James Maxey (author and "big science geek") and Jim Craig (planetarium director) are our featured guests.

Topic: The Year in Science. What's new and what's happening. Such as: Life extension using telomeres; TA-65; three parent embryo; antimatter made and trapped in lab; stem cell research; stem cells from breast milk; 3D printers to print human organs for surgical implant; a machine that can test a single sample for 10,000 toxins; the first person ever has been cured of AIDS.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 20, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 31 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half was presented last week.)

James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Jim Craig is the director of the James H. Lynn Planetarium at the Schiele Museum in Gastonia NC. He is a lifelong science fiction fan and has given presentations on the history of science fiction. He is an outspoken activist for science education, critical thinking, skepticism and free thought. In 2006 he was allowed to name a crater on Mars.

Bonus: your host reads a few more paragraphs from his new novel Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica) which features the alien character who calls herself Pug. 

Within human civilization, hundreds of individuals resembled Pug. None were real. All were fake, every last one. They were androids intended to give humanity the impression that Pug's civilization was interacting with theirs. It was not. Nor would it ever. These decoys visited human tourist sites, shopped in stores, ate in restaurants, made business contacts, set-up shop, bought and sold real estate, and did all the other things human beings would expect of them. To Pug their activities were meaningless. They were not spies or manipulators, they were just cover. They existed only to provide a signal-to-noise problem for anyone who might otherwise realize that Pug was the only member of her species in this galaxy.