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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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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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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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C.J. Wolf

This week on episode 280 of Beam Me Up I start off with a funny track from Star Wars Fan Girl  called the Star Wars Blu-Ray rap!  Once again fans are up in arms with George’s ‘tweaks’ to the Star Wars Universe.

The first story this week is a tale for all the world in the same universe as Firefly.  But even if not, Good business with guns is a fun telling of the Empires outer fringe worldsand how everything old is new again and in boarder towns, as is often the case, a person’s reputation is maintained at the business end on a gun.  Our reader for this story is Ron Huber who always adds his own spin to everything he reads.

Our second story was written and read by C.J. Wolf titled After Hours at the Black hole.  Often when you throw something away, you would rather it not reappear and certainly not at the worst of times. C.J. Wolf puts a whole new spin on “the trash man”  with devistating effect!

From the blog

The Blu-ray movie disk is on tap this week as a review is the film “Source Code” directed by Duncan Jones and starring  Jake Gyllenhaal Michelle Monaghan Scott Bakula.  Kind of a retelling of the classic science fiction theme.   Around the World in 63 Seconds From the ISS A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night.  Stunning pics of Vesta from Dawn  and musing as to what exactly happened when the UARS burned in.

That’s this week’s program, last in September.  Next week starts my favorite month.  See you then.

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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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This week on Beam Me Up, episode 278 I play part one of Adam Troy-Castro’s amazing short story “Arvies”.  Adam’s tale flips our assumptions of what is true or false or what is alive or dead.  What is a person and what is not.

From the Beam Me Up blog

I play the new Symphony of Science  music, which features the voices of Morgan Freeman,, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking among others.

Next I review the Disney CGI animation Tangled which all in all the best thing that can be said about the movie is that it may not take any chances, but is endearing in its own right. Plus the added benefit of high quality animation only adds to the enjoyment.

Next,  From the NYT via Boing Boing comes evidence of the earliest tool manufacture. From the science journal Nature, tools from Kenya that were dated to about 1.7 million years ago. This is the earliest found so far.

Astronomers are studying the nearest and brightest supernova of of a type that has not been observed for 40 years.

A recent study suggests that super-massive black holes can trigger the formation of stars, thus ‘building’ their own host galaxies. This could also explain why galaxies hosting larger black holes have more stars.

NASA’s 6.5-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will be re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in what NASA has described as “an uncontrolled fall” sometime in late September or early October.

Was there ever an Apollo 18?  Well technically…yes.  In July 1975 there was indeed an Apollo mission. It was the last Apollo mission and the last manned US space mission until the first Space Shuttle flight in April 1981.  This last mission was called the ASTP and it was the first joint U.S./Soviet space flight.

Antipodean’s September 2011 issue, #159 is now online.

and finally Photos taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of Apollo 12, 14 and 17 have proved to be some of the sharpest ever taken of the landing sites.  Even experiment packages can clearly be seen!

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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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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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Gary Cuba & Chris

This week in episode 268 I start with the July 4th episode of Earth Sky.  This week’s article is about the seasons and why the summer in the northern climes and winter in the southern are longer and why the winter in the north and summer in the south are short, even though it seems just the opposite.  The Earth Sky article is fun as well as informative.

Our first story of the afternoon is a piece of flash fiction from Duncan Shields called Silicon Valley.  Duncan’s story tells the tale of a future where all the humans have disappeared in-explicitly.  While the robot take up where the humans left off.  Duncan’s tale is a curious journey to self awareness, from a most unusual subject.

Before I play the last story, I take a jaunt to the BMU blog at wrfrbeameup.blogspot.com.

Since the shuttle program is coming to an end shortly I begin by discussing an end to the space age.  During a short break, Barry weighs in with the point that the military was the driving force in the earlier programs and until the military decides once more that we need the high frontier, we may never get there again…

On another really fascinating front, is it possible that bio-mechanical frameworks like those developed for yep, you guessed it, the military, be a boon to the handicapped?  The inventor of the Segway thinks that many of the devices can be ported to aide in rehabilitation.

A two hour flight across the Atlantic may be possible within 10 years. Employing new hyper speed engine technology the HyperMach’s proposed ultra high speed plane the SonicStar will be able to fly at 3.6 mach and do so at altitudes above 60 thousand feet but only carrying 20 people?!!!

on June 27th of this year. A bus sized asteroid flew so close to the Earth that it was well inside many of satellites orbits.

A bus sized asteroid 2011 MD, passed within 7500 miles of Earth,  passing over the coast of Antarctica before being slingshot back into deep space.

Scientists at Tokyo University with assistance from Sony, have developed PossessedHand which consists of a pair of wrist bands that deliver mild electrical stimuli directly to the muscles that control your fingers, with hopes of say teaching your body how to properly position your fingers to play an instrument.  Or other equally creepy uses….

And for our last story, Gary Cuba has let me read his excellent story Manifest Error.  What would you do if you found that a delivery is late…..by a century!  I describe the tale as an “uplift” story for the real world.