Science fiction is the only form of literature that sets out to bring home to our imaginations the surprising universe that science has discovered. How well it does that job depends on its scientific accuracy – up to a point.
If we as readers catch a writer getting some well-established scientific fact wrong, we may suspect that we’re reading incompetent science fiction – or mainstream literature.
This new generation vaccine has big benefits beyond eliminating the “Ouch!” factor. Delivering the vaccine to the gut — rather than injecting it into a muscle — harnesses the full power of the body’s primary immune force, which is located in the small intestine.
…
“Nature isn’t used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle,” said Barrett, who also is a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defense against antigens is your gut.”
The lunar elevator doesn’t actually reach the regolith. Instead, the elevator ribbon ends 10 kilometres shy of the lunar surface so that no lunar mountain peaks hit the end, or terminus, of the orbiting elevator.
So how do astronauts make that 10 km jump to the elevator’s dangling tail? Easy: as the terminus passes overhead, they are fired in a magnetically levitated train along a track that’s been laid across the lunar plain and which gradually eases upwards to become vertical.
If they are fired at just the right time – and I wouldn’t like to be the person specifying or writing the software to do that, they are caught by some kind of robotic grappler at the terminus, which attaches the train to the ribbon.
Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiativesuggests that but for a quirk of history we might all be using Gopher instead of Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web:
By the 1990s, there was just about enough power to allow access to text and image-based files via the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web was born.
But network administrators at the time preferred a streamlined text-only internet service, says Topolski, using something called the Gopher protocol.
He suggested that if those administrators had had access to data filtering technology, like that becoming popular with companies and governments today, they would have used it to exclude Berners-Lee’s invention, and kill off the World Wide Web.
As the actual content of the reports is still classified we can amuse ourselves by wondering what Biometaphor For The Body Politic [March 2006] refers to. It sounds like a description of someone explaining the Facts of Life with handpuppets.
The Beeb rounds up various of our favorite skiffiers to ask the perennial question: does the genre need to stay up to date with the latest breakthroughs in order to be relevant? Ken MacLeod‘s comment:
Good news for spike-averse individuals like myself with the ongoing development of 
A classic 
Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the 
The proud journos at