During our ramblings around YouTube, we came across this marvelous compendium showcasing the evolution of special effects in film since 1900, beginning with The Enchanted Drawing, and ending -- of course -- with the amazing anti-aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Who knows what the visual effects wizards will come up tomorrow?

Science, entertainment and art converge in the work of Willard Wigan, a British artist who creates sculptures so tiny, they fit inside the eye of a needle, or on the head of a pin. In fact, you can't even see the sculptures without looking through a microscope. He's created a tiny replica of the Lloyds of London building (on commission), a mini-Moon landing, and placed iconic Hollywood figures like The Incredible Hulk and Homer and Bart Simpson inside the eye of a needle.

What with black holes, dark energy, and so on, it’s a big strange universe out there. Science fiction films add more strangeness when they include weird and wonderful aliens. The closest we’ve come to real aliens so far is evidence of water that could support life, past or present, at a few sites in our solar system. But we have recently found lots of extrasolar planets and that helps fuel a long tradition of speculating about life in the universe.

Moon creatures appeared in the first science fiction flick ever, the French Voyage dans la Lune (Voyage to the Moon, 1902). In 1924, the Soviet film Aelita: Queen of Mars showed an intricate Martian society. Since the 1950s, other new and improved models of aliens have appeared in films – literally improved, since the steady development of special effects, especially computer generated imagery, has made even extremely strange aliens look believable on screen.

Plenty has been written about what our fascination with aliens says about ourselves. Some aliens are human-seeming (like the alien emissary in the 1951 and 2008 versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still) but they’re mostly an unsettling lot, which may reflect human paranoia. It’s hard to warm up to the slavering reptilian predator of Alien (1979), the insectoid creatures of Starship Troopers (1997), or the monkey-like bestial aliens of War of the Worlds (2005). With their hostility to humanity, these ugly customers return our repulsion in spades. That’s not to ignore the few appealing aliens that have appeared on screen. Movie viewers found the lost alien in E. T. (1982) endearing despite his funny looks, and the Disney-like Ewoks in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) are cute and fuzzy.

Things get more interesting though when we’re asked neither to exclaim “how cute!” or to blow away an alien, but to actually relate to one, as in the just released film District 9. The film imagines a world in which over a million alien beings have been sequestered for years in District 9 outside Johannesburg, South Africa. This has plenty of parallels with South Africa’s racial history, complete with shanty towns, gang warfare, and military, legal, and quasi-legal maneuvering to control the aliens.

But these tall insect-like bipeds with tentacles around their mouths aren’t just a little bit different; they’re truly inhuman and truly unappealing. Yet they have intelligence, parental feelings, a sense of justice and of loyalty, and a desire to leave their squalid conditions and return home. We discover this as the human in charge of resettling District 9 finds himself more connected to the aliens than he ever wanted to be. He works together with one of them for common goals, and though they don’t exactly become friends, they bond.

This can be read as a parable about black-white interaction or more broadly about how to accept what is unfamiliar to us. Either way, the “alien other” carries messages we need to hear. That’s one reason why I hope that if and when we find alien life, it will be more advanced than a smear of lichen on a Martian rock.

BTW, in my previous post about the Mexican science fiction film Sleep Dealer, I commented that Hollywood science fiction always has the aliens land in New York or Washington, DC, whereas Sleep Dealer brings a different third world perspective. Similarly, the characters in District 9 are surprised to see a spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg rather than NY or DC, and this film likewise enriches the story with its own particular South African background. Both films are examples of what I hope is a growing global approach to science fiction.

For more about Sidney Perkowitz and science in film, visit http://www.sidneyperkowitz.net/

Fans of Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series -- now coming to a silver screen near you - love the fact that her vampires "sparkle" in sunlight rather than burn up, a la Dracula. It's an intriguing departure from classical vampire lore, and far be it from us to argue with artistic license. But you don't have to be a broody vampire to have a bit of a glow about you.

Among the standouts at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year was a film by writer/director Max Mayer called Adam, which was honored with the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for outstanding feature film focusing on science and technology. It's the story of a young man named Adam (played by Hugh Dancy) suffering from Asperger's syndrome, who falls in love with his new neighbor, a "neurotypical" young woman named Rose.

- Chad Ozel is a professor of Physics at Union College and has a blog called "Uncertain Principles." His new book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, will be in stores in December, 2009.


I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the first thing I want to do is take issue with the question's phrasing. While it's commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that's very far from the truth.

It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other scientists, through conference talks and journal articles, is critical for scientific success. Additionally, most research funding is obtained through applications to granting agencies like the NSF or the NIH, and successful proposal writing is all about communication.

So, it's simply not true that scientists lack communication skills in any absolute sense. Successful scientists, by and large, have excellent communication skills. The problem is that those skills have been developed for communication to a very specific audience: other scientists in the same field. The communication strategies that are most effective for scientists talking to other scientists are often not effective when communicating to the general public.

(This problem is not restricted to scientists. The same basic problem afflicts every profession with specialized jargon: academics in the humanities and social sciences, doctors, lawyers, politicians, movie and television producers--even the manager-speak mocked by Dilbert and other comics is an example of communication that works well for a specific audience and fails with people outside that audience. Pretty much any profession whose characteristic style can be mocked in a Saturday Night Live sketch suffers from the same problem as science, to a greater or lesser degree.)

The question, then, is not how to get scientists to develop communications skills, it's how to get them to apply the skills they already have to the problem of talking to the general public. Any successful scientist has the skills needed to communicate science to an audience of other scientists. Those same skills can be used to communicate science to the general public; they just need to be employed in slightly different ways.

Getting scientists to make these changes, though, is a hard problem: the current situation has come about because all of the professional incentives in science reward technical communication to an audience of other scientists, with communication to the general public ignored at best and, in many cases, actively discouraged. This problem is not insurmountable, though: scientists are fundamentally pragmatic people, and if convinced of the necessity of communicating to the general public, they will find a way to get it done.

It's also not necessary to turn every single scientist into a public communications expert--just a few capable scientists engaged in public communication would be enough. All we really need to do is support and encourage those scientists who enjoy speaking to a wider audience but are discouraged from doing so.

So, what incentives do we need to provide? The ultimate prize in academic science is a tenured faculty position, so the best way to encourage public communication by scientists would be to make public communication count toward tenure. Again, this doesn't need to be an extra requirement imposed on all scientists--that only encourages a "checklist" mentality, with each requirement met with the minimum possible effort. What we need is a recognition of public communication as a worthy and important part of the scientific enterprise, one of many different professional activities that are appropriate for a scientist. Too often, public outreach efforts are regarded as a distraction from the "real" business of a scientist. To encourage public communication, we need to reward these efforts as valuable professional service.

These efforts can perhaps be linked with calls for increased emphasis on education. Parents and politicians are beginning to demand better educational results from academia, which indirectly requires an improvement in public communications skills on the part of academic scientists. Effectively teaching introductory classes is not too different from communicating science to the public. Improved teaching will almost certainly lead to better public communication, and vice versa.

Unfortunately, there is no easy, centralized way to change the incentives of academia. The academic system is an emergent property of the activities of vast numbers of academic scientists, and changing the system requires changing their minds. The system can be changed, though, through the local efforts of individual scientists. There is no "Science" in the abstract--we are Science, and if enough individual scientists push for change, we can shift the incentives of the academic system toward where they need to be.

There are a few top-down initiatives that are often suggested from outside academia, but these need to be approached with care. For example, the "broader impact" sections of NSF and NIH grants could be used to force government funded scientists to communicate their results to a wider audience. This will have only limited success without a general change in attitudes, though--the existing requirements are often met with boilerplate statements. Changing behavior through this method would require a willingness to deny funding to otherwise worthy projects for failing to put enough emphasis on communication, a move sure to provoke complaints.

A bolder approach might be something along the lines suggested by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their recent book Unscientific America. They suggest creating new kinds of scientific jobs that focus on communicating science to broader audiences. Such positions would encourage public communication by creating new jobs outside the traditional academic track for scientists who have the interest and skills to communicate science to the general public.

The main obstacle to this proposal is respect; for this approach to succeed, these jobs cannot be seen as consolation prizes for those who "wash out" of the academic career track. A possible solution would be to use the prestige of national professional organizations, such as the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and others. In many ways, The Science & Entertainment Exchange can be seen as a model of this approach: using the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences to support communication activities that some scientists might regard as frivolous.

Ironically, the current economic crisis may be a boon to such efforts. With the country mired in recession, the already tight academic job market has only gotten worse. When economic conditions make even outstanding candidates struggle to get tenure-track positions, the stress may finally break the myth of academic science as a pure meritocracy and force scientists to recognize a broader range of career tracks as valid and fulfilling paths.

As I said above, convincing scientists that they need to communicate more effectively with the general public is a difficult problem that requires changing the minds and attitudes of many people. Solving it will take a great deal of time and effort, but it starts close to home. Those of us who are in academic science need to do more to encourage our students to consider a wider range of careers than the traditional focus on academia. We also need to support and encourage those students and colleagues who have an interest in bringing science to a wider audience. Doing these things on a local level is the essential first step toward changing the system of academic science for the better.

Zombies are all the rage these days, what with the bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; the pending release of Zombieland; and news that Max Brook's sci-fi classic, World War Z, is bound for the silver screen. But maybe it's time to call a halt to this never-ending battle with the Undead. Can't humans and zombies learn to get along and co-exist in harmony? According to a new paper by a group of Canadian epidemiologists -- no way, no how.

The film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's bestselling novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, hits theaters this weekend. For those unfamiliar with the premise, it concerns a Chicago librarian named Harry (Eric Bana) who suffers from a rare genetic disorder that causes him to live on a constantly shifting timeline, shuttling back and forth between past, present and future with no control over this unusual quirk.

Fans of SyFy's Eureka are already familiar with the "character" of S.A.R.A.H. (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat), a literal "smart house" build inside an abandoned fallout shelter that serves as the residence of Sheriff Jack Carter.

For years, I resisted watching the TV series LOST. My friends loved it, assuring me that once I started watching the show, I wouldn’t be able to stop. So it seemed a good idea not to start. But then the Science & Entertainment Exchange matched the producers of the DVD extras for Season 5 with a few good physicists for a filmed bonus feature. They sent some sample episodes, and we were hooked. We bought the DVDs of prior seasons and are squeezing in the odd episode whenever time permits. Who knew 40+ people stranded on a desert island could prove to be so compelling? (The millions of existing Lost fans, of course.)

We all remember the frisson of delight when we watched The Matrix for the very first time, and thrilled to this incredibly convincing on-screen depiction of a truly virtual world. Gaming has cashed in on the explosion in computing power and networking capabilities to create highly realistic, nearly immersive playing fields.

By Joshua Hale Fialkov

Comics is a tough business. Even now, with seemingly nine out of ten movies in the theaters tied somehow to graphic novels or comics, it's still a surprisingly tough business, marred by an uneven playing field dominated by multi-billion dollar corporations, a single distributor system, and an outdated sales force. As an independent comic creator, until very recently the challenges of competing with Messrs. Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and Wolverine seemed insurmountable. Thank god for technology.

The decision to syndicate my new graphic novel Tumor on the Amazon Kindle was an easy one. I love my Kindle. I'm an avid book reader, with a couple dozen bookshelves lining every bit of free wall in our apartment. But I also suffer from an abnormality of the eye that makes reading a difficult chore for me. The Kindle gave me back my love of books. I can read for hours on end, with no eye strain, plus I have a built-in dictionary for when Vonnegut uses big words that may or may not be made up, and access to virtually any book I can imagine -- usually for about $9.99.

The Kindle represents a new way for artist to reach audience. While the web has offered that same connection, it's always been tied to a computer, leaving you staring at a bright white screen, and thinking about all of the work you should be doing instead of reading some guy's unpublished novel which he's syndicated on his blog, backwards, meaning you have to start at the end, and work your way up the screen, thereby screwing up the flow and--

You get my point.

The Kindle represents a seamless method to purchase and read content. You buy the book, and it magically appears on your screen a second or two later. The playing field becomes quite a bit more even. People will still be drawn to bigger authors or titles, but, for the people who want to seek out your work, they actually can. The same can't be said of most comic shops, or, for that matter, most bookstores. In effect, by removing the physical commodity, we've opened up the marketplace to endless options. It's no longer a question of whether to stock Batman OR Tumor, because they're both there, all the time, waiting to be downloaded.

So what about the screen? Granted, the screen's a bit small on the Kindle 2 for a comic book. The dimensions are slightly off, and it's about 10% smaller than digest size (the size of a manga). We compromised by cutting the pages in half, thus allowing them to scale out further on the horizontal, while still maintaining the reading flow. The contrast on the screen is pretty impressive, considering the technology, and, frankly, I really enjoy reading my book on the device. Plus, with the iPhone Kindle App, you can also read it on the bright, zoomable screen of your iPhone or iPod Touch. It really is the best of both worlds.

Some people complain that the device is black and white, and comics are in color. That’s not true. There is an entire world of gorgeous black-and-white comics, with rich traditions in the old newspaper strips of Windsor McCay, through the sub-culture work of R. Crumb, and on to the violent dark world of Frank Miller's Sin City. Even the venerable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out as a tabloid size, newsprint black and white comic. But yes, that means for the most part, you won't be seeing Bruce Wayne and his various boy targets prancing on to the device in the immediate future. If you ask me, that's not a bad thing.

The renaissance of the graphic novel means realizing that while we all wish to some degree that we were Spiderman, there's more to the medium than just guys punching each other and dating super models. There's also a rich world of story, an entire medium that's wholly born of the 20th Century, so resonant that it's what they use to explain what to do if you're in an airplane crash on the piece of paper shoved in the back of the airplane seat. Comics are in our lives, and they communicate with us in amazing, startling ways that have far more potential than whatever villain the X-Men are fighting (and then recruiting, and then fighting again where he turns bad).

Is the Kindle the killer device for comics? Not yet, but, it's getting there. With my book, we made a conscious decision in the creative process to help address the limitations of the device, and turn them into positives. At its heart, Tumor is a pulp detective story. To have it readable on the pulpy screen of the Kindle evokes, perhaps subconsciously, the look and feel of Black Mask or Weird Tales – books that were printed on newsprint during war time.

Also, Noel Tuazon's art features a very simple line, with a retro style that transfers crisply on the device. Combine that with pages reformatted into half-page intervals, and you end up with a wholly unique way to read the story. In fact, there are flourishes that will be noticeable in the Kindle edition that will be lost when the book is released in the Hardcover edition later on.

Like most things with art as commerce, there are sacrifices. I think all of the opportunities to reach new audiences, make the comics affordable to new readers, and to try something new and different make them worthwhile sacrifices.

-- Joshua Hale Fialkov is the writer of the critically acclaimed graphic novel Elk's Run, the cult hit Punks the Comic, and Tumor, the first original comic on the Amazon Kindle, published by Archaia Comics. He lives in Los Angeles, California.