The film Into the Inferno opens with a grand spectacle. The camera glides up and over tiny figures clustered on the peak of the volcanic island of Ambrym in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Far below, an ominous lava lake splutters to a bombastic choral soundtrack. There is a sense of ritualistic grandeur here that sets the tone for what follows. Read more
A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit. Read more
I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening. Read more
Last week’s Chinese Sci-Fi event at the London Literature festival was irresistible: I love science fiction and have a keen interest in the Far East. The star here was Cixin Liu, whose 2008 Hugo-awarded novel The Three-Body Problem is a huge best-seller in China and, since its English translation (Head of Zeus, 2015), beyond. (See Nature’s interview with its translator, sci-fi writer Ken Liu, here.) Liu’s fellow panellist was Xiaolu Guo, the award-winning, genre-defying Chinese novelist and filmmaker now living in Britain, whose works include the 2014 I Am China and 2012 UFO In Her Eyes. Read more
Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Read more
It seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple even in respectable magazines such as Time and Life. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic. Read more
If fame were measured in namesakes, Alexander von Humboldt might reign supreme. The moniker of the brilliant biogeographer, naturalist and explorer graces dozens of species and phenomena, from the hog-nosed skunk Conepatus humboldtii to a sinkhole in Venezuela. Yet the Prussian polymath’s reputation has lagged somewhat behind that of, say, Charles Darwin. Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature went some way towards changing all that. Now this immensely acclaimed biography is burnished anew by winning the Royal Society’s Science Book Prize, sponsored by Inside Investment. Read more
As Star Trek boldly sails into its second half-century, you might wonder what other impacts on science and culture this astonishing franchise could have. ‘Live long and prosper’, for instance — could the show hold clues to hyper-longevity? (Certainly ‘Bones’ McCoy managed to survive an incurable terminal illness, xenopolycythemia, during heated skirmishes on the asteroid-ship Yonada in an early series). Might the weird paradoxes the series harnessed to explain time travel ever transpire? Read more
Some of the most intriguing stories in the history of US science have emerged over the past few years. It’s about time. These books centre on something long under wraps: the centrally important roles women played starting some 70 years ago in the great technological transition that gripped the twentieth century. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, 2013) chronicled the contributions of the women who worked at the secret atomic-bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt (reviewed here) depicted the mathematicians or “human computers” who crunched numbers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California from the 1940s. In this catalogue, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures is more than just another entry. Read more
