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Those ladies who are fluent in Klingon but just can't seem to find a boyfriend are now in luck. Apparently, a certain someone is seeking women for "Star Trek" role-playing -- strictly "The Next Generation."

A recent Craigslist ad titled "Make It So" is making the joke rounds on Twitter today. The ad promises "no nudity, no touching" but asks for two to three women to get in character with the ad's author as he plays the "honorable" and "intellectual" Captain Picard.… Read more

It's one of the biggest film franchises of all time. It's also one of the biggest merchandising franchises of all time. It's spawned dozens of novels, countless comic books, spoofs, video games, and even was responsible for the name of a controversial military defense system.

We're talking about "Star Wars," of course, George Lucas' mammoth empire that started back in the early-1970s as a much, much smaller creation. But don't think that Lucas didn't have big ideas. From the earliest days of working on the script of his sci-fi space opera, the &… Read more

Poor President Obama. Not only does he have to deal with Congress, now he's also the target of some interstellar smack talk coming from none other than the Galactic Empire.

Recently, the White House responded to a petition on its "We the People" Web site calling for the federal government to construct an actual Death Star. 

The answer was a definitive no, citing budgetary constraints and the administration's opposition to blowing up planets.

"It is doubtless that such a technological terror in the hands of so primitive a world would be used … Read more

You're onboard the Millennium Falcon. You give the command to jump to lightspeed. The stars outside turn into long streaks of light and you're off. It's one of the most memorable images of sci-fi space travel ever created. It's also likely to be pretty far from reality, according to a study by a group of students from the U.K.'s University of Leicester.

The study, titled "Relativistic Optics Strikes Back," was published in the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics. You can indulge in all the delicious physics equations in the abstract.

The physics students started by imagining that the Millennium Falcon has accidentally wandered into our solar system, on a direct course for our sun. If it then engaged in near-lightspeed travel, the stars around it wouldn't appear to stretch out. Instead, it would look more like a disc of light.… Read more

If Luke Skywalker had a living room with a big-screen TV, he would also have a hand-carved X-Wing Fighter coffee table made of wood and glass. The detailed model looks like it's in mid-flight, except instead of blasting the forces of the Dark Side, it's calmly guarding your coffee.

The table is designed so that half of the spaceship is above the glass and half is below. That means it takes up quite a bit of space that could otherwise hold mugs, half-eaten bags of Doritos, and vintage issues of "Starlog" magazine. Still, the design is so cool, you won't miss having the extra room.… Read more

The White House has rejected a proposal to build a Death Star, saying that in addition to its prohibitive construction costs, the current administration does not advocate destroying other planets.

Today's lighthearted official statement came in response to a petition posted in November to the White House's We The People platform that called for the administration to begin construction of a moon-size military battlestation armed with a planet-destroying superlaser by 2016. The petition, which attracted well more than the minimum 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the White House, suggested that such a project could give … Read more

At the center of our galaxy, chaos ensues: a supermassive black hole absorbs everything, young stars materialize, and elder stars explode. This violently beautiful cycle of activity creates galaxy-size bursts of charged particles that eject from the center of the Galactic Plane, and now you can see what those emissions look like.

Ettore Carretti, who works with Australian scientific research organization CSIRO, along with several other researchers around the world, describes the mega waves of energy in last week's issue of Nature. Team member Gianni Bernadi notes that the supersonic outflows -- which travel in excess of 621 miles per second -- originate from more than 100 million years of stars forming and exploding at the center of the Milky Way. … Read more

If you're heading to the International Space Station, try to bunk in the Japanese section. It's as quiet as a Zen temple.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recently went aboard the ISS and has been recording what it sounds like. It's not quite the elegant "2001: A Space Odyssey" experience you might expect. It's more like a noisy tin can.

After recording last week the ambient sounds of the U.S. lab, with its noisy air pumps and fans, Hadfield managed to get samples of what the ISS toilet sounds like, as well as the relative serenity of the Japanese Experiment Module (aka Kibo). … Read more

Samsung and LG Display have been fined by the Chinese government over charges that they fixed the prices of LCD panels.

China's National Development and Reform Commission fined Samsung $16.2 million and LG $18.6 million, according to the Yonhap News Agency.

Also included in the fines for price fixing were four Taiwanese firms: Chi Mei Optoelectronics, AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd., and HannStar Display. The total fine levied against all six companies reached $56 million.

The display makers were accused of fixing prices on LCD panels that they sold to Chinese TV makers from 2001 to … Read more