Heroes to Return in a 13-Episode Run onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Heroes to Return in a 13-Episode Run

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Heroes is back. The show will return to NBC in 2015 as Heroes Reborn, with original series creator Tim Kring back at the helm as showrunner. The 13-episode event miniseries will star a new cast of characters and follow a story line independent from the show's original 4-season run (though NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke said former cast members would likely "pop" in for cameos.)

"The enormous impact Heroes had on the television landscape when it first launched in 2006 was eye-opening," said Salke in a statement issued last night. She continued:

Shows with that kind of resonance don't come around often and we thought it was time for another installment. We're thrilled that visionary creator Tim Kring was as excited about jumping back into this show as we were and we look forward to all the new textures and layers Tim plans to add to his original concept. Until we get closer to air in 2015, the show will be appropriately shrouded in secrecy, but we won't rule out the possibility of some of the show's original cast members popping back in.

How maddeningly vague. For now, let's hope the reboot hews closer to the original's early seasons in terms of tone and content; it looks like we'll get a taste for both in the weeks and months leading up to the 2015 premiere, when NBC will launch a digital series that will introduce the new characters and storylines. Now, let the casting rumors begin!

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Heroes to Return in a 13-Episode Run

A Farscape movie is in the works onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Farscape movie is in the works

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A Farscape movie is in development, a decade after Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars provided closure to fans left hanging by the original series' final episode. Screenwriter Justin Monjo has reportedly written a script for the spinoff, to be directed by Brian Henson (son of Jim Henson), Executive Producer of the show's original four-season run and director of Peacekeeper Wars.

News of the movie spinoff originally broke from if.com, but Tor gives a good summary of the reboot's reported plot:

Set to follow the awesome comics written by our favorite Keith R.A. DeCandido, the film would follow John and Aeryn's son, D'Argo (or Little D, as we will always refer to him). Because their baby was exhibiting a set of interesting powers that made him a magnet for galactic villains, we find that John and Aeryn hide their son on Earth to grow up. Now the kid is 19 and ready to go into space with his parents.

As if that weren't enough to get excited about, Monjo is also said to be developing a new series for HBO called Mongo. The show is based on the detective series by George C. Chesbro, with a lead role Monjo reportedly wrote specifically for Peter Dinklage.

A new Farscape movie AND a new HBO series led by Peter Dinklage? Is there such a thing as too much good news?

[If.com via Tor]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Farscape movie is in the works

The best WTF moment in last night's Helix episode onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The best WTF moment in last night's Helix episode

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The post-human, corporate nightmare soap opera just won't stop on Helix. Even though we got lots of juicy reveals last night, and a bad guy turned slightly less bad, our favorite moment had nothing to do with the goo zombie conspiracy. Spoilers ahead!

But before we get to the best moment, can I just say that Constance seems to have a lot of luck with the gents? First she does a punch-and-kiss with Sergio, then it turns out she was Hiroshi's longtime lover and mad science buddy? In one of those "as you know, Bob, we actually had sex a bunch of times" moments, Constance reveals that she and Hiroshi had some long-term plan to change the course of history. Back when Hiroshi "loved and admired" Constance.

Is Julia product of all that, ahem, admiration? Maybe, although that would be news to Constance, who spends most of this episode asking various faceless underlings why she can't figure out what Julia's value is. I have to say I enjoyed last week's ironic corporate-speak Constance better than this week's scheming fascist Constance. I think Hiroshi shares my feelings, because we learn that he dumped Constance when he grew some ethics and realized that destroying humanity would be a bad idea. Perhaps that was around the time that he decided to adopt Daniel instead of using him as an experiment.

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Speaking of which, Daniel sends his sister off into the snow and decides to help Hiroshi retake the base from Constance — not because he likes Hiroshi, but because he hates Constance more. I'm glad he finally decides to call himself Miksa and that he rejects Hiroshi's authority. It's great to see him taking initiative and helping in the "kill Constance" plan. Oh and bonus points to Sarah for knowing how to bring a sound cannon into the mutiny strategy.

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Julia tries to help out in her own way, too, by pretending to barf up an alien at lunch and hanging out with goo zombies in the ducts. She's still puzzling over a ripped photo that Hiroshi showed her, of the two of them holding hands when she was a little girl. Meanwhile, Constance just wants to box Julia up and ship her back to Ilyria because she's their property now that she has their patented silver eye genes.

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My guess continues to be that the silver eye thing was part of the "let's create a super race" plan that Constance made with Hiroshi. It appears to grant super-healing powers, since Constance recovers almost instantly from the bomb that Alan and Sarah cook up for her in the lab. And Julia says she's never felt better in her life.

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As an aside, did anybody really believe the Moment that Anana and Sergio shared when they were out in the snow with no toques and no gloves? Where Sergio is like "I'm gonna steal your skidoo" and then Anana says, "fine steal it but I know you like me" and he's like "no I'm evil, and I'm stealing it" and then she punches him and then he says, "run away and save yourself!" What was that? I mean, I'm glad Sergio lets Anana run away from Constance's guard, but I'm getting a little tired of his shitbag-with-a-heart-of-gold thing. His allegiances shift so fast it's like he's doing whatever the ethical equivalent of twerking is.

OK so all of that was great, and I'm excited about the goo zombies stealing Peter's body and all that crap, but LET'S TALK ABOUT THE BEST MOMENT EVAR.

I love that Hiroshi strangles Constance with a garrote he's hidden inside the watch she gave him. And then he puts her head inside one of those jars hidden out in the snow, along with Richard Nixon's head and a bunch of the other scientists' heads. Why is he storing everybody's heads?! I hope that in the last episode of the season, all the heads come back to life and one of them tries to run for president. The jar heads are definitely one of the most demented and goofy details on this show.

Now Hiroshi has control of the base again, but he's lost Miksa's loyalty and a lot of his staff. The zombies are running wild looking for NIH funding, Constance's bosses are going to come looking for her, and he STILL hasn't told Julia what their relationship is. Plus, Alan is pouting.

Tune in next week to find out WTF is going on.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The best WTF moment in last night's Helix episode

A Second Look at the First Geological Map of Ganymede onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Second Look at the First Geological Map of Ganymede

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Last week, researchers released the first-ever geological map of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. Here's the map again, flattened into a 2D, rectangular map.

I sometimes prefer these planar versions of maps to their three-dimensional counterparts. Their geologic nature (and planetary provenance) are less obvious this way. And sometimes that's the point – to enjoy the beauty of a thing for the sake of its beauty alone. Like a caption-less photo of the Australian Outback, a map in this format can more closely resemble a piece of art* than a reference tool. That the variegated view of Earth's Moon pictured below is, at first glance, unrecognizable as a geologic map is one of the reasons I'm so fond of it:

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And so it is, also, with this map of Ganymede. Removed from its lunar sphere and flattened out like wrapping paper, its visual impact is more keenly felt, its raw aesthetic more readily appreciated.

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Of course, more practically speaking (i.e., in a manner more suited to its original, geological purpose), 2D maps also enable the observation of large-scale features and patterns. Furrows, grooves and craters can be considered in a more global context – are there more signs of impact events on one side of the object than the other? Is its surface divided into global highlands and lowlands, perhaps in a hemispheric dichotomy similar to the one astronomers observe on Mars?

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Above: The Red Planet's hemispheric dichotomy. Simply put: the planet's Southern hemisphere has a rugged, crusty surface, while much of the planet's Northern hemisphere remains relatively smooth.

These are questions similar to the one I had while examining the map of Ganymede at the top of this post, namely: what is the deal with that vertical gap of terrain, about two thirds of the way across (highlighted below in red)?

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Puzzled, I emailed planetary scientist Geoffrey Collins, who led the team responsible for the map's creation. It turns out the gap is an artifact of sorts, a patch of map devoid of data. Not the sexiest or most satisfying answer, but Collins was good enough to dispense with a fair bit of insight into his team's process, and a little map-making trivia, to boot:

Yes, that stripe… I wish that I could have convinced the USGS publications folks to change the center longitude on the map to put it at the edge, because that's a complete artifact… One subtlety that only extreme map aficionados might notice is that the color changes on the map at that boundary don't have any black lines on them, which means "no mapped contact" between the units. What this means in plain english is that it represents a transition where we couldn't see how the surface changed from one type of terrain to the other. The reason we couldn't see it is because right at that longitude there is a sharp break between very detailed images to the west, and much less detailed images to the east. If you look at the two little "rainbow" maps in the lower left corner of the full map sheet, they show the changes in the quality of the imaging data that we had to work with when constructing the map. (Map makers a few centuries ago didn't have data quality keys, they just drew sea monsters and mermaids on the parts where they had low data quality.)

Any line of inquiry that begins with a map of Ganymede and ends with mermaids and sea monsters is a win in my book. Aren't maps just the best?

*I in no way mean to suggest that maps can not also be pieces of art. In fact, I'd venture that most maps can be regarded as such. Map-making is an art form in itself, after all; surely maps are, too, themselves.

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Second Look at the First Geological Map of Ganymede

Google Launches Tool to Monitor Deforestation in Near-Realtime onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Google Launches Tool to Monitor Deforestation in Near-Realtime

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Google has partnered with more than 40 other organizations to create a sobering deforestation-monitoring tool. Called Global Forest Watch, the tool enables visitors to witness worldwide deforestation as it happens, in near-realtime.

Via the Global Forest Watch website:

Global Forest Watch (GFW) is a dynamic online forest monitoring and alert system that empowers people everywhere to better manage forests. For the first time, Global Forest Watch unites satellite technology, open data, and crowdsourcing to guarantee access to timely and reliable information about forests. GFW is free and follows an open data approach in putting decision-relevant information in the hands of governments, companies, NGOs, and the public.

The tool is very straightforward to use, with pink representing forest loss and blue representing forest gain (a global view illustrates that the former far exceeds the latter):

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When statistics like "50 soccer fields' worth of forest are lost every minute" start to feel meaningless, spend a few minutes over at GFW. The impact it has, watching swaths of the planet vanish before your eyes, is enough to give even the most desensitized visitor pause.

[GFW]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Google Launches Tool to Monitor Deforestation in Near-Realtime

The Great Lakes Experience Their Deepest Freeze in 20 Years onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Great Lakes Experience Their Deepest Freeze in 20 Years

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For the first time since 1994, 88% of the surface of the Great Lakes has frozen solid.

The image above, like the image of the lakes we posted earlier this week, is a true-color image, which can make it difficult to discern ice from snow and clouds. In the image below, NASA's Aqua – an Earth-observing satellite that maps the planet's water – has photographed the lakes using infrared filters that make these features easier to tell apart. As Phil Plait explains over on Bad Astronomy:

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Different wavelengths (colors, if you will) of infrared light are absorbed and reflected differently by the features below, making it easier to tell them apart. In this case, water is deep blue, ice is pale blue (where it's thicker it looks brighter), snow is blue-green, and clouds are blue-green or white.

As you can see, a lot of water is covered, some of it in pretty substantial ice sheets. If they hadn't labeled Lake Erie, I would've missed it.

"Persistently low temperatures across the Great Lakes region are responsible for the increased areal coverage of the ice," said Nathan Kurtz, cryospheric scientist NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. According to NASA Earth Observatory, cold air and winds remove heat from the fresh water until it reaches the freezing point, at which point ice begins to form on the lakes' surface. "Low temperatures are the dominant mechanism for thickening the ice," said Kurtz, "but secondary factors like clouds, snow, and wind also play a role."

[NASA Earth Observatory via Bad Astronomy]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Great Lakes Experience Their Deepest Freeze in 20 Years

Meet "No. 1," the giant isopod that went on a five-year hunger strike onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Meet "No. 1," the giant isopod that went on a five-year hunger strike

Isopods – the segmented, ancient-looking order of crustaceans to which pill bugs belong – are popular in Japan; and so it was with much fanfare that, in 2007, the country's Toba Aquarium welcomed a giant, foot-long isopod to its ranks. But one day in 2009, the isopod, for reasons unknown, decided to stage one of the longest hunger strikes in the history of animal captivity.

Robert Krulwich has the sad details surrounding "Giant isopod No. 1" (for so the creature was unceremoniously named) and his five-year protest today at NPR:

No. 1's caretaker, Takeya Moritaki, couldn't figure out what was wrong. He tried pushing the food closer. No. 1 didn't care. He tried different foods. No. 1 wasn't interested. It would either push the food away, or walk away. He tried sticking No. 1's face into the food. Nothing. He even tried changing the temperature to make No. 1 hungrier, or more comfortable. Still nothing.

Months went by. Then years. No.1 didn't eat anything for all of 2010, then for all of 2011, then for all of 2012. By this time, word got out that a big crab was on some kind of hunger strike at Toba Aquarium, and people began showing up for its feedings, or rather, not-feedings, to see if it would finally break fast.

It didn't.

Read the rest of No. 1's story (which ultimately concluded on Valentine's day of this year), over at NPR.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Meet "No. 1," the giant isopod that went on a five-year hunger strike

This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario

Listen to this young girl playing her sheng, a Chinese instrument invented thousands of years ago. The woodwind may be ancient, but the sound is pure 1980s nostalgia—it's the Super Mario Brothers theme, right down to the sounds of Mario collecting coins and mushrooms. Amazing!

Music was a big part of the old school Nintendo experience, and it's eerie how the notes coming out of an instrument you probably never heard of sound so shockingly familiar. This young musician has certainly put in a ton of practice—clearly, all those hours playing Super Mario have paid off. [YouTube via TastefullyOffensive]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario

Have you ever seen a snowflake blossom? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have you ever seen a snowflake blossom?

One of the more technically creative time lapses we've seen in a long while, Snowtime is a 2-minute "microscopic time-lapse" by Vyacheslav Ivanov that captures the mesmerizing bloom of budding ice crystals in all their hexagonal glory.

The ice crystal(s) in snowflakes owe their six-fold rotational symmetry to the hydrogen bonds in water molecules. As water freezes, water molecules bound to other water molecules crystallize into a hexagonal structure, where each point on the hexagon is an oxygen atom and each side of the hexagon is a hydrogen bonded to an oxygen. As freezing continues, more water molecules are added to this microscopic six-sided structure, causing it to grow in size into the six-sided macroscopic structure that we recognize as snow flakes.

Water's tendency to expand as it nears freezing – rather than condense, like most substances – is part of what lends its frozen crystal structure its unique shape. (It's also responsible for a number of water's unique properties, and why it's so essential to the existence of life.) Something to keep in mind the next time you're experimenting with good old H₂O.

Complement with some stunning close-up photographs of snowflakes, here and here.

[Vyacheslav Ivanov via Kuriositas]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Have you ever seen a snowflake blossom?

How will we retrieve dead satellites in the future? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How will we retrieve dead satellites in the future?

Hint: It probably won't involve astronauts.

I'll admit it: I'm too young to remember 1984. I wish I did, however, because it was a banner year for the Manned Maneuvering Unit. NASA astronaut Dale Gardner, for example, used this jet backpack to retrieve malfunctioning satellites, as you can see above. (FYI, Gardner died Wednesday (Feb. 19) of a brain aneurysm at the age of 65.)

After three shuttle flights, however, NASA discontinued use of the backpack in space for several reasons — most famously, safety considerations following the shuttle Challenger explosion of 1986. But thirty years on, the problem of dead satellites is growing. There are now thousands of pieces whipping around our planet, occasionally causing collisions and generally causing headaches for people wanting to launch stuff into orbit safely.

Space agencies such as NASA and the European Space Agency have been working hard on reducing debris during launches, but there's still stuff from decades before. And when a satellite goes dead, if it's in the wrong orbit it could be circling up there for decades before burning up. How do you fix that?

Robotics has come a long way in 30 years, so space agencies are looking to use those instead to pick up derelict satellites since that would pose far less danger to astronauts. One example is the e.DeOrbit mission recently talked about by ESA, which would pick up debris in polar orbits of altitudes between 800 and 1,000 kilometers (about 500 to 620 miles).

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One design idea for the e.DeOrbit mission, which would retrieve dead satellites from orbit. Credit: European Space Agency

The mission would use autonomous control and image sensors to get up close to the drifting satellite, and then capture it in some way. Several ideas are being considered, ESA added. A big enough net could easily nab the satellite, or perhaps one could clamp on using tentacles or grab it with a harpoon or robotic arm. Here's a 2013 proposal with more information on e.DeOrbit. ESA noted there is a symposium coming up May 6 to discuss this in more detail.

e.DeOrbit is one of just several proposals to pick satellites up. A Swiss idea called CleanSpace One appears to use a sort of pincer claw to grab satellites for retrieval. The Phoenix program (proposed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) would take useable parts off of broken satellites for use in new satellites, and in past years DARPA had some ideas to remove satellites from orbit as well. Another option is satellite refueling to make these machines useable again, a possibility that NASA, Canada and many othersare taking seriously.

What do you think is the best solution? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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This post by Elizabeth Howell originally appeared on Universe Today. It has been republished with permission.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How will we retrieve dead satellites in the future?

How Wrong is Your Time Zone? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How Wrong is Your Time Zone?

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In an ideal world, everyone's clocks would strike 12 noon just as the Sun reached the highest point in its path across the sky. But clock- (aka "standard-") time and solar time rarely overlap, with one generally leading or lagging behind the other – a fact this map by math blogger and Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo clearly illustrates. [Click here to enlarge.]

Why do these discrepancies exist? Maggiolo offers two important reasons:

One is that (solar) days do not all have the same length: the modern calendar compensates by letting midday oscillate a bit around the year: for example, midday in Naples goes from 11:47 in early November to 12:17 in early February... More importantly, each city at a slightly different longitude would have a slightly different time. It seems strange that time systems with such a huge problem had ever been practical, but in the pre-industrial-revolution world, travels were so uncommon and slow that this problem was no more than a minor annoyance.

The transition from apparent solar time, where all days have different lengths, to solar mean time, where midday wanders around 12:00, was caused by the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the early 19th century. The change to a time zone system, to solve the second problem, was caused instead by the telegraph and even more by the spreading of railway networks in the second half of that century; it's not a coincidence that the first country moving to a common time was Great Britain.

Indeed, if we acknowledge that the two problems must be solved, the natural result is the current time zone system. The immediate consequence is that in the western part of the time zone the sun rises and sets later than in the eastern part. Normally, these differences amount to at most half an hour in either direction, but human geography sometime forces greater differences.

Other explanations for major solar/standard time-discrepancies are often political in nature. In China, for example, all clocks are set to Beijing time; in the country's westernmost reaches, solar noon happens at around 3 in the afternoon. The opposite is true in India (which also adheres to a single time zone), where a summer sunrise in the far-eastern state of Assam begins at 4:30 a.m. And don't even get us started on Antarctica.

[Stefano Maggiolo via Slate]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How Wrong is Your Time Zone?