Creepy Crawlies

One of the things about being a science geek: It is not for the faint of heart. Worse? Being married to a science geek when you are not one. Feel my husbands pain. I adore all the creepy, gross, hope I never meet that in a dark alley wildlife and critters that run around this planet. Meet Bathynomus giganteus. He lives here. When you vacation in Mexico, it might be this isopod nibbling on your toes when you take a dip in the Gulf. Not really - they don't like the shallows. File this under 'things that make you say 'ew!'' and then forth and create those scifi Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Backwards Planets

Astronomers are revisiting their theories about how planets form after finding evidence of planets that orbit their stars opposite the star's rotation. You've seen the animation of the interstellar dust cloud turning majestically in space. Over time, the dust clouds coalesce and planets form, all following the same path around the central star. It's a lovely idea that has now been called into question given the new data. Personally, I love the image of a planet going the wrong way round its star if only because I suspect most of us feel like that defines us and our lives. Now. How can I work a retrograde planetary orbit into some character's daring escape from overwhelming odds?

Brain Controlled Tech

To further Friday's post regarding the line between human and cyborg, I offer a link brought to my attention by fellow SFR Brigade member Charles. Researchers, in the pursuit of brainwave controlled prosthetics, used EEG to post a Twitter message. No one I know would claim that controlling computer generated speech software with brainwaves qualifies a person as a cyborg. Still, move that development one hundred to two hundred years in the future. No one is wearing a mini-EEG reader external to the skull. Miniaturization has reduced it all to something tiny that can be implanted either into the skin of the scalp, or into the tissue of the brain itself. And then what are you controlling? Computer generated speech? Your car (or hover craft)? Your station on a ship?

Augmenting Senses

For the cyborg fans among us, it appears that science is on the cusp of integrating technology with human information processing. It's on a limited scale, at the moment, but if you're familiar with the D20 gaming system Shadow Run and the novels the game has spawned, then you're familiar with the concept of hardware implants designed to let human consciousness mesh with computer generated visualizations. The questions (and therefore story points) just keep popping up. At what point do technological enhancements turn a human into a cyborg? What happens to the human brain when the admittedly cool tech like that detailed in the article linked above makes it so that our brains no longer have to learn to operate on a spacial basis? Is there inherent mental/physical benefit - beyond being able to find your way from point A to point B - in having to learn how to read a map or visualize your city and your position therein? Can something as simple as a pair of glasses giving directions really influence how humans evolve? In what way? Aren't there at least a thousand stories in this single article? I have mine. The third, as yet untitled, book in the Enemy series (Enemy Within, Enemy Games - from Berkley Sensations in November 2010 and Spring 2011) includes a heroine using technology to enhance and sometimes to compensate for her senses. What's your story?

Fluid Morality

Scientists have discovered that magnets can alter a person's perception of morality. Granted, in this limited study, the change was minor and temporary, but we're writing science fiction here and this is the stuff of major bad guy weaponry. Why have Dr. Doomsday get off his evil genius backside when he can apply his magnetic mind altering device to a captured good guy and have said hero do the dirty work? Or does Dr. Doomsday alter the heroine's moral compass enough that she'd date him? If she does date him, how does that alter Dr. Doomsday's morality? Something about wanting a bunch of baby evil geniuses underfoot has a way of changing a man's priorities - if not his morality.

Planetary Rumblings

If you'd read or heard that the Chilean earthquake had knocked the earth slightly off of it's axis, thereby shortening our day by 1.26 milliseconds, fear not. It turns out that, in the long run, the planet has a series of coping mechanisms designed to put everything right again. How interesting would it be to work some of those properties into a science fiction story wherein a planet's changing orbital patterns can be used in some fashion to thwart the bad guys? Or the good guys, depending on your bent.

Imagination Runs on Strange Fuel

One of my favorite video podcasts is "Stuff They Don't Want You to Know". This 3 to 7 minute podcast definitely qualifies as 'weird' and only vaguely as 'science'. It spins off into conspiracy theories and other fun (and story rich) stuff. Past episodes have covered the Hollow Earth Theory, and the end of time (2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar). Scientific? Not so much. Fodder for all sorts of strange and twisted story making? Oh, yes.

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