Note: We included a snippet of Star Trek, "Amok Time," Because T'Pau is arguably being forced to marry Spock against her will.

Musical accompaniment: DJ Paul V, "Might Like Ghosts Better"

Additional reporting by Katharine Trendacosta and Amanda Yesilbas

Now that a Star Trek movie is #1 at the box office again, everybody's looking back at the history of Star Trek films. And one meme I've been hearing a lot is that Wrath of Khan, formerly the sacred cow of Trek films, is overrated. Here's why that's not true.

Massive spoilers for Wrath of Khan ahead...

When Wrath of Khan came out, it felt like Star Trek had gotten a brand new warp core. Compared to The Motion Picture, it seemed jaunty and action-packed and filled with danger and skin-of-your-teeth escapes. The dialogue was sparkly, the starship battles were exciting, and there was an actual villain, with monologues.

Now, when you watch Wrath of Khan, it does feel like a slow boil. It takes like 45 minutes for the first actual confrontation between Kirk and Khan to happen, and during those 45 minutes the only "action" involves the Kobayashi Maru test and Khan capturing Chekov and Captain Terrell. From then on, Kirk is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of Khan, but it's a psychological battle of wits rather than a "ticking time bomb" thing or a kickpuncher thing.

To a large extent, this is because Khan comes from a different era in film-making. The original Star Wars is similarly slow to build up — true, there's a space battle in the opening moments, but then it's a long time before we even meet Luke Skywalker, and a much longer time before Luke gets to the Death Star. Rewatch the original Alien, and it feels like a slow, creepy tease as well.

(And I've often thought that one reason some people don't like Wrath of Khan is that they're watching the "Director's Cut," which restores a bunch of non-essential footage that slows things down, like getting to know Scotty's nephew.)

But the theatrical cut is not slow-paced in the sense of "padded." There's no single scene where nothing happens, and each scene moves pretty briskly except when the movie wants to show off some cool visuals. The characters get time to breathe, and the film is definitely talky, but no scene outstays its welcome, for the most part.

So Wrath of Khan is definitely a product of its time, and will inevitably feel as dated as every other film from 30 years ago. Another feature that probably hasn't aged well: Some of the dialogue is a little stagey, particularly the scene between McCoy and Kirk in Kirk's apartment, and some of Khan's conversations (as opposed to his monologues.) There's a slightly stilted, declamatory quality to the acting that feels very much in keeping with the original TV series.

But even if you do find Wrath of Khan old-fashioned or ponderous, it's still a great movie. And here's why.

People misidentify their own biggest flaws

To a large extent, this film is a character study of Kirk and Khan, and the action proceeds from the mistakes that both men make. A lot of what looks like slow pacing is actually heavy lifting the movie is doing to set up the decisions that lead to two starships getting more and more junked.

Kirk's big mistake, of course, is not raising his shields the moment it becomes obvious there's something wrong with the Reliant, the Federation starship Khan has taken over. Kirk is being cocky and gets "caught with his britches down." But prior to that moment, absolutely everybody's biggest worry about Kirk is that he's been wasting his talent for command sitting behind a desk — not that he's gotten too overconfident or complacent.

There's even a scene where Spock keeps insisting that Kirk must retake command of the ship — because Spock would be fine as captain for a "training cruise," but Kirk should command if there's real action. Kirk keeps demurring, until Spock says the thing about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. The irony, of course, being that if Spock had stayed in the captain's chair, he'd almost certainly have raised those shields in time. So Spock winds up endangering the many for the sake of the one.

And after that, Kirk is forced to confront the possibility that he really is too old to command a starship — the linchpin of the movie, from Kirk's perspective, is the scene with Carol after he's met his son and been marooned by Khan. Kirk lets a vulnerability show, that's different from the usual "I'm losing my command" angst and is more about losing your edge. It's hard to build a compelling science fiction adventure movie around fears of aging and decay, but TWoK pulls it off — and all of that careful set-up is a big part of why.

And for all his flaws as an actor, Shatner is great here — he shows different sides of Kirk's personality depending on whether he's talking to nervous cadets or his oldest friends. And it's largely through Kirk's performance that you see how outwitting Khan isn't just the source of the movie's "fuck yeah" moments, but also how Kirk becomes rejuvenated and regains his mojo, once and for all. Kirk's mojo is a "use it or lose it" type deal, and this film takes great pains to show how the use of it restores it to him.

Meanwhile, the film shows Khan being clever enough to run rings around Kirk — except that he won't let go of his vengeance, and he thinks he has something to prove about his superior intellect. The same way Kirk has something to prove about regaining his command.

He comes very close to getting away with the Genesis Device, the film's McGuffin, and being able to set himself up as a dictator on a brand new planet, teeming with life. Joachim keeps offering him the chance to abandon the pursuit of Kirk and rebuild his life, but the "wrath" thing is a serious character flaw at this point. Except that, in the film's most famous scene, Kirk tries to manipulate Khan into coming down inside the barren planet Regulus to chase after him, and Khan decides... not to. Kirk and Spock, by convincing Khan that the Enterprise is helpless, have outsmarted themselves a bit.

And Wrath of Khan isn't just a great character study of two old warriors — one who feels like he's being consigned to the past, the other feeling like he can't let go of it — it's also a great psychological thriller, which starts off slow and creepy and slowly builds to these two men using huge starships and a terraforming machine to try and crush the life out of each other.

And "explain it to them" has to be the best way of commanding someone to fire photon torpedos ever.

It's a solid science fiction movie

Star Trek: The Motion Picture spends approximately five hours too much on long majestic shots of the Enterprise in drydock or in space. Robert Wise really wants you to know that this is one sweet-looking vessel. But TMP does bequeath to TWoK a certain love of the starship porn, which it hits just hard enough to lend a sense of majesty to the proceedings. And this is a film that definitely benefits from practical spaceship models, ILM at the top of its game.

And there are shots of people loading photon torpedos into tubes, without any of the main castmembers present. In some of the bridge scenes, you hear people talking and doing their jobs in the background. The Enterprise is a busy ship.

And all of the love and adoration bestowed on the starships, both inside and out, helps make the submarine-style combat in the film feel way more visceral and exciting — the final sequence in the nebula, with both ships flying blind, still has a hell of a kick. And it remains one of the more clever space combat scenes, with each ship catching the other by surprise and firing wildly at each other.

By and large, Star Wars has dogfights, Star Trek has submarine battles — and this is probably the best submarine-style battle Trek ever did, with each ship giving as good as it gets until they're both just shreds.

And even though it arguably gets lost a bit in all the fighting, Wrath of Khan does have a science fictional conceit that pays off, both thematically and in a plot sense — the McGuffin isn't just a McGuffin. Just like Serenity is a movie about the ethics of experimenting on people (River Tam, the people on Miranda), Wrath of Khan is a franchise picture that brings up an ethical question — another reason why all those "talky" scenes are worthwhile.

The Genesis device is a terraforming miracle, which can spontaneously generate life overnight on a barren planet — but it could also be used as a weapon, and everyone from Dr. McCoy to David Marcus freaks out over the potential misuse of this in the wrong hands. Meaning Starfleet's hands, possibly — but then Khan gets a hold of it, and the term "wrong hands" gets massively redefined. And yet, in the end, when Khan finally does use it as a weapon, it kills almost nobody (except Spock, temporarily) and it creates something beautiful: whole new life.

So maybe, the film suggests, even when science is misused or perverted, the effects may turn out to be positive in the end — if you have a long enough or accelerated time horizon.

As Carol Marcus herself says to Kirk, the results of the Genesis device will make you feel "young as when the world was new." And in fact, the Genesis device is exactly like the metaphorical rejuvenation that Kirk undergoes in this film. People have to die for Kirk to feel young and alive again, just as the Genesis device is destructive as well as creative.

And that's really the crux of why Wrath of Khan still holds up as a science fiction movie, not just as a Star Trek movie — it's got a Big Idea wrapped up in it, which is fully integrated with a big, intense character arc that's fundamentally about universal human experiences like growing older and coping with your past. So that at the end, when Spock makes the ultimate (temporary) sacrifice, and Kirk breaks those glasses, it feels like a huge emotional punch as well as the culmination of a big journey that we've taken with some old, old friends.

Images via TrekCore

Now that Warehouse 13 has been consigned to the same fate as Eureka — tying off loose ends and then going away for good — each episode is a reminder that this show is still seriously fun, and quite agile. Last night's episode was mostly a standard "artifact of the week" outing, but it packed in a lot of goodness in one hour.

Spoilers ahead...

Remember when Warehouse 13 used to do just one artifact per week, and there was a lot more running in place? It's worth remembering that, when you see how deft the show has gotten at this point. Like the "Vegas magician making people levitate" thing — there are plenty of red herrings on the way to figuring out who/what is causing people to fly into the stratosphere, but each of them is dispensed with relatively quickly. And then there's still time for the pathos of the aging magician whose granddaughter is trying to give him one last moment of glory by letting him use real magic, without dragging it out unnecessarily.

Likewise, the "B" story, about the jockeys who are having all their adrenaline sucked out, goes through enough permutations to let you think briefly that this is some kind of Dick Francis-esque cheating scandal. And then you find out that it's actually a stable boy who was upset that the jockeys were abusing the animals, and it makes sense — again, the story turns out to be about something, but neither the misdirection nor the big reveal feel either rushed or prolonged.

And then the "C" story is where the episode packs most of its emotional punch — Artie is still coping with the fact that he killed Leena under the influence of an artifact, and he refuses to let anyone help him. And he's doing stupid things like jumping in front of a moving car, with Claudia in the trunk. So the Regents hire an ex-therapist to be Leena's replacement, and she tries a few strategies to get through to him: playing innocent, tempting him with an artifact, and finally letting him see some of her own vulnerability and frustration. And it finally pays off, with Artie admitting that he killed someone he loved and doesn't know what to do. Abigail Chow also gets some nice moments, in general, when she talks about how you stare down grief.

But actually, the standout moment of the episode is probably when Pete and Myka show the Monty the Magnificent, who's been crushed to realize the levitating thing was just a doohickey, around the Warehouse. And he gets to see loads of actual magic, all in one place — reminded me just a bit of the ending of the Doctor Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor." Nice stuff!

All in all, this is a show that's delivering solid "thing of the week" storytelling, with loads of twists, along with a strong arc for five or six characters. Still not sure why it has to go before its time.

I can't bring myself to complain about Revolution any more — about the fact that this show isn't living up to its fun, swashbuckling pilot and also doesn't seem to be about anything, other than "war is awful and soldiers are bad people." So here's a tribute to the show's best character instead.

Yep, talking about Nora. Watching last night's episode, I was realizing that Nora is the show's standout character at this point. That could have been Miles, instead, but he's gotten grumpy and dyspeptic and keeps making incredibly wack command decisions. But Nora? She's still kind of badass and awesome. Sure, she's pretty one-dimensional, but that dimension is "tough chick who can blow anything up and repair any machine." I'll take it.

In last night's episode, Nora gets captured by Monroe, who first the traditional "put her in a nice dress and treat her to a fancy dinner" move, which I believe Ben Linus already perfected. Ahem. And then he has her tortured, and drugged and stuff.

Much, much later, we find out that after weeks of being drugged out of her mind and beaten to a pulp, Nora managed to strangle her main interrogator to death with her thighs. This is presented as evidence that Nora is out of control and capable of doing terrible things because of the drugs — but I prefer to take it as proof that she's totally amazing.

The show attempts to undercut this reveal by having Rachel, too, strangle a man to death with her thighs like five minutes later, but it doesn't matter — Nora still wins.

In this episode, Nora is basically still so drugged up that she's hallucinating, and Miles decides to let her come along on the crucial "stop Monroe" mission. Yes, it's incredibly silly of Nora to insist on going, but Miles is the one who okays it. And then she manages to survive an attack by the knife killer, despite barely being able to see straight, and later repairs a trashed helicopter with her teeth.

So let's focus on the badassery of Nora, instead of the fact that this show threw away Alphas' Malik Yoba, after relegating him to the background for most of his episodes, by turning him into a traitor and then killing him off. You can sort of see why they killed off Mark Pellegrino, who's about to co-star in The Tomorrow People, but why did Yoba have to get tossed overboard so fast, without even showing what he can do?

Meanwhile, Monroe finds out that Rachel is heading for the tower, and he confronts Randall, who... I don't get the relationship between Monroe and Randall at all. Originally, Randalls shows up and offers to help Monroe become a dictator, and it appears as though Randall is using Monroe as a pawn, with Monroe going along with it because he gets awesome gear. Then, a couple weeks back, Monroe suddenly starts calling Randall his "IT guy" and bullying him. Now, Monroe is ready to kill Randall outright, and treating him the same way he treats his other crappy underlings, even though Randall holds all the keys to actual and figurative power.

What happened? Was there an episode that showed us the turning point in Monroe and Randall's relationship that I missed somehow? This seems like a pretty major development to have happened offscreen, especially given how many other, less interesting, developments have played out agonizingly slowly on screen.

In any case, Rachel decides to sneak inside the Monroe camp, near the entrance to the Tower, and blow up Monroe and herself with a grenade. If there was any justice in the world, she would succeed — but we never get that lucky.

But let's get back to Nora, who survives weeks of torture, volunteers for a deadly mission, fixes a helicopter and also seems to have just the merest spark of inner life inside her. I'm rooting for Nora now, alone among these characters. Which probably means she's doomed.

Iain M. Banks has had two astoundingly great careers — with the middle initial, he's one of the most influential and brilliant science fiction authors of the past 25 years. Without it, he's a great literary author. And some people believe he did the science fiction to subsidize his literary work. If anything, it's the reverse.

Since Banks announced his cancer diagnosis, he's received countless comments from fans, friends and well-wishers. Including one from an ex-neighbor of his, containing a factual inaccuracy that he decided to correct in a new blog post:

An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over.

As someone who loves and recommends Banks' non-genre novels, I've never thought of either body of work as inferior to the other — they're two sides of a very excellent coin. But it also seems entirely likely that his "mainstream" novels might be outselling his genre works, especially in the U.K., where he's more widely published without the M. [Banksophilia via the Telegraph]

Adding this to the article...

One of the neat shout-outs in Star Trek Into Darkness is a set of models on Admiral Marcus' desk, depicting the entire history of flight, from the Wright Brothers up to the U.S.S. Kelvin. And those models are available for sale from Quantum Mechanix, and we've got the exclusive high-res photos.

Plus we've got some nice (but not exclusive) photos of some of the other goodies that QMX (which worked on creating models and props for Star Trek Into Darkness) is selling.

Warning: A couple of these models are very mildly spoilery.

Here are those models from oldest to newest. Follow QMX Insider on Twitter to find out when they go on sale!

The Wright Flyer

Spirit of St. Louis

V2 Rocket

North American X-15

Vostok

Gemini Capsule

XVC 330 Ring Ship

The Phoenix

NX-Alpha

NX-01

U.S.S. Kelvin

And here are some of the other Star Trek Into Darkness props you can buy from QMX...

Badges

Phasers

Posters

Starfleet Academy Ring

UFP Flag

Vengeance Collectors Statue

Kelvin Collector's Scale

It's summer movie season, the time when blockbuster films come out every week and we pit Vin Diesel against Wolverine. But how do you keep that cineplex excitement alive when you're at home on the couch? With books! Here are 10 science fiction novels that pack more non-stop thrills than Fast & Furious 6. Really.

Top image: The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton.

To compile this list, we took to our Facebook page, and asked our peeps there. We did take some liberties with the responses — like, we didn't include any books that we've included on similar lists recently. (Scroll down for further reading.)

1) Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

This one is sort of a gimme, considering our review of this book proclaimed it to be " as close as you'll get to a Hollywood blockbuster in book form." We praised the space-faring setting as well as the "intense space station combat," among other things. And you guys agreed. Says Jacqueline, "Leviathan Wakes is a serious guilty pleasure. Part gumshoe detective story, part buddy adventure, part romance, part space opera, with the added bonus of vomit zombies. Rip roaring adventure."

2) The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold

In general, a few people mentioned Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, full of space adventure and intrigue, as a good movie-substitute. But this book, in particular, seemed to be singled out as especially fizzy. Or maybe Young Miles. As we wrote a few years ago, "The three-time Hugo-winning saga of the disabled Miles Vorkosigan and his awesome military career is like Flash Gordon on steroids."

3) Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

We tend to praise Banks' sprawling Culture series for its thought-provoking portrayals of a post-scarcity society and artificial intelligences. But he can also bring intense, fast-paced thriller-y action — people also praised Banks' first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, for that. In this one, a Culture operative named Cheradenine Zakalwe is brought out of retirement for One Last Mission, while flashbacks travel backwards in time, retracing his career and showing just how everything went wrong for him. Cracking great suspense and action, alongside Banks' usual mind-expanding ideas.

4) Uncharted Territory by Connie Willis

This is a quick, fun read in comparison to some of Willis' longer, more in-depth works — and it's basically a frontier story set on another planet, with Willis poking fun at tons of genre tropes. It's the story of two "famous planetary surveyors," Carson and Finriddy, who travel to a distant planet and wind up going on an expedition into unknown areas with a native guide and a woman who only knows of them through ridiculous video dramatizations of their exploits.

5) Deathworld by Harry Harrison

We've praised Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books a lot before, and also paid homage to Bill the Galactic Hero. But Harrison's Deathworld books are also a cracking great adventure story — as Troy says, "I still say that's one book that MichaelBay should turn into a movie." They're the story of Jason, a dissolute gambler with psionic abilities, who travels to the Most Deadly Planet Ever Colonized, where things evolve so quickly that even natives have to be retrained to survive after leaving for a while. Image via Project Gutenberg

6) The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook

Basically your standard "buddy cop romance in a steampunk post-apocalyptic world with zombies" kind of story, in which Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth is forced to team up with the notorious Iron Duke to travel into the zombie-infested wasteland and save England. Says Carrie: "Iron Duke has the most action, but Riveted has a much better hero and still has plenty of action to go around. Steampunky goodness." Art by Anastasia Tychkova.

7) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

The tale of Gully Foyle, the resolute individualist, who faces off against massive megacorps that seek to control everything. Says Kenneth James, "Every chapter is a classic, near-standalone action set-piece. (And his first novel, The Demolished Man, is not too far behind; in that book every chapter is a classic crime-thriller-future-noir confrontation.)" Says Alface, this book "starts off slow and keeps on changing gears and doesn't let go to the end."

8) Divergent by Veronica Roth

This is just one of the many, many dystopian young adult science fiction novels that have trundled down the assembly line in the years since Hunger Games unleashed an insatiable hunger. But it's becoming a movie soon, and people are enthralled by this frenetic depiction of a future Chicago where everybody has to choose to embody one singular virtue. Reviews of this book tend to mention its nonstop violence and Roth's mastery of action scenes.

9) Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton

Says Rick Cromack: "Genetically bred starships swallowing in and out of sentient orbital cities; boosted mercenaries capable of harnessing more firepower than a main battle tank; exotic, interdimensional beings that by their very existence shred the fabric of reality; planetary defense platforms capable of mazing entire arcologies; energy weapons that render entire regions of space into dead zones; planet-busting antimatter bombs deployed to annihilate the populations of entire worlds. And, then, there are the armies of returned dead, possessing both the living and godlike abilities."

10) Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

As we wrote in our review a few years ago, this debut novel is popping with clever ideas, as if Morgan wasn't sure he'd ever get to write another one. And we added back then: "It could make a terrific movie, if they could travel back in time to 1990 and get Bullet In The Head-era John Woo to direct."

Further reading...

This isn't an alien world — it's a representation of the winds traveling from East to West (in blue) and West to East (in red) here on Earth. And this is just one of the fantastic images that won the 2013 Science As Art contest at Princeton University. See a few more below.

Top image: East-West, West-East by Martin Jucker, Jury First Place

Every year, Princeton chooses the best science art images of the year — here are some of the previous year's best images. This year's include the above image in "atmospheric and oceanic studies," plus a ton of others, some of which are below.

People's First Place: Messenger Meshwork Shawn C. Little (postdoc), Kristina S. Sinsimer (postdoc), Elizabeth R. Gavis (faculty), and Eric F. Wieschaus (faculty) Department of Molecular Biology

The fruit fly ovary consists of about 100 egg chambers. Each chamber contains 15 "nurse cells." These surround the oocyte, or egg cell, which ultimately will develop into a baby fruit fly. The nurse cells synthesize RNA molecules that are ultimately deposited into the oocyte. Here we see four nurse cells. Each red or green dot is an individual RNA molecule, which is produced from DNA (shown in blue). The RNA molecules intermingle on a threadlike network that allows them to move from one nurse cell to another and then into the developing egg (which we don't see in this image).

People's Second Place: Bridging the Gap Jason Wexler (graduate student) and Howard A. Stone (faculty) Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

When drops of liquid are trapped in a thin gap between two solids, a strong negative pressure develops inside the drops. If the solids are flexible, this pressure deforms the solids to close the gap. In our experiment the solids are transparent, which allows us to image the drops from above. Alternating dark and light lines represent lines of constant gap height, much like the lines on a topological map. Â These lines are caused by light interference, which is the phenomenon responsible for the beautiful rainbow pattern in an oil slick. The blue areas denote the extent of the drops. Since the drops pull the gap closed, the areas of minimum gap height (i.e. maximum deformation) are inside the drops, at the center of the concentric rings.

Light eddies Mitchell A. Nahmias (graduate student) and Paul R. Prucnal (faculty) Department of Electrical Engineering

Fiber optic networks have transformed global communications by moving digital bits of information around the planet at the speed of light. By combining lasers with artificial neural networks, it may one day be possible to create high-speed processors that react to incoming data far faster than current computers could ever handle. Our brains are composed of billions of individual cells called neurons, which communicate along millions of billions of channels with electrochemical signals. This computer model visualizes a laser that behaves like a neuron by plotting a so-called "phase space." Notice that the lines swirl inwards like a whirlpool to converge at stable equilibrium points, indicating that the laser will stabilize over time. Studying these trajectories helps us understand how our devices emit and receive pulses of light that mimic the way in which neurons communicate.

Photon's eye view Emily Grace (graduate student), Christine Pappas (graduate student), Benjamin Schmitt (University of Pennsylvania), Laura Newburgh (postdoc) Department of Physics

The Universe exploded into being 14 billion years ago and remnant light from this explosion is still visible today. Our group measures this light at a site 17,000 feet high in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We use special "detectors" developed in a collaboration between Princeton and other institutions. These detectors use antennas to capture the non-visible wavelengths of light focused by our 6 meter telescope. This photograph looks down into feedhorns, small corrugated structures that allow particles of light to funnel toward the antennas. The antennas are tiny dark triangles suspended upon a thin membrane on a silicon detector wafer that attaches to the base of each feedhorn. The membrane is thin enough that you can see the gold-plated reflective wafer behind the antennas. Light from the camera is reflecting off the gold-plated wafer, casting a golden gleam.

Baby mouse Celeste Nelson (faculty) and Joe Tien (visiting faculty) Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

"We are linked by blood," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "and blood is memory without language." The network of blood vessels known as the vascular system connects all tissues and organs. Confocal imaging gives us the opportunity to view the vascular system by illuminating the whole body with fluorescent light and providing a translucent image of the subject. This mosaic of different confocal images gives us an entire picture of a mouse embryo. Here the vascular system, rather than appearing in a familiar blood-red, is represent by the color green. The blue color represents the DNA that will direct the embryo's growth.

Maze dweller Chhaya Werner '14 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

That sweet little face peering out of a coral labyrinth is that of a a goby fish. A goby fish is dependent on coral for its home, and in turn will often clean algae that would otherwise smother the coral. I took this photo in the course of field research for the Coral Reefs lab course in Panama (EEB 346) for a project on the ecology of coral reefs, focusing on interactions between corals, algae, and sea urchins.

C. instagram Meredith Wright '13 Department of Molecular Biology (Murphy Lab)

Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worms are stored on agar plates covered with a lawn of E. coli bacteria as their food source. Sometimes when the C. elegans have consumed all of the bacteria, they begin to clump together as seen in this image. I found the pattern on this plate particularly lovely, and was able to capture it with my cell phone by holding the lens of my phone's camera up to the microscope eyepiece. I've since shared the photo on social networking sites and have had friends who've never been interested in biology ask me more about my work because of this photo. To me, this image represents the simple pleasure of finding something beautiful when you don't expect to, and it shows how easy it is to connect science with new audiences by simply clicking 'share.'

The history of science fiction television is full of shows that have a lot of wonderful stuff... but you just know they could be even more awesome if someone seized their raw potential with both hands. Which classic TV show do you wish you could personally make a new version of?

As always, please include a picture — along with your explanation of just how you'd reimagine your chosen show. Thanks!