Emotional Resonance & Rocket Launchers: YouTube Should Become The Next Scifi Channel

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column above how much trouble it was to download episodes of the scifi TV series I had been missing. I predicted it would take at least a few years for the technology and business models to shake out so that viewing Internet video would be as easy as watching television.

That day is fast approaching.

The TV networks are falling all over themselves to push you to their websites to watch reruns of your favorite shows and broadband capabilities have expanded to make watching them more seamless.

I, myself, have more recently come into the Web video world myself as content manager of Energy Policy TV, a website that's sort of a CSPAN for energy and the environment. As both a consumer and distributor of Internet video I'm astounded on a daily basis on how this market is moving.

In the realm of science fiction, as with most scripted TV series, big studios still control the content. Episodes may now live on the Web, but if some Hollywood executive axes a series, that video will still certainly dry up and we fans are still on the outs.

The Internet offers a different approach, however. We've heard for years how scifi is mostly a "niche" audience. Fair enough -- the Internet is absolutely designed to serve such niches.

A couple of years at a scifi convention, author and one-time Star Trek writer David Gerrold was describing how the costs for professional-quality gear -- the cameras, CGI generators, etc. -- were coming down dramatically on the production side of the equation.

The rise of Internet video now puts the distribution side of the equation in more and more hands, as well.

Fans have already begun making use of this convergence, of course. Several groups have sprung up in recent years that produce fan-produced Star Trek episodes, with fans also playing the major characters.

These projects, however, are the video equivilent of fan fiction -- there is no profit motive in it.

But what if an entrepreneurial producer were to take this to the next step?

What if someone were to tap some forward-thinking investors to create a for-profit, original Internet scifi series?

The idea would be to avoid Hollywood altogether. Hollywood has no monopoly on talent -- either in front of, or behind, the camera. Hire a cast and crew -- not for blockbuster salaries, but enough to live on comfortably.

Create special effects are that aren't Lucasfilm-level, but are of good quality and are good enough. Then sell advertising around the whole thing to pay the bills.

Take the whole enterprise, so to speak, directly to the fans -- I think they would respond overwhelmingly.

This new Web series would find its fans, who would feel a direct connection and investment with this sort of production precisely because they are closer to it -- they will not be separated by huge corporate entertainment conglomerates.

And more good science fiction would find its way into the world.

Any takers?

A former entertainment journalist, Scott Nance has been active with the USS Chesapeake Star Trek/scifi club for more than a decade.

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Star Trek Device Uses Ultrasound To Seal Punctured Lungs

A stretcher races through the entrance of a busy hospital. The car-accident victim lies on top and grimaces in pain. While surface injuries looks gruesome, the real medical danger is invisible -- internal organ damage caused by being crushed against the steering wheel.

This isn't a scene from Seattle Grace Hospital, the set of the popular television drama Grey's Anatomy, but from its real-life model, Harborview Medical Center. Engineers at the University of Washington are working with Harborview doctors to create new emergency treatments right out of Star Trek: a tricorder type device using high-intensity focused ultrasound rays. This summer, researchers published the first experiment using ultrasound to seal punctured lungs.

"No one has ever looked at treating lungs with ultrasound," says Shahram Vaezy, a UW associate professor of bioengineering. Physicists were skeptical it would work because a lung is essentially a collection of air sacs, and air blocks transmission of ultrasound. But the new experiments show that punctures on the lung's surface, where injuries usually occur, heal with ultrasound therapy.

"The results are really impressive," Vaezy says. He cautions that this is still in the early stages and the technique is not yet being tested on humans.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

In this case, lenses focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on the patient's lungs. Focusing the ultrasound beams, in a process similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creates a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. Meanwhile the tissue between the device and the spot being treated does not get hot, as it would with a laser beam.

"You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy says. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

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