John Leslie is Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph’s Philosophy Department. He’s also associated with the Lifeboat Foundation and has written about and studied cosmology, metaphysics and cosmology.

I kick the week off with a short exchange with technology writer Paul Gilster author of Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration on the subject of spaceflight.

I interviewed another British researcher stationed at Halley Research Station in Antarctica about his life there. Mark Wales is an electrician currently wintering over in Britains most remote Antarctic research station.

One thing I like about this blog is that I get to ask just about all kinds of brainy types questions that have been nagging me. Today I have a short interview with Daniela Cerqui. She’s an anthropologist currently conducting research at the University of Reading’s Cybernetics dept

Today I pester science blogger Jennifer S Griffin on biological and molecular kinds of things.

MT How do you feel about the way science is portrayed in science fiction?

JG There is a very wide range of science fiction, and some of it is brilliant and fascinating.

Robert Peckyno has been a lecturer for the “Introduction to Space Studies” course at the University of North Dakota as well as the webmaster for Volcano World for the past four years. He is currently leaving UND to begin PhD work at Oregon State focusing on Martian volcanism and geomorphology.

I’m continuing the robots and ethics thread that I started with that Kevin Warwick interview last week (link). This week I bring you the perspective of Daniel Wilson author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, a funny and informative book on the future of robotics that reads like a quirky non-fiction take on science fiction.

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate and how changes related to varying forcings relate to variations due to intrinsic (unforced) climate variability, using general circulation models. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on the subject of climate change.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics and carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. I first heard of Kevin Warwick on the news several years ago when his nervous system was wired up to a computer. I didn’t take much notice of him at the time but I saw him again on Building Gods (a documentary available on Google Video- link)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Natasha recently, a transhumanist theorist and futurist with a background in the arts. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about transhumanism and futurism for us.

Sorry for the lack of content for the past 48 hours (and the lack of images) but blogger has been playing silly bugger. However I’m making up good today with an ace interview with Rudy Rucker. Rudy has always taken his writing into some very interesting directions. To get a taste of it I strongly reccomend that you check out his photo heavy blog

We’ve covered quite a bit on transhumanism, new technologies, and the singularity on Meme Therapy over the past few months. I decided to add another contrarian view to the mix and I found it in Bob Seidensticker author of Future Hype: The Myths of Technological Change.

After Karl Schroeder’s comments about cognitive science in our underrated technology brain parade (link) I decided to expand on the subject a little bit more. So I conducted a short interview with Chris Chatham who maintains a very good Cogsci blog. Apart from blogging Chris is a 1st year Grad student who is pursuing PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience.

We’ve interviewed a number of science fiction authors over the past three months. For an interesting change I thought I’d interview someone whose doesn’t write science fiction but whose job is very science fictional.

One of the most interesting treatments I’ve seen regarding extraterrestrial original of genetic and organic material was Fred Hoyle’s 1983 book “The Intelligent Universe.” He draws some intriguing correlations between weather conditions and sudden epidemics of “mutated” microbe strains, and has much to say about bacteria-like structures found in meteorites, that orthodox science (at that time anyway) tended to ignore.

The timing could not have been worse. While the United States suffered repeated pounding by hurricanes, on 19th September 2005 NASA Administrator Dr. Michael Griffin announced the details of President Bush’s plan to return human explorers to Earth’s moon and go on to Mars.