Geoffrey Rush, who plays the older Albert Einstein in “Genius,” re-enacts a cllassic picture of the world-famous physicist. (National Geographic Photo / Dusan Martincek)
There have been plenty of TV documentaries about Albert Einstein, but almost none of them begin with a political assassination and a sex scene. “Genius” does.
The 10-part docudrama series, premiering April 25 on the National Geographic Channel, goes where few accounts of the physicist’s life have gone before.
Executive producer Ron Howard told The Associated Press that the series’ eyebrow-raising first scenes “fulfilled the desire to announce to audiences right away that we weren’t approaching it in an entirely straightforward, traditional and academic way.”
“We were looking for the drama in the story and willing to deal with Einstein, warts and all,” Howard said.
HBO has ramped up the tech-themed comedy “Silicon Valley” for its fourth season. (HBO Illustration)
HBO’s “Silicon Valley” comedy series presents a California-centric view of how tech is done (and undone), but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Seattle-based Amazon Web Services came in for satirical shout-outs in April 23’s season premiere.
The show centers on the travails of a startup called Pied Piper, often suffered at the hands of Hooli, a monolithic Google-like company.
As the season’s first episode begins, Pied Piper is pivoting from the data compression and storage business to video chat – specifically, a miraculous smartphone app called PiperChat that can conference an unlimited number of video users at the same time, with no lag or loss of picture quality.
Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks poses as an Uber driver and virtually kidnaps a potential VC investor, touting PiperChat’s 120,000 daily active users and the 18 percent week-over-week growth in its user base.
But there’s a problem: The user load is so high that Pied Piper is burning through cash to pay Amazon Web Services for the streaming. There’s no money left to pay Pied Piper’s developers, despite their protests.
“I’m not paying because you’re not the one getting [bleeped] face first by your credit card company because of massive AWS hosting fees,” the startup’s living-on-the-edge backer, Erlich Bachman, tells the team.
Public Lab enlisted citizen scientists to map sites affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, using cameras carried aloft by balloons and kites. (American Public Television)
It’s fitting that a four-hour documentary series about citizen scientists, titled “The Crowd and the Cloud,” is available to the crowd via the cloud a week before its debut on public television.
The first episode makes its TV debut on April 6 on the World Channel, but all four episodes can be watched anytime on the PBS.org website, on YouTube or using the PBS mobile app.
“The Crowd and the Cloud” showcases some of the people on the front lines of the citizen science movement, which enlists regular folks to gather observations and crunch data, often using online tools.
Researchers say citizen science projects contribute billions of dollars a year in donated labor. Such efforts can be as old as the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, which dates back to 1900, or as new as Astronomy Rewind, a cosmic picture-sorting project that went online just last week.
“How does it feel to be the first honorary Starliner astronaut?” Colbert asks in one clip. “I’ve made it. This is what all of this comedy work has been leading up to: wearing a very tight jumpsuit with a really big inflatable butt on it.”
Samples of chemical elements are spread out on a periodic table for David Pogue, host of “Hunting the Elements.” Now Pogue and “Nova” are raising money for a sequel. (WGBH Photo / Cara Feinberg)
Today marks the start of a 30-day “Make Science for All” campaign, pitched by the “Nova” team at WGBH and tech reporter David Pogue.
The objective is to raise at least $1 million for a two-hour broadcast special, “Beyond the Elements,” which Pogue would host. If the Kickstarter total reaches $2.25 million, that would fund a wider variety of multimedia works and make the show available for viewing at schools across the country.
“Beyond the Elements” would follow up on “Hunting the Elements,” an earlier program that was hosted by Pogue. The first film was based on Theodore Gray’s coffee-table book, “The Elements,” a colorful chronicle of all the elements on the periodic table.
The sequel would take the story a step further, showing how a limited set of atoms combine to form the tens of millions of substances that make up our world.
If renewable energy is on the rise in America, why should we even bother with nuclear power? Seattle tech maverick Nathan Myhrvold, who’s backing a next-generation nuclear venture called TerraPower, explains the rationale in terms of toasters.
Myhrvold lays out his toaster analogy in an extended video clip from “Nova: The Nuclear Option,” a PBS documentary that premieres tonight.
The program looks at the prospects for nuclear power five years after an earthquake and tsunami dealt a crippling blow to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. Fukushima’s foul-up dealt a blow to nuclear power’s image as well, but tonight’s show focuses on next-generation technologies aimed at making fission-generated power safer and easier to manage.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughs during the Golden Globes, with supporting-actor nominee Simon Helberg at left and presenter Matt Damon at right. (NBC / Golden Globes via YouTube)
Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is becoming a regular at Hollywood award ceremonies like tonight’s Golden Globes, and now he’s becoming an inspiration for the jokes as well.
Bezos is attending the free-wheeling festivities by virtue of the 11 nominations that Amazon Studios picked up this year, including five for its TV shows and five more for “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon-backed theatrical release. Another movie with an Amazon connection, “The Salesman,” was up for best foreign-language film.
One of the video productions, “Goliath,” picked up a best-actor award early in the evening for Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of a washed-up lawyer trying to redeem himself. Toward the end of the show, “Manchester” star Casey Affleck won the Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic movie.
But for Bezos, the biggest nod of the night may well be the joke that Golden Globes host Jimmy Fallon shot his way.
This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar. They found about as much frozen water as the volume of Lake Superior. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona Photo)
So how can future Red Planet settlers take advantage of those deposits to produce the drinkable water, breathable oxygen and hydrogen-based rocket fuel they’ll need? Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a way.
Their research builds upon a technology that was pioneered almost two decades ago, known as the water vapor adsorption reactor, or WAVAR. Adam Bruckner, a professor in UW’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, worked with students to develop a device that could extract tiny amounts of water vapor from the Martian atmosphere.
The WAVAR device was successfully tested in Mars-type conditions, but there wasn’t any funding to move the technology beyond proof of concept.
“NASA has not really funded in-situ resource utilization for research work on that at all,” Bruckner told GeekWire. WAVAR does make a cameo, however, in the fictional tale of Red Planet settlement depicted in “Mars,” a miniseries airing on National Geographic Channel.
The look of the Daedalus spaceship in National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries is based on what experts think would work best for a Mars landing. (Credit: NGC / Framestore)
The Red Planet mission that’s depicted in National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries may be purely fictional, but it draws upon decades’ worth of technological development for real-life interplanetary odysseys.
One of the technologies was proposed by researchers at the University of Washington way back in the 1990s. It’s a device known as a Water Vapor Adsorption Reactor, or WAVAR, which could theoretically extract humidity from the thin Martian atmosphere.
“They actually built a device, they tested it, they showed it would work,” said Robert Braun, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado who was once NASA’s chief technologist and is now a technical adviser for the “Mars” TV show.
Braun worked with the show’s scriptwriters to put an array of WAVAR devices around the Mars crew’s living quarters. Such a setup could keep the astronauts hydrated until they can get a steady supply of water from melted-down Martian ice.
The crew of the fictional Daedalus spaceship touches down on the Red Planet in “Mars,” a miniseries making its debut on the National Geographic Channel. (Credit: National Geographic Channels)
The “Mars” miniseries premiering on the National Geographic Channel is only the latest in a decades-long string of media projects laying out a vision for settling Mars – but this time, the creators say they’re sure the vision will actually come true.
“We’re in a zeitgeist moment right now,” producer Justin Wilkes told GeekWire. “There are enough people talking about Mars, thinking about Mars, dreaming about Mars, and now there are people who actually have the means to do something about it.”
The people leading the pack are at SpaceX, where billionaire founder Elon Musk has made the establishment of a sustainable city on Mars his lifetime goal. The 45-year-old Musk and other space luminaries lay out their case in “Mars,” in interviews that are interspersed with a fictional movie-style narrative about the first human mission to the Red Planet in 2033.
Musk sees the push to Mars as an evolutionary imperative, to ensure humanity’s survival in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth. Wilkes sees it the same way: “At its most basic level, it’s backing up the human species,” he said.
