There was once a controversy about human embryonic stem cell research – former president Bush put in place limited forms of research in 2001, to the outcry of science advocates who vilified his close-mindedness and then president Obama put in place limited forms of research on Friday and science advocates cheered the progressive thinking in his deft handling of the NIH policy.  Yeah, you are probably confused in that ‘why it was wrong for Bush to limit research in 2001 and why it is right for Obama to do it today’ thinking of people who basically just frame their science positions through their politics.

It turns out we could have solved the whole culture war mess (though would we even have science blogging without Bush?  100 years from now, historians will look back and conclude that science owes Bush a lot) by just making stem cells practical – none of this ‘maybe if we throw a lot of money at it we will cure something’ stuff but something truly beneficial for men and women, Republican and Democrat.  Namely, by using their value in breast implants and liposuction.   ALL AT ONCE.
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It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

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Scientists like order and structure and methodology. Repeatability is even better, though that often requires additional grant funding. It’s no different when it comes to weekends, bars and picking up science groupies.

But it’s not so simple, even for scientists. The perfect world of methodology and repeatability is instead replaced by linguistic voodoo and trial and error regarding shots of alcohol. Science, as always, is here to help.

There are rules, you see, but they are unwritten. By taking a broad cross-section of shared experiences we can establish a baseline and go from there. That is good science.

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I am, I confess, among the most boring men in my family. In a family lineage that includes war heroes, riverboat gamblers, inventors, crusaders and even a guy named King Arthur, I instead write science humor on the interwebs.

Not much to brag about.

That’s not to say I don’t do stuff – I have travelled all over Europe, parts of the mid-east, and a decent chunk of Asia. I’ve gone up against the Bulgarian mafia, done falconry in England and faced down Turkish police. There just isn’t a lot to explore these days and real-life adventuring is so obscure as to be a little weird to take on as a career: There are no inner reaches of Africa left unmapped and the Amazon has better cell phone reception than I get in Silicon Valley.

Heck, even being an astronaut means you only get to drive a glorified delivery van to a warehouse orbiting the globe.

But I look like I do stuff and a few months ago I was at a conference and a woman came up to me and started babbling about interviewing me after a near-disaster in the Lincoln Sea part of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission last year. I looked at her quizzically and finally she noticed.

“I have the wrong person, don’t I?” she asked. I nodded my head (1). “Well, they described him and said he looked like a younger Harrison Ford so I assumed it was you.”

She meant the Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, of course, and not that knucklehead Han Solo in “Star Wars” who mumbled something unintelligible about making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs.” No one in my family would ever make that kind of grade-school physics mistake.

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It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists – a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

Since then we have had some interesting projects take off; the Dawn misson to Ceres, for example, but nothing that really captured the attention of the common man. The space shuttle is, let’s face it, boring.

I remember one episode of Farscape where our lead character, who piloted a ship through a wormhole and discovered all kinds of interesting things, speaks with reverence about his astronaut father who was … a space shuttle pilot. I started laughing even though it wasn’t supposed to be funny. That’s how far the space program had fallen – the only recent thing that young people could idolize was the equivalent of a high-altitude delivery truck.

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Sometimes people think that, because I write this column for peanuts, I am somehow available for free science consulting services. Obviously this is not the case but I don’t mind the occasional question, especially if it concerns real puzzles like how a car in China doesn’t cause global warming but a car in America does.

Lately I have been pestered with questions about this whole Christmas thing. It’s a troublesome issue, I agree, but I am not in the free science business so most of the questions I just ignore – however, one of the many,many,many (not that many – Lady Scientist ) groupies that flitter about me on the internet caught my attention recently with their query about Yule physics because they had the creativity to put it in seasonal rhyming form;

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We all know that if there’s one thing certain to happen to professional tennis players who get hurt in skydiving accidents, it’s that a clandestine para-military organization will swoop in and replace the now defective natural parts with über-awesome cybernetic ones. Thus began the saga of Jamie Sommers in a 1975 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man

The episode garnered the actress her own series which ran for three seasons before losing its charge but the concept was so riveting that it could work at almost any time so I was always surprised that, TV movie specials aside, it never got re-made.

That’s why I was excited about the new Bionic Woman television show when I first heard of it. With the advancements in medical technology leading to new story ideas coupled with improvements in special effects, it could be a huge leap over the original which, let’s face it, doesn’t hold up very well. That’s not to say I didn’t watch it. I did, but only because of Lindsay Wagner, one of those natural beauties who never needed makeup to look terrific. And she won an Emmy for the show, so I guess she can act.

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Groundbreaking – and heartwarmingly unessential – research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared – that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

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I saw a few articles discussing an upcoming convergence between robot and human culture based on research by Netherlands student David Levy, who completed his PhD on the subject of human-robot relationships. Using the Artificial Intelligence ( A.I. if you are new to, well, everything ) curve laid out by Levy, humans and robots would be inter-marrying by 2050. Inter-marrying means sex and, of course, I am a specialist in the science of sex.

Before we get to the marrying stage, a few issues would have to be addressed. You think Japanese girls have a tough time explaining an American man to their parents? Wait until she brings home a robot. That’s right, sex is easy but relationships, even with women of other cultures, are more like Voodoo than science so robot relationship management must be a higher order of Voodoo, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. Psychologists state there are about a dozen reasons people fall in love – and there is no reason those same reasons couldn’t apply to robots. in some cases, like actual marriage, it will open up a legal can of worms but someone will be willing to give it a try – most likely in Massachusetts, according to Levy.

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