Richard Forno, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
‘Star Trek: Picard’ is set 400 years in the future, but, like most science fiction, it deals with issues in the here and now. The show’s third and final season provides a lens on cybersecurity.
With commercial spaceflight companies now taking older people to space, it’s timely to consider the potential physical impact space flight might have on them.
Holograms with a sense of touch are being created at Glasgow University.
Design_cells/Shutterstock
If humanity wants to travel between stars, people are going to need to travel faster than light. New research suggests that it might be possible to build warp drives and beat the galactic speed limit.
With little else to draw from, people turn to science fiction when thinking about the Space Force.
CSA Images via Getty Images
Science fiction has often had an inspirational and positive relationship with space endeavors. But the new US Space Force is struggling with a pop culture public relations problem.
Miniaturized laboratory equipment is making it easier to identify airborne pathogens in the field, but there’s still work ahead to be able to instantly determine if a room is safe or contaminated.
A document in Tengwar, the script of the Elvish languages invented by JRR Tolkien, Dozza, Italy.
Luca Lorenzelli via Shutterstock
This year, The Conversation celebrated the 50th anniversary of 1968 with its first podcast, ‘Heat and Light.’ These are some of the most interesting stories we uncovered – ones that still resonate in 2018.
A time-lapse image showing the plane flying across a gymnasium.
Steven Barrett, MIT
Steven Barrett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Ionic winds – charged particles flowing through the air – can move airplanes using only electricity; no propellers or jet engines needed. The scholar who led the project explains how it works.
Nervous about how southern television viewers would react, NBC executives closely monitored the filming of the kiss between Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner.
U.S. Air Force
The career arc of Nichelle Nichols – the first black woman to have a continuing co-starring role on TV – shows how diverse casting can have as much of an impact off the screen as it does on it.
Seasoned readers of US science fiction will have the uncanny feeling of having seen this all before.
Strange new materials that propel the fictional Star Trek universe are being developed by scientists in reality today. Above, the USS Discovery accelerates to warp speed in an artist’s rendition for the TV series Star Trek Discovery.
(Handout)
The latest iteration of Start Trek’s most famous non-human species is physically extraordinary – they’ve been kitted out like badass Egyptian warriors.
Here, an alien crew member, Saru on Star Trek: Discovery. We often rely on science fiction to guide our expectations of alien life. We can hope lessons about accepting beings very different from yourself can be extracted by the series end.
(Courtesy of CBS Studios)
Star Trek: Discovery explores our corner of the block – just a fraction of the galaxy. Some stars are better candidates for intelligent alien life, and it may not be anything like we imagine.