Theoretical physicist Marcela Carena is one of the scientists appearing in "The
Atom Smashers," a behind-the-scenes look at Fermilab's hunt for the Higgs boson.

Can the movies turn real-life physicists into stars? "The Atom Smashers," airing Tuesday on PBS, packs a lot of real life into its saga about the world's biggest subatomic quest - plus a bit of movie magic.

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Bible gets a reality check

Alan Boyle — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:44:00 GMT

Providence Pictures

Biblical archaeologist Ron Tappy examines the Tel Zayit abecedary, a 2,900-
year-old alphabet stone that suggests King Solomon was a real historical figure.
Tappy's findings figure in "The Bible's Buried Secrets," a PBS documentary.

"The Bible's Buried Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS, presents archaeological findings that will annoy believers as well as skeptics - which suggests the TV documentary just might be on the right track.

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