It occurred to me that birds have been angry with us for some time: And perhaps, they have good reason to be: Launching themselves via slingshots seems a natural next step, no?

On Wednesday March 9, energy and film experts gathered at the original Austin City Limits studio on The University of Texas campus to discuss the role of energy and movies in our lives. The event was hosted by Dr. Michael E. Webber, and featured a panel of energy and film experts: author Sheril Kirshenbaum, producer [...]

Tamara Krinsky is reporting on the science-oriented films and conversations from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. This is her second report for Scientific American. Winning a jury prize at Sundance can change a filmmaker’s life, bringing them recognition and new career opportunities. But winning the Alfred P. Sloan prize brings a [...]

Tamara Krinsky is reporting on the science-oriented films and conversations from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. This is her first report for Scientific American. When one thinks of Sundance, "science" isn’t usually one of the first words that comes to mind. However, when attending the annual forward thinking festival in Park [...]

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed the internal “movie” that plays in a person’s head. To re-create dynamic visual experiences, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of volunteers (the other members of the research team) as they watched short movie clips (left panel in the video [...]

NEW YORK—Just as a true outbreak might, the new viral thriller Contagion, opening this weekend, begins unremarkably enough. A simple cough, heard against a black screen. This is no ordinary hack, of course. Aside from coming from the lovely, if peaked, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) passing time at a Chicago O’Hare airport bar, this cough [...]

Nuclear power is evil. Solar power is our savior. Or…is it the other way around? Tonight (March 9), at 7:00 p.m. EST, the University of Texas will present an entertaining program about how movies have depicted energy sources and therefore shaped public opinion and government policy, for 70 years. The evening will be filled with [...]

Different branches of science have played famous roles in lots of movies. But one category is often overlooked: sources of energy, even though the plots and turning points of major movies have hinged on just that. How likely is the potential nuclear reactor meltdown in China Syndrome (Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon)? How quickly could the [...]

SAN DIEGO–You won’t learn much physics watching a sci-fi movie or TV show, but reading an old comic book or taking Jim Kakalios’s "Physics of Superheroes" seminar at the University of Minnesota might inspire you to figure out if the Flash would consume all of Earth’s oxygen if he ran at nearly the speed of [...]

The television show “Revolution” is getting ready to start, with its plot based on the failure of the electrical grid. That’s nothing new, though — the most recent Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Spiderman movie, “The Amazing Spiderman,” came out this summer, each with significant events or  themes involving infrastructure systems. Half of the [...]

Tomorrow night, Friday February 22 at 7:30pm, Cinefamily and and Cinespia Salon will present the latest installment of the their Science on Screen series at the old Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. The evening’s screening will feature an independent film called Bestiaire. A truly breathtaking exploration of interspecies observation, Bestiaire is the rare documentary [...]

What responsibilities do filmmakers have in terms of scientific accuracy? Usually, I argue that filmmakers are storytellers first, and while scientific accuracy (or plausibility) can often support a narrative, the first responsibility of the filmmaker is to weave a captivating tale. But what happens when the film (or TV series) in question is overtly scientific [...]