Month: December 2018

Enlarge / US Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) walks toward the Rummel Creek Elementary polling place on Election Day 2018. He lost his seat, which may have ripple effects well beyond Earth. (credit: Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif.—The political attack ad lunged straight for the jugular. In seeking to unseat Republican incumbent John Culberson from the House of Representatives, a pro-Democratic political action committee advertisement sneered at his enthusiasm for science and passion for finding life on another world for the first time.

"He wanted NASA to search for aliens on Europa, an icy moon millions of miles away," the narrator said. "For Houston, Lizzie Fletcher will invest in humans, not aliens."

The non-partisan Planetary Society condemned the advertisement as anti-science. "This dismissal of a scientifically valid area of study—one that could potentially reshape entire fields of science—should be roundly rejected by any citizen committed to a modern scientific society, regardless of political affiliation," the organization's chief advocate, Casey Dreier, argued.

Enlarge / Russia's Soyuz rocket and crew capsule are back in business after a launch Monday. (credit: NASA)

Less than two months after a booster separation issue with a Soyuz rocket caused a dramatic, high-gravity landing, the Russian vehicle soared back into space on Monday at 6:31 ET (11:31 UTC). The launch from Kazakhstan, under mostly clear, blue skies, was nominal as each of the rocket's first, second, and third stages fired normally.

The launch sent NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques, and Russian Oleg Kononenko into space aboard their Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft. After making four orbits around the Earth, their Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the Russian segment of the International Space Station at 12:35pm ET (17:35 UTC) Monday

This marked a critical launch both for Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, as well as NASA. For Russia, Monday morning's successful launch came after several high profile failures in recent years, which called the safety of its venerable Soyuz rocket into question.

Enlarge / The rankings are based on an "influence score" determined by how many times each film has been referenced in subsequent films. (credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Well, this is sure to spark some intensive debate. The classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is the most influential movie of all time, with Star Wars: A New Hope and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in second and third place, respectively. That's the conclusion of a new study by Italian scientists in the journal Applied Network Science, suggesting a fresh metric for determining a film's success, similar to that used for scientific publications.

According to co-author Livio Bioglio of the University of Turin, the usual metrics used to measure a film's success are inadequate for evaluating its true quality and significance. Box office receipts, for example, are affected by such non-aesthetic factors as advertising and distribution, while reviews are by nature inherently subjective. Plenty of now-classic films bombed at the box office and/or were critically savaged at the time of their release. (Ahem. Blade Runner, anyone?)

The Italian scientists reasoned that maybe the science of complex networks can help. "We propose an alternative method to box office takings and reviews for analyzing the success of a film," said Bioglio. "We have developed an algorithm that uses references between movies as a measure for success, and which can also be used to evaluate the career of directors, actors and actresses, by considering their participation in top-scoring movies."