(NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: I would be happy to write pilots for any of these…just saying)

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY

Space opera is a sadly dying breed on TV and a reboot of this 1979-1981 show based on the 1928 pulp character might just save the day. Developed by Glen A. Larson, the creator of the original Galactica, Buck Rogers followed a 1987 astronaut as he’s transported to the eponymous 25th Century where people have laser guns and the bad guys wear capes. For Galactica to be successful, it needed to be made much more serious, however Buck Rogers was never as heavy and had a much greater sense of fun, so hopefully such a reboot would maintain the tone. Plus, how could anything where a tiny robot continually says “biddi-biddi-biddi” be a hard-hitting drama? (Also, apologies that all I could find was this local TV commercial)

THE INVADERS

This 1967 series was groundbreaking at the time, but since then there have been several similar shows, such as Dark Skies and parts of The X-Files. This type of show is pretty intrinsically tied to the Cold War and the “red menace” we’ve heard so much about, but I really think this show could work in today’s climate of everyone being afraid of terrorism and identity theft. The notion of one person trying to convince the world is also a pretty terrifying and isolating one that would be really fun to play with. The only stipulation I have is that I would demand it still be a Quinn Martin Production and keep the theme music.

THE TIME TUNNEL

So, underground there’s this scientific military base, right? And, like in the base there’s this giant, black and white swirly tunnel thing, okay? And, dude, if you go into this tunnel, you can travel in time and junk. This is, I imagine, pretty close to the conversation they had over at Irwin Allen’s house prior to the creation of this show. However silly the premise, it’s a good way to explain how and why people are travelling through time every week. The funny thing about the show is that they used clips from big budget films of the day like The 300 Spartans to depict the ancient history, so I can only imagine a reboot today would feature a ton of Zack Snyder and Michael Bay movies. “See episode one, where the heroes go back to the battle of Pearl Harbor…”

SAPPHIRE & STEEL

This is a very weird British show I’ve only recently discovered. Made up of only 34 episodes comprising six “assignments” over a four year period, this series followed two operatives, Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum), who are the human-form versions of their namesake elements as they investigate and fix time-based problems on Earth. Make sense? This show was very minimalist, with only a few characters per story in usually only one location over the duration of the assignment, yet it still managed to be intensely creepy through its use of lighting and sound effects. The ripples in time often manifested themselves as ghost-like apparitions which made for a sufficiently scary science fiction series. If it were to be redone today, you’d have to amp up the scares and maintain the overall mystery of the lead characters or else it just wouldn’t work.

SPACE: 1999

The guy who brought us the “Supermarionation” of Thunderbirds also created this bombastic series from 1975. It supposed that in 24 years, people would be living and working on the moon and in the opening episode, nuclear waste stored on the moon explodes sending it and the people on Moonbase Alpha hurling through space. It was the most expensive series ever produced for television at the time and was flat-out crazy. I think this show would be excellent if done EXACTLY the way it was in the 70s. Same production values, same costumes, same premise, and especially the same music. Who cares that 1999 was 13 years ago? That’s why it would be awesome. Why go to the far-flung future when we can make fun of how dumb we used to be? I think it could be a fantastic send-up of our intense and ultimately ill-conceived notions of what “the future” would be like.

So, I should just get started on all these, right? Right, Hollywood? Copyright Kanderson, 2012.

-Kanderson wishes everyone worse shiny jumpsuits now like we were promised so he isn’t the only one… Follow him on TWITTER

Norman Wilson Edmund died Tuesday. He was 95, and he was a hero of mine. Oh, I didn’t know much about him, but there was only one thing I needed to know: He was the founder of Edmund Scientific, which, for a nerdy kid growing up in a faceless mid-Atlantic suburb back in the pre-Internet days, was the greatest catalog ever.

I was a science geek in my formative years. I was destined for a career in science until college, when Chem 102 (Organic), my creative streak, and my interest in the media pretty much wiped that out. But as a kid, one of the highlights of every year was when my father would return from the New Jersey Education Association’s Teachers’ Convention in Atlantic City with a copy of that year’s Edmund Scientific catalog. It was, along with the Phillies and Mets yearbooks I would annually procure and maybe The Sporting News, the single most influential publication of my childhood. (More adult publications came later. Get your mind away from there)

Photo: Halfblue (via Wikipedia)

What was it? It was, as the video above (from someone selling the 1972 catalog on eBay) shows, a thick pamphlet from a store in Barrington, New Jersey, somewhere in Camden County, showing off only the most amazing collection of science gadgets, gizmos, and curios I’d ever seen: weather balloons, microscopes, telescopes, drinking crows, little discs that would jump off the table, black lights, prisms, freaky lens filters, fiber optic lamps, all sorts of surplus optics…. There was not one thing in that catalog I wouldn’t have wanted. Not that I had any use for most of it, but I wanted it all. I wanted to see the stars, to bend light, to send a balloon to space, to… well, I didn’t know what I could do with a lot of it, but I knew I wanted it.

And I couldn’t afford any of that stuff, so the catalog was the best I could do. But it was the Edmund Scientific catalog that helped nurture a love of, and respect for, science that’s lasted all these decades, even though I ended up not really having the aptitude to do anything with it, or even retain the knowledge that college organic chemistry knocked out of me. (Whenever Chris gets on a real science roll on the podcast, I can only strain to remember all the things I once learned and eagerly absorbed. It’s been a looooonnnnng time) The Edmund family still runs the optics company; Edmund Scientific, run, it appears, by another company, still exists, and there’s still a catalog (the last time I saw one was in the studio at Y107 back when Chris was the morning co-host) but they don’t have the Barrington store and it’s not the same when you’re not a kid.

Or is it? When I heard that the founder had died, I went online and the current incarnation of the company has a lot of what I remember desperately wanting as a kid, and more. Drinking crows, Buckyballs, the star and planet locator, potato clocks, weather gear, magnetic stuff, it’s all there, and for a moment, I was a kid again, only, more dangerously, a kid with credit cards. If only I had those when I was 11 years old, paging through the Edmund Scientific catalog and dreaming of a house full of wonder.

Thank you, N.W. Edmund.

Whatever the reason, here’s added incentive for you to buy your tickets now: The special guest for the Nerdist Podcast taping will be the Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait. The founder of the Bad Astronomy website, author of Death from the Skies, debunker extraordinaire, the hugely entertaining and exceedingly smart guy who uses his powers of knowledge and skepticism for the greater good, live on the Nerdist Podcast… You’ve asked for it, you wanted it, and now you’re getting it. Oh, how you’re getting it. And it’s live in Boulder on March 2nd.

What? You’re still here? GO BUY TICKETS NOW. Chris plus Jonah plus Matt plus Phil Plait equals a good time.

It also lets him hover above the water and do acrobatics; the difference between this and your regular off-the-shelf jetpacks is that you get to both zip beneath the water’s surface and hover above.

It’s $6,400 if you’re interested. I don’t think you can buy it from Walmart yet. Maybe Sky Mall.

HT: Popular Science

And now, for the art of chemistry: Graphic designer and illustrator Simon C. Page has created a series of posters that celebrate some of chemistry’s most important figures and their contributions, and they are just amazing. Each poster is a graphic representation of a particular discovery or achievement and the chemists behind them, from Einstein’s confirmation of the atomic theory of matter to Mendeleev’s creation of the periodic table of elements. Here’s a poster of graphene:

And our friend, the atom, and Ernest Rutherford’s work:

One more, on Avogadro and ions:

There are a lot more.  And, yes, you can buy these. They run $20 to $80 depending on size. Go here and see ‘em all.

In case you’re like me, you’ve never thought about the internet in terms of mass. Before I watched this video, I guesstimated the nets would have to be at least a heavyweight. I’d like to think cyberspace would be able to pick me up and carry me around.

Turns out the internet is the weight of a small aphrodisiac. Or perhaps three. You can check their math yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll dip my internet in chocolate.

(via a friend of a friend on Facebook I can’t remember now. Apologies.)

******
You can follow all 125 pounds of @SexNerdSandra on Twitter!

That’s John Boswell’s latest Symphony of Science installment, “Onward to the Edge!” It includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, as heard on the latest Nerdist Podcast, plus bits of Brian Cox narrating the BBC’s Wonders of the Solar System and a TED Talk by Carolyn Porco.  These things are genius, in more ways than one.

There’s also Cox reading a line from the late, great Carl Sagan in there. Today would have been Sagan’s 77th birthday. His influence on countless Nerdists is incalcuable. (Insert “billions” reference here)  That’s worth celebrating.  And as we heard in the Nerdist Podcast, Sagan’s epic Cosmos is getting a sequel series on Fox, hosted by… Neil deGrasse Tyson. Everything’s connected.

(Thanks to Nerdist reader MetaMike23 for posting the video in the comments for the podcast)

A simulated Mars mission that is.  The crew of the Mars500 mission successfully spent 520 days locked in a spaceship at a Moscow parking lot.  They were looking to simulate a trip to Mars, and to see if the crew would be able handle the mental stress.  This video shows the 520 days in 15 minutes.   Six guys, who shower once per week, eat canned food, mess around on their computers all day, and never leave the house.  Looks like we can get to Mars by locking a bunch of guys in a log cabin with World of Warcraft.

via [ars technica] [ESA]

That’s a da Vinci surgical robot peeling a grape. At an event to raise awareness of men’s cancers at Southmead Hospital in England, they let doctors, former patients, and the general public try out their surgical robot, and, man, they really can do some precision work with these things. We live in amazing times.

HT: Popular Science, Wired.co.uk

This is the stuff straight out of a sci-fi movie that gets me excited and scared at the same time… definitely more excited, though!  Researchers at The Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley have developed a method using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to read your mind and then recreate the images your brain is “thinking of” using YouTube clips.  The video above shows the clip that the subject was watching, and then the visual picture that the researchers recreated from the brain activity.  They can certainly explain the science behind this better than I will ever be able to, but the possibilities for this type of technology are really awesome.  Dream recording anyone!? The researchers have more medical applications in mind though:

Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.

It may also lay the groundwork for brain-machine interface so that people with cerebral palsy or paralysis, for example, can guide computers with their minds.

Between this new tech and the Back to the Future MAG sneakers released by Nike we are living in the future.  Now, where’s my hoverboard?

via [io9]