A screenshot from The Great Flu, an online game.

I’m looking forward, with some trepidation, to seeing the movie Contagion, which comes out in theaters tomorrow. The subject is scarier than any made-up horror flick–a realistic scenario of a killer pandemic virus. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University and an expert consultant on the new film, gave me real reason to worry about the scenario dreamed up by the moviemakers, telling Salon: “We know that if we were to have some sort of an outbreak—or pandemic, worse yet—in the United States, we don’t at present have the tools that are required to rapidly ramp up some sort of a strategy for making vaccines and distributing them. Those are just the cold, hard facts.” After watching Contagion, we’re all going to either want to hide away in our homes and/or start calling our congresspeople to take action so we’re better prepared for something like this.

Or we could just play games. Here are five games to play after watching the movie:

Sneeze: The goal of this mini online game is to sneeze at just the right time and in just the right direction to transfer a virus to others who then transfer it to others and so on, eventually reaching as many individuals as possible. It’s a simple demonstration of how easy it is to transmit a virus when people don’t cover their mouths when they sneeze (and one out of four people in one study didn’t bother).

Pandemic, The Board Game: In this cooperative game, two to four players work together to cure four diseases. Each player takes on a role—such as scientist or medic—and on each turn travels the world, treating people, building research centers and finding cures for the diseases. If you find the cures, everyone wins. If not, you’re all dead. The message of the game is that if this happens in real life, we’re all going to have to work together to fight a pandemic or we’ll all end up dead.

Pandemic 2: This is another mini online game (and not related to the board game, despite the name), and the goal is to wipe out the world. Pick a virus, bacteria or parasite and let it loose. As more people become infected (and eventually die), you earn points that you can use to buy new traits for your disease, such as symptoms, drug resistance and modes of transmission. Can you evolve your disease faster than humans can develop and deploy a vaccine? This game excels at demonstrating how the various traits of a disease can affect where and how quickly it spreads and how virulent and deadly it becomes.

The Great Flu: Choose from one of five viruses (difficulty levels) in this online game and then pick through a selection of strategies to defeat it. You can stockpile vaccines and antiviral medicines, spend money on research facilities and teams, shut down schools or airports, distribute face masks, or isolate infected individuals. Trying to contain the disease in a single country is not easy, and the numbers of infected and dead can quickly pile up. This game is an interesting simulation of some of the realistic options available to those fighting a pandemic disease.

Killer Flu: This game, from the U.K. Clinical Virology Network, should give us all a little hope. The UK CVN developed the game, in part, to demonstrate just how hard it is for a flu virus to mutate, spread and kill. And that adds a layer of difficulty to the game, in which you try to make a flu virus spread from person to person and city to city, infecting as many people as possible, and makes it that much more fun.

Do you ever peek at the end of a book? (courtesy of flickr user Documentally)

Do you hate it when someone tells you the ending of a book you haven’t read? Do you get angry at reviewers who give away too many plot points? Does the existence of “spoiler alerts” set your hackles up because you think spoilers shouldn’t even exist? Well, it seems you might be missing out—spoilers may enhance story enjoyment, according to a new study from Psychological Science.

Two researchers at the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment in which undergraduate students read classic short stories presented in one of three ways: by itself, with a separate spoiler paragraph, or with that same paragraph incorporated into the beginning of the story. They were then asked to rate their enjoyment of the story on a scale from 1 t0 10. The 12 stories fell into three types: ironic twist, such as “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov; mystery, such as “A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie; and literary, such as “The Calm” by William Butler.

Each story type and each story were rated higher when presented with the spoiler paragraph. The scientists write:

Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage readers, and to surprise them. But giving away these surprises makes readers like stories better. This was true whether the spoiler revealed the twist at the end—that the condemned man’s daring escape was just a fantasy before the rope snapped taut around his neck—or solved the crime—that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is in fact the perpetrator.

The researchers suggest that knowing what will happen helps the reader (or viewer) concentrate on other bits of the storytelling. “So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier—you’re more comfortable processing the information—and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story,” says study co-author Jonathan Leavitt.

However, this study does not indicate that writers should be giving away all their secrets in the first lines. When the spoiler paragraph was presented as part of the story, there was no additional benefit to reader enjoyment.

The researchers conclude:

Erroneous intuitions about the nature of spoilers may persist because individual readers are unable to compare between spoiled and unspoiled experiences of a novel story. Other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong, and perhaps birthday presents are better wrapped in transparent cellophane, and engagement rings not concealed in chocolate mousse.

Perhaps not. But considering all the joy people (including myself) get from rereading and rewatching stories over and over again, maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about ruining our pleasure when we come across spoilers.

(HT: io9)

Kanzi the bonobo is quite the musician. Image courtesy of the Great Ape Trust

In the new movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the leader of the ape revolution can talk. In the real world, apes can’t speak; they have thinner tongues and a higher larynx, or vocal box, than people, making it hard for them to pronounce vowel sounds. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have the capacity for language—sign language, after all, doesn’t require any vocalization.

Over the years, researchers have succeeded—and failed—in teaching apes to use language. Here’s a look at some of the more famous “talking” apes.

Viki: Viki, a chimpanzee, came closest to being a real talking ape. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Keith and Catherine Hayes of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then located in Orange Park, Florida, adopted Viki and raised her at home as if she were a human baby. With the Hayeses moving her lips for her, Viki learned to utter “mama.” Eventually, with much difficulty, she managed to say three other words—papa, cup and up—on her own. Viki’s tenure as a talking ape didn’t last long; she died at the age of seven of viral meningitis.

Washoe: In the 1960s, psychologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada, Reno recognized that chimpanzees naturally gesture a lot and thought chimps would be well suited for sign language. In 1966, they started working with Washoe. Later, psychologists Roger and Deborah Fouts, now retired from Central Washington University, continued the work. By the end of Washoe’s life in 2007, she knew about 250 signs and could put different signs together to make simple combinations like “Gimmie Sweet” and “You Me Go Out Hurry.” Washoe’s adopted son Loulis also learned to sign—by watching his mother. He was the first ape to learn signs from other apes, not humans. For more on Washoe’s life, read Roger Fouts’ Next of Kin.

Nim: After the success with Washoe, psychologist Herbert Terrace of Columbia University decided to replicate the project. At first, Nim—full name Nim Chimpsky, named after linguist Noam Chomsky who thought language was unique to humans—was raised in a human household. (Washoe had been treated like a person too but had her own trailer.) Later, Nim was removed from the family and his language lessons moved to a lab on Columbia’s campus. In the end, Terrace concluded Nim never really learned language; he had merely been trained to imitate his teachers to get rewards. The sad story of Nim’s life after the project ended is told in the new documentary Project Nim.

Chantek: Chimpanzees are not the only talking apes. In 1978, anthropologist Lyn Miles of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga began studying an orangutan named Chantek. During eight years of study, Chantek learned 150 signs. He also showed signs of being self-aware: he could recognize himself in a mirror. Today, you can visit Chantek at Zoo Atlanta, his home since 1997.

Koko: Koko the gorilla is probably best known for her love of kittens and Mr. Rogers (and maybe less well-known for her encounter with Captain James T. Kirk). Koko’s sign-language training began in 1972 with then-graduate student Francine (Penny) Patterson of Stanford University. According to the Gorilla Foundation, Koko knows 1,000 signs and understands spoken English. It also claims the gorilla has an IQ somewhere between 70 and 95 (the average human IQ is 100). (Critics, however, remain skeptical about some of Koko’s supposed abilities due to the lack of recent scientific publications supporting the claims. (PDF))

Kanzi: Kanzi, a bonobo, doesn’t use sign language; he uses different combinations of lexigrams, or symbols, to communicate. In the early 1980s, psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, then of Georgia State University, was trying to teach Kanzi’s mom, Matata, to use the lexigrams; instead, Kanzi was the one who mastered the symbols. Kanzi understands spoken English and knows close to 400 symbols. When he “speaks,” his lexigram usage follows rules of grammar and syntax, according to researchers at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, where Kanzi now resides. Kanzi is also an accomplished stone-tool maker.

Still from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, photo courtesy of WETA Digital

It’s the summer of the chimpanzee, at least at the movies. The documentary Project Nim and the sci-fi flick Rise of the Planet of the Apes offer audiences very different forms of simian entertainment, but moviegoers will walk away from both wondering, “Is it ethical to use chimps in research?”

Project Nim chronicles the life of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee who was the focus of one of the most (in)famous ape language studies. In 1973, just days old, Nim was taken from his mom at an ape lab in Oklahoma and brought to New York City. Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, wanted to see if he could communicate with a chimpanzee through language (Nim was named after linguist Noam Chomsky). Because apes do not have the proper physiology to speak, Terrace decided to teach Nim sign language.

The best way to do this, Terrace thought, was to raise Nim among humans. Terrace gave Nim to one of his former graduate students, a mother in a Brady Bunch-style household. Life there was chaotic, with few rules, and no one in Nim’s human family really knew sign language.

Lacking results, Terrace once again took Nim away from his mother. This time he brought him to an old mansion in the New York suburbs owned by Columbia. Nim lived there with a few college students who were his teachers. Nim also made trips to the university’s campus for language training sessions, which he apparently disliked. One former teacher claims Nim used the sign “dirty,” meaning he needed to use the bathroom (he knew how to use a toilet), to get out of the classroom.

As Nim got older, he became stronger, unpredictable—and violent (his teachers have the scars to prove it; he bit one woman’s face so hard that she had a gaping hole in her cheek for months.) This is normal for a chimpanzee. “Nobody keeps a chimp for more than five years,” Terrace says. Soon Terrace ended the project.

Nim is then returned to the Oklahoma lab. This scene is why you should bring tissues to the theater. Nim gets locked up, forced to live alone in a small cage next to the cages of strange creatures he’d never seen before: other chimps. The lab looks like a primate prison. The workers shock the animals with cattle prods to keep them in line. One former worker describes Nim as a “spoiled child.”

Nim’s life gets worse. He is sold to a medical lab for vaccine testing. Later he moves to a sanctuary—for horses. He lives there in almost total isolation, as the owners don’t know how to care for an ape. Nim appears lonely, depressed. It’s heartbreaking.

Nim eventually gets some chimp companionship. But there’s no real happy ending for him. He died in 2000 at the age of 26, quite young for an animal that can live up to 45 years in the wild and 60 in captivity.

By the time Project Nim ended, I was ready to cheer on the ape rebellion in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Watching it, I was struck by how much the protagonist’s story paralleled Nim’s.

The movie begins in Africa with the capture of a female chimpanzee. In the next scene, she’s solving a puzzle in a lab. (Today, chimps used in research are bred in captivity. It is illegal to bring them in from the wild.) This chimp is part of a medical trial for a gene therapy to treat Alzheimer’s. The treatment goes beyond the expectations of medical researcher Will Rodman (played by James Franco); it enhances the cognition of the chimp, making her super-smart. (Ed. note — Mild spoilers ahead, though its nothing you haven’t already seen in the trailers, so consider yourself warned. You can read on after the note below)

The ape passes down her superior intellect to her son, Caesar (played by Andy Serkis with the help of amazing CGI effects). After an unfortunate incident, Caesar’s mom is killed, and the lab manager halts the project and orders all the chimps to be put down. Rodman saves newborn Caesar and takes him home.

This is where Caesar’s life begins to resemble Nim’s. Rodman treats Caesar like a human and teaches him sign language. Several years later, a bigger, stronger Caesar attacks a neighbor while trying to protect Rodman’s father, and is sent away to a primate “sanctuary” that bears a striking resemblance to the Oklahoma lab where Nim lived, right down to the cattle prods. And Caesar must learn how to interact with other apes.

Eventually, Caesar breaks out, steals some of the medicine that made him smart and returns to give it to his ape comrades. The apes revolt and descend on San Francisco. During an incredible battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s clear that the California Highway Patrol—and perhaps all of humankind—is no match for this army of super-simians. By the end (stick around for the credits), it’s clear how the apes will conquer the rest of the world.

What happened to Nim and Caesar made me incredibly sad and made me think about the ethics of captive ape research. I’m not alone.

(Spoiler-concerned readers: You’re safe to read on from here)

Although the premise of Rise of the Planet of the Apes seems absurd, some scientists worry that genetic engineering is advanced enough to create primates with human-like behavior and self-awareness. The U.K. Academy of Medical Sciences released a report last month suggesting such experiments should be off-limits. The United Kingdom along with many other countries already ban the use of great apes in research. The subject is now being debated in the United States.

In the case of Nim, Terrace concluded years after the project ended that the chimp never really understood sign language; he just learned to mimic his teachers to get rewards. As the movie implies, the lack of results could be blamed on the lack of a proper experimental design in the first place. Other apes—most notably Washoe the chimpanzee, Koko the gorilla and Kanzi the bonobo—have been taught to use sign language. The researchers studying them believe they are truly communicating with these animals via language, but there are still some skeptics, including Terrace, who think otherwise.

I have mixed feelings on chimp studies. The sad irony is that the very reason it seems wrong to study chimps is the same reason why they are attractive study subjects: they are our closest living relatives, and the animals that come closest to being like us.

A zombie walk in Chile in 2010 (courtesy of flickr user rodolpho.reis)

Zombies seem to be only growing in popularity, and I’m not talking about the biological kind. They’ve got their own television show, plenty of films, and even a musical. They invaded the world of Jane Austen, and there are zombie crawls around the world, in which people dress up like the living dead and shuffle across some urban area.

And then there’s the growing field of zombie science.

In 2009, University of Ottawa mathematician Robert J. Smith? (and, yes, he really does include a question mark at the end of his name) published a paper in a book about infectious disease modeling titled “When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” (pdf). It started as a class project, when some students suggested they model zombies in his disease modeling class. “I think they thought I’d shoot it down,” Smith told NPR, “but actually I said, go for it. That sounds really great. And it was just a fun way of really illustrating some of the process that you might have in modeling an infectious disease.” Using math, the group showed that only by quickly and aggressively attacking the zombie population could normal humans hope to prevent the complete collapse of society.

That paper sparked further research. The latest contribution, “Zombies in the City: a NetLogo Model” (pdf) will appear in the upcoming book Mathematical Modelling of Zombies. In this new study, an epidemiologist and a mathematician at Australian National University refine the initial model and incorporate the higher speed of humans and our capacity to increase our skills through experience. They conclude that only when human skill levels are very low do the zombies have a chance of winning, while only high human skill levels ensure a human victory. “For the in-between state of moderate skill a substantial proportion of humans tend to survive, albeit in packs that are being forever chased by zombies,” they write.

Then there’s the question of whether math is really the most important discipline for surviving a zombie attack.

But how might zombies come about? There are some interesting theories, such as one based on arsenic from Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science. Or these five scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could happen, including brain parasites, neurotoxins and nanobots.

A Harvard psychiatrist, Steven Schlozman, broke into the field of zombie research and then wrote The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse, which blames an airborne contagion for the zombie phenomenon. The book delves into the (fictional) research of Stanley Blum, zombie expert, who searched for a cure to the zombie epidemic with a team of researchers on a remote island. (They were unsuccessful and succumbed to the plague, but nicely left their research notes behind, complete with drawings.) It’s more than just fun fiction to Schlozman, though, who uses zombies to teach neuroscience. “If it works right, it makes students less risk-adverse, more willing to raise their hands and shout out ideas, because they’re talking about fictional characters,” he told Medscape.

For those interested in getting an overview of the science, a (spoof) lecture on the subject, Zombie Science 1Z, can now be seen at several British science and fringe festivals. Zombiologist Doctor Austin, ZITS MSz BSz DPep, lectures in three modules: the zombieism condition, the cause of zombieism, and the prevention and curing of zombieism. And for those of us who can’t attend in person, there’s a textbook and online exam.

And the Zombie Research Society keeps track of all this and more, and also promotes zombie scholarship and zombie awareness month. Their slogan: “What you don’t know can eat you.”

Scientists named 2012 the worst sci-fi movie of all time (via wikimedia commons)

The Worst:

1)  2012 (2009): Neutrinos from a solar flare heat up the Earth’s core, setting off the end of life as we know it. The plot conveniently ignores the fact that neutrinos pass straight through matter—even us—without doing much of anything.

2)  The Core (2003): The Earth’s core has stopped rotating and scientists have to drill into it to start it back up. The moviemakers go nuts with basic geology, ending up with something the New York Times called “monumentally dumb.”

3)  Armageddon (1998): A team of drillers is sent to an asteroid on its way to strike Earth to split it into two parts they say will fly safely past the planet, completely ignoring Newton’s First Law of Motion (“an object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force”), which says that all they did was make two asteroids that would hit the Earth.

4)  Volcano (1997): Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano that springs up in the city. Bad science mingling with cheesy dialogue and effects.

5)  Chain Reaction (1996): Keanu Reeves. Bubble fusion. A government plot to prevent the spread of the technology. The perfect recipe for bad.

6)  The 6th Day (2000): Arnold Schwarzenegger is cloned. Because one of him just wasn’t enough?

7)  What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004): Read the synopsis on Wikipedia. It’ll make your head hurt.

And the Best:

1)  Gattaca (1997)
2)  Contact (1997)
3)  Metropolis (1927)
4)  The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
5)  Woman in the Moon (1929)
6)  The Thing From Another World (1951)
7)  Jurassic Park (1993)

After looking at the lists, I think we can conclude that the last couple of decades has been both good and bad when it comes to sci-fi in the movies. Special effects can make our imagination come to life on the screen, as in “Jurassic Park,” but it’s no substitute for good storytelling, which is what the worst of the worst all seem to lack. It wasn’t that the science itself was bad—that can be ignored if there’s a payoff—but there wasn’t anything good to balance it out.

As for what the lists may be missing, I’d add to the “worst” list “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2005 version of “The War of the Worlds” and “Jurassic Park 3,” the only dinosaur movie that made me wish the dinosaurs would eat the people and stop annoying me. As for the “best” list, there are plenty they missed, particularly in the modern era, but I particularly liked “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “WALL-E.”

What are on your lists of best and worst sci-fi films?

Make your own hot sauce in one of our 2010 Geeky Gifts. Courtesy of Flickr user 2eklecktik

This year, 2010, is a big year for science gifts! We’ve searched far and wide for the coolest, brainiest—but also trendiest—toys of the season, to be enjoyed by kids and adults alike. Here’s our wish list for this holiday season:

Mythbusters Kits: Any science enthusiast who also likes television will likely be a huge fan of the Discovery Channel’s hit television series, Mythbusters, in which a team of science-minded handymen and -women, led by hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, test common myths. Now Mythbusters fans can take matters into their own hands with one of several Mythbusters kits. Choose from the “Power of Air Pressure,” “Science of Sports,” “Forces of Flight” or the “Weird World of Water.”

Human Power: The new nPowerPEG transforms kinetic energy into energy you can use to charge your phone or other electronic devices. Put it in your backpack or purse and the PEG will gather energy throughout the day. In a pinch, shaking the device will generate enough power for you to make an emergency phone call.

Space Shuttle Gifts: Next year marks the end of NASA’s space shuttle program (I interviewed curator Valerie Neal of the National Air and Space Museum earlier this month.) The Kennedy Space Center has a host of items that commemorate the shuttles’ milestones of space exploration. My personal favorites are the rhinestone-studded T-shirt and the space shuttle Discovery mission patch.

Star Wars Force Trainer: Star Wars is, without a doubt, one of the geekiest (and greatest!) film series of all time. The movies also engendered a generation of toys, perhaps the most popular being the glowing light saber. The new Star Wars Force Trainer allows Jedis in training to hone their use of the Force using nothing but their minds. The Trainer is a Jedi helmet and an encased ball. Manufacturers claim that the helmet actually senses brain waves and moves the ball accordingly (Editor: we’re a bit skeptical of this claim).

Terrarium: This year, terrariums have made a serious comeback as a cool house decoration. Make one yourself by arranging some dirt and moss in a glass container (read more here), or buy one of Etsy’s super stylish options. Etsy also has some mossy rings for taking the terrarium idea to the streets.

City Lights Globe: For trendy but brainy urbanites, the City Lights Globe simulates how the lights from the world’s cities are perceived from outer space.

Let Your Geek Flag Fly: For nerdy friends with a sense of humor, try a gift that really puts their geek status out in the open. Laser-cut “Geek” or “Nerd” necklaces are available on Etsy, while the irresistible “I Heart Nerds” T-shirt is very indie-chic.

Make Your Own Root Beer/Hot Sauce: Those with a proclivity for both science and cooking might enjoy either a root beer or hot sauce kit. There are many more options for “make your own” food kits, but these stuck out as most original. The hot sauce kit in particular will yield enough sauce to spice up any dish, even your root beer! (Okay, that might not be so tasty, but an experiment nonetheless.)

Science Heroes: While coworkers’ desks might be populated with baseball bobbleheads (Editor: That’s me!), yours could have the “Lil Giants of Science,” a collection of four petite figurines of famous scientists: Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Tesla.

Not Your Average Ant Farm: This glowing blue ant farm was the result of NASA’s 2003 tests to see how animals tunnel in microgravity. The farm’s blue nutrient gel is designed to provide all the food and water ants need for up to a year (most farms last only two to six months). The farm also comes with an “illuminator” that lights up the gel so you can watch the insects hard at work even at night.

Or Star Trek:

Or Reservoir Dogs (at least it didn’t cost much; all they had to buy for this photo shoot were a few pairs of sunglasses):

Most perplexing to me, though, is this poster for the upcoming May mission to the International Space Station:

Why baseball?

Who wants these posters? I can’t see little kids who dream of being astronauts wanting to hang these up on their bedroom walls. And if I was in one of these missions, I would be more than a little embarrassed by some of them. So why is NASA spending time and money on this? Or am I just not getting the joke?

Movie poster from The Core, courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Even a bad movie can be enjoyable under the right circumstances. Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn’t bothered. Here are eight clunkers from the last decade:

• Erin Brockovich (2000): Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her work in this true-life story of a woman who fought against polluters in Hinckley, California. But the film glosses over the difficulty of making a connection between strange diseases in a community and the cause, prompting people (including some of my friends) to find pollution- or chemical-caused cancer clusters any time two or more people they know are diagnosed with a form of the disease.
• The Time Machine (2002): This is the remake of a 1960 film based on the novel by H.G. Wells but the story has changed so much—with the addition of new characters and plot holes—that the story no longer works. That hasn’t stopped the rumors, though, of a Time Machine 2.
• The Core (2003): Scientists have to travel to the center of the Earth to set off nuclear explosions that will restart the rotation of the planet’s core. The moviemakers took some basic geology and then went nuts in this film, which the New York Times called “monumentally dumb.”
• Day After Tomorrow (2004): Climate change causes the North Atlantic current to stop, plunging the Earth into a new Ice Age overnight. Mayhem ensues. Yeah, right.
• I, Robot (2004): This is really a decent movie to watch, but the moviemakers deviated too much from Isaac Asimov’s original stories. (As with The Time Machine, the lesson is that you shouldn’t mess with the classics.)
• War of the Worlds (2005): Yet another remake gone bad. It’s got cliches, plot holes and Tom Cruise.
• 10,000 BC (2008): There are mammoths helping to build the pyramids in 10,000 B.C. Hmm. The first pyramid wasn’t built until about 2630 B.C. And that’s just one of the many things the moviemakers got wrong in this film.
• 2012 (2009): Tentatively tied to the date when the Mayan calendar ends, this is another apocalyptic movie. This time, neutrinos from a solar flare trigger the heating of the Earth’s core. Natural disasters abound. Few survive. I guess 2012 isn’t quite the end of the world, though, since there are plans to make a TV-series-sequel, 2013.

What science-y movie of the 2000s did you hate? Did you like any of the ones we didn’t? Tell us in comments below.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, courtesy of Focus Features

The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we’ll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed:

• A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in game theory but later struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): Jim Carrey erases Kate Winslet from his brain. It may seem like crazy science fiction, but scientists know how to do it in mice, and this week New York University researchers claimed that they have figured out how to rewrite fear memories.
• Primer (2004): This $7,000 film about time travel was praised for its attempt to portray scientific discovery—even if it’s outlandish and impossible—in a realistic and down-to-earth manner.
• March of the Penguins (2005): We can forgive the anthropomorphization of Antarctic emperor penguins in this French documentary because not only was the movie beautiful and charming, but it also got thousands of people, especially children, interested in nature. The film won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
• An Inconvenient Truth (2006): The documentary about Al Gore’s slideshow woke up the United States to the issue of climate change. (And before the skeptics start arguing with us: Gore got most of the science right.) The movie won an Academy Award, Gore got a Nobel Prize and it looks like the country might be on its way finally to tackling the problem.
• Flock of Dodos (2006): Marine biologist-turned-filmaker Randy Olson explores the evolution-intelligent design debate, smacking down the proponents of creationism and intelligent design and chiding scientists for losing the message war.
• Idiocracy (2006): Two modern-day people have their bodies put into stasis by the military—which forgets about the experiment—and wake up 500 years in the future to find the human race has devolved. It’s crass comedy but one of the best examples of human evolution to be portrayed in a movie.
• Encounters at the End of the World (2007): This was acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog’s answer to March of the Penguins. While there are penguins in the movie, there are also volcanologists and physicists, maintenance workers at science stations and stunning footage of the Antarctic underwater.
• WALL-E (2008): The sweet love story of the only robot left cleaning up the Earth after humans have fled takes on the themes of environmentalism, technology and even human evolution. The film won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
• Star Trek (2009): There’s this one lovely moment at the beginning of the movie where there is silence in space, a rarity in science fiction films. So the movie makers got much of the rest of the science wrong. Who cares? We really like the reinvented Star Trek universe, especially the new Spock.

What was your favorite science-y movie of the 2000s? Tell us in the comments below.

Death from the Skies!

How will the world end? When Hollywood answers that question, the result is often terrifying but completely unrealistic. But the realms of reality can be even scarier than fiction, as astronomer Phil Plait deftly illustrates in Death from the Skies!, which comes out in paperback this week.

Each chapter begins with a movie script-ready scenario of Armageddon. Before delving into the topics of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, for example, there comes the story of a cold winter made worse when an event—prefaced by sunspots but not yet named—knocks out power for half the planet. Without heat, thousands die, and entire countries are driven bankrupt by the catastrophe. Having hooked his reader thusly, Plait then goes on to describe in easy-to-understand language what had caused the disaster, including how we know that such things happen and whether or not we should be scared.

Topics include gamma-ray bursts, black holes and even alien attacks. And a chart near the back of the book handily sums up the risk of each event, level of damage and whether or not we could prevent such things from happening. The most likely scenario is being hit by an asteroid, though we might one day be able to prevent these strikes. Near impossible in our time, thankfully, are the deaths of the sun or the universe. Most worrisome, though, might be the supernovae, which if one occurred close enough to Earth could lead to a mass extinction.

This book should be on the shelf of every disaster flick screenwriter. Perhaps we would then get movies with plots that are even more terrifying for the possibility that they could really happen.

“The Universe is vast beyond imagining, and wields mighty forces,” Plait writes. And for the events in his book, “it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.” Scary, indeed.

The Security Service, more commonly known as MI5, is the UK’s security intelligence agency. It is responsible for protecting the country against covertly organised threats to national security. In addition, it provides security advice to a range of other organisations, helping them to reduce their vulnerability to threats.

We are looking for a Chief Scientific Adviser to lead and co-ordinate the scientific work of the Security Service so that the Service continues to be supported by excellent science and technology advice. Candidates for this unique and challenging role will need to have:

• World-class scientific expertise and credibility in relevant scientific and technology disciplines.
• Excellent strategic skills.
• Outstanding influencing and communication skills.
• Experience of building an effective network and of creating a high quality team.
• A successful track record of managing critical projects and processes in a complex environment.

The role will require a 2-3 day a week commitment.

To be eligible to apply, you must meet our residency criteria. You must be a born or naturalised British Citizen and one of your parents must be a British Citizen or have substantial ties to the UK. Candidates must normally have been resident in the UK for 9 out of the last 10 years. This is particularly important if you were born outside the UK. You will nonetheless be considered if you have, for example, served overseas with HM Forces or in some other official capacity as a representative of Her Majesty’s Government, studied abroad, or lived overseas with your parents.

Due to vetting requirements you will need to be 18 years old, or above, to apply. Your application may take around 6 months to process.

Discretion is important to the Service, so please only discuss this application with your partner and/or immediate family.

For further information and how to apply go to http://appointments.egonzehnder.com or request an application pack by telephone at 020 7943 4876.

Applications must arrive no later than close of business on 24 April 2009.

To find out more about the Security Service please visit the website at www.mi5.gov.uk

The Security Service is committed to reflecting both equal opportunities and the society we protect.