As the hit time-travel TV show 12 Monkeys enters its fourth and final season, we talked to the show's season four science advisor, Sophia Nasr. Sophia is an astroparticle physicist working on dark matter. We talked to her about the work she does at UC Irvine, why dark matter (not the show) is so important,...
What would you do if a group of people suddenly appears seeking asylum from a war? The first step would be to vet their story, see if what they are saying is true. What if this group of people is American and the conflict they are escaping happens 180 years in the future? The pilot...
This article contains spoilers about Black Mirror, season four Do we have free will, or are we controlled by a higher power? The capacity to act and determine one’s own actions in an increasingly technologised world is the most prominent theme in the latest season of Netflix’s Black Mirror. And the question writer Charlie Brooker...
How often do you, outside the requirements of an assignment, ponder things like the workings of a distant star, the innards of your phone camera, or the number and layout of petals on a flower? Maybe a little bit, maybe never. Too often, people regard science as sitting outside the general culture: A specialized, difficult...
In The Orville episode, "Pria," Capt. Ed Mercer (Seth MacFarlane) tells Pria Lavesque (Charlize Theron) his ship is powered by a Dysonium quantum drive capable of speeds in excess of 10 lightyears (ly) per hour. This speed scale is far more intuitive than Star Trek's warp factor but how exactly does it compare? Could the...