Mexico has a long-standing tradition of observing the cosmos. The Aztec deciphered the position of the stars to develop the Aztec calendar. For the Aztec, stargazing was more than just a hobby—the Aztec calendar was used to the dates of the equinox, the solstice and the lunar phases. These dates were important because the agricultural calendar was based around them. Fortunately, for the Aztec, their calendar was even more precise than the Gregorian calendar we use today.

During the Aztec’s time, the summit of Mt. Tliltapetl remained unaltered by mankind’s touch. Now, on its crown sits a future Gran Telescopio Milimetrico, a large millimeter telescope complete with a dish that measures 50 feet in diameter. The telescope is a result of a collaboration between the United States and Mexico, headed by Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics and the University of Massachusetts.

While the ancient Aztec astronomers looked at the sky to facilitate our communion with the Earth, the new telescope will be aimed at the sky to increase our understanding of the heavens. The telescope will also facilitate the study of planets’ atmospheres. Astronomers also hope to better understand the physical processes that create cosmic structures and how they evolve. –Robin Kilmer

ISF unveiled the ImagineScope last fall at the Maker Faire in New York. Watch a clip from from the fair below:

Imagine a garbage man in space! Since the issue of space junk has been brought to light recently, cosmic garbage collection will be seen as a necessity in the near future if we are to explore space and continue using satellite communication. Fortunately, a solution is within reach, and it won’t require launching garbage men into space.

The idea of janitor satellites comes not from the imagination of George Lucas, but from the scientists at the Swiss Space Center in Lausanne, a city on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The scientists predict that the first janitor satellite models, which have already been christened Clean Space One, will be launched within five years.

The idea is a good one, but with a lot of details to sort out. Space trash travels at five miles per second, and even softball-sized junk can be hazardous. The Swiss would use a satellite to clean space, but much hazardous space waste derives from defunct satellites. If a space janitor satellite were to malfunction, chances are it too would become space waste.

If all goes as planned, however, Clean Space One will have the capacity to hunt and catch space junk by matching its trajectory and capturing it with a gripping claw before heading back to Earth. Clean Space One will then sacrifice itself for the sake of a cleaner cosmos as it and its captive trash both meet a fiery demise when they burn up on the way through the atmosphere. –Robin Kilmer

For more information read: Swiss Janitor Satellite Space Cleanup in The Guardian.

Ever since Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1916, the idea of time travel has been accepted as hypothetically possible. The theory became a muse for the arts and sciences. From scientists we got black holes and wormholes, and the artists became better equipped to add to a theme that dates back to ancient time.

Time travel, a concept that was previously limited to dreamers and myth-makers, steered the plot of texts ranging from the Sanskrit epics and the Talmud to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It is now a motif that has been shifted onto the shoulders of mad scientists as well.

In the short film Time Freak, a neurotic inventor unlocks the secrets of time travel and becomes obsessed with controlling the outcomes of events that happened the previous day. Time Freak, a product of husband and wife team Andrew Bowler and Gigi Bowler, became a favorite of ISF’s 2011 festival for it’s comedic take on the theory of relativity.

Time Freak received an Academy Award nomination for best live action short in an Oscar year that seemed obsessed with time travel. The Artist, which left audiences feeling like they had been through a time warp, won five awards, and Woody Allen received the Oscar for best original screenplay for Midnight in Paris, in which modern day Owen Wilson got to mingle with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway in 1920s Paris.

Though The Shore, directed by Terry George, took home the gold in the live action short category, the story behind Time Freak is Oscar worthy in itself. It is the result of a gamble that Bowler Causey took on their future. They had saved up $25,000 to invest in an apartment in New York City, but decided to invest the money in a short film instead. They got a happy ending that not even a mad scientist would want to change. – Robin Kilmer

In the ISF interview below, Writer/Director Andrew Bowler shares his thoughts about the Oscar Nomination and reveals what the future has in store for Time Freak.

IMAGINE SCIENCE FILMS: Before the Oscars you stated on Today’s THV that if you could go back in time you wouldn’t change a thing. Now that the Oscars have come and gone, if you had the capacity to go back in time, would you like to relive your Oscar night???

ANDREW BOWLER: I am feel very lucky to have the Oscar night we had. I would be happy to go back in time and relive it if it means not changing a thing cause I wouldn’t want to do anything differently. That’s not true… my hair was doing some weird things at times and if I could do it over, I might have made a different hair decision or two but other than that, no regrets and certainly no need to change anything.

ISF: Time Freak has been in many film festivals. Any thoughts on having it screened at the Imagine Science Film Festival???

AB: We were approached and asked to submit to the Imagine Science film Festival, which is a great position to be in as a filmmaker. It’s also great for us cause we were a very Brooklyn-made project so getting to be in a few Brooklyn and New York based festivals allowed all our friends, family and crew to see the movie with an audience. I was not able to attend the Imagine Science Film Festival in person but I had friends who went and had an amazing time. I love the idea of a film festival with a theme. Time Freak has been in a few comedy film festivals, which is nice cause the audience goes prepared to laugh. With a science film festival, the audience is primed for a different kind of viewing experience, which is really cool.

ISF: You and Gigi mentioned that you want to do a feature length version of Time Freak, and are already working on a script. Any chance you’ll submit that to ISF???

AB: We would love to submit the Time Freak feature to ISF. First we should make sure it’s a good script and than a good movie. We are having a great time writing it but we wanna make sure we get the most out of the idea before setting out to make it.

ISF: There is a time in everyone’s life, many times a day for some people, in which we always wish we could have taken back something we said or did. Did the idea for Time Freak derive more from this universal experience or a penchant for nerdiness, or both???

AB: Time Freak started as a joke about the worst thing you could do with a time machine. I pictured someone overlooking the infinite possibilities that come with time travel cause they were caught up in the mundane. That made me laugh. I am sci-fi nerd for sure but I was far more interested in neurotic behavior than I was in time travel. Time travel is just a premise.?

ISF: How would you describe your relationship with science? ?

AB: I don’t have much a relationship with science other than a deep respect for it. I was not much of a student so I didn’t get very far on my science education. But when we made Time Freak I decided that some of the math you see around the lab needed to be authentic so those are real equations taken from papers and studies about the possibility of time travel. I have no idea what they mean but they look real, because they are real and that is very comforting to a filmmaker.

ISF: If time travel were possible, which time period would you like to visit??

AB: I would love to go back in time and make movies during the era of the studio system. Maybe it’s just from the contrast of today’s film climate where so few films get made but the idea of a director making two or even three films in a year blows my mind. I believe film making is one of the hardest art forms to get right and it’s so hard to practice actually making films when a fantastic, dream career is one where the filmmaker has gotten to make, lets say 10 films? Most filmmakers get very few chances to actually execute their art form let alone get good at it.

Imagine getting smashed at a frat party to get rid of a stomach bug. While some people swear that a shot of whisky will ward away a sore throat or a minor infection, it turns out that for fruit flies getting drunk is a matter of life or death.

Death for fruit flies comes in the form of parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in fruit fly larvae, the optimal result for the wasp larvae being that they feed on the innards of their host and burst out of the flies fully formed. The only protection a fruit fly has against these parasites is an alcohol binge.

We humans are familiar with the sight of fruit flies loitering around those week-old bananas we never had time for. We’ve seen them zooming about aimlessly, shifting course at the drop of a dime, almost as if they were drunk. And there is a good chance that they are drunk since they subsist on fermented fruit.

Inebriation is not limited to fully grown fruit flies. In a serious case of underage boozing fruit fly larvae actively seek out fruit with high alcohol content, especially if they have been infected with wasp larvae. In a study at Emory University, infected fruit fly larvae were placed in a Petri dish with alcoholic food and non-alcoholic food. Within 24 hours 80 percent of the fruit fly youth had congregated around the alcoholic side of the Petri dish.

While these underage lushes may suffer from alcohol poisoning, they lessen their chances of being devoured from the inside out because it turns out that the wasps die from second hand drinking. Todd Schlenke, study researcher and assistant professor at Emory University explained to MSNBC: “If you dissect a fly that was fed alcohol food, the wasps were obviously dead and in a lot of cases the internal organs of the wasp larvae had fallen out of the wasp’s anus.” –Robin Kilmer

For everyone’ who has had a hangover, this makes puking your guts out seem delightful in comparison.

For more information read MSNBC’s A Parasitic Wasp Is No Match For a Drunken Fruit Fly

The Award for the winning film is an amazing package for two members of the winning creative team:

• Magazine Science Expression Award
• Screening at the IMAGINE SCIENCE FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK, October 2012
• A Master Class in Film Directing with Professor Jay Anania, Head of Directing at New York University Tisch Graduate Film School

CARBON
a site specific installation by Charles Lindsay is on display at The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) (Rensselaerville, NY/NYC)

At the heart of CARBON lies a camera-less photographic process that Lindsay has invented. His imaging technique fuses together mark-making with science, beginning with a unique carbon based emulsion applied to a transparent base that is electrified, frozen, and manipulated in various ways. Beginning in the analog realm, the negatives which exhibit highly dimensional forms in extreme resolution are then scanned, digitally layered, and printed up to 60 feet long or animated for video applications. Numerous generations in the fluid’s history create minute evaporation trails, rendering an archeology of time.

A photographer, musician, and installation artist who originally trained to be a geologist, Charles Lindsay is fascinated by the aesthetics of scientific imaging and the great experiment that is life on earth. His work harnesses the organic, the sensory, and the mechanized to explore our perception of the universe and the evolution of symbols. At the heart of CARBON is a hybrid camera-less process Lindsay invented. This imaging technique fuses mark making with photography, utlizing a unique carbon based emulsion that he electrifies, freezes, and manipulates in many ways. The fantastically detailed negatives are scanned at high resolution, digitally processed, and then printed or animated. A similar analog to digital transformation occurs in his sound works, beginning with field recordings he gathers in remote environments and then processes.

“My influences range from bizarre bio-forms and insect polyrhythms to fluorescent minerals and galactic super-structures. The bioluminescent comb jellyfish is a prime example. Making art is a way to explore pattern recognition and modes of perception and communication. What are the visceral and emotional responses to these stimuli? How does our mind grasp a new experience or process an unfamiliar shape that subconsciously elicits fear? I am intrigued by the idea that so much of our most trusted knowledge is based on images from beyond our normal scope of vision. With this in mind I am interested in our rapid evolutionary arc from early primates to astronauts and the increasing role devices play in ‘seeing’. How will we evolve as as a species, will biology and artificial intelligence merge and what does life on earth suggest about what intelligent life might look or sound like elsewhere in the universe? Conceptually, I become most curious when ideas reach beyond the anthropocentric to suggest worlds with vastly different evolutionary paths from our own. The implication inherent to CARBON is the existence of species of consciousness other than our own.”

Imbued with the clarity of vision possessed by explorers throughout the ages, Charles Lindsay’s CARBON project is a journey into mysterious and uncharted realms. He presents his art both as physical touchstones from psychological journeys and as catalysts to activate the viewer’s senses, offering access to hidden dimensions which fill us with wonder and a curiosity for the unknown.

Charles Lindsay spent ten years covering environmental issues as a photojournalist in Southeast Asia before moving back to the U.S. Solo exhibitions of CARBON have previously appeared at the Dennos Museum in MIchigan, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho, and Visions West Gallery in Montana. Lindsay’s work was included in Lyle Rexer’s book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2009) and in the accompanying exhibition at the Aperture Foundation in New York City. His experimental music was most recently presented at New York University’s Frederick Lowe theater as part of the Ear to the Earth Festival. Lindsay’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the hewlett Packard Contemporary Art Collection

Lindsay’s photographs have appeared in numerous international publications including The New York Times Magazine, Blind Spot, Aperture, Men’s Journal, Sports Illustrated, CPW’s PQ, and others. He has been profiled on National Public Radio, and CNN Internationl. He has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, Pratt Institute, and the Open Center in New York, among others. Four monographs of his work have been published to date including Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest (Aperture, 1992). Recently appointed to the Executive Committee of Musicians for the Environment, a branch of the Electronic Music Foundation, Lindsay is also the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography and is the first artist-in-residence at the renowned SETI Institute.

To learn more about his work, work visit www.charleslindsay.com

To view CPW’s press release about the exhibition CARBON, click here.

Imagine snail mail and landlines being primary forms of communication! Not too hard to imagine because that was soooo fifteen years ago you might think. But Space Junk 3D, a new Imax 3-D movie that debuted on January 13 elucidates that though these forms of communication might be soooooo fifteen years from now.

The movie highlights the Kessler Effect, also known as the Kessler Syndrome, which points to rogue trash as an antagonist that will prevent space travel and satellite communications. But Donald Kessler, who proposed the theory in 1978, wasn’t talking about baby diapers or hamburger wrappers. He was talking about space trash.

Trash is as ugly as it is omnipresent. Consistent with humanity’s tradition of befouling every place we go, we have been dumping detritus even in the heavens ever since we entered the space age. The difference between terrestrial debris and space debris is that the latter travels at a speed of five miles per second. An object of one kilo traveling at this speed causes greater damage than one kilo of TNT.

Every time space trash collides space trash, more trash is born out of the impact. In 2009 two satellites, one relaying phone calls, and the other a defunct Russian communications center crashed and splintered into approximately 2,100 pieces. Though the crash’s immediate effects were small, resulting in dropped phone calls, the event proved correct Kessler’s theory.

A few dropped phone calls might not be alarming collateral, but what about the billion dollar International Space Station? The ISS has had too many encounters with lethal trash for the Kessler Effect to be taken lightly. 2010 saw two close calls when chunks of expired satellites zoomed within a mile’s reach of the ISS—each big enough to completely decimate the laboratory.

And space trash is not just dangerous in space. Just like a plastic water bottle tossed to the ground, space trash eventually has no other way to go but down. There are approximately 20,000 chunks of trash bigger than softballs in the space junkyard and over half a million the size of marbles.

Indeed, with time, the stew of trash high above us becomes more and more lethal. For every space trash collision increases the chances of further collisions, making the cosmic shore a minefield that even Han Solo would find difficult to navigate. — Robin Kilmer

For more information read Space Debris: When Will We Clean Up Our Act? in the Huffington Post and Wired Magazine’s The Looming Space Junk Crisis: It’s Time to Take Out the Trash

On January 24th, the documentary film Searching for the First European (in Spanish with English subtitles) will be opening the new Culture & Science Series at the Cervantes Institute in Manhattan.

ISF’s Producer Luis Quevedo is curating this series of events that will blend equal parts of narrative and science into a dialogue between two renown characters.

The film is a road-movie flavored scientific journey where a young man searching for the origins of Europeans, and Eudald Carbonell, an eminent archaeologist and co-director of the excavations at the Archaeological Site of Atapuerca, travel through three continents in search of ancient clues that will shed light on the present and future of our species.

En Busca del Primer Europeo has been awarded “Best Documentary” in Spain’s 2011 “Prismas” prize; “Scientific Jury Grand Prize / Gran Premio della Giuria Scientifica Special Award / Menzione Speciale” in Rome’s 2011 DOCSCIENT; and “Oficial Selection” at the Zaragoza Film Festival 2011. Click here to watch the trailer.

We would love to see you all there! Join us at the Cervantes!

When: Tuesday, January 24th, 6:30pm
Where: Cervantes Institute, 211 East 49th Street, New York , NY 10017

Al Attara, in front of the the Metropolitan Exchange building on Flatbush Avenue, which he has owned for 32 years.
Photo by Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The Imagine Science Films offices have relocated downtown to 33 Flatbush Avenue. The building, which from the outside is a staid and formal reminder of Brooklyn’s industrial past, is gaining a reputation for its unique group of renters and their spirit of reinvention. Artists, scientists, green architects, media designers and filmmakers fill the expansive lofts with their start-up businesses and new visions of the world. Some of our new neighbors include: Maria Aiolova and Mitchell Joachim of Terreform One, Janna Levin who is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, and James Patten of Patten Studios.

Al Attara, owner and manager of 33 Flatbush first bought the former Metropolitan Exchange Bank 32 years ago for under $250,000. It was his vision to create an environment for artists, designers, and architects to work side by side in the 45,000-square-foot space and he has succeeded in doing just that.

ISF is very excited to join this inspiring atmosphere and is looking forward to contributing to the collaborative spirit.

Click here to read more about the history of ISF’s new offices.