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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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Jason Kahn

Well rounded episode of Beam Me Up this week on episode 287.  I lead of first with a new offering from Symphony of Science called Onward to the Edge, featuring excerpts from speeches made by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, and Carolyn Porco and set to some great music.

Our first fiction offering is a brand new story arc from Jason Kahn and Cyberstudios online.   Jason once again takes us to New Arden and our favorite physic detective Jack Garrett.  This arc is In Plain Sight and episode 1 is “On The Mend”  As you might recall with the last story, A New Beginning, Jack managed to solve the case, but took an amazing amount of damage in doing so.  On the Mend literally picks up where a new beginning ended.  But far from being lauded for his crime solving, it would seem that New Arden has a short memory.

The last story of the afternoon is part 2 of Elliot Bangs excellent story “This Must Be the Place.    With Many Many thanks to the voice work of Andy and Diane Finkle!

Last week we found the main character Loren Wells seems to have secrets to keep.  Foremost of all is every time Andria sees him, he appears to be a different age and sometimes he knows her, but often he has no clue!  In part 2 and the conclusion Andria uncovers what has got to be one of the strangest retirement plans ever!

From the Beam Me Up Blog:

Orion crew capsule is scheduled for a mission in 2014!  NASA  reports that the plan is to send the capsule through two orbits, ending up farther from Earth than any craft intended for human transport has been since 1973. Then, Orion will return for a splash-down in the Pacific.

According to BBC news online the Russian space agency reports that shortly after launch, the Phobos Grunt probe failed to fire its’ mains to launch it towards Mars and is now stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have two weeks to correct the fault before the probe’s batteries run out.

And something I thought I would never hear – In a paper which will be published this week in Nature, Professors Christian Knigge & Malcolm Coe from the University of Southampton worked with Philipp Podsiadlowski of Oxford University to reveal how they have discovered two distinct populations of neutron stars…  Two?!!!!  I can just handle how weird the universe is just having one type of these monsters!

That and some clever animations on the blog.

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Jason Kahn

This episode for the first week in October 2011, as usual I go in for stories that are seasonal I think you would say.

With that in mind the first story of the evening is the conclusion to The Dark InSpectre written and read by Jason Kahn.  This is episode 17 of Unfinished Business in which our intrepid psychic detective Jack Garrett puts the finishing touches to one of the most horrific murders he has ever seen.

The second story this week is a classic piece from the pages of Analog Magazine call “Am I still Here?” by James R. Hall.  Here, in a tale set into the near future where any and everything can be repaired or replaced in a human body, the question is asked…when do you stop being you and become something or someone else that just thinks it is you?

In news…Earth Sky speaks about water flows on Mars and the makeup of mysterious  rogue waves.  I read the impressions of some NASA astronauts that have taken the ride home in a Soyuz capsule.

From the Blog

Doug Hilton sends us a note on his news short story collection:  How We Play Football in Alabama And Other Short Stories.  Mark Wilson over at About SF writes that The movie Source Code is coming to the small screen as a series.  The giant particle accelerator The Tevatron is shutting down 9/30/11 and a great project becomes victim like SETI, to budget cuts and apathy.

Thats episode 281 of Beam Me Up

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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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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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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!

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This Beam Me Up episode is the first in year six – and we start off year six with episode 261, solidly in the weird column!  My pet peeve this week is a theme I have gone to before, and once again I am at that well.  Space Trash.  Would you believe that by 2030 the amount of trash being tracked will triple?!  That by the was is the least of the problems.  Is there a possibility of a new animated Star Trek?  Wonder woman tv series is a no go it seems.  Ron Howard’s Dark Tower project  is crumbling as we speak.   Superman / Batman public enemies was up for reviews this week.   And does anyone remember William  Campbell?  He played the q like creature on the original Star Trek.  Well mr Campbell has beamed out for the last time.

This week’s stories and music?  Well, my opening song is She Dont like Firefly.  Lol she is perfect in every other way, but doesnt like Firefly, so she is gone!   This week is episode 12 for the Dark InSpectre.  I want to thank Cyberwizard productions for their continued excellence in production values.   Our strangest story to date is Health Tip for Traveler.  A does and don’ts  travel brochure of the most unusual type!

Photo is David Goldman

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This week in episode 256 of Beam Me Up I start with a fast paced piece of music from Yu Kobiachi called Fight or Flight.  This is the closing theme music for the anime series Dragonauts which is not really all that bad of a series.  The “Dragons” are alive, but they are almost like living fightercraft with pilots which bond with them.  It gets complicated, but has it’s moments.

From the blog this week, a film that shows some very unusual activity around the April fifth launch of Soyuz.  I am leaning well to the FAKE! side, but it could be something much more dangerous.  If so, then many more launches may have trouble as well…  A rather odd pair of white dwarf stars are doing a very unusual dance around each other and the outcome may be the most unusual of them all!  Javier Bardem is Universal Pictures choice to play gunslinger Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower movie series directed by Ron Howard.  NASA’s Mars Odyssey entered it’s 10th year of continuous operation this week, making it the oldest orbital spacecraft still exploring the red planet, this according to NASA’s website. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has put together a short animation of the Curiosity Rover leaving Earth and landing on Mars and I have the video on the blog site.  I also put up a video of Martin doing outside test on the jet pack. Branson along with Chris Welsh will helm the Virgin Oceanic vehicle on five separate dives to the deepest points in Earth’s oceans.  Watch the animated video Virgin put together to demonstrate what they hope to acomplish.  Craphound mentioned the Beam Me Up podcast recently. I played Cory’s story Ghosts in My Head on episode 255 and he did the favor of mentioning the fact.  Hey if you haven’t heard the story yet, its the first story I played last week on episode 255.  Virgin put on quite a media blitz for the opening of Virgin America’s new Terminal 2 at the San Francisco International airport. In a short film on the blog site, we see White Knight and Space Ship 2 flying in close formation with the media junket jet that Virgin provided.  I have a short vid from SpaceX with animation showing testing of the New Heavy Lift System they have developed  and this thing is STRONG!  and last but not least, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan is retiring at 67.

The first story I play this week is episode 11 of the Dark InSpectre series by Jason Kahn and thing seem to be getting quite dicey for our favorite mind reading detective…., and I end this weeks program with part one of In Fall by Ted Kosmatka.  A very mysterious tale of two men on a ship on the brink of an endless chasm, on young, the other old and both prisoners of their belief.

Its a fast and entertaining hour.  enjoy!

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Episode 253 was a bit strange today.  But all in all, I think it came out as fun enough!  First, you have to hear this new song I found on youtube from Your Favorite Martian called Club Villain.  What a fun song, and it name drops about any villains you can recall!  Plus it will just keep your feet tappin.

Stories are good this week.  I remembered that it had been awhile since we had a Dark  InSpectre story from Jason Kahn so I corrected that error and played episode 10.  Inspector Garrett has to deal with more than just ghosts and corrupt politicians but we begin to see more of Jack’s past.  Something very wrong is buried deep but we are beginning to see that Jack’s interest in the “quad’s” is very very complicated….

Our second story is part four of David Steffen’s “the Utility of Love”  follows Dorothy and The Tin Man as they try to carry out the quest the Wizard set them to.  Author Steffen again uses deft control of his plot to bring us further along the convoluted path using many of the images we thought we knew in truly inventive and striking ways.  The end of the tale is drawing nearer, but that doesn’t mean that there are not many twists still to come.

From the blog  MDA of Canada may start a gas station in space?  No Ordinary family may come to a very ordinary end.  ABC isn’t talking but have they canceled our favorite superpower family?  Corning put together this video called “A Day Made Of Glass,” which is a very inventive short on all the devices that might one day be as common as the cell phone is now.  All these high tech devices have one thing in common, they use lots of glass.  NASA is reporting that Messenger, the first probe ever to orbit the planet Mercury, has made a successful orbital insertion and is now Mercury’s first ever artificial Sat.!   There is no question that last week’s earthquake in Japan did a great deal of damage, however some of effect are not that apparent but I can guarantee that they are every bit as mind bending!  And finally I take a break and watch some American animation.  I do a  review of the animated movie Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.

All in all not a bad episode, even though the start was a bit rough.  Enjoy!