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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.

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Keith Latch

This week on Beam Me up, I get things rolling with a rather caustic quote from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell on global politics.  Next, music from a strange little indie Sci-Fi short in which the camera follows a day in the life of Vera a girl with speakers in her skin and no volume knob to control her constantly blaring music from the indie album Winter.

The first story is a wicked little piece of flash fiction from Duncan Shields over at 365 Tomorrows, called Serial Killer.  The man was either the savior of the world, or a mass murdering psychopath.    The second story this week is part two of Keith Latch’s The Stars Fell. Keenan’s life has become a morass   of pain, sadness and disappointment since the death of his farther.  But then, three weeks later, something much stranger takes place which is even stranger still.

From Beam Me Up’s blog, Predictive Bionics.  New technology is being developed for lower-limb prosthetics that allows amputees to walk without the leg-dragging gait characteristic of conventional artificial legs.   Does ranting at SyFy do any good?  Who knows, but its sure is frustrating with the new crop of canceled programs…   Darpa says the Falcon htv-2 last flight was a success?!!!  Really?   ESA’s Don Quijote spacecraft is going to take a whack at the Apophis asteroid? The 1,600-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid which NASA said had a chance of around one in 250,000 of hitting Earth in 2036.   Astronaut Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station, shows us what a meteor looks like from space with his photo of a meteor from the Perseid Meteor Shower.   Erik Weihenmayer can see with his tongue,  Erik in fact is participating in  experiments with the Brainport Vision Device, a revolutionary new technology enabling a blind person to see with his tongue.   Finally Hubble, using its  Wide Field Camera 3
takes a photo of the strange and amazing Necklace Nebula!

As always, we wish to thank Cyber-Studios for their unique and helpful services.

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Just fun this week on BMU # 274! But right in the middle, there I sit rantin and ravin! Oh well, you can take a horse to water….

Sometimes you find new material in places you would not expect. I have found that many really good animations of comic book fame are seeing a new infusion since their exposure to the big screen. One that has profited by the infusion of Japanese Anime artists is what we would normally call children cartoons. One that I found by scanning through the channels was a reworking of the Iron-man universe in to Iron Man armored adventures. It would seem that anime artists and writers have retooled the older style to a cgi product heavy on action aimed at a teenage audience. Even the theme song has been totally rewritten. I start of with a heavy rock theme song from Rooney, Iron Man Armored Adventures.

From there, I play the first story of the afternoon – episode 15 of Jason Kahn’s Dark InSpectre – This week Jack Garett closes down on the corruption that has covered up unspeakable acts but as he gets closer, he risks becoming one of them!

Second story of the afternoon, I play part one of Keith Latch’s The stars Fell. On the surface, the story would seem to be pretty straight forward but in the next episode thing take a VERY strange twist.

From the Beam Me Up Blog, we first hear from Earth Sky about the possibility of running water on Mars, Next the Pentagon lost the hypersonic HTV-2 which was capable of flying 20 times the speed of sound. Boeing plans on getting into L.E.O. in a big way with it’s CST-100 crew space transport, it plans on using for its own astronauts. This seems to be the answer to the military’s dream. It is possible that this will be the core of a weapons system that could drop bombs just about anywhere within one hour. The crazy thing is this is not as crazy as it gets. I rave about the first choice which was swapping out trident missile warheads to conventional explosives! Yep a left over from the Bush admin. And let’s not forget the suborbital Virgin Galactic who plan is to construct the first launch site outside the United States at Kiruna Sweden, 90 miles north of the arctic circle. For irony… Google’s test-bed Toyota Prius crashed near Google HQ in Mountain View. Witnesses to the accident reported that the crash caused a five-car pile-up and it would seem An offshoot of the South Florida Tea Party called “Tea Party In Space” (T-PIS) is looking to break apart the government’s socialist grip on the final frontier. These people seem to thing that NASA is part of some Evil Government empire….there were lots of conversation on the blog this week about this. Might be worth checking out…the blog I mean!

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Harris @ work

Beam Me Up 273 saw new additions and just plain good stuff. I start with an excellent quote from Isaac Asimov that Courtney posted on the Beam Me Up Facebook site.  Next, I play two stories this week.  First  from a story in the newest edition of Antipodean.  From Steve Carter comes a different twist on an old sci-fi time travel theme “Time Enough”  The second story has to be one of the strangest alien encounter stories I have ever read.  I play Harris Tobias’ Elko.

I have discovered a new anime series in my travels around youtube and found that it was playing on SyFy.    Durahrara is a spin on the myth of the grim reaper and a mixture of the European headless horseman and their ilk.  However the spin and the handle make the series much more entertaining and modern.  I found the opening track on one of the short films and play it for the program today.  Very nice and catchy.  Overall its a very good series for those that don’t go into the giant robots that litter the main outlets.  Give this one a shot.

From this week’s blog @   wrfrbeameup.blogspot.com:  Researchers at the University of Toronto have used a combination of synthesized DNA and semiconductors to create a nano-scale antenna that harnesses light.   arth at one point in its early history had more than one moon. The second moon was most likely very small and may have collided with its larger Luna companion.  Have you heard the  story of the two NASA logos?  No?  You won’t believe it!  The  Juno mission to Jupiter  launched  Friday August 5.  A film of the launch can be viewed on NASA.  The primary goal of the mission is to understand the origin and evolution of the massive gas planet.    Oh you will just HAVE to check out The Mercury Men.   A  new Web series made for under $10,000 in Pittsburgh with ray guns, evil aliens and even a brain in a jar. It’s a modern homage to the black-and-white serials of the early 1900s.  Space X has petitioned NASA to combine two upcoming missions of their Dragon launch vehicle, one to rendezvous with the ISS and next to dock with it.  And there is much more on the blog as well as the podcast.

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Deanna Knippling

Beam Me Up episode 271 continues this week with part 3 of Deanna Knippling’s Paid.  Things get even stranger for our intrepid cross dimensional detective as he begins to unravel his latest murder mystery, from an evangelist that most likely isn’t  a lawyer who is who knows what and Boregard keeps getting himself inconveniently killed….

I open with a new story from an author new to BMU.   Andrew Bale sends in First Flight.  Humanity’s first interstellar flight comes to a very strange end.

From the blog

NASA has signed a deal worth 306 million dollars with Roskomos for six rides to the ISS in 2012 and 2013, or a charge of 51 million dollars per US astronaut. However Russia may up the price.

astronauts aboard the ISS had watched Atlantis as it entered the atmosphere from the stations Cupola viewing window.  And someone snapped a photo!

Hubble has discovered a new moon around Pluto.  So far is the smallest discovered around the dwarf planet.  Designated P4, It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles.

JoshM reviews the movie Green Lantern.  What should have been an inspiration, Josh describes as  apathetic.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began sending back photographs of Vesta from the asteroid belt.

Part of the X chromosome found in people from outside Africa originally comes from our Neanderthal cousins.   So much for the theory that they never interbred!

And Black holes instead of slowing down are spinning faster than they ever have since the Universe began!  How is that possible

That and more from this week’s episode of beam 271

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This week on episode 270 of Beam Me Up episode 14 of Jason Kahn’s Dark Inspectre.  Our intrepid detective is framed for a grisly murder.  Which means he is getting close, but before he can prove his innocence  he might find himself dead instead.

Oddcube joins us once again for his unusual brand of reviews –  This week Dungeon Seige is the unfortunate target of his unusual utterances.

From the blog I review the movie Spirit, the review might be of some use, the movie sure wasn’t.
Scientists build a time cloak?  The 2010 Locus awards are in!  Dawn meets Vesta.  Check out a 360 VR view interactive of the Shuttle flight deck.  astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson  along with Neil Armstrong and John Glenn spank NASA.  First time ever a comet has been photographed plowing into the sun.  And did you know that the Buran was built to drop bombs?!!!

I close with part 2 of Paid by Deanna Knippling.  You will not believe how time is handled in this wildly weird tale.  And the bad guy?  even weirder!