Month: December 2018

Enlarge / The crew of the USS Orville stands ready for a new season of adventures in season 2 of The Orville. (credit: Fox Broadcasting)

The Orville, Seth MacFarlane's warm homage to the Star Trek franchise, delighted viewers with the interstellar adventures of the crew aboard the titular starship. As the series gears up for its season 2 premiere on Sunday night, Ars sat down with writer/producer and science advisor Andre Bormanis to talk about some of the science behind our favorite episodes in the first season.

(Some spoilers for season 1 below.)

The Orville had a rocky start, at least in terms of critical reception, garnering just a 19 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it debuted. Viewers begged to differ: they gave the freshman series a 91 percent favorable rating, won over by its skillful mix of humor and drama. That's a tough balance to pull off, but The Orville does so more often that not. This is a smart series that combines slapstick humor and witty dialogue with cutting edge science and the odd literary reference. (In one episode, the Orville visits a two-dimensional world, complete with an allusion to Edwin Abbot's satirical allegory, Flatland.)

Enlarge / Computers, they're just like us! (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Every time I take my kids to the library, I always gravitate toward the non-fiction section and, in particular, the space books. (Hey, it's a good primer for Star Trek!)

This year, there's been some amazing new children's books that I've loved reading and have read repeatedly in recent months.

Here are my four favorites, in no order:

Scientists at Caltech have created the world's smallest game board for playing tic-tac-toe out of DNA strands. What's more, it's possible to swap hundreds of DNA strands in and out at once to reconfigure the nanostructure at will, making it possible in principle to build complicated nanomachines in different custom patterns. The scientists described their work in a December paper in Nature Communications.

Back in 2006, Caltech bioengineer Paul Rothemund figured out how to fold a long strand of DNA into simple shapes, demonstrating this "DNA origami" technique by producing a smiley face. All you need is a long strand of DNA, plus several shorter strands ("staples"). Combine them in a test tube, and the shorter strands pull various parts of the long strand together so that it folds over into any number of simple shapes. DNA origami was a huge advance for nanotechnology, but to really achieve its full potential, scientists needed to be able to create larger and more complex structures.

Last year, Rothemund's Caltech colleague Lulu Qian introduced a cheap means of getting DNA origami to assemble itself into large arrays. The best part: you could create custom patterns. The array was a bit like a blank canvas, and Qian demonstrated the power of her technique (dubbed "fractal assembly") by creating the world's smallest version of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," visible only with atomic force microscopy.