It’s been a couple of years now since we first heard that an updated version of the Carl Sagan documentary series Cosmos was on the way, and that it was being produced by Family Guy and American Dad! creator Seth MacFarlane, and hosted by astrophysicist rock star Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Now comes word that we’ll finally get to watch the new 13-episode updated Cosmos sometime in 2014 when it’s aired on Fox. No official premiere date has been announced as of yet. [...]

IBM has created a short movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The movie, which is titled A Boy and His Atom, is made using stop-motion techniques—such as the ones used in films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride—but instead of manipulating a visible doll or figure or object multiple times to create a film, this particular film is made up entirely of manipulated atoms that have been magnified by a microscope over 100 million times. This makes it the smallest movie ever made.

As the title implies, the short follows a boy and his friendly, lively atom. It consists of 250 stop-motion frames using techniques that were perfected over years of atomic data storage research. The microscope used to make the movie is not the kind used in science class either, as you may have guessed. This microscope weighs in at two tons, and operates at minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit. The microscope uses an ultra sharp needle to within one nanometer of a copper surface, which attracts the atom and allows them to move one at a time.

Be sure to check out A Boy and His Atom below now! [...]

The Science of Avatar
Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle Edition
By Stephen Baxter
Orbit Books
Released May 29, 2012

Prolific science fiction author Stephen Baxter invites us to explore with him both real life science and space fiction in The Science of Avatar. There are lots of details sprawling in every direction, from speculation to established facts, in an almost scene-by-scene recount of the entire movie. He posits what our real world might be like in the year 2154, the year Avatar takes place.

We begin with Jake Sully leaving an ecologically devastated Earth, which we get the barest glimpse of in the film. Baxter explains to us what might have happened in an all too real account of ecocide, wherein Earth’s resources are depleted and space exploration offers the only hope of finding the resources we need to stay alive here. In the movie, this is the reason for the journey to Pandora. [...]

We as human beings are constantly being fed sales pitches claiming to hold the secret for truly losing weight fast…most often not requiring any exercise whatsoever, while still allowing you to eat whatever the hell you’d like.

Only fools buy into such nonsense, and, whether you’re able to put in the effort or not, anyone with even partial brain function knows that it takes a lot of painfully trying discipline and hard work to lose the weight you feel you need to lose.

Still, for the sake of entertainment, and because it does happen to be All Hallows’ Eve, what if I told you that a new study claims that watching horror movies can in fact help you to drop pounds. Would you listen? [...]

Once thought to be a completely fictional concept, what would intergalactic space exploration be like for we the human race if we were to figure out how to take the faster-than-light propulsion system known as warp drive we’ve seen used in great science fiction pop culture like Star Trek, and make it a reality?

Something so ambitious is still little more than a fantasy…but a fantasy of some of the smartest people to ever walk this planet. But even though it is still a fantasy, the warp drive may not be as impossible as was once thought. [...]

Neil Armstrong, who will forever be etched in the world’s memory as the first person ever to set foot on the Moon, died today after complications arose from cardiovascular procedures, according to CBS News. He was 82. This is, for sure, a dark day in American history.

Armstrong represented a class of astronaut that every boy of my generation and subsequent ones aspired to be like at one point, a true hero among so many paper ones. While the comic and sci-fi/fantasy genres have their heroes and influences and outright wondrous figures by way of mythical, heroic, and positive, Neil Armstrong, in his true, reality human flesh and blood of a man, TRULY represented those aforementioned attributes. The feat he achieved by landing on the Moon with his crew of the Apollo 11 back on July 20, 1969, had stood and will stand ever more so now in his passing as one of the most breathtaking and inspiring images of all time, certainly the television footage remains arguably the greatest iconic image in the history of broadcasting. Millions upon millions of people stood frozen at television sets and large screens put up all over the world when the event happened, an all too rare time of a communion of people put together for a POSITIVE cause. Armstrong, at the helm of it all, was the perfect choice of astronaut at the time, with his rugged good looks, calm, strong demeanor, and every boy’s hero kind of swagger [...]

Back in June we told you about a very cool experiment National Geographic was doing along with the Arecibo Observatory, where they wanted to send your messages via Twitter out to space in response to The Wow! Signal on its 35th anniversary.

As of August 15th, the exact anniversary of first receiving the signal, all messages—including over 20,000 tweets and a few videos from celebrities—were officially beamed out to space for whatever intelligent lifeforms that may be out there to hopefully one day pick up on. [...]

For those who don’t know, the Wow! Signal (learn more here) is an extraterrestrial radio signal picked up by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope on August 15, 1977. It lasted 72 seconds, and has never been heard again. Many believe it could have been a signal sent out by intelligent life somewhere far off in space, where others feel it could in fact simply be something from our own planet that found its way back.

We’ll likely never know the origins of the Wow! Signal, but National Geographic has decided to send out a response just in case there’s an intelligent species somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight (and beyond) to receive it. [...]

On this week’s show, Andrew Sorcini and Christopher Burnor discuss: Facebook goes public! Google officially makes things, Microsoft goes social, Zuckerberg gets hitched, and private enterprise launches into space…

Here’s the headlines… Pinterest joins the $1 BN club, Microsoft launches social network So.cl, Comcast tests tiered pricing, SpaceX launches first commercial rocket into space [...]

The Drill Down 235 [ 1:06:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week The Drill Down team takes a look at the battle for your online distributed data, with new features on cloud storage services from Microsoft, Dropbox, and Google. Then, it’s sci-fi billionaires in space!!! as Google’s Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and director James Cameron launch into a new venture to mine asteroids.

But first, the headlines… Nokia‘s down 30% with a $1.7 BN loss, Anonymous launches a social music service, Facebook pays Microsoft $550 M for former AOL patents, Adobe announces Creative Suite 6 (and subscription-based licenses), and Facebook announces its staggering Q1 financials, including details on its Instagram purchase [...]

The Drill Down 231 [ 1:13:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When James Cameron isn’t making sci-fi, horror, and action blockbusters, or movies that destroy box office records and then movies to destroy those box office records, he enjoys going on deep sea expeditions…as is a hobby for many of us.

Cameron, who was named an honorary National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence in 2011, has visited Titanic and observed the aliens of the deep, but now he plans a historic expedition not yet accomplished by anyone else on our planet. [...]

NASA scientists have been making a lot of exciting discoveries lately, including numerous Earth-like planets that might just be far enough from their stars to be habitable for otherworldly lifeforms.

But the latest planet to be reported on might just be the best chance yet at proving that there is in fact other forms of life out there. And why is that? you might ask. Well, because the majority of it is made up of water. [...]

The ebook deal of the day over at Amazon today is three top-rated science books by Dava Sobel for only $.99 each (that’s 94% off the list prices).

- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
- A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
- Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

Note – this deal is valid only for today, Wednesday, January 4, 2012, until 11:59pm PST [...]

The astronauts at the International Space Station celebrated the new year 240 miles above the Earth.

The crew recorded a special New Year’s message for all of us here on the planet, which you can watch here below. Each of the space men gave a personal greeting, including two crew members who did so floating upside down [...]

We don’t often veer off the path of entertainment-related content here at Geeks of Doom, but every now and again you see something that boggles the mind and must be shared with the masses.

Today comes a new infographic that basically proves that the odds of we as human beings existing is pretty much zero. Author Ali Binazir put together the numbers—odds of our many ancestors keeping the line going, of our parents meeting, of the sperm that would become us infusing itself with one of our mother’s eggs—and the digits that resulted are astronomical in size. Will Hunting would weep at the brain-melting size of these numbers [...]