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Jason Kahn

This week could have run out of control, but I kept somewhat of a tight hold on the reins, but still, towards the end….things frayed a bit…

Thanks to Mark, I played the proper episode of the Dark Inspectre by Jason Kahn. Last week I played episode 4 which I was sure was the proper episode….Nope. Mark wrote to tell me that I played episode 4 last month! So this week I play episode 5 – Thanks Mark.

But first I lead off with an Indie song from the game “To The Moon”. The song’s title is “Every-thing’s Alright” and it is sung by Laura Shighara. Laura sings all the parts and plays the instruments and I think you will fall right in love with the tune.

From the Beam Me Up Blog – research that black holes may indeed evaporate and that gravity may not be a fundamental force of nature! The Swiss are planning to launch an $11-million satellite called “CleanSpace One” in the near future as a start to cleaning up space junk. NASA activated Robonaut for a first ever robot / human hand shake. oh goodie…….

I take a short break to play the audio of Sagan’s wonderful “Pale Blue Dot” if you have never heard it before, your in for a treat and if you have, the revisit is just as moving. I finish reading from the blog with Topless Robot’s 10 toys with really questionable names and let me tell you it is beyond comprehension how some of these made it through product QC….I mean a game called Ball Buster? Really?

And the final story of the program is the fourth episode of Erin Bassett’s “Clock Work”. I really hope to have more of this extraordinary series in the future.

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Jason Kahn

Listeners of the live show said that this was a bit of a “giggly” episode. Well considering that this was episode 300 I was a bit giddy plus a few of the station’s show hosts were out in studio 3 making sure I didn’t get too serious.

Anyway, this week I play episode four of our favorite Psychic detective Jack Garrett on New Arden in “In Plain Sight”. I then review the movie “I am Number Four” blu-ray and as luck had it
was able to find a cut of one of the songs to play, Adel’s “Rolling in the Deep” is used in the movie very effectively I might add. From there we head back to the Beam Me Up blog and talk about Mars reaching aphelion this week and play a report on the event from Earth Sky. I find a Youtube short that shows a fascinating experiment on-board the ISS concerning of all things, knitting needles and drops of water! Boing Boing posts a link to a decidedly weird video from the band Total Ghost called “Space Station” now what is really funny about this is that SpaceX founder Elon Musk Tweeted this video saying it would be an appropriate theme song for their efforts to get private industry into space. Even though the video is totally out there the mind set is really dead on! Scientists from Russia have finally reached the surface of Lake Vostok more than two miles under Antarctica ice! Back to Earth Sky, I run an article on the discovery of more of brown dwarf class y stars. These stars are some of the more unusual of their class.

Finally I play a story from this month’s Antipodean flash fiction site. This story is called “Love in a Time of Entropy” by Geordie McLeod and is a great short story that I had a great deal of fun reading.

That’s pretty much it for episode 300. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed doing it. Thanks.

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Tobias Buckell

Right out of the blocks I play a news track from John Anealio called Steam Punk Girl.
John has managed once again to produce a fun toe tapping tune. It is always a pleasure
to play his new material.

Next the first story of the afternoon. The Universe Reef by Tobias Buckell which tells the tale
of an alien organism that has invaded Earth with devastating results. Also of note is Tobias
has a new book coming out feb. 28th 2012 called Arctic Rising.

The first news article is from Earth Sky and deals with the discovery of two ancient hominid
skeletons that shows a mix of early hominids and modern humans. Next from the Beam Me Up
blog: a novel new way to look for extra-terrestrial intelligent life, the Grail moon orbiters are
starting operation. The first order of business was the first films from the craft Ebb showing the
far side of the Moon, scientists are making great strides in computer intelligents working towards
hardware that will allow people with with illness, or damage that has otherwise left them mute -
allowing them to speak again, biologists have been able to make headway towards turning ordinary
skin cell / stem cells into brain cells. This research could one day help people with all kinds of
brain injury or disease, Dr. Neal DeGrasse Tyson spoke recently on MSNBC’s Rock Center about
the failing space program. Check out the excerpt from this on the BMU blog.

I had enough time to play another piece of music. I play Creep by Radio Head. For not much more
reason than it is a strange piece, but it really could be a piece used in a science fiction or horror
film.

Oh one more news article, did Meteors bring life to an early Earth? Earth – Sky has a few ideas.

An on to our last story of the program: Life Plus 70 by Key Liu spins time travel and copywrite
trolls in a whole new way!

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David Steffen

Little bit shorter episode this week. I misjudged how long the articles would take, but 298 still runs 50 minutes!

I start with a Librivox read of M. Cumming’s No Pets Allowed. He couldn’t do any real job, so they gave him a job that didn’t require him to do anything….guarding the treasure, and since there were no dishonest people anymore, he couldn’t get into trouble. But he was so far away and nothing to do…so maybe a pet? As long as no one knew…….

At the close of the hour I play Turning Back the Clock by David Steffen. He was too late! Mary was dead. Their life together was over. There was nothing he could do….or was there? If he could only get to the rift……..

Between the stories I go back to the BMU blog. This episode I recognize the crew loss of Apollo 1. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee all lost their lives to fire brought about by a series of mistakes that proved fatal. But out of that was a little known tribute that you might not have heard about. The iconic voice of the 60s classic Lost in Space’s robot has died. Dick Tufeld who’s famous lines like “Danger, Will Robinson” and “That does not compute” died Jan. 22 he was 85. Asteroid 2012 BX34 makes an extremely close pass! Nasa rover Opportunity is once again gearing up for another mission. Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson, says basically in the commercial below, you give him 150 million and he will send you to the Moon. What Is The Air Force Using the X-37B Space Plane For? Xnewsman sends in some Star Trek gold. Interviews from 1966 of Shatner and Nemoy! In an effort to conserve diminishing power, NASA controllers turned of the heater to the ultraviolet spectrometer instrument aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

and to make sure that I cover all the bases I head back and review the new x-men movie X-Men First Class.

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D.Thomas Minton

Little bit shorter episode this week.  I fell short by about eight or so minutes.  However I think you will be entertained.

While I got organized I played Karma by Kokia which I have not played for a while.  This song was of course one of the opening titles used in the anime series Gunslinger Girls.

My first story this week is a flash fiction piece from down under.  From the pages of Antipodean is Jason Butterfied’s excellent flash fiction story called “Out of Time” .   At the bottom of the hour is part one of Thomas Minton ‘Thief of Futures’.   Where in the not so distant future a person’s “Future” becomes a commodity, if it proves to be of exceptional quality.  And a X futures thief trying hard to protect what is most important to him, his daughter.

From the Blog: Russia’s failed Mars exploratory rover mission failure mean that scientists and engineers behind the Phobos-Grunt mission could face criminal prosecution.  In an update however:  The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that they will attempt to contact the stranded Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft that became stuck at a low-Earth orbit due to engine failure that followed its launch on November 9.    Back in 2010, an out-of-character Stephen Colbert sat down with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberly Academy to talk for 90 minutes about science, society and the universe. I have the video embedded on the blog.   Comic book character Booster Gold is heading towards a meeting with the SyFy channel with a live action series in the offing.  The Navy is phasing out its steam based catapult aircraft launching system and will be replacing it with an electromagnetic catapult launching system. Plans are to install the new system on the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier now in production.   Intel is hard at work in hopes of bringing augmented reality technology into its’ chips. The Terminator tech of the future….today huh?  NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft is hoping for a third extension of it’s mission.  Controllers fired the spacecrafts engines to keep all mission possibilities open.  From the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a short over-flight of the proto planet Vesta. This 3-D video incorporates images from the framing camera instrument aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft from July to August 2011.   There is a lot more on the blog, I just didn’t get a chance to get to it all.

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Cory Doctorow

This week on Beam Me Up episode 286 I start playing This must be the Place by new author Elliot Bangs.  In part one of this masterful tale we are introduced to  Lauren Wells and the main character Andria who through a year develop a something akin to a relationship but so strange that even Andria has to question he sanity.  Part one sets the stage this week.

But first a story from Cory Doctorow called Authorised Domain which Cory takes us into the near future where the digital certificate is not something to fool with!

Between stories I take a look at some of the reviews and articles from the past couple of weeks.

NASA would like to have a “Tractor Beam”. The problem is that no one has of yet ever built a tractor beam or even agreed on what constitutes a tractor beam,

Issue 161 of the Australian Flash SF online magazine Antipodean is now ready for downloading.

Photographer Peter Chang used an array of Canon 5D Mark IIs and motion control sliders to capture both indoors and outdoors time-lapse scenes in 3D, and it contains stunning visuals!

In an effort to eradicate mosquito borne illnesses researchers report initial success from the first test release into the wild of mutant  mosquitoes.  Their job….to pass on a lethal gene to their offspring that kills them before reaching maturity.

Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields 60 miles south of the Arctic circle in Sweden.

But first I review the bluray disk version of the movie Paul!

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This week on episode 283, the program  seems to write itself!  I decided to play it straight and see how things proceed.  All in all though you will have to listen to get my drift.

I start right out with expert by Weird Al Yandovic on the Beam Me Up Blog.  A new song “Stop Forwarding that Crap to Me!”   This puts a spin on some of the abuse that is foisted off on us by some users that have more cell phones than brains.  Recent surveys have it that more than 4% of the countries cell phone users have more than one cell.  The survey pointed out that there are more cell phones in operation in the us than there are people.  It is a certainty then with this kind of density that parody performers would comment on this.  First up is Weird Al Yankovic  with his protest song about junk email.  “Stop Forwarding that crap to Me”

More from the blog…..From two astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France come an interesting article on the reason Uranus is on it’s side.  It would appear that Uranus was struck with at least two massive planet sized bodies in it’s distant past that knocked it completely on it’s side.

HP’s new technology may well make DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015. flash memory in a year and a half.  This new technology that HP is betting on is called the memristor. Memristors are wires made of titanium dioxide a mere 150 atoms wide.   They can preserve memory states when off and can be written to trillions of times.

I found a great online film of the Alma telescope.  Higher than any other ground based observatory, located in Chile, is the new ALMA’s only about a third of the dishes in the array are installed as of yet, but ALMA is the most powerful scopes of it’s type. By 2013 all of it’s 66 dishes will be installed, bringing ALMA to full power,  Check out the film describing the telescope.

Back in August of 2010 I reported on this odd little series, a bit more than webisodes but not quite network tv called Pioneer One  it is a viewer supported project that seems to have worked!
There are now five episodes available online.  I have the link online or you can go here http://www.pioneerone.tv/   for more episodes plus the original.

What’s a Q-Drive? Well over at Cannae LLC in Pennsylvania,they describe the QDrive as a resonating cavity with design features that redirect the radiation pressure exerted in the cavity to create a radiation pressure imbalance on the cavity. This differential in radiation pressure generates an unbalanced force that creates thrust. The cavity is accelerated without use of propellant.  ooooooooooooooooo kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

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Kit St. Germaine

Once again we get into the scaring season in Episode 282.

This week’s story is a true horror piece produced for radio by Kit St. Germain as well as a very talented acting troupe performing- Mr. Bronze from a short story written by Phil Voyd. Heather Brown engineers. And the narrator in the story is Mark Oliver. Ben, the “star” of tonight’s outing is a consummate body builder, working all the way from a literal 90 lb weakling to wining the Mr. Bronze trophy. Everything was going right in his world, that was until he found this weird photo album, then things got decidedly worse.

From the Blog I review Rio the Movie. Unfortunately this Plot-line for this film is something you have seen over and over again, especially in animal based animation. How did I rate it? Well animation is good but the plot is soulless and the studio flips you off with no extras. 6…I suspect everyone was in for a payday on this one. Next I found something interesting in Dvice…..a Princeton Grad Student has created a device that is wired with a complex system of electrical sensors to make the plastic sheet fly?!

Is SpaceX up to picking up space missions of resupply and service in effect privatizing many of the low Earth orbit projects… Antipodean issue 160 is out…. and have you see where Mars Curiosity Rover is going to land? Yeah, inside the Gale crater, this bad boy has a central mountain over 3 miles high and the crater itself is 90 miles across, but still…it is quite a feat of programming.

Of course I could not resist starting the program with news of the October sky and a new song from Anealio called I want a Stormtrooper for Halloween….

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Adam-Troy Castro

Fast moving and plenty of stuff this week on Beam Me Up episode 279.

I start things off with one of the fast pieces of music for the animated series Naruto Shippuden   Syoujo by Scandal.

In this week’s blog, it seems everyone is talking about the star system discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope.  One planet but two sun which brings to mind almost immediately  the Star Wars World Tatooine!  Everything from a ghost planet to a frozen -100 degree world was bandied about.

The Russian resupply crash was caused by a clogged fuel line in the third stage engine of the Soyuz rocket. This particular fuel line was driving a turbo pump that pumps fuel into the main combustion chamber, so when the pump failed, the third stage shut down.  However knowing the cause and getting back on track for a crew change in early November a tall order at best.

Hey, did you ever see James Cameron’s “The Abyss”? It still rates right up there as one of my all time favorite science fiction movies and not for the end, because the end was a cop out and a sell out and didn’t come within a row of assholes of making sense, but up to that point wow, it’s Alien only underwater where EVERYTHING kills you! The reason there was never a remake or part two? No one would go back for a remake.  Well I found this series of “the making of” on the movie “The Abyss” and if you never saw the movie you don’t know what you missed and if you did, then check out the “making of” because it is fascinating!

NASA has a newheavy-lift launch vehicle that they say will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. The Space Launch System will give the nation a safe, affordable and sustainable ….hummm I heard that somewhere before…

Up for discussion is five possible ways time travel may work….  the functional word here is MAY  because I seriously doubt WILL.

And for our story this week.  Part 2 and the conclusion to Adam-Troy Castro’s   wonderful and controversial  “ Arvies”

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Keith Latch

In Beam Me Up episode 277 we take on Labor Day weekend by doing as little as possible!
This week’s program came out fine though.  I start of with y John Anealio  doing Summer Glau.

Then for our first story which this week is episode 16 of the ongoing saga of the Dark InSpectre series by Jason Kahn.  This week find inspector Garrett following clues and a psychic scream to locations that offer little advantage to our inspector.   We find him in the worst of places, knowing even worse things.  Things that others would kill to prevent from ever seeing the light of day.

The final story is part four and the conclusion to Keith Latch’s ‘The Stars Fell’.  Sophie’s life now  smothering unhappiness.   With the loss of her entire family has taken away her reason for living or any reason TO live.  It had been three weeks since the accident and she had hardly left her bed, but now, something strange had happened, she had been drawn outside by the most unusual occurrence…..  The Stars were Falling……

In blog and other articles….from Earth / Sky a short article on the status of Cern antimatter containment, Dan drops in this month’s sky based occurrences, I read off the things to look for from the third to the tenth of September.

In the blog, Located about an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth is the strangest planet….one made of diamonds!  ISS Crews NASA and Russian mission control are all holding their collective breathes as technicians try to uncover the cause of the Progress supply ship malfunction.  If it can not be uncovered then the ISS will have to be abandoned as there is now no other system ready to lift crew to the station.   In what has to be a WTF moment…. Chinese scientists are studying ways to capture an asteroid and bring it into Earth orbit!  Why?  There’s money in them thar asteroids!  Especially metallic based asteroids.
Xnewsman sends in a link to a you-tube video concerning computer banking as predicted in 1969 and you know, they got a lot right!  Chat-bots are often used as Web chat support agents to help you solve basic problems. When they are interacting with a person, they seem very strange as they converse in an almost lifelike fashion – but you have got to see what happens when two of these things are hooked up to talk to one another!  I play the audio and it is plain rib cracking funny!  And finally – Rover Opportunity, in the seventh year of it’s 90 day mission has arrived at the Martian crater Endeavour to help researchers understand ‘compositional differences’ of the rocks surrounding the crater.   Crater Endeavour is much larger than the last one visited by Opportunity, which was the Victoria crater.