Paramount recently dropped 78 seconds of Into Darkness online. The trailer comes to us over 6 months before the film’s opening date (May 17, 2013). Take a look:

“After the crew of the Enterprise find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.” says IMDB.

There are a few things to note from the trailer. First, the trailer starts in what looks to be a funeral scene. Who died? Secondly, who is the villain in Into Darkness? Rumors have Benedict Cumberbatch’s role being Gary Mitchell or Khan. However, nobody really knows for sure.

Are you excited to see Star Trek Into Darkness? Will you be going to see IMAX screenings of The Hobbit to catch the full 9 minute trailer? Let us know in the comments below.

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Remember that project proposed by BTE-Dan? Remember how he wanted to make a real life version of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, drawing up all the necessary plans to do so? Thanks to some new DARPA funding, that dream could soon become a reality.

Sort of. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just received $500,000 in seed money from the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence to form 100 Year Starship (100YSS). The goal of this non-governmental initiative is to facilitate human interstellar flight within the next 100 years. The independent organization works with experts across many fields–like scientists and engineers, as well as artists and entertainers–to achieve this goal.

To be fair, half a million dollars isn’t going to do much. The “proposed” Gen1 Enterprise is estimated to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion dollars. We also have to realize that Voyager 1 is only just about to become the first manmade object to leave our solar system and it has taken the probe 35 years to get to the heliosphere. To have a starship capable of transporting humans that far for that long, let alone beyond our solar system, is quite the ambitious task indeed. Voyager 1, if it maintains its current pace of 3.6AU (about 334 million miles) per year would take another 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our next closest star.

As an aside, the Gen1 Enterprise is intended for intrastellar (within our solar system) missions, whereas the DARPA funding is more about going much, much further. Either way, I’m sure Neil deGrasse Tyson approves of this badass idea. We just have to come up with the other $999,500,000… and well, the tech and innovation to do it.

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BTE-Dan (Build The Enterprise Dan?) has published specifications for the iconic spacecraft, as well as estimations for the costs involved. He also has a mission plan and funding strategies, demonstrating that he has really thought this out. If everything goes according to plan, he said the real USS Enterprise (called the Gen1 Enterprise) could be built in as little as 20 years.

While his proposed Gen1 Enterprise will bear a resemblance to its sci-fi counterpart, its function will be a little different. This Enterprise will be a “spaceship, a space station, and a spaceport,” working in some ways similar to the current International Space Station, though BTE-Dan decries the lack of gravity on the ISS. He’s overcome it with a rotating magnetically-suspended gravity wheel in the saucer section, generating 1g. He also bemoans the “comical and primitive” toilet facilities and the cramped quarters. His Gen1 Enterprise would be home to about 1000 people.

As expensive as it sounds, Dan claims the the project would constitute only (I say only) 0.27 percent of the United States’ GDP, and would allow the construction of ever-more advanced Enterprises every 33 years. Dan claims this compares favorably to the Apollo era, when NASA’s budget averaged 0.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Further, at a spend of $40 billion per year, Dan reckons this equates to 1.1 percent of the 2012 budget.

This spaceship is not designed to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” Instead, the 1.5 GW nuclear-powered ion engine is for intra-solar system missions, reaching the Moon in 3 days and Mars in 90 days. It would not have any “faster than the speed of light” warp drives. One small step for man? One giant waste of time for mankind?

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He’s a cognitive science researcher and this has been a hobby interest of his for several years. Jansen first began work on the project in 2007, sparked by curiosity and looking to spark curiosity in others. With the second-generation model, he has loaded up a couple of OLED resistive touchscreens and plenty of sensors.

The new Tricorder can measure temperature, humidity, magnetic fields, atmospheric pressure, color, ambient light level, GPS location, and distance to an object. It’s actually pretty advanced and it all runs on Debian Linux. Power comes by way of six AAA batteries. Even better, Jansen is offering up the whole project for free for others to attempt. The schematcs are available through a TAPR non-commercial hardware license and the source code is available under GPL.

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To be fair, the NASA tractor beam is still in the very early development stages and the initial models won’t be really good enough to pull in rogue spaceships. Instead, the goal is to use these tractor beams to more efficiently and effectively capture space particle samples.

There are three approaches that they are considering. First, there is an “optical vortex” wherein two counter-propagating beams of light create a geometry that confines the particles to the dark core of the overlapping beams. The air around the particles are heated and the beam moves along the ring’s center. However, this requires an atmosphere, so it won’t work on, say, the moon’s surface.

Another possibility uses electromagnetic effects with optical solenoid beams. The intensity peaks spiral around the axis of propagation, creating a force that drives particles in teh opposite direction of the source of light beam. And third, they’re considering a Bessel beam, inducing electric or magnetic fields in the path of the object, pulling the object against the movement of the beam itself.

The video below shows us how they can theoretically “make it so.” Oh, and if you’re wondering why there is no sound, it’s because no one can hear you scream in space.

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Every Star Trek geek has dreamed of this day. We’ve all dreamed of setting our phasers to stun and making use of the Holodeck. Those two innovations aren’t quite here, but it seems like we’re getting closer to tractor beams.

Unlike regular lasers that push things away by plastic them with photons, a tractor beam would effectively be a laser that pulls things toward them. To do this, the Hong Kong scientists need something called a Bessel beam.

Also unlike regular lasers, Bessel beams remain focused at an infinite distance, rather than dispersing as it gets away from its source. Perhaps more interestingly, the Bessel beam is able to reconstruct itself past obstacles. It cannot be blocked.

Without digging too much into the science side of things, what this means it that scientists may be able to generate a large enough concentration of energy on the far side of the object and minimize the concentration of energy on the near side. The net result: the object is “pushed” toward the origin of the Bessel beam.

That’s some crazy stuff. Too bad, for now, it sounds like this is all theory and no practice. Where is Locutus of Borg when you need him?

[Giz via Arxiv.org]

Photo: Thomas Harriman

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