Imagine that you’re a writer on the Magnum PI television show, the reboot of the 1980s classic about an ex–Navy Seal turned private investigator in Hawaii. Now imagine that you’ve been assigned to write an episode all about a mystery set in a psychiatric hospital, where a misdiagnosed patient turns…
Actor and science communicator Christina Ochoa sits down with Kevin Hand to talk about what it might be like to be an octopus on Europa. Kevin is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist. He is also the author of Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space.…
The new film Ex Machina premiered this week and it is asking some serious questions about artificial intelligence (AI). It is not a new debate. 2013’s Her did a wonderful job of exploring what love is, attachment to a mind that is far more advanced, and what it means to…
Matters of the heart and the laws of science are odd bedfellows, but at the Science & Entertainment Exchange’s recent event, The Science of Love, Chris McKinlay shared his experiences finding love on the internet. But this is no average tale!
Chris, who recently finished his PhD in Mathematics at…
“Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch…”
We like to consider ourselves some of the best matchmakers in the science and entertainment game. Finding scientists to explore some of the most remote and often obscure corners of their field to enrich Hollywood plotlines…
Attention kids, any aspiring filmmakers out there? If you think you’re the next Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, why not show off your talents for the world to see at the next Science and Engineering Festival, which is taking place April 26-27 in Washington D.C .? The Festival is sponsoring…
Kevin Crowley admits it is a struggle to express things in layman’s terms due to primarily working in scientific environments where shorthand technical terms are the norm, but he was more than happy to help the writers of USA Network’s Covert Affairs. Covert Affairs is a one-hour spy drama television…
Sometimes science isn’t the solution. That’s the reality of science consulting and something Kevin Grazier, Planetary Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of The Exchange’s consultants, knows well. “Until a story starts shooting, and often times even after, the script is a living document,” he explained. “Over time, different…
Whether it is a man dressing up as a bat to fight crime (Batman Begins), three mutants running a police department (Minority Report), or a man chosen to protect the universe using a ring (Green Lantern), the basic premises of most superhero and science-fiction movies can seem, well, silly. That…
Whether it is a fictional (but plausible) link between a disease and a symptom, downloading a human into a computer, or wormholes between universes, The Exchange’s consultants certainly have fun extrapolating science for fiction’s sake. But often our consultants are on hand to provide authentic scientific details to a television…
