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Watching the latest episode of House last night, we were struck by the impressive use of medical terminology throughout. It reminded us of just how hard writers and their staff on such shows work to bring plausibility to their fictional world. Sure, people love to joke about the constant parade…

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What might happen to an idealistic marine biologist after he decides to leave the Ivory Tower? If you’re Randy Olson, you become an independent filmmaker. First, you make a splash with a short music video about the sex life of barnacles. Then you take on intelligent design and the failure…

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One of the Star Trek franchise’s most enduring legacies in science fiction is the fictional “warp drive” technology that enables faster-than-light travel. It’s not the kind of thing that can be achieved with conventional rockets, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely outside the realm of scientific plausibility. In fact, there’s…

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Some of the most popular characters in science fiction are its artificial creatures: the robots like R2D2, the androids like Commander Data. I like them too, especially Data, but there’s another type of artificial creature I find more interesting. Or I should say semi-artificial, because I’m talking about cyborgs –…

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What would the world be like if nobody could lie — not even a harmless little white lie? It would probably be like the world envisioned by British comic actor Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying, where brutal honesty is the order of the day, until Gervais’ hapless character…

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We nearly missed the lovely profile of astrophysicist Carolyn Porco that appeared last week in The New York Times. Porco trailblazed was part of the team that analyzed data from the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s, making her one of the young up and coming “rock stars” of space science.…

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As teachers settle into a new school year, it seems a good time to provide some general tips and suggestions on how to make use of popular movies or television in the science classroom. Some of these ideas may be more appropriate for the high school setting, but I hope…

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Popular science books have been around at least since the Middle Ages, when illustrated “bestiaries” were a big hit, highlighting the most bizarre creatures found in Nature. Many such books mixed reality with myth, but entomologist May Berenbaum, who also serves on the Exchange’s advisory board. shows that truth is…

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Particle physics — especially the research being done at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — seems to have captured Hollywood’s imagination these days. First, the collider was featured in director Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons. And on Thursday, sci-fi novelist Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flash Forward makes its network debut on…

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Is there a scientist in history more misunderstood in modern times than Charles Darwin? His seminal work, The Origin of Species, revolutionized the biological sciences and led to a tension between science and religion that still exists today. The story is ripe for the biopic treatment, and director Jon Amiel…

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