The 5 Times

Futuregoth - science & flesh...

2010-12-18T15:00:00.000-08:00

‘Futuregoth’ is a genre that draws elements from fabulism, horror-fantasy, speculative science fiction and the great gothick tales of the nineteenth century. It is a natural progression and mutation from Cyberpunk and shares many defining features.
Perhaps its prominence in current culture is a hangover of ‘millenniumism’ and the human desire it sparks to review and evaluate our past whilst looking forward to the new era. It is indicative of the blurring of boundaries, between past and future, art and science, dream and reality, light and dark, good and evil, and is a strident step toward challenging the dualism that rules much of human thought and history… Sometimes some things are not so clearly defined in terms of one thing or the other. The past informs and certainly influences the future though between the two lies the present. Darkness is a contrast to light, as good is to evil, and without contrast, nothing would be clear, though it is the combination of contrast that creates the overall picture… Of course, reality is what we make of it - and ‘proper’ hard science seems to be proving this a fact, or to further diffuse the issue with a quote from Jean Cocteau, “art is science in the flesh”.

Herschel Probes Huge Dog Star

2009-12-03T03:17:00.000-08:00

The Herschel Infra-red Space Telescope, launched in May, is already giving good pay-off with the most in-depth imaging and spectrographic analysis of the hypergiant sun Canis Majoris.

Canis Majoris is, so far, the biggest star in the universe, first observed about two centuries ago, and it could go supernova, any millennium now! There is a good posting about it here at the BBC News website.

Info from Wikipedia states that, "If the Earth were to be represented by a sphere one centimeter in diameter, the Sun would be represented as a sphere with a diameter of one hundred and nine centimeters, at a distance of one hundred and seventeen meters. At these scales, VY Canis Majoris would have a diameter of approximately 2.25 kilometers."

So that's BIG, but big does not necessarily mean bright and it is often smaller stars that burn brighter and faster. Canis Majoris is also one of the coolest giant stars we know of and as a result is comparatively dim.

It's A New Darwin Wing Situation

2009-11-26T08:24:00.001-08:00

The new Dawin Centre is open at London's Natural History Museum and is very informative, interactive and rewarding. Designed primarily as an educational resource it appeals to all ages of children and is fascinating for interested adults. During office hours you see the scientists at work in the laboritories and collection rooms and even have an opportunity to ask them questions about the work they are doing. They have a really useful system if you are pushed for time: you can pickup a special card and collect the interactive resources available in order to re-visit them at your leisure on-line. The system works.

Find out more about the Natural History Museum and what's on here.

It's A Darwin - Win - Situation

2009-05-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

This year we are celebrating the courage and genius of Charles Darwin. It's been 200 years since his birth and 150 since he explained his revolutionary idea of evolution and the origin of species. So here are some cool Darwinian sites with lots of good graphics and info.

The BBC have been making some excellent programs and have been generous with on-line content at their BBC Darwin Pages.

You can also find the BBC's lovely visualisation of evolution on planet earth at the Wellcome Trust Darwin site.

Science News have produced a good evolution timeline. It has a slide bar control and some neat graphics. You may have to scroll down a bit to find the controls...

Project Steve: although we have been evolving for about 3.5 billion years and Darwin explaind his ideas one and a helf centuries ago, it seems that some people still haven't quite got the gist yet... Project Steve is a sort of serious 'joke' about a very important issue.

This is the first model of DNA as visualised by Crick and Watson in 1953. Fifty years later, the Human Gnome Project had mapped out our DNA, building upon, and further confirming the ideas first put forward by Darwin.

Go on, evolve. You know you want to!

A lovely illustrated edition of The Origin Of Species

Darwin's four major works in one volume

The Autobiographiues of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life BBC DVD with David Attenborough

Hubble Trouble?

2009-05-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

Space Shuttle Atlantis has ferried up the maintenance crew to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope. For more information on this mission go here.

For more on Hubble and the universe it reveals, including a fantastic gallery of images, go here.

It's Stem & Us

2009-03-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

A new breakthrough in stem cell research means that the future is looking far brighter for some suffers of certain conditions and diseases such as Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis. There is good evidence that both these illnesses could be treatable with therapy using stem cells to replace the damaged or degenerating tissues. Unfortunately, research in this area of medical science has been hindered by ethical problems, because the only ready source of stem cells for this purpose has been from human embryo tissue.

The 'magic' property of stem cells is that, because all cells in the body stem from this type of cell, they can be manipulated into becoming and replacing any kind of tissue... and now a team, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, has managed to turn fibroblasts, common cells in our skins, back into their embryonic state so that the cells then behave like stem cells! The above image belongs to The New York Times.

This early research has so far been conducted with skin samples from mice, but there is no reason why this technique cannot be adapted to human cells of this type. Of course, there will need to be much more refinement and development before this technique could be tested safely in human subjects. However, this progress should help to speed up stem cell research and make it much more acceptable to those who have previously objected on moral grounds...

read more here:

bbc science news

and here:

Science Daily report

Iain M Banks Interview

2009-01-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

Iain Menzies Banks is Scottish. He was born and raised in and around Dunfermline, Fife, educated at Sterling University. Along with fellow Scot, Irvin Welsh, Banks has become known as one of the most startling of modern British writers. Scotland seems to be producing more than its fair share of literary talent and recently that talent has began to make a notable impact on British SF, with Iain M Banks and Ken MacLeod pushing the vanguard.

The Culture is a broad concept that links the bulk of Banks’ widely read and acclaimed SF output. It is a vast intelligent culture of sentient machines, including giant living space vessels, which have become so advanced that they have exceeded the full understanding of humans and now look after the human population in a cosmos-spanning, multi-cultural future society... Is this a future that Iain thinks we may be heading towards, and would that be a good thing?

‘Is the Culture a possible future...’ Iain mused, ‘Probably, eventually, but not for us. It will be the future for another species perhaps, different from us as we are today. We’re too tied up in bigotry, hatred, war, economics, oppression, competition...

Read the rest of this interview.

Happy New Year

2009-01-08T05:45:00.000-08:00

If you like The 5 Times, you may also like:

New Scientist
Scientific American
Nature

Enjoy.

NASA , ISS, 2009, Calendar, Free.

2008-12-19T07:39:00.000-08:00

Those generous, and heroic, folk at NASA have designed a calendar originally intended for teachers and made available to everyone as a free download (pdf 5.3 Mb). The calendar marks the Space Station's tenth anniversary and is illustrated with photos from the International Space Station and its missions. Key dates relating to the project are listed, as well as some facts and historic information...

Check out the ISS homepage and you can get the calendar there. It works best at A3 paper size, but A4 is also OK, if you don't mind some tiny text.

NASA International Space Station website

Ten years in orbit! Keep watching the skies...

Wisdom From The Yeast

2008-12-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

Recent research has found that yeast cells have two systems in place that seem to ‘program’ their lifespan or mortality ‘clock’. These latest findings, from research conducted by Vladimir Titorenko and his team at Concordia University in Montreal, show that cells with higher level of certain types of lipids (fats) die younger than those with less fats, and that the mitochondria in ‘leaner’ cells are more efficient ‘powerhouses’ for their cell and better able to cope with stress and trauma. Yeast given a calorie-restricted diet were healthier for longer than their well-fed counterparts.

Keeping carbohydrates, sugars and fats low in the diets of more complex organisms, such as worms, fruit flies, mice, rats and dogs, has resulted in measurably increased lifespans and levels of well-being. This does indicate that the beneficial effects work across species, from single celled organisms, simple invertebrates, right up to complex mammals…

This is yet more evidence to back up the work of pioneering life extentionist Roy Walford (image above, (C) 1999, Roy L Walford Living Trust) who advocated “under-nutrition without mal-nutrition" as one of the steps we can take to increase the duration of healthy life.

Well they say, “Live’n’learn,” eh?
The more we live the more we can learn.

Learn more about living long here:

Aging Gets With The Program from ‘Science News’

We Will Be Able To Live To 1,000 by Dr Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge

Roy Walford Wikipedia Entry and Roy Walford’s Website

Then & Now

2008-12-17T07:12:00.000-08:00

The 5 Times was an award (multi-award) winning publication that began as a science and science fiction fanzine and was to become the official newsletter of the 'Babylon 5 UK Fan Club'. In its 16 issues with Questing Beast, the publication included a great many exclusive interviews with cast and crew of the TV SF series Babylon 5, as well as broadening its coverage to include other shows such as Doctor Who, Earth Final Conflict, Star Trek, Lexx, Shadow Raiders, all with interviews conducted exclusively for The 5 Times.

The 5 Times was also concerned with the function of SF to model potential futures and inspire scientific advancement in the real world through scenarios explored in the continuum of imaginative fiction. Our blogspot will reflect this and will include articles about both Science Fiction and cutting-edge Science Fact

Information on back issues and archival pages can still be viewed at: The 5 Times old homepage.