I’ve been tempted to link to some of the ReGenesis science Facts Behind the Fiction articles I’ve written, but I kept putting it off because I’m always a few weeks ahead, and always know that the next one will be more interesting. But now I have to draw your attention to it again, because this week two of my favourite episodes are airing. Episode 8 already aired last Sunday but is being repeated tonight (April 24th) on the Movie Network. It’s about evil crows, very Hitchcockian (Hitchcockesque?) and the final solution was a creative chain of events. The fact sheet for that was one of my favourite to write so far, and is up here.Next Sunday (April 27) Episode 9
Next Sunday (April 27) Episode 9 airs, and I won’t spoil it other than to say that it involves a lot of molecular biology (yay!) and that it is the most exciting episode of the whole season in terms of story, but also the most science-heavy one. It may sound like an impossible combination, but they totally pull it off.
Highlights from past episode fact sheets include the one about engineered red blood cells. For every ReGenesis science fact sheet I write, I have to find some useful links for the “read more” section. Those are sometimes very hard to find, especially for technical things which only exist in jargon-rich journals behind paid subscriptions. In those cases Wikipedia is often the most accessible source of information, and we all just have to hope that the page doesn’t change for the worse. When I was looking for something on engineered red blood cells, however, I found a very easy to read piece in the New York Times. “This is good”, I thought. “Who wrote this?”. And of course it was Carl Zimmer. Thanks Carl, for not making me have to link to Wikipedia!
Another piece I liked writing was the one about satellites because it was so very different from the usual diseases that come by every episode. And did you know that dogs can get a type of cancer in which the cancer cells themselves are the parasite? That’s freaky and creepy. I found out about it when researching episode 4.
