sci-fi

Picture this: Invisibility cloak made from glass

Once or twice a year, we bring all you "Harry Potter" fans news of yet another invisibility cloak under development. So it is that we return with word of another scientist promising to help you perform your wizardry in secret.

This time, it's Elena Semouchkina who's venturing into H.G. Wells territory. An associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech University, Semouchkina has found a way to use magnetic resonance to route rays of light around objects, making the objects undetectable by the human eye.

Other researchers have bent visible light using things … Read more

'Tron' T-shirt glows just like it should

Online apparel store Threadless has a new T-shirt called My Other Ride Is a Light Cycle. Clearly inspired by the retro Disney movie "Tron," it features a glow-in-the-dark print that will make it look like you have a glowing printed circuit board on your body when the lights go off.

This tee is perfect for those who love the old movie and are looking forward to the upcoming sequel, "Tron: Legacy." The shirt is available now online for $20 and will probably go well with the Adidas Adicolor Tron shoes and tracksuit from 2006.

(Source: Crave Asia … Read more

Only 1 in 5 believe aliens are on Earth

All smokers smell. All buses are late. All politicians are mendacious narcissists.

Some things in life are so truly self-evident that they require no discussion. Which is why I was thrust into prehistoric hysteria by a piece of research that declared only 20 percent of the world's population believes that green people are already in our midst and enjoying our Corn Flakes.

According to Ipsos, the fine researchers of markets terrestrial and celestial, the majority of the world is still unwilling to accept that aliens are already here and disguised as us.

And by "disguised as us", … Read more

William Shatner takes on Facebook

An exercise in taking yourself out of, well, yourself is to follow William Shatner on Twitter.

It's not merely that he tries to end each of his tweets with the touching personalized sign-off, "My best, Bill." It's that Twitter.com/William Shatner is so darned revelatory.

A few days ago, the Kirk with the smirk offered this tweet: "Help us build www.MYOUTERSPACE.com to be the best that it can! Your feedback is priceless; you don't want to miss this. My best, Bill."

Good Lord, I thought. Has the captain bought himself … Read more

Martin Jetpack gives you turbines, lets you fly

Since I was young, I've dreamed of being a pilot. I'm still nowhere close to that shining goal as age slowly creeps up on me.

My next target is to cough up $90,000, which again is a near-impossible ambition as I am a poorly paid scribe. At least I can write about it. Humpf.

The Martin Jetpack by New Zealand's Martin Aircraft is the closest thing to bringing my childhood fantasies to life. If I place an order now and put down a 10 percent deposit, it could be mine in 12 months. The problem is … Read more

Season premiere floods 'Lost' fan wiki

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you probably know that the final season of sci-fi-action-adventure-drama series "Lost" premiered on Tuesday--so what happened over at one of its most popular fan sites? CNET hit up the team behind Wikia, which hosts and operates "Lost" fan encyclopedia Lostpedia, for some details on exactly what their traffic was like right after the two-hour episode aired.

In short: It wasn't the site's biggest night, but it was still impressive.

Sixty new pages were added to the wiki in the wake of the finale, additions that night … Read more

N.O.V.A.: The next best thing to Halo for iPhone

Will we ever see Halo for iPhone? Let me be the first to say: who cares? We've got N.O.V.A.

Short for Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance (as if that matters), Gameloft's first-person shooter borrows heavily from the Halo playbook.

You're the sometimes solo, sometimes squad-based hero out to save mankind from the alien threat du jour. The game's 13 single-player missions span five environments (from bunker to jungle to spacecraft), each one dripping in console-quality graphic goodness.

An excellent tutorial acclimates you to the controls, which are always a challenge for any iPhone/iPod … Read more

Top 5: Worst sci fi predictions

Science fiction loves to show us the future. But we've had enough science fiction around for a long enough time that we're starting to notice it's not very good at predictions. In this episode, we count down some of the worst predictions of sci fi. And we give you a chance to win a small pack of zombies from October toys. So watch, won't you? And then come back to answer the trivia question for a chance to win your own small army of zombies.

'Touchable holography' stars Wiimote

Remember those uber-cool 3D projections in flicks like "Star Wars?" The University of Tokyo has turned this movie fantasy into a reality with its latest holographic projector prototype.

For added realism, it utilizes a pair of Nintendo Wiimotes for hand movement tracking and a technology known as (ready for it...) Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display. This essentially adds tactile feedback to the hovering image via ultrasonic waves (the projected images float about 12 inches away from the display surface).

But enough of the tech speak, check out the following video to see the "touchable holography" system (PDF) … Read more

Q&A: The Ultimate Gamer--keeping a cool head

This post was updated at 11:30 p.m. PDT with a corrected photo credit. The photo of Alyson, aka Nin9ty Nin9, was taken by Stephen Couratier.

On Tuesday, after eight weekly episodes, video game enthusiasts--and others--saw a winner crowned in the Sci-Fi Channel's reality TV show, "World Cyber Games Ultimate Gamer."

Pitting 12 hard-core gamers--whom the public knew only by their first names and their "gamertags"--against each other in what could be called the video game version of "Big Brother," the show highlighted the difficulties of top-level gaming, as well as … Read more