Science and SF Tidbits: Extreme Life, Using our Brains, Celebrating Dawn

Some recent bioscience and science fiction articles I found interesting:

• Ancient Microbes Found in Buried Antarctic Lake : Discovery News »

Some of the strangest forms of life on Earth live in the coldest and hottest environments. As long as there is a source of water, life is likely to be found. That's why any hint of water on Mars or Venus or other bodies in our solar system is big news.

Scientists recently found diverse bacteria thriving in an buried Antarctic lake, an environment devoid of oxygen, saltier than the ocean and a frosty -13°C. That hints at the possibility of life on frozen worlds like Europa.

• Scientists discover possible building blocks of ancient genetic systems in Earth's most primitive organisms

Has life always been as we "know it" today? Quite possibly not.

The genetic instructions in plant and animal life is currently based on DNA, with a deoxyribose based backbone. Before that, it's thought that life may have been RNA (ribose backbone) based. But what came before RNA? One hypothesis is that hereditary molecules were built from aminoethylglycine (AEG) peptide nucleic acids.

One problem with that theory is that AEG had never been found in nature - up until now. Scientists have found AEG inside cyanobacteria that live in extreme environments, such as hot springs. It's a far cry from finding AEG-based life, but the fact that AEG can be biologically synthesized makes that hypothesis less unlikely.

Image: Filaments of cyanobacterium Nostoc colonies. Uploaded by Thibul at fr.wikipedia. Shared under a CC-BY-1.0 license.

• Do we only use 10% of our brains?

Some myths keep being debunked over and over. One such idea is that we only use 10% of our brains, leaving some 90% just idling. In science fiction that often is used as an explanation why a character has psi powers or superintelligence: they have a mutation or took a drug that allows them to use that normally "unused" part of their brain, unlike us normal folk. It's annoying, because it's simply not true.

At BBC Future Claudia Hammond explains why the idea that the claim we only use 10% of our brains is a myth, albeit a persistent one. Various measures of brain function make clear that it's simply not true. And if you think more deeply about it, it doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary perspective either, as Hammond points out:

"It is true that nature can sometimes involve some strange designs, but to evolve to have a brain ten times the size we needed would seem very odd, when its large dimensions are so costly to our survival, leading on occasion to obstructed labour and the death of a mother during childbirth if no help is available."

• Celebrating Dawn by Octavia Butler

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Octavia Butler's Dawn, author N.K. Jemison reflects on the novel's significance and how Butler dealt with sexism and paved the way for African American science fiction writers:

"this fiction went right to the worst that I was seeing in the real world around me, but then she also suggested we can still do better, we can still survive, grow, change, improve"

Dawn is the first novel in Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy. It takes place on a mostly depopulated Earth which has been invaded - or perhaps rescued - by aliens. The surviving humans must choose whether to adapt to an integrated hybrid human-alien society or fight for independence. If you haven't read the series you should do so!

Science & SF Tidbits: Brain Music

Music from the brain and the brain on music:

• Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings - PLoS One

Neuroscience + art = the music of our minds

A team of Chinese scientists has proposed a new method of translating the signals from EEG-fMRI brain scans into music. We'll have to wait and see if the music eventually is an aid to diagnosis or medical treatment as the authors hope, or if this turns out to be an off-beat art project:

"The brain music, as one of the human brain's intelligence product, embodies the secret of brain in an artistic style, provides the platform for scientist and artist to work together to understand ourselves, and it is also a new interactive link between the human brain and music. We hope the on-going progresses of the brain signals based music will properly unravel part of the truth in the brain, and then to be used for clinical diagnosis and bio-feedback therapy in the future."

Listen to the EEG music

Image: Illustration of the score of EEG-fMRI music from Lu J, Wu D, Yang H, Luo C, Li C, et al. (2012) Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49773. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049773 Shared under a CC-BY-2.5 license.

• Brain scans of rappers shed light on creativity » Nature News

What does a rapper's brain look like while he's freestyling? Neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health had 12 rappers improvise while in an MRI machine. What they found was that brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex increased, and activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreased. What that may mean is that the parts of the brain involved in cognitive "executive functions" like planning, problem solving, attention and verbal reasoning might be relaxed during the creative process.

This could explain why the creation of music can seem to flow during improvisation without any conscious thought. As study co-author and alternative hip-hop artist Open Mike Eagle puts it:

“That’s kind of the nature of that type of improvisation. Even as people who do it, we’re not 100% sure of where we’re getting improvisation from.”

• Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus

Performer Bobby McFerrin and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitin teamed up at the 2009 World Science Festival to demonstrate how our brains are wired for music.

In this clip McFerrin "plays" the audience with the pentatonic scale:

Science Tidbits: Beatles, Birds and Brains

What Beatles and birds may tell about brains:

• The Beatles' Surprising Contribution To Brain Science : NPR »
It all started with an interesting observation by Georgetown neuroscientist Josef Rauschecker: if you asked him what order of the songs on his favorite Beatles album, he wouldn't be able to tell you. But he could sing along with a song and at the end he would be able to start humming the notes of the song that usually followed.

To try to figure out what was happening, he had volunteers listen to their favorite CD while in a brain scanner. It turns out the area of the brain that was most active wasn't associated with hearing, but the brain's motor system, which is usually involved in controlling our muscles.

Just like learning a sequence of dance steps or how to ski down a slope, our brain uses the motor control system to put together chunks of notes into the right order.

Listen to the whole story on NPR.

• Wrens teach their eggs to sing »

Unborn fairy wren chicks must learn a special "password" note from their mother while still in the egg. After hatching will only be fed by their parents if they can produce the correct "begging call" - this prevents any relatively enormous cuckoo hatchling interlopers in their nest from being fed.

But some species of cuckoos are adapting: the cuckoo chicks may try out different calls until they find one that gets them a meal. Clever cuckoos!

Image: Juvenile female superb fairy wren. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, LiquidGhoul at the English Wikipedia project.

• Human Brain Project -video overview (Vimeo)

The Human Brain Project is a collaborative effort between scientists across Europe to create a computer simulation of the human brain. They believe that working together is the key:

"We find that the major obstacle that hinders our understanding of the brain is the fragmentation of brain research and the data it produces. Modern neuroscience has been enormously productive but unsystematic. The data it produces describes different levels of biological organisation, in different areas of the brain in different species, at different stages of development. Today we urgently need to integrate this data – to show how the parts fit together in a single multi-level system."

Learn more about the Human Brain Project.

Science and SF Tidbits: October 15, 2012: Thinking machines and changelings

Interesting articles elsewhere:

• From Cooling System to Thinking Machine | Being Human »
Carl Zimmer writes about the history of Western thinking on the function of the brain from ancient times to the present. Will our current thinking of how the brain functions eventually seem as outdated as the ancient notion of "animal spirits"? From the article:

"Are we brains in a vat? Strictly speaking, it’s hard to prove we’re not. But in any world—real or manufactured—we still know so little about how brains work that we wouldn’t be able to put Putnam’s thought experiment into practice."

( Hilary Putnam is a philosopher who has used the "brain in a vat" analogy to discuss the human concept of the external world)

• Define Me: The Role of Changelings in Folklore »

How does the child in this tale sound to you? A changeling? or would we modern folk simply say he's not neurotypical?  

"Once upon a time there was a poor man and his wife who lived in the middle of the woods.  They had a beautiful little boy with blonde hair and strikingly blue eyes.  He was the light of their lives… and then something changed.
The boy wouldn’t coo. He wouldn’t look at his parents or at the pretty toys they dangled in front of him.  He shrank away from their touch as if it physically hurt him, couldn’t gag down his food, and began to scream."

Mercedes Yardley's article provides much food for thought.

• Oh, You’re one of “those” kinds of people »

Horror artist Russell Dickerson has gotten some negative reactions from people when they learn what he does for a living. He argues that it's people who are outside the norm who make change in the world:

"It takes those strange folks out there, with odd ideas of fantastical things, to really change the world. Scientists, artists, authors, folks from all different walks of life who simply believed differently than those around them. Those odd people created the very world we live in, because they dared to put those strange ideas out there for all the world to see."

Image: Changeling child from DOWN-ADOWN-DERRY: A Book of Fairy Poems (1922) by Walter De La Mare, Illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop

Science and SF Tidbits: October 13, 2012: Nobel Prizes, Bringing Back Dinosaurs, Martian Biorhythms

Have you watched my live interview with artist Brian Kolm yet? We talk about his design of the Biology in Science Fiction logo, teaching art, and socializing with other artists. Be sure to check it out!

From around the web:

• G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) win 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | The Curious Wavefunction, Scientific American Blog Network
On Thursday the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two biochemists: Brian Kobilka (Stanford) and Robert Lefkowitz (Duke). Their work helped explain how a signal on the outside of the cell (such as a neurotransmitter, hormone or even light) is translated into physiological changes inside the cell and altered gene expression. Their research focused on a particular class of receptors in cell membranes that are associated with "G protein" signalling molecules inside the cell. The article linked above is a pretty good overview of how they function.

• An Interview with Sir John Gurdon winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine
I recommend this Cambridge University video interview with John Gurdon. He talks about his original work on frog cloning in the early 60s, the relevance of his work today, and how his parents helped him pursue studies in science after his teacher made him out to be a failure in the subject.

• DNA has a 521-year half-life :: Nature News
After 6.8 million years nearly every bond in a DNA molecule would be broken. That means no Jurassic Part-style cloning of extinct dinosaurs will be possible. Sad news for those of us wishing for a cute cloned Sciurumimus as a pet. It also brings into question reports of extracting DNA from very ancient amber.

• Weird Things » Blog Archive » Who Needs DNA to Bring Back the T-Rex?
Perhaps dinosaurs could be reconstructed even without their DNA. The trick is to use what we know about T. rex anatomy and modern animal biology and fake the rest:

"The blueprint for this creature will be everything we know about the T-Rex. We can design bone structure, ligature and a thousand other tiny details we’ve learned from the fossil records. Although we may never find DNA, we have found cells inside T-Rex fossils, resembling the same kind in ovulating birds. Cells, protein and other kinds of information can help us build a replica that’s perhaps 95% accurate"

• Ridley Scott Explains Prometheus, Is Lovably Insane | Tor.com
Ryan Britt summarizes Ridley Scott's commentary from the DVD release of Prometheus. Sounds either quite brilliant or a bit unhinged, or maybe both.  I may have to watch the movie with commentary myself to see what he says about the dumbest biologist in the galaxy (ooh, the goo in this alien building full of dead bodies is unexpectedly turning into a snake-like creature - let me pet it!)

• Fossil of Ancient Spider Attack - only one of its type discovered
About 100 million years ago a young spider was about to start munching on a wasp caught in his web. But before he could commence munching, tree resin flowed over spider, wasp and web and they were trapped in amber.  Click here to see the fantastic large image.

• How Blue Light And Caffeine Will Help Humans Move To Mars
Mars days are 24.6 hours long, which means we humans with Earthly 24-hour internal clocks can find it hard to adjust. It turns out the key is carefully timed blue light, caffeine, and a comfortable sleeping environment. Tests on members of the Mars Phoenix mission suggests it works, even for folks here on Earth.

• Science In My Fiction » Mind-Control and Instant Skill
Optogenetics combines advanced genetic engineering of neural tissue in the brain and implanted fiber optics to allow external control of behavior and learning in mice. It has even been shown to work to some extent in monkeys. And simply stimulating the brain with electrical current and speed up learning in humans.  Not surprisingly, the military is at he forefront of this sort of research. But it's still in it's early stages - there won't be human "mind control" using this technology any time soon. But if it did work, would you allow your brain cells to be manipulated if it would give you instant skills?

• Report: Ukraine Trains Dolphins With Friggin' Pistols on Their Heads | Danger Room | Wired.com
Pistols attached to dolphins may be far fetched, but it's already the case that navies (including the United States) use dolphins for mine clearing and other underwater operations. The US also apparently uses sea lions "equipped with a spring-loaded clamp that can be attached to a diver’s legs. The sea lion then swims back to its handlers, who can reel the enemy diver in like a snagged fish."  But if you want to make dolphins really lethal, give them mechanical arms and hands. Not only will they be able to kill, before you know it they'll be piloting starships!

Image: Courtesy of Brian Kolm at Atomic Bear Press. Used with permission.

Free Friday Flick: Donovan's Brain, Curt Siodmak, and the science of memory

This week's recommended free online movie is the 1953 science fiction horror film Donovan's Brain, starring Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan) and Lew Ayres, and directed by Felix Feist.

The basic plot: a multi-millionaire's airplane crashes in the desert, a scientist keeps his brain alive in a tank, and there are unintended consequences (of course)!

The movie is based on Curt Siodmak's best-selling 1942 novel by the same name. While Siodmak is probably best known as a Hollywood screenwriter for horror movies like The Wolf Man, he also wrote a number of science fiction novels. And he wasn't just interested in cheap thrills. In a 1997 interview, Siodmak talks about how took pains to assure scientific accuracy in his novels.

I have a trick with writing sci-fi [. . .] . In all these books there is a tremendous amount of research involved. I pick up the telephone and call the most important scientist I can think of in that field in America. So far they have all worked with me because they all are frustrated writers anyhow. If someone is writing [a book] for them, then they can correct it, which makes them feel they wrote it. I siphon off years of knowledge and research from those people for a small fee, or for a percentage of the book, whatever the case. But at the end, I have a story that is scientifically right. 

Apparently not one to mince words, Siodmak doesn't paint a pretty picture of scientists as wanna-be writers. I suppose it's a small consolation that he compensated them for their time and expertise.

In the novel version of Donovan's Brain, the brain is kept alive in a mixture of "blood serum" and human brain "tissue ash". That does appear to be based on the latest science in organ culture at the time the novel was written.

In the 1930s aviator Charles Lindbergh worked with biologist Alexis Carrel to develop devices to keep organs alive in culture. At the time, blood serum was one of the standard components of organ culture medium. Their work was widely known even outside scientific circles, and even making the cover of Time Magazine in 1935.

Around the same time, Dr. Fenton B. Turck published a book discussing his experiments indicating that tissue ash - tissues baked in an oven, then dissolved in saline solution - was usually toxic when injected into animals, but could stimulate cellular growth in vitro in low doses. He termed the active component "cytost", which appeared to be a species specific. So extracts made from dog tissues would be active more active when injected into dogs, than it would in pigs or monkeys. Taking that to it's logical conclusion, presumably such extracts from human brains would only work to stimulate the growth of other human brains. Unfortunately Turck's results were not reproducible, but that doesn't stop it from being a decent science fictional premise. (Turck also speculated about the possible toxic nature of mummy dust in Egyptian tombs, which is another great science fiction-horror premise.)

I couldn't find any indication that Siodmak had talked to scientists about how to grow a brain in a tank, but it seems that he could have derived inspiration just from the science news in the popular press.

Hauser's Memory, Siodmak's 1968 sequel to Donovan's Brain, likely was inspired by the James McConnell's research into memory transfer in cannibalistic planarians, which seemed at the time to be mediated by RNA. In developing the background for the novel, Siodmak also studied people with memory loss. As he described it:

 In researching that book, I worked at this hospital where they had 2,500 retarded children, insane and old people, too. I remember two old guys asking me, "Tell me, sir, are we going to lunch or coming from lunch?" They didn't know which. But they remembered what they had done when they were eight years old. So we might have a greater amount of RNA—ribonucleic acid—when we are young. As we get older, that substance dries up. That's why we can't learn new languages so easily when we get older, but kids pick it up right away. The growing process of the brain is based on RNA, which is why we learn so fast as kids. Even memory—and also what is right, what is wrong—is information you pick up easily as a child.

So what about the movie version?

There were three mid-20th century movies based on Donovan's Brain. Apparently Siodmak didn't care much for any of them.  He claims he didn't even bother to watch the 1953 Feist-directed version, because in it "God destroys Donovan's brain with a thunderbolt." So be warned that the movie has less scientific plausibility than the novel. Still, it's a decent B-movie for this holiday weekend.

Check it out:

• Watch Donovan's Brain at Hulu.com. Note: this movie may only be available in the US.
• Listen to a 1944 reading of Donovan's Brain, plus a parody by Orson Welles, on the old time radio show "Suspense".

 Further reading for the technically inclined:

• Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Patrick McGilligan (1997) 
• Turck FB "The Action of the Living Cell: Experimental Researches in Biology" (1933) 
•  Lindbergh CA "An apparatus for the culture of whole organs" J Exp Med 62(3): 409-431 (1935) (Note that the text abstract is for the wrong article. Click on the Full Text link for the correct abstract) 
•  Carrel A "The culture of whole organs" J Exp Med 65(4): 515-526 (1937)

Image: The quintessential brain in a jar, by Flickr user Kaushik Narasimhan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Hand transplants, face transplants ... and brain transplants?

If you can believe what you read in science fiction, in the future we'll be able to swap out any damaged or malfunctioning body parts for new and better functioning replacements. But not only are there serious ethical issues to be considered before that can become a reality - where or who do the replacement parts come from, exactly? - there are also many technical hurdles that need to be overcome.  So what may the future bring?

There was a lot of buzz last month about a major surgical achievement: a man who had suffered severe facial disfigurement from a gunshot wound received a full face transplant. Using techniques less than a decade old, the transplant included facial tissue from his hairline to his neck, and included a replacement of his upper and lower jaw and teeth. The results were stunning.

Face transplants represent just the latest step in the development of transplantation technology over the past century.  Experiments on dogs and other non-human animals beginning in the early 1900s demonstrated that limbs could indeed be transplanted successfully. But there were serious complications caused by infection and rejection of foreign grafted tissue. And even if the procedures could be successfully used to help human patients, there was a lack of donors.

It wasn't until 1944, in the midst of World War II, that Lieutenant Richard H. Hall, a member of the Navy medical corps, proposed a method for human arm transplants.  The time was ripe: recently developed sulfa drugs, penicillin, and other antibiotics could prevent loss of the transplanted limbs to infection. And there was a need. With no end of the war in sight, Hall noted that "there is certainly a growing demand for this procedure." He proposed that "civil or military casualties" could be used as donors. It's terrible to consider, but wartime created a flood of both potential recipients and deceased donors. 

It turns out that Hall was decades ahead of his time. In 1964 the first human hand transplantation was performed, but that failed after two weeks when the hand was rejected by the recipient. It wasn't until 1998 that a hand transplantation was performed successfully. And the first successful arm transplantation followed  in 2008, more than 60 years after Hall's paper was published.

But even though Hall's proposed methods weren't immediately successful, that doesn't mean his paper went unnoticed.  In 1959 Astounding Science Fiction published Anne Walker's short story "A Matter of Proportion" that explicitly cited Hall's 1944 paper. As one of her characters explains it:

By curiosity, I know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal, back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks of ear and such; then, in the '60s, fingers, feet, and whole arms in fact.

But since this is science fiction, Walker takes the idea to it's logical extreme, from "simple" limb transplants to  whole brain transplants:

"[...] When you cut your finger, it can heal in two ways. Usually it bleeds, scabs, and skin grows under the scab, taking a week or so. But if you align the edges exactly, at once, they may join almost immediately healing by First Intent. Likewise in the brain, if they line up cut nerve fibers before the cut-off bit degenerates, it'll join up with the stump. So, take a serum-conditioned brain and fit it to the stem of another brain so that the big fiber bundles are properly fitted together, fast enough, and you can get better than ninety per cent recovery."

"[...] There's a place in the brain stem called the isthmus, no cell masses, just bundles of fibers running up and down. Almost all the nerves come off below that point; and the few that don't can be spliced together, except the smell nerves and optic nerve. Ever notice I can't smell, Willie? And they transplanted my eyes with the brain—biggest trick of the whole job."

You'll have to read the whole story to learn about what sort of man is willing to risk being a brain donor. 

Of course there's no real world brain transplantation, at least not yet.  And maybe we're more likely to have our memories, thoughts and emotions uploaded to a computer than have our brains transferred to a new mortal body. Only time will tell. 

On a side note, I am quite curious about the author Anne Walker.  I've only found one other story attributed to her, published in 1961, and then she disappears. Was she a doctor or other medical professional? if not, how did she come across a Hall's article in a medical journal? If any of you readers have more information about Walker, I'd love to learn more about her.

References:

Hall RH "Whole Upper Extremity Transplant for Human Beings." Annals of Surgery 120:12-23 (1944)

"A Matter of Proportion" by Anne Walker at Project Gutenberg

Top image: Hall (1944) Figure 3 "Donor graft in place on recipient, medial aspect. Closure partially completed. (a) Details of vascular anastomosis."

Bottom image: Illustration from "A Matter of Proportion" by Bernklau

Viewing the mind's eye: communication or interrogation?

His captors positioned the hood directly over his head and began releasing the medusa contacts one at a time, fixing them to his scalp. [...] They finished attaching the contacts to his head. The Gammu type swung the probe's console into position where all three could watch the display. [...]  Yar touched a control on the probes console. Teg heard himself grunt with pain. Nothing had prepared him for that much pain [...]
~ Description of the "T-Probe" in Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

One of the staples of science fiction technology is the mind probe.  The device can be used to interrogate prisoners or allow the memories of an unconscious patient to be retrieved.

Until fairly recently such devices were more fiction than fact, but recent advances in the development of brain scanning technology may change that.

Based on those recent technological developments, imaging and display expert Mary Lou Jepson makes a bold suggestion in her recent Solve for X talk. She proposes translating mental images into displayed images in order to improve communication.



As UC Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant and his colleagues have recently shown, even the technology we have today can produce surprisingly accurate reconstructed images from brain scans.  In a study they published last fall, brain activity was recorded while subjects were shown short movie clips. The brain scan data was then used to reconstruct the viewed image.  The reconstructed images may not be clear enough to identify the original movie clip, but they were distinct enough to find similar images.


The process will likely work with memories too. Similar studies by cognitive neuroscientists Giorgio Ganis and Stephen Kosslyn have shown that similar regions of the brain are activated when images are remembered and when they are actively viewed.

Currently the images aren't clear enough to provide much more than a vague impression of the image someone is thinking about. However,  Jepson argues that with a combination of higher resolution imaging and holographic techniques (her own speciality), more "big data storage", and improved computational techniques, better images are within our technological grasp.

And it's not just mental images that can be reconstructed from brain scans. A recent report from Robert Knight's lab at UC Berkeley showed that spoken words could be reconstructed from neural activity recorded in the auditory cortex the listener's brain.  The participants in the study had the recording electrodes implanted in their brains, so the technology is still a long way from being a practical mind reading tool. But simply demonstrating that brain activity can be "read" to determine what someone is hearing is a major achievement.

Of course there are major ethical concerns with any technology that could be used for "mind reading". I'm hoping the focus will be developing methods of enhanced communication - perhaps even with non-human animals - rather than interrogation or mental eavesdropping.

More reading:

• Ganis G, Thompson WL, and Kosslyn SM. "Brain areas underlying visual mental imagery and visual perception: an fMRI study" Cognitive Brain Research 20:226-241 (2004) doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.02.012

• Nishimoto S et al "Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies." Current Biology 21(19):1641-1646 (2011) doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.031 (supplemental material and FAQ)

•  Pasley BN , David SV , Mesgarani N , Flinker A , Shamma SA , et al. "Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex". PLoS Biol 10(1):e1001251. (2012) doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251

Related post: Language, Genetics and Alien Communication

Medical aid on distant worlds

The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

~ "Ej-Es" by Nancy Kress

The November issue of Lightspeed Magazine republishes Nancy Kress's 2003 short story "Ej-Es". The tale follows a member of a team of "medicians" that lands on a colony planet where the inhabitants have been wiped out by an unknown disease.

In an interview with Lightspeed, Kress explains the inspiration for the medical team:

The Corps is based on USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. This group has joined (and sometimes waged turf wars with) the CDC in fighting epidemics in third-world countries; they also have shared jurisdiction, with FEMA and the CDC, for any bioterrorist attacks here (potential turf wars).

Of course USAMRIID's web site makes it sound like they are quite chummy with the CDC. It's true, though, that the vaccines, antivirals and antitoxins developed by USAMRIID have been used to help people around the world.

I like the idea that when humanity does spread through space, there will be a medical organization equipped to help identify and fight the unexpected diseases we are likely to encounter.  I think it unlikely that viruses or microbes evolved on alien worlds to infect the local life forms would find humans to be good hosts, but who knows? That's why we'd need medical experts ready for the unexpected.

The other scientific aspect of "Ej-Es" is that the infections seem to have induced conversations with invisible companions.  In an accompanying article, neuroscientist The Evil Monkey takes a look at the science of how a brain malfunctions and seizures could lead to visions. He writes:

How is it possible for a sane, sober, rational human to see things that aren’t there, and that maybe don’t even exist? Because your mind is your reality, that’s how. And your mind only exists because your brain exists. And your reality only reflects REALITY^TM inasmuch as the information your brain processes accurately represents the world. Which, of course, then begs the question: what happens to us sane, sober, rational humans when our brains misfire?

Read the article to learn how our brain affects our perception of the outside world.

Read "Ej-Es" by Nancy Kress

Forgetting

Neurotopia's The Evil Monkey has a non-fiction article in the latest edition of Lightspeed Magazine about memory, self-perception and amnesia.

Personalities can change as we walk through life. One day you’re happy, the next, angry at losing your job. That anger can change you. Fear can change you, and some Buddhists would argue that you’re really a new person from moment to moment, with memory providing only the illusion of continuity. Events can set us free, scar us temporarily or permanently. Memory is not just a personal narrative, it shapes who we are. We recall our memories and reflect upon them, and that mere act of reflection and evaluation can alter our choices and, thus, who we become.

It's loosely related to Tobias Buckell's short story "Manumission" (published in the same edition), which uses intentional memory removal as a plot device.

Read "You Are the Person You Are Now" by The Evil Monkey at Lightspeed Magazine.

If it's July, it must be Comic-Con: Abusing Science on Fringe

I apparently was caught in a time vortex because all of a sudden I find that it's the last week of July. Where has the time gone?

Anyway, what shook me out of my lack of blogging was the realization Comic-Con had come and gone already. If you aren't familiar with Comic-Con, it's a massive annual convention in San Diego that started out focusing on comic books but has been embraced in recent years by Hollywood. That means movie previews and panels with TV stars along with comics and science fiction fare,

This year a panel on "Abusing the Sci of Sci-Fi" was moderated by Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy), and included panelists*:

• Sean Carroll, a CalTech cosmologist who blogs at Cosmic Variance
• Kevin Grazier, a planetary physicist at JPL/NASA who has been a science consultant on TV show like Eureka and Battlestar Galactica, and who sometimes blogs at Science Not Fiction
• Jamie Paglia, writer and producer of the TV show Eureka
• Zack Stentz, producer of TV shows Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

 Now I am a fan of Fringe, so it's not a criticism when I say that it appears to have only a tenuous basis in any sort of real science.  I think that works because Walter Bishop (played by the excellent John Noble) is a mad scientist extraordinaire, who works his genius on the fringes of a wide range of scientific disciplines.  The crazy science on the show is no less believable than having a scientist who is a hands-on expert in astrophysics and microbiology and synthetic organic chemistry and mechanical engineering and everything in between. (And yes, I know they claim that the science on Fringe is based on "reality", but I don't see that.)

And on the panel Stentz confirmed that science plays second fiddle to "story" on Fringe as Eric Wolff reported at Science not Fiction:

“Sometimes you have to break the rules to tell the story you want to tell,” he said, and ran a Fringe clip in which Olivia and Peter realize that Bell has  extracted memories from Walter’s brain by removing actual pieces of Walter’s brain.

“He literally had his memories removed,” Stentz said. “We knew when we wrote it that memories aren’t stored in a discrete portion of your brain.”

That episode - "Grey Matters"  - was indeed especially silly science.  Wolff suggests that it's especially bad bad science because most people don't know it's bad science:

Everyone knows we can’t travel faster then light, so we accept a universe where we all agree that the technology exists. But the brains/memories plot device hinges on the audience being too ignorant to understand the inaccuracy. The rule-breaking isn’t based on the paranormal or on advanced technology. It’s based on the audience not knowing better. That seems like the wrong kind of rule-breaking to me.

When I saw the episode I knew it was ridiculous, but in a fictional universe where a person can be wired to a dead man's brain to retrieve his memories it didn't seem particularly out of place. But Wolff may be right that the way the story was presented most people might not have realized that it was as unrealistic as regular travel between parallel universes. Perhaps that has something to do with the average SF-watcher's knowledge of bioscience as compared to physics?

Apparently the scientists on the panel disagreed that science needs to bend for the sake of drama.

I'm hoping someone posts a video of the panel online, since it sounds like an interesting discussion.

Script PhD also has a write up of that and a few other science and science fiction-related Comic-Con panels.

* The panelists seem like an interesting and intelligent group, but they appear to embody the stereotypes that "science" is the realm of white men working in the physical sciences and that the science in "science fiction" is astronomy and physics.  And it perhaps provides a hint as to why the biosciences are portrayed so inaccurately on SF TV shows.

@ SIMF: Perception, Neurology and Fiction

Check out my latest post for the "Science in My Fiction" blog:

Perception, Neurology, and Fiction.

My previous SIMF post: You Are What Your Grandad Ate

And there have been a number of other great biology in science fiction-related posts over there - go read!

Tags:science fiction, neuroscience

Luc Reid on Neuroscience Fiction

Luc Reid has an interesting article in the latest issue of Clarkesworld Magazine - "Future Brains: Neuroscience Fiction versus Neuroscience Fiction".

Science fiction has had brains on the brain at least since Dr. Frankenstein installed one in his monster. Over the years science fiction has depicted technologies like mind control (in Star Trek, for example), instant learning (The Matrix), telepathy (Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars), and transferring memories and skills (The Dollhouse). While some of these technologies may eventually prove to be possible, others are extremely unlikely to ever work based on what we now know about the brain — because our own minds are much stranger territory than we ever used to imagine they were.

Go check it out if you are interested in the real science behind copying memories, mind control, and telepathy.

Image: National Cancer Institute Visuals Online: Color slide of a single image of a human brain using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Shows a bright blue color where brain cancer metastasizes in the occipital lobe.
Tags:science fiction, biology

More Pandoran Biology

Now that Avatar has won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture and there is buzz that it could take top honors at the Oscars, I figured a round up of links about Pandoran biology would be timely:

• Darren Naish has written up the Tet Zoo Guide to the Creatures of Avatar

A lot of thought and time obviously went into the design of Pandora's ecosystem and creatures. In part, I'd say that this was a success: a lot of people (even many not that interested in the natural world) have been very much taken in by the movie's xenobiology - if only this inspired them to become interested in, and passionate about, the biology and ecology of the real world.

 Read his spoilery speculations on the biology of Avatar's creatures.

• io9 interviewed some of the designers who worked on Avatar

Read how the movie's Bio-Lab was inspired by a visit to biotech company AmGen, why the plant life was green instead of cyan, and how human "drivers" might control their avatars from a distance.

• Production designer Rick Carter explained the inspiration for Pandora's bioluminescent wildlife.

Cameron's inspiration for that, Carter believes, came from his deep-sea diving experiences. "The whole idea of (that) bioluminescent world at night is something he'd actually witnessed when he was down at the bottom of the ocean during his 'Titanic' time," Carter says. "That bioluminescence is almost like a nervous system of the planet, and that's what's at stake in the movie, as you start to get past the initial foray into the Na'vi culture and seeing the drama start to emerge between the military-industrial complex that wants to exploit the world."

• At The Intersection Sheril Kirshenbaum shares what she enjoyed about the movie's science

Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of a research scientist was uncharacteristically good. Instead of the typical caricature we see in Hollywood, she wasn’t socially inept (i.e. typical Rick Moranis roles) or out to destroy everything (i.e. Dr. Evil). Instead, Grace conveyed the natural curiosity about the world that I observe so often in colleagues. Also noteworthy, she was funded by a program with corporate interests, but really using the opportunity to pursue her own research. Sound familiar to anyone?

• Peter Watts commented a bit on Pandora's biology in his review of the movie

 Someone put a lot of thought into Pandora’s wildlife; it was beautiful to behold, it was amazingly diverse, it even seemed (for the most part) phylogenetically consistent. Across a wide range of species, everything from nostril placement to jaw structure was nicely suggestive of common ancestry. Except for the Na’vi, which are ridiculously anthropomorphic: tetrapod bipeds where everything else on the planet seems to have six limbs; binocular vision on a world where four eyes is the vertebrate norm.

 Read the post for the rest of his (spoilery) comments.

• Astrobiology Magazine: Avatar's Moon Pandora Could be Real

So far, planet searches have spotted hundreds of Jupiter-sized objects in a range of orbits. Gas giants, while easier to detect, could not serve as homes for life as we know it. However, scientists have speculated whether a rocky moon orbiting a gas giant could be life-friendly, if that planet orbited within the star’s habitable zone (the region warm enough for liquid water to exist).

The gist of the article is that moon with life could exist, and if it does, astronomers should be able to detect it.

And if that's not enough, you could order a copy of the official Pandora field guide: Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora


Related Biology in Science Fiction posts:

• Botany of Pandora
• Is Avatar Science Fiction?
  

Fantastic Voyage: Inside the Cell

Konev said, "The surface is gathering us in."

Dezhnev nodded. "It looks like its doing this." He held up his thick and callused hand, cupping it. "Exactly," said Konev. " It will invaginate, make a deeper and deeper cup, narrowing the neck and finally closing it, and we will be inside the cell." He seemed quite calm about it.

So was Morrison. They wanted to be inside the cell and this was the way it was done. The receptors continued coming together, alongside each one of them some molecule - some real molecule - and in among them the feigning molecule of the ship. The cell's surface, like Dezhnev's cupped hand, closed upon them entirely and drew them in.

[-- big snip of text with escape from the vesicle -- ]

Dim objects to either side loomed up ahead, drifted to one side, left or right, and fell behind. Ribosomes? Golgi apparatus? Fibrils of one sort or another? Morrison could not tell. From the vantage point of small molecule size, nothing, not even the sharpest, most familiar intracellular object, would look familiar, let alone recognizable.

~ Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, by Isaac Asimov

As many of you probably know, Isaac Asimov wrote the novelization of the 1966 Racquel Welch movie Fantastic Voyage. Asimov was apparently unsatisfied with the poor science in the story, which he was unable to change because it was central to the movie. So what he did was write a new novel in 1987 - Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain - which isn't really a sequel, but is rather a new story with a similar plot.

I recently found a copy of FVII:DB at my local library's book sale and found it pretty entertaining. Asimov does his best to create a plausible scientific basis for the miniaturization technology and the descriptions of the miniaturized sub exploring the brain are pretty good. It's not perfect - characterization isn't really Asimov's strong suit, particularly of female characters, and the story has a disappointingly psi-based ending - but it was certainly worth far more in entertainment value than the 50 cents I paid for it.

Anyway, the novel's description of traveling through inside of the cell reminded me of the excellent video by XVIVO, produced for Harvard University:


Watch XVIVO's Inner Life of the Cell - blow it up to full screen size for the best effect. There is a narrated version that explains what you are seeing (but isn't quite so high resolution) on Harvard's BioVisions web site.

Note that the video depicts a highly simplified version of the interior of the cell. As one of the animators explained in an interview:

We had to figure out how to take a cell that is so packed with molecules and to edit out visually about 90 to 95 percent of those molecules and still keep in all the kinds of structure that would indicate to the student what’s going on.

The reality is that there isn't much space in there for maneuvering, even if you are traveling in a submarine the size of a glucose molecule.

To get a sense of scale of the cells and cellular structures, check out the interactive "Cell Size and Scale" graphic at the University of Utah's Learn Genetics site.

(tip of the hat to ERV for linking XVIVO's latest video about the flu)

Tags:science fiction, Fantastic Voyage

Sci Fi Psi

At io9 Charlie Jane Anders wrote about the riffs on Star Wars in the Ewan McGregor-George Clooney movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. The movie is a humorous fictionalized take on Jon Ronson's (supposedly) non-fiction book by the same name, which documents the real-life US Army program to develop psychic soldiers in the 1980s.

At Wired's Danger Room blog, David Hambling takes a closer look at the program, and its origins in New Age woo. But it's woo with a sciency overlay. Just take a look at Lt. Col. Jim Channon's First Earth Batallion manual (pdf), which suggests that psionic powers are a matter of evolution (we may be abled to live on a diet of radio waves and our carbon based bodies may be turning into silicon!).

I kind of like the manual's description of warrior monks who participate in "ethical combat" and are connected into the biosphere and the universe. But I find the psychic powers idea to be pretty silly non-supported by any conclusive evidence that it work. Read the whole Danger Room post for more about what was tried and what they succeeded in doing.

But the idea that the human mind holds untapped abilities is a familiar one to anyone who has read the classics of science fiction from the mid-20th century. That was due in large part to the fascination of John W. Campbell - influential as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction - with pseudoscience. As Wikipedia quotes:

In 1957, novelist and critic James Blish tallied: "From the professional writer's point of view, the primary interest in Astounding Science Fiction continues to center on the editor's preoccupation with extrasensory powers and perceptions ('psi') as a springboard for stories.... 113 pages of the total editorial content of the January and February 1957 issues of this magazine are devoted to psi, and 172 to non-psi material.... By including the first part of a serial that later becomes a novel about psi the total for these first two issues of 1957 is 145 pages of psi text, and 140 pages of non-psi." James Blish, The Issues at Hand, pages 86-87.

But psi-based science fiction stories didn't start with Campbell. There's a long list of pre-golden age SF featuring telepaths at io9, many of which have passed into the public domain. And moving into mid-century - Campbell's era - there are number of SF classics featuring characters with psi powers: A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1946), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation (1953), John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), to name a few.

There is a common theme that development of psychic powers is supposed to move Homo sapiens up the "evolutionary ladder"*:

"E for Esper," he muttered. "Esper for Extra Sensory Perception . . . For Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers. [ . . . ] Those damned mind-readers are supposed to be the greatest advance since Homo sapiens evolved. E for Evolution. Bastards! E for Exploitation!
~ The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Definitely good reading, but personally I don't consider telepathy to be "science" no matter how it's dressed up in technical terms. While some parapsychology researchers have claimed to see positive results, those studies are controversial and, even if valid have only demonstrated minor effects.

I get the sense that SF authors sometimes want to write about powerful wizards in a technology-based setting, hence psi-powered supermen that explore the stars. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does annoy me when people go on about about how "hard" the science was during the olden days "Golden Age".

And coming back around to The Men That Stare at Goats, it sounds very much like the story of people who view the world through a science fiction lens. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

(Danger Room post via BoingBoing)

* Of course evolution has no direction or goal. Continuing human evolution does not mean that Homo sapiens will become more "advanced", only different. Listing the SF stories that get that wrong is a completely different post.

Tags:science fiction, parapsychology, psi

WiSF reading club: Woman on the Edge of Time - Equality Through Biotechnology?

Note: I've volunteered to host the WiSF reading club discussion about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. The post below is my take on one aspect of the novel - one that fits in with the "biology in science fiction" theme of my blog quite nicely - but I don't mean for it to limit the discussion. I think there are a number of other issues the novel touches on that would be interesting to explore, so please have at it in the comments.

====

Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is a disturbing novel. It's the story of Consuelo "Connie" Ramos, a poor Mexican-American woman who has been in and out of mental hospitals. She ends up committed once again after she physically defends her niece from her niece's pimp boyfriend and that's where the horror starts. In the "present day" (mid-1970s) mental hospital the patients are treated with both indifference and abuse by the staff, and Connie and several other patients are chosen to receive experimental neural control implants, not only without their consent, but in Connie's case explicitly against her wishes. The patients are considered little different than test animals by the physicians and doctors participating in the experiment:

[Connie] remembered something she had heard Dr. Redding say to Superintendent Hodges: that they had used up five thousand monkeys before they began doing these operations on patients. Used up. She had heard him say he had wanted to work with prisoners – he thought the results would be more impressive – but there had been such an uproar about three little psychosurgical procedures at Vacaville in California that his team decided to work with mental patients. "After all," he had said, smiling his best ironic smile, "they made a court case and a bleeding heart publicity brouhaha about three procedures, while San Francisco Children's Hospital does hundreds with sound and thermal probes – mostly on neurotic women and intractable children – and no one says boo."

This unfortunately wasn't just fiction. By the mid-1970s there had been a number of cases in which experimentation on human subjects without their informed consent had been revealed to the public.

But Connie has an escape of sorts*: she is visited by Luciente, a woman from 22nd century Massachusetts. She comes from a future in which time travelers leave can behind their unconscious bodies while appearing corporeally by forming a mental link with an individual at their destination. This allows Connie to leave the nightmarish hospital to visit Luciente's utopian future. What she finds is that Luciente lives in a small rustic-appearing village, a communal society in which everyone has their own space, works to their best ability, is free to pursue their interests and has their necessities are taken care of. However that appearance of rusticity is somewhat deceiving. Not only does everyone have a personal networked computer (a "kenner"), but the underpinning of their society is advanced biotechnology.

Luciente herself is a plant geneticist who develops new crops, in part by introducing new genes from the plants in carefully preserved wild areas. But the real difference that sets her society apart from Connie's is the elimination of discrimination due to gender or race. Their solution was two-fold: eliminate childbearing and child-rearing as female-only activities and separate genetics from parenthood. As Luciente explains to Connie:

"It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding."

Their reproduction is based on vitro fertilization and fetuses grown in artificial wombs. After birth, each infant has three co-mothers, male and female, who are given hormonal treatments so that all can share in nursing. And because there are no genetic ties between parents and their children, they have eliminated discrimination by race. However, they have found a way to maintain cultural diversity by separating it from genetics:

"At grandcil – grand council – decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness."

As that quote hints at, people of Luciente's society can adopt any culture they chose, just as they select a name they feel suits them. Luciente's village is culturally "Wampanoag", while others are "Harlem-Black", "Cape Verde" and "Ashkenazi Jewish". I use quotes because only the elements of those cultures that fit their society are adopted - sexism, racism, and patriarchal religion are excluded.

But not everything is idyllic. Luciente and her people are at war with a neighboring society that is essentially their exact opposite. It's urban, uses genetic engineering to create super soldiers, and the common people eat bland food grown on factory farms. Connie accidentally travels to the future New York City where she meets a woman - Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ - from this society who has been "cosmetically fixed for sex use" and is sealed in her windowless apartment. Gildina's none to bright, and that's by design:

"She was born a dud. She's just a built-up contracty. All duds have brain deficiencies from protein scarcity in fetus and early childhood. Their IRP's are negative forty to negative fifteen. Her psych scan tests show negative twenty-five. She has no more mental capacity than a genetically improved ape."

Wealthy families and corporations in this version of the future use biotechnology to keep the lower classes oppressed. Gildina doesn't expect to live beyond her 40's while the "richies" live for centuries on involuntarily "donated" organs. It's a nasty place to be one of the masses.

Despite the novel's heavy handed (to my eyes) dichotomy between Luciente's idyllic pastoral Marxist society and the hellish capitalist urban society of New York, I thought it was interesting that both versions of the future are heavily dependent on technology - particularly biotechnology - for their existance. In one it's used to allow women to become independent equal members of society, in the other it creates women that are just sexual objects (among many other differences). If forced to chose I'd obviously prefer the former over the latter, but my perhaps naive hope is that we can achieve equality without reengineering our biology.

* There is some ambiguity as to whether Connie's trips to the future are real, or whether they are just manifestations of schizophrenia. It could be argued that she is a victim of being a poor non-white woman whose normal actions are interpreted with the assumption that she is mentally ill (something that has been shown to happen in psychiatric hospital).

======

So that's my take on the biotechnology in WotEoT. I think there are a number of other aspects that would make for good discussion too.

If you are interested in an academic analysis, check out this essay by Clemson English professor Elisa Kay Sparks.

Tags:Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy, biotechnology

Hugo Award Winner: Kress's Erdmann Nexus

Nancy Kress's novella "The Erdmann Nexus" won a Hugo yesterday. It's basis is a combination of the philosophical and scientific concept of emergence in complex systems along with a bit of neuroscience. In particular she uses the fact that activity in the brain changes when people go into deep meditative states as an indication that humanity could develop a group mind that goes beyond basic human consciousness. It's not a new science fictional idea, and not surprisingly the story has significant religious and mystical themes. I didn't find the story that interesting, other than Kress's inclusion of some recent science.

Read The Erdmann Nexus.

Image: fMRI data for expert meditators. From Brefczynski-Lewis JA et al. "Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2007) 104: 11483–8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0606552104
Tags:science fiction, neuroscience, Nancy Kress, Hugo Award

Science in Science Fiction at Comic-Con

Update: Script PhD has a transcript of the Mad Science panel! Some of the topics of bio-interest include brain scanning, legal issues regarding the children of clones, where they get their science ideas and the role of science advisors.

There's also this quote from Fringe writer Glen Whitman on why they like to base their plots on biology:

Fringe is a horror show, partly. Creepy and gross is easier with biology and virology, than astrophysics, usually.

Update 2: Science Not Fiction has the scoop on the Unlocking Arkham panel.

Update 3: I've embedded video of the Mad Science panel below. There are more recaps linked here.
==========

For those of you willing to brave the crowds at Comic-Con (and lucky enough to have been able to purchase a ticket before they sold out) you might be interested in the Mad Science: Science of Science Fiction panel on Thursday, from 6pm-7pm:

... explore science as a double-edged sword – it's ethically and morally neutral in and of itself, but science depends on who wields it and how. [. . . It will be ] a lively and fun discussion on science used for good vs. evil."

• The moderator is Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy
  
• Jaime Paglia — co-Executive Producer of Eureka
• Kevin Grazier — Battlestar Galactica and Vituality science advisor. From his bio: "Grazier earned B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Geology from Purdue University, and a B.S. in Physics from Oakland University, as well as M.S. degrees in physics from Purdue and Geophysics and Space Physics from UCLA. He did his Ph.D. in Planetary Physics at UCLA." Grazier currently is a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
  
• Jane Espenson — major scifi writer/producer: Firefly, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: The Next Generation and many other shows
  
• Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman — writers for Fringe
• Ricardo Gil da Costa — cognitive neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and consultant for Fringe

The panel is co-sponsed by Discover Magazine and the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

Sounds like it should be interesting and entertaining. Maybe someone will post video? Here's the video:



There are a few other events of science in SF interest on the Thursday schedule:

5:30-6:30 The Physics of Hollywood Movies— Join physics instructor Adam Weiner (author of Don't Try This at Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies) for an interactive presentation employing basic physical principles and a sense of humor in analyzing scenes from favorite Hollywood science fiction, superhero, and action movies, from Iron Man to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and actually learn the physics behind them—both good and bad!

6:30-7:30 The Anthropology of Star Trek – Daryl Frazetti (Department of Anthropology, Lake Tahoe Community College, where he teaches a course by the same name), Ian Morris (UCSB student), John Stivers, Jacob Hurd, and Kanan Miller (Lake Tahoe Community College students) discuss the anthropological themes in the Star Trek universe. Select themes include such topics as politics, religion, identity, technology, the cultural role of the individual, and the anthropological concept of "race." A brief discussion on the subculture of fandom is also included, along with the cultural impact of Trek. Audience participation is encouraged. This presentation spans the franchise and explores the relationship between Star Trek and society throughout the past four decades.

6:30-7:30 Unlocking Arkham: Forensic Psychiatry and Batman's Rogues' Gallery – Arkham Asylum holds some of Gotham City's most disturbed criminals. But do they truly belong there? From the vantage point of a forensic psychiatrist utilizing real-world psychiatric diagnostic criteria, panelists explore the mental disorders of the Dark Knight's Rogues' Gallery, with in-depth analyses of The Joker, Two-Face, Riddler, The Ventriloquist, Mad Hatter, and Mr. Zsasz, among others. Learn as three psychiatrists explain the meaning of such terms as "psychotic," "not guilty by reason of insanity," and "psychopathy." Bring your questions, and join the fun as experts unlock Arkham Asylum and possibly set free some of its "inmates"! Panelists include H. Eric Bender, M.D., University of California, Los Angeles; Praveen Kambam, M.D., University Hospitals/Case Medical Center, Cleveland, Ohio; and Vasilis K. Pozios, M.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Tags:science fiction, biology, Comic Con