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Sci Fi

The View from Kepler-452b

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Kepler-452b

High in the night sky, the bright stars Deneb and Vega mark a star field at the center of a probe unrelated to Benghazi or Hillary’s emails or whether Iran will get the Bomb. NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has discovered Kepler-452b, an earth-like planet 1400 light years away. At 6 billion years old, it is 1.5 billion years older than Earth. This raises the question whether any intelligent life there has avoided destroying itself. How might earthlings evolve over a similar time period? It will be sad but unsurprising if it turns out that Kepler-452b has produced several intelligent life … Read more

News: So There’s A Working Hoverboard

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Lexus Hoverboard

Lexus’s hoverboard uses magnetic levitation, or maglev, to achieve frictionless movement. Liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors are combined with a magnetic surface to essentially repel gravity. Even though Lexus and Evico were able to pull off the project, don’t expect to see a hoverboard fly past while you’re walking down the street next year. To use maglev technology that would make this sort of hoverboard work, you need a magnetic metal track. Normal concrete pavements won’t do. Lexus solved this issue by converting a skate park in Barcelona into a temporary hoverboard skate park. On an existing track composed of cement and … Read more

Announcement: Echelon’s End, by E. Robert Dunn

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Echelon's End

QSFer E. Robert Dunn has a sci fi series out: Just imagine worlds in which harmony between peoples has been established. Where families are cultured and treasured. Where species from different worlds commune in peace. Imagine further these worlds having resolved all misunderstandings between sexualities, a series of planets where same-gender Echelon relationships are the majority and opposite-gender Reproductionist couplings are seen as necessary only to propagate a species. Now, imagine this civilization on the verge of extending itself into unexplored space … sending out the cream of their generation to colonize this Utopian philosophy into the Unknown. Book 1, … Read more

News: Watch as Astronauts Eat First Crops Grown in Space

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Nasa harvest

“A crop of lettuce has been harvested from the ISS plant growth system dubbed Veg-01, Nasa’s plant experiment being used to study how plants can be grown in micro-gravity,” NASA’s official YouTube reads. According to Science Recorder: “Expedition 44 crew members, including US. astronaut Scott Kelly, harvested their first crop of ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce from the orbiting laboratory. They will clean the greens with citric acid-based, food-safe sanitizing wipes before consuming them.” See the Full Story at Passport

The Next 800K Years in Sci Fi Predictions

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Photo by Michel du Cille/The Washington Post

When will humans land on Venus? When will we have robot cats? And when will the aliens finally come? Science fiction offers some potential answers to these burning questions. The timeline below, created by designer Giorgia Lupi and her design team at Accurat for the blog Brain Pickings, lays out 62 future events predicted by various works of science fiction, from “Hunger Games” to Isaac Asimov. Here’s a selection: 2012: The Titanic is resurrected from the ocean floor. (“The Ghost from the Grand Banks,” Arthur C. Clarke) 2019: The U.S. loses its position as world leader to Japan. Extraterrestrial life … Read more

News: NASA Discovers Global Underground Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus

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Planning a sea-faring vacation to escape from the rest of the world? Don’t discount Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as NASA has just released new research that indicates a global ocean lies underneath its icy surface. Using research from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that is scheduled to make a flyby of Enceladus on October 28, NASA was able to detect a slight wobble on the moon that researchers say can only be accounted for by a underground ocean. “This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got … Read more

WORLDBUILDING WEEK: Day Two – Creating Alien and Magical Races

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Worldbuilting Week

Welcome to the first annual Worldbuilding Week at QSF. We’ll talk about all aspects of building a world for your story, including languages; alien/magical races; history and timelines; culture and politics; sex, marriage and reproduction; and tools and techniques. It should be a lot of fun. Today we’re talking about alien and magical races, and Jana Denardo will be our moderator. Have you ever created a an entire alien race for a story? Or maybe a magical race for a fantasy novel? How do you design them – are they human-like? Completely alien? What characteristics do you consider? And how … Read more

Announcement: Kaminishi, by Jan Suzukawa

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kaminishi

DSPP author Jan Suzukawa has a re-released time travel/historical fantasy book out: Michael Holden wakes up in an impossible reality: mid-nineteenth-century Japan, face to face with Shinjirō Kaminishi, a samurai warlord Michael has seen in a dream. Imprisoned by the warlord and interrogated about the future, Michael has no idea if what he’s experiencing is real… and then he finds himself back in present-day America. Lord Shinjirō’s commanding presence and smoldering sexuality draw Michael again and again to the past, where dangerous information is revealed and Shinjirō’s life is threatened. Through the mists of time and in the reality of … Read more

News: Stunning New Photos from Pluto

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Pluto

A new set of images has been received from the New Horizons spacecraft, showing close-up images of Pluto taken on July 15 (and only just recently processed) while it was passing by the dwarf planet at high speed — but not so fast it couldn’t see terrain so varied it’s astonishing astronomers. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there,” said the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, in a NASA release. With wide plains, mountains and valleys, deltas implying moving liquids, and … Read more

Could You Transfer Your Consciousness to Another Body?

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Immortality

With the topic of mind uploading appearing in recent films such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avatar, CHAPPiE and the upcoming Selfless starring Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds, the ASAPScience guys decided to dig in and find out if our brains and memories might one day be able to be download, stored, and uploaded into something new. See the full story at Towleroad