… depends on the author! There is trivial SF, which is a disguised western where the cowboys and Indians have been turned into astronauts and aliens. But there is also high-class SF where the authors did a lot of thinking, for example by Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov. Incidentally, Lem published a book, “Summa Technologiae”, on future developments, which is really worthwhile reading.

Hey.... I've been thinking of that liquid breathing thing ever since i saw it in the abyss. Earlier in evolution it was always liquid to surface contact for respiration, so why can't it be that way now? I'm sure we didn't completely lose the ability... I'm still trying to work out the chemistry behind it... I even brought it up during a class on respiration and people had a good laugh...

Interesting topic. I'm thinking very educative too. I also had a presentation Science, art, nature and if you think to the structure of dendrimers and afterwards you look to some architectural motifs it is clear a strong connection. Moreover if you think about rheology and Deborah song it is clear that it could be interesting. We can discuss more if you want.

It sure is a cool thing scientific information is spread out in a fun interesting way, and movies and TV series do that quite efficiently. Information might be simplified or exagerated to make it more exciting, but they do that with technicalities from other areas too... But sometimes I get the feeling that Academics ignores this kind of production as a source of problems-to-be-solved, maybe for not taking it seriously. Maybe it's just my university, I don't know

I'm gonna start looking up at materials that may have that approach. I just found one about rheology and the Deborah song, really interesting. I'll also try to list films, books etc which bring that up and see if someone in the world made a research line out of it. I'll try to post it here every now and then, it might be a nice pastime.

Dear Erick, that topic likes me so much. I am a teacher, a scientist but also a big fan of science fiction. There are lot of current research that could seem science fiction. Perhaps, you should have a look at TED website. There are some conferences related to your topic. Here are a few ones:

Speaker: Paul Root Wolpe

conference: It's time to question bio-engineering.

link: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html

Speaker: Juan Enriquez

Conference: Will Our kids be a Different Species?

link: http://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_will_our_kids_be_a_different_species.html

Speaker: David Keith

conference: Unusual Climate Change Idea

link: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html

… depends on the author! There is trivial SF, which is a disguised western where the cowboys and Indians have been turned into astronauts and aliens. But there is also high-class SF where the authors did a lot of thinking, for example by Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov. Incidentally, Lem published a book, “Summa Technologiae”, on future developments, which is really worthwhile reading.

Hi Erick,

we had developed a primitive form of the “tri-corder” in a trans-European project “NIR - Remote Sensing and Artificial Neural Networks for Rapid Identification of Post Consumer Plastics”. We also constructed a fiber-optic “pointer” which collected the diffuse reflectance IR-spectra from the analyzed surface which had to be illuminated with a halogen lamp. Primitive, since we could only detect and differentiate from a distance up to a few meters 5 plastic types, which are polyethylene (PE), polyethyleneterephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinylchloride (PVC) in the garbage. Other application of a special small unit was the remote analysis of the varnish of paintings to identify fake old paintings by differences in the diffuse IR-spectra. Yet another application of a special “tri-corder” tuned to only one molecule was done in the field of car safety. Since the diffuse reflectance spectra of water and ice are different, a remote determination of ice and water in front of a car (> 10 m) could be performed within milliseconds. In the patent application DE000010314424A1 the exact localization of the icy area projected on the windshield is described in order that the driver can avoid this area. In yet another application of diffuse reflectance IR spectrometry gravel on a moving belt was not only identified as material (plastic, wood, steel, concrete,) but also in its shape in order to be automatically sorted by a robot. Maybe this could be the start of more…

other examples:

clothing containing electrically conducting fibers, for heating in a cold environment (probably containing conducting polymers); found that in one of Asimov's books

room temperature superconductors (idea of György Botond-Bolics)

light and radar-wave absorbing paint (E. E. 'Doc' Smith)

food rations that get hot when you open the package (Isaac Asimov)

hallucinogenic nerve gas (Stanisław Lem)

new hallucinogenic drugs (Doc Smith's "thionite", Wells' "soma")

Ulrich,

I think it would be better if the last two examples be kept under wraps.. They could possibly stimulate some of the readers...

Cheers!

A couple of examples: in Stargate (the film) they use a small hand device able to analyse minerals, identifying not only the chemical composition but the mineral itself. Many films and series (I am not sure, but I think that you can see it in stargate (the series) or startrek) space travelers have a similar device to analyse a planet atmosphere. Furthermore, in most films this device is able to identify also pathogenic microorganisms. In my opinion, this is specially science-fiction since the microorganisms should be completely unknown and, therefore, almost imposible to know how would they interact with the human body.