star trek

Star Trek introduced the world to a wide range of fictional technology, most of which, like beaming or warp drive, will likely remain fiction. However, a team of scientists from the University of Canada has taken the phaser, the show's famous stun-laser, out of the TV and into reality. Unfortunately, right now it only works on worms.

Ever dreamed of having a personal communicator built right into your clothing, a la Star Trek? That dream might be closer to reality than you realized. Finnish company Patria Aviation Oy has spent the last 18 months bringing to life a flexible antenna that can be worn on the sleeve of your favorite shirt. With the support of the European Space Agency (ESA), Patria created a patch with personal communication and GPS tracking capabilities that could satisfy even those on the Starship Enterprise.

The very first Macintosh Plus is up for auction, but that's not all: serial number 0001 was a gift from Apple Computer to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in January 1986. Bidding on the system -- with its 1MB of RAM -- will start at $800 (original sticker was $2,600) through auctioneer Profiles in History in October.

Harry Kloor may be the world’s most well-rounded nerd. He is the only person to have earned doctorates in physics and chemistry simultaneously, and he has penned episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. And when NASA asked him for help in improving its image with young people, he drew on both of those experiences. The best way to get kids enthused about outer space, Kloor figured, was to hide their medicine in a bucket of popcorn. Next February, Quantum Quest, a star-studded CGI space adventure that pairs animated protons with real footage from NASA spacecraft, hits theaters. “Many of NASA’s scientists were inspired by Star Trek and Star Wars,” he says. “I want to inspire that kind of passion.” We caught up with Kloor to find out why kids will go nuts for quarks.

Science geeks, Trekkers, and action-movie fans have now had a few days to digest the newest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise. PopSci set out to answer some of the movie's most puzzling questions (aside from what Winona Ryder was doing on Vulcan): Can we time-travel through black holes? Can we seed said black holes using something called "red matter"? How about teleportation -- will someone named Scotty (or Chekov) ever beam someone up?

Fourteen years ago I instructed all of my friends and relatives to file past the picture of me with Spock and into the the basement of the synagogue so we could begin my Star Trek-themed bar mitzvah reception. Needless to say, it would be a long while before I had a date.

Summer is coming, and that means robots, teleportation, antimatter bombs, dinosaurs, an elite high-tech fighting force, fictional metals with unearthly properties ... we love it!

Here’s a look at the Hollywoodified science hitting the big screen this summer, complete with our highly scientific Expected Gibberish Quotient (EGQ).