DC comics proudly gives us Batgirl #38
writers Stewart & Fletcher with artist Tarr


Batgirl, while chasing a criminal, throws an object in the criminals car. The object erupted with goo pouring out of it and immobilized the criminal. She politely visits the lad and give the explanation above. This awesome display of science leaves us me with questions!

QUESTIONS:
1.) What is polyurethane?
2.) Can it be made into a foam?
3.) Is it pink and does it have the property of absorbing enough shock to help someone in an crash?

ANSWERS:

Image presents Howtoons #2
Van Lente (w) Fowler (a)


I cannot emphasize enough the admiration I have for this book. They have taken science and made it into an adventure that can be read and understood for all ages. This is a great way to digest some good science AND they have engineering projects! Like building a go-kart. Amazing ideas and amazing work.  
Look at the clip to your left, it's full of god science. It shows you how much energy is in one peanut and then gives that every relevance to the real world. My hat is off to them. 
Also, if you look below, there is a clip of a 2-page spread on all the difference types of energy that culminated to make the peanut to give a wholistic energy picture of how it all transforms. 
As a bonus, there are instructions on how to make a go-kart! great stuff. I highly recommend this book! 

DC's Justice League 33 by Johns (w) and Mahnke (a)
Luther is doing his best to prove that he belongs in the Justice League as he tries to get to Power Ring but Dr. Caulder, Chief of the Doom Patrol, stands in his way. Chief damages Luther's armor by using EMP's (electro-magnetic pulses). Certainly Luther's armor uses electricity and circuits to provide added shielding and make the armor smarter. So, an EMP could disrupt any vulnerable circuits. While Luther is briefly down he is lectured by Dr. Caulder regarding the source of fear in the body. 

QUESTIONS:
1.) What is the basolateral nucleus?
2.) Is the Amygdala associated with emotions or fear?
3.) What is psycho-surgery? 

Answer before I do!
1.) It's located in the amygdala. It receives sensory signals from the temporal lobe and processes the information to send out. 
2.) Yes, the amygdala is responsible for the storage and processing of emotions, including fear. Look below for a diagram of this area of the brain. 
3.) This is a real. Psychosurgery any type of neurosurgical surgery to treat a mental illness. This is a sensitive issue as psychotherapy is much more widely accepted. 

I must tip my hat to Johns has he has done his research and successfully integrated good science into Justice League #33. 

This months installment of a fun sic-fi thriller has the President of the U.S. sweeting bullets as an alien craft blew up one of Jupiter's moons for seemingly no reason. While talking to the science guy, who is rocking a bow-tie (sorry no clip) the President realizes how much power the aliens have. He worries that Earth might be next. 

QUESTIONS! 
1.) How many moons does Jupiter really have? 
2.) How many Joules does a nuclear bomb give off? 
3.) Is 2.94 x 10^22 Joules a lot?

ANSWERS:
1.) There are 67 moons for Jupiter! There are 50 moons and 17 provisional moons. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Jupiter&Display=Moons

2.) Some nuclear weapons contain about 20 megatons, which equates to average blast of 4x10^15 Joules. 
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MuhammadKaleem.shtml

3.) YES! 6 million megatons of nuclear power does equate to about 6x10^22. This would likely render Earth uninhabitable. 


My hat is off to Charles Soule for doing his math and science homework! Kudos! Keep up the good work! 

Dynamite's Justice Inc. #1
credits in the flip to the left. 


Uslan's science research is servicing Doc Savage's character well as he has Savage working at the prestigious Hadron Collider and meddling with time. Time is a very controversial topic in physics. Many of the major physists cannot agree on the concept of its nature; some even disagree that it exists at all. Savage states that all time exists at once and the past and future can be observed if you know how to look. Well, he figured out a way to look into the past by colliding particles together and creating a wormhole in time. All this interesting science leaves me with some...


QUESTIONS:
1.) What is the Large Hadron Collider and where is it located?
2.) How can we have the concept of all time existing at once?
3.) What is a wormhole?
4.) What is a Universal Quantum Machine?


ANSWERS:
1.) The Large Hadron collider is a 16.78 mile long tube underground that uses magnetic fields to speed up subatomic particles to get them collide and fragment to understand their fundamental makeup. This marvelous equipment is located in Geneva, Switzerland. 
http://www.stfc.ac.uk/646.aspx

2.) This is a bit mind boggling but it has to do with the concept of space-time. If people are at rest, the view time in the same way because they are occupying space in the same way. However, if one person is moving that person will now view time in a different way than the person sitting. Since we do not move very fast or normally look at things at a great distance it is hard to see this concept expressed because the larger the distance the more distorted the time effect become when moving. If you move toward an object you can see its future. Likewise, if you move away from an object you can see its past. So, seemingly all time exists at once. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks

3.) A wormhole would be like a tunnel through space-time what would allow someone to go to the past or future. Theory speaks of such things but it, of course, has not been observed in nature. This may be simply due to the fact we are still strapped to Earth without the ability to go boldly where no man has gone before. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0916_050916_timetravel_2.html


4.) If you look below Uslan says the Universal Quantum Machine is also the Universal Turing Machine. A Turing Machine is a simple program to complete a task like 4 + 4 = 8. Now, the tasks can but more complicated than this and, of course, the machine uses binary language to complete a task. A Universal Turing Machine is a Turing Machine that can do more than one task. It can get much more complicated than this but this is a base level. Below is a link to the more simplistic video I could find on the topic that explains it well. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQTFhkhwPA