SF/F Links: February Roundup Part Two

(My apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the post via the "Read More". It wasn't working for some reason. Now it should be. Thanks for your patience.)

Alright, time for part two of this month's link roundup (click the read more):

• La Gringa over at The Swivet is officially a literary agent. Read the announcing post here.
• Remember that air car I talked about a while back? Well it's probably being released this year or early next year! It's a compressed air car that can go 125 miles at 68 MPH. Guess how much it costs. $2 USD per fill-up. That's better than your gas engine by a long shot.
• 10 SF movies every SF fan should watch. Including the SF staple food group Blade Runner.
• Space junk. Want to know what our immediate space looks like in terms of what's left behind up there? Now you can know. It's really crowded. The maps are rather cool too.
• Reaction Engines Limited is another company trying to help push space flight into the commercial scene. Of course by the time this stuff happens it will only be for rich folks and chimps, so, yeah.
• How common are Earth-like solar systems? Well they might be more common than we once though since we've found one that is similar to our own.
• The digital tattoo display. Basically a Bluetooth device you shove under your skin that displays imagery (like a touch screen) that you can poke at and make do things. Well, it's more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Futurismic also has an article on it here.
  
• Dark Party Review doesn't like Blade Runner and here's why. They also have a list of notable gunslingers, thieves, etc. from the old west. Awesome list!
  
• Nancy Kress found the following YouTube video which is rather bizarre. People just froze in the middle of Grand Central (New York)!!
  
• The Stargate is real. Okay, no it's not, but CERN really looks like the Stargate
  
• This is what the world looks like at night.
• Big Belly Solar. A trash disposable that uses solar energy to reduce waste. Really interesting. How does it work? I haven't the foggiest.
• Neuromancer concept art! Really cool!
• The solar flare. Dangerous, destructive, and beautiful. The power of the sun in nobodies hands.
• Futurismic:
• Gravitational Lensing is pretty, and really useful. We can find golden pieces of candy with it (yes, that part was a joke because the lensing makes it look like there is a little ball of golden, glowing candy in the middle).
• Haagen Dazs wants to help with the honey bee problem (you know, that they're dying out due to things like Colony Collapse Disorder). How are they going to help? Make a bee-themed honey ice cream and give the profits to bee research.
• The first video of an electron! This is so cool!
• Nokia is making a flexible phone that can be worn as a bracelet. Tis cool. Needless to say, nanotechnology is involved.
• The next big thing in energy might be these energy islands that use ocean waves to produce power. The list of alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuels gets bigger.
  
• io9:
• Georgia Tech students are building a fossil fuel car that has no emissions. Good luck with that.
• Post-apocalyptic concept art:
• More post-apocalyptic are here.
  
• Disney's House of the Future is getting an upgrade. See Mickey Mouse as a cybernetic killing machine. Well, not really, but that would be cool.
• Nuclear power plants that are almost waste free. I'm in, let's do it. While we're at it let's build a plant that runs on old banana peels, since I'm sure there is an overabundance of those anyway.
• Well, we might not need to go to another star system to find another Earth. Apparently scientists believe there are loads of Earth-ish bodies out in the Oort Cloud just waiting to be pushed into a new, warm orbit and defrosted. Sort of like a mini-pizza, only more valuable and without the freezer burn.
  
• Apparently New York had something called a Pneumatic Subway that pulled a little car back and forth via air pressure. Really cool and totally retro.
• Self-healing rubber. Self-explanatory.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, a remake for the twelfth and a half time with Brendan Fraser, looks like crap. Slapstick idiocy. See the trailer here.
• How many internal organs can you live without? Well, quite a few it seems. Technology has come a long, long, long way.
• 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth. Granted, stupid ways, but interesting nonetheless. It's not meant to be taken as serious things to do, but more like a way of looking at what we can do.
• Akira, one of the greatest anime films ever made, is being turned into a live action flick! I'm stoked! A-ki-ra!
• This disease map gives an idea where we can expect the next epidemic to hit. Somewhat scary, but the Chinese should be a bit more worried than us.
• I mentioned it before, but we'll be able to manipulate a single protein in your brain to turn you autistic, like an on/off switch. Scary, but strangely intriguing.
• Remember that satellite us Americans were planning to shoot down just to show that we could? Well, watch it happen for real! We did it! Kaboom! Eat that China!
• This chart is fascinating. It shows that when the economy is doing well, then there are more dystopian novels, but when it's doing bad, there are less! Really cool!
• Patrick Stewart is to be in a new show called The Eleventh Hour. I'll watch it because it's Patrick Stewart and he is possibly the coolest actor ever. He makes fun of himself in American Dad! A LOT!
• Massive radio telescope project in Chile due for completion in 2012. Yay for space exploration and discovery!
• Proof that the Internet won't bring us together. Pakistan, in all their ever so free glory, have banned YouTube. Yup, because that's progress. The reasons? Because a Dutch fellow is voicing his right to free speech and I sadly have to agree with this fellow on a lot of points.
• Norway has built an end of the world shelter in the ice of the arctic. I'm sure there will be room for all the Teddy Bears, as well as the rest of us.
• I think the title "Your Face Cream Will One Day Eat the World" is enough to get someone interested in clicking...
• We now have a machine that can do brain surgery. Expect neurosurgeons to go on strike.
• This is fascinating. Apparently NASA never abandoned Project Orion, which involved using nuclear power to propel a craft to Saturn.
• Neural-networks + war + sex. Yeah, so we might be able to control everything from machines to pleasure over the net one day due to research into the brain.
• This article talks about some large scale attempt to change human development. Remember eugenics? That's in there. It's really rather scary and fascinating at the same time.
• How can galaxies look cute? When they collide and have little tails and silliness like that.
• Universe Today:
• Mars may not have ever had life after all. There was water, but apparently it was too salty for all those little microbes.
• Arecibo spots a triple asteroid! Cool!
• Ten reasons to love the International Space Station. Should also be ten reasons to hug the International Space Station.
• An entire galaxy in ultraviolet! It's purple! Eep!
• Scientists believe that organic matter flung off into space from impacts on the Earth could come back and re-seed our planet. So, sort of like we're returning home after being gone for millions upon millions of years.
  
• St. Andrew's University wants to create the event horizon of a black hole by using lasers. Sounds dangerous and fun.
• Scientists think that 20 to 60 percent of sun-like stars form rocky planets. That's good news for us. There might be a three legged evil tree-frog species out there for us to conquer. Viva La Earth!
• Scientists are working out models for what might happen to the Earth if we don't change our emissions policies. I don't necessarily agree that the change is real, however I do agree that we need to push for near-zero emissions or no emissions at all.
• What happens when you give scientists a lot of free time to speculate and the science to validate it? They come up with this idea to play billiards with the asteroids. Apparently we could use primordial black holes to push around all that leftover rocky stuff.
• Gravitational Lensing. Not just pretty, but useful in looking at distant objects in space.
• Paul Jessup talks about why fantasy has been mooching off science fiction.
• 7 Amazing Scenes Made With Food! Don't watch if you are hungry. Really original and amazing.
• 10 Evolutionarily Unique Animals! Yes, evolution strikes again!
• McGrath talks about politics in Scalzi's Green Soldier Trilogy (Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigade, The Lost Colony)
• Scientists are tagging bees to monitor and study them (particularly for memory). Interesting indeed.
• This is a very bizarre project. Life makes music. It's strange and interesting.
• Beautiful image of the aurora borealis from space! Breathtaking.
• Redlines and Deadlines has an article about worldbuilding traps. Pay attention!
• Hope dims that we will survive when the sun explodes. My question is: Why are we even bothering with this right now? We know we're dead in a few billion years if we don't move, so why are we studying it so much?
• Brilliance comes in brilliant packages. This is really fascinating to think about.
  
• More reasons why Microsoft is better than Mac. Microsoft Surface.
• Might have linked this before, but tough. It's awesome. Force fields for our tanks and what not!
  
• What happens when robot programmers get bored? This:
  
• Apparently PublishAmerica is suing Preditors & Editors for telling the truth. My lord.
• Blah Blah Tech talks about how close we are to Star Trek technology.
• 10 Science Stuff You Got Wrong At School!
• Deep Genre talks about pitching a multi-volume series to a publisher. Read up fantasy writers.
• Scientists have discovered huge oil resources on Titan. Great. Just great.
• This is old, but check out this robot. Apparently it freaks people out. I think it's remotely charming. The University it is a part of ruled it just a little too freaky.
• L. E. Modesitt, Jr. makes a really interesting parallel to the speeches of Hitler/Mussolini and Barack Obama. That's not to say I think Obama is either of those evil men, but Modesitt makes a very good point about Churchill, who never promised perfection.
• LostBooks has this great list of speculative fiction subgenres with books that are ideal representations.
• 5 Reasons Why SF Pwns Fantasy (Courtesy of SF Signal)
• A really detailed diagram of one of those big sailing ships we've become so fond of. Thanks Jack Sparrow!
• IBM is working on using DNA to construct new processors and the like. Strange, but cool!
• Red Ice Creations suggests that machines will match us in 2029 and also lists serious challenges we face as a species.
• Awesome female characters from science fiction literature! (Courtesy of SF Signal)
• The Top Ten Sci-fi Armies! (Courtesy of SF Signal)
• Pictures from a French nuclear weapons test, or two. Scary and gorgeous.
• SFNovelists talks about the great debate over "Show, Don't Tell", which interesting insights into it as it pertains to SF/F.
• The Thinking Blog has 20 Facts about Bananas that you should know!
• Star Wars as summarized by a three-year-old. Cute, hilarious, wonderful.

And that's it!

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