For a dry ice martini, try the Hungry Scientist Handbook

Do you like to play with your food? Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns, the authors of "The Hungry Scientist Handbook," do. In the book -- officially out next Tuesday, but available now on Amazon -- they bring their love of technology into the kitchen and share simple DIY instructions for light-up lollipops, pomegranate wine and more.

Many of the projects in the book, which were inspired by group dinners near San Francisco, began with questions. Can you fold up wonton wrappers like origami paper? Yes: the book has complete instructions for making the crane croutons above. Could you create conductive frosting, so that a birthday cake could be decorated with LED lights instead of candles? After some icky false starts, they hit on a tasty recipe, explained in chapter four.

There are also crafty/construction projects; one, which requires some tools and skill, is building an oversize outdoor barbecue-like contraption called a hotbox. Just about anybody could make the portable camp stove from three cans of cheap beer (one needs to remain unopened, which is probably best for everyone).

This is not a kiddie book, as can be seen in the photos accompanying the first project: edible caramel lace lingerie. It's really for grownups with a sense of fun, for people who think fizzy lemonade would be more zesty with dry ice -- the same kind of people who'd love to sip a dry ice martini (stirred, not shaken, because once it's added to the shaker the martinis begin "bubbling like crazy").

The thing about DIY manuals is that they begin to make you believe that you really could do any of this yourself. Me, I'm wondering if there's a way to get dry ice into the martinis in people's hands, so they get to see the spectacular bubbling. Maybe dangle some in a tea infuser? Since there's a resource list in the back of "The Hungry Scientist Handbook," I'm halfway there -- I know where to find some edible dry ice.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Lenore M. Edman of www.evilmadscientist.com

Sean M. Carroll: life at the edge

Today Brett Levy reviews "Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge," an anthology of scientists and science fiction writers looking very far forward.

Among the contributors is Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who is among the bloggers at Cosmic Variance, an essential if occasionally mind-blowing Web stop. There you'll find him writing about physicist-y stuff, including excerpts of a paper on a long-range "fifth force": "A long-range fifth force coupled to dark matter can induce a coupling to ordinary matter if the dark matter interacts with Standard Model fields." But just when your brain starts to hurt, he'll post with exasperation about a billboard campaign that says, "Sex can wait" because "I want to be an engineer."  "That's why you should become scientists, kids!" he blogs. "(Because engineers don't have sex.  You want me to spell it out for you?)"

But back to the book. Levy notes that Freeman Dyson is the progenitor of many of the authors' ideas. In 2003, Dyson spoke at the TED conference; that video has just been made available online. And it's after the jump.

Listening to Leonard Susskind

In college, I had a roommate who came off an acid trip babbling endlessly about "the universal hologram." When she became obsessed with repeatedly washing down the walls of our room with bleach, I chalked it up to post-trip craziness. But maybe I should have paid closer attention: Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind has proposed a holographic principle that might just be crazy enough to be true, according to Jesse Cohen, who reviews Susskind's latest book today.

In "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind not only discusses the holographic principle and string theory, the book is also "a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship."

In this interview with rock musician and physicist Brian Cox, Susskind shows his amiability while discussing string theory over wine.

If you like Susskind's style, you can sit in on his continuing education class in quantum mechanics; Stanford has put the series of all nine lectures online.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ice on Mars is no surprise ...

... at least not to award-winning sci-fi writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford ("Timescape," "If the Stars Are Gods," "The Sunborn").

When the UC Irvine professor and his (uncredited) coauthor, biologist Elisabeth Malartre, were researching their bestselling 1999 novel, "The Martian Race," they were "fairly certain" that ice eventually would be found on Mars, especially near the poles.

"Since 1999, NASA has found caves (large, identified from orbit) and plenty of signs of recent fluid flows down slopes, from momentary melting," Benford wrote in an e-mail after NASA announced that the substance uncovered by the Phoenix lander was most probably ice.

The before and after images -- of white stuff uncovered in a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic claw that disappears over a few days -- are spectacular in their simplicity. They underscore, for me at least, the Red Planet's grip on the human imagination. Why is that?

Post-Festival of Books: Science fiction notes

Joe Hill and his dad: It was nice to find Joe Hill completely at ease talking about his father, Stephen King, during the science fiction/fantasy/horror panel Sunday morning. "He's my first reader," he said. "I've learned a lot from him." But, as he told the audience, he decided not to approach publishers as Joseph Hillstrom King (his given name) because "it would have been beneficial for me only in the short run."

  "If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said.

But because "Heart-Shaped Box" received favorable reviews, Hill feels comfortable enough now when the question is raised about his father. When an older audience member approached the mike and even complained -- "There's a lot that's wrong with horror today, all that slasher stuff, and much of it has to do with Stephen King" -- Hill responded that his father's work "in large part explores the experiences of the middle class, what they're feeling. I think he prides himself on being a reporter of what's going on. But if you want Lovecraft and all that, go ahead, man. It's a wide field. You can always find something else to read."

Other bits: Kevin Anderson, who completed Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga with Herbert's son, Brian, told the audience that a new motion picture of "Dune" may be in the works. "Let's keep our fingers crossed," he said. The special effects technology that's available today, he said, might lead to an even richer realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.

James Howard Kunstler wasn't on this panel (he was on a fiction panel later in the day), but he easily could have been for his novel "World Made By Hand." His novel looks at life in a future world where energy resources have run out and people revert to an existence resembling 19th century life.

I'm mentioning it here because Kunstler explained that he wanted his book to respond to the post-apocalyptic picture of the world that readers get in Cormac McCarthy's harrowing novel "The Road." "I want people to feel some hope about the future," he said. "I just want them to realize that there are alternatives to what that novel presents."

-- Nick Owchar 

Joe Hill photo: Beth Gwinn