Seems to happen a lot with actors and musicians, doesn't it? One of many reasons I generally ignore celebrities when they try to pose as experts on important issues. It would be sad if it weren't so easily avoided by applying a bit of common sense to the real world outside of their bubble of fame.

I would not be volunteering, but it sounds like a great idea. It's pretty much the same deal offered to colonists, pioneers, and explorers throughout history. If you actually survived the ocean voyage or the harsh terrain, you and your entire expedition could die in hundreds of ways once you arrived. One thing holding back manned space exploration is NASA's extreme aversion to risk and death. When people do dangerous things and go to dangerous places, some of them are going to die and others aren't going to be coming back home. Let's acknowledge that fact and get on with it.

I've been flipping horseshoe crabs since I was a kid. Horseshoe crabs sometimes swim upside down. That works great in deeper water, but it's a bummer if you get swept up on the beach. I feel sorry for the poor primitive things. Besides, they have copper-based blood, like Vulcans, and I think that's pretty neat.

OTOH, I try to be realistic about it. A dead crab is something else's meal, and seagulls and other beach critters have gotta eat too, you know. All part of Nature's Circle Of Death.

Mawwage! Mawwage is wah bwings us twogevah toodah.

I'd have to be pretty desperate to undergo something like this, but I'm open to the possibility that bee venom might be useful for something. After all, who would've expected that obscure and weird stuff like horseshoe crab blood, intestinal worms, or maggots would be seen as viable medical contributions in the 21st century?

I have a poster of this in my office. I always thought it was neat. And, yes, there are 51 plates. The 50 states plus the District of Columbia, in alphabetical order.

Uh oh. If zombie stormtroopers don't have to rely on their terrible aim, they might actually be dangerous.

I am intrigued. But I've always been a sucker for creepy, haunted ships.

It's unfortunate that commercial chemists and the pharmaceutical industry don't hang out more. The first synthetic antibiotics, Prontosil and the later sulfa drugs, were direct spinoffs of the German dye industry. The dyes were found to kill bacteria and quickly adapted to use in humans. And, of course, methylene blue started as a fabric dye too.

And, in fact, the early pharmaceutical industry faced the exact same problem when it came to making a profit. The basic chemicals used were off-patent and widely available from lots of sources for industrial use. So they turned to making all sorts of chemical variants and testing them all to find ones which worked better while minimizing the side effects. And which were salable. Profit's a good thing. Without it there have been no incentive to take the risk of turning red dye into medicine. (Check out "The Demon Under The Microscope" by Tom Hager for a good account of all this.)

Wow, that is cheap. And it seems to be cleaner and more efficient than some other tiny cars. Or many scooters, which are notoriously dirty and not particularly efficient.

The world does not need this. Cities need fast, reliable, unexpensive subway systems.

Fast
Reliable
Inexpensive

Choose any two. And then figure out how to build them to everywhere people would like to go, and how to persuade people to use them all the time in preference to personal transportation. Best of luck.

No one in the area remembers ever seeing anything like the sea blob before.

That's obviously because everyone who saw the last sea blob was eaten by it.

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

First Pedestrian:
"Hey, that guy looks pretty dangerous!"

Second Pedestrian:
"Oh, don't worry - he's 'armless!"

My God, I think that's a Stirge:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/intheworks_stirge.jpg

There was always a decent chance that some astronauts wouldn't come back. Exploration is a dangerous thing, and people always die while doing it. Of course, people also die while getting out of bathtubs or walking across the street. It'd be a lot cheaper and safer if we all just stayed inside and never bathed.

Somebody catch that Hasselblad!

I re-watched The Black Hole a few months ago, for the first time in many years. Shockingly, it was actually better than I remembered. Yeah, BOB was an annoying waste of time and talent, but VINCENT did have some dramatic potential, despite looking like a refugee from a Playmobil set. The ship design and special effects were excellent, and the overall atmosphere appropriately spooky and mysterious.

Unfortunately Disney could not resist piling on the artificial cuteness, either out of corporate habit or as a clumsy attempt at reproducing the wide appeal of Star Wars. (Ironically, one of the same mistakes that later spoiled the second Star Wars trilogy.)