Some quickies for you before I head down to Science Online. Here are the links to the discoveries lampooned in today’s comics: New Endoscopy Technique. Look at that thing. YOU swallow it. Stiff Supergel that melts when it is cooled Enjoy! I’ll try to update with some conference doodles if I have time. Hope to [...]
Without the sun as a guide, screwing up your inner clock is not hard to do—and it can have drastic consequences. Torturers seeking to “break” their captives often begin by using sensory deprivation to remove all sense of the passage of time. As such, astronauts are put on a tight schedule, to keep their circadian [...]
Taking a break from Mars-500 for a day while I review some literature regarding the sleep studies that were carried out during the mission. Friday’s Mars-500 comic will probably be the last for a while. Though we may check back on the crew at a later date. A tine totally broke off my comb! Wtfbbq [...]
While the Mars-500 living unit looked like your grandmother’s basement (ugh, the wood panels!) it was actually a pretty robust simulation. By design, the capsule was set up to simulate all the aspects of the actual mission, which included having landing module and an indoor mockup of the Martian surface—complete with dirt and rocks. Not [...]
Last week I drew a comic about a possible ruse one could employ to lure a wild Neil deGrasse Tyson out of hiding. I unceremoniously misattributed the joke to former/future roommate Jess, rather than future roommate Diana. For this I apologize profusely. What’s that about Neil’s height? That’s how tall he is in real life. [...]
The downside of not being able to draw a comic every day is that any series more than 3 or 4 comics feels like it really drags on, and that the time between them is a gaping abyss. I don’t remember feeling this with Super Woo, and that even had Nadir comics in between each [...]
For anybody just jumping in, over the next few comics I’ll be covering aspects of the landmark Mars-500 experiment, which put six guys (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij, Romain Charles, Diego Urbina, and Yue Wang) from a variety of backgrounds—including cosmonauts, engineers, and doctors—in a mockup of an Earth-to-Mars spacecraft for 520 days. The [...]
This isn’t the first comic about a Mars-based reality TV premise. Nor is the concept so strange to me anymore. But the difference between MArs-500 and its predecessor is that the former was a real experiment—a series of experiments, in fact. The production crews are probably going through the footage as we speak. While only [...]
All credit for this joke goes to [UPDATE: I DUN GOOF'D] the illustrious Diana Ho, who actually made the joke. [I'm so sorry!] (You can still visit Jess here). It’s a true story except for the part where we conducted a sting operation in the Rose Center for Earth and Space, where astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sits as director of [...]
Just a bonus comic for you all. The Facebook and Tumblr crowds already got a taste yesterday, but I spiffed up the image a bit and added examples of the crime against humanity that is “Back to the Future Day.” I’m sure the hoax started off innocently enough. The readout in Doc’s DeLorean DMC-12 is [...]