Star Trek!

[Drunk Monk]

The Star Trek Universe Celebrates 2022 with New Premiere Dates, Season Pickups

The franchise is boldly growing
BY STARTREK.COM STAFF

JANUARY 18, 2022 1:00 PM PST

 

StarTrek.com


Paramount+, the streaming service from ViacomCBS, today announced new season premiere dates and additional 10-episode-long season pickup orders across the service’s Star Trek Universe live-action series:

• [b]Star Trek: Discovery[/b] has been renewed for a fifth season. Season four of Star Trek: Discovery returns with new episodes on Thursday, Feb. 10.
  
  
• Season two of [b]Star Trek: Picard[/b] will premiere on Thursday, March 3. Following the premiere, new episodes will drop weekly on Thursdays. Star Trek: Picard is currently in production on a third season.
  
  
• [b]Star Trek: Strange New Worlds[/b] has been renewed for a second season ahead of its season one debut, which will premiere on Thursday, May 5. Following the premiere, new episodes will drop weekly on Thursdays.
  

In addition to the live action series within the Star Trek Universe on Paramount+, there is more animated Star Trek on the horizon:

• [b]Star Trek: Lower Decks[/b] will return summer 2022 with a 10-episode-long third season. Star Trek: Lower Decks has also been renewed for a 10-episode-long fourth season.
  
  
• Season one of [b]Star Trek: Prodigy[/b] returned on Thursday, Jan. 6 with episode six. The remaining four episodes of season one’s first half will be available to stream weekly on Thursdays, with episode 10 available to stream on Thursday, Feb. 3. The additional 10-episode-long second half of season one will be available on Paramount+ later in 2022.
  

“Four years ago, we made a promise to grow Star Trek into something it had never been before, and thanks to the incredibly hard work done by our many talented showrunners, writers, and directors, along with the extraordinary support of CBS Studios and Paramount+, we’re keeping our word,” said Alex Kurtzman, architect and executive producer, Star Trek franchise. “Now our current shows are set up for the future as we work to build Trek’s next phase of programming for years to come.”

[thatguy]

I'll (un)box your ears!



--tg

[thatguy]

This has got everything...amok time, Pink Floyd Echos, surf music! It's like if one of the 3 stooges was a stowaway on the Enterprise.



--tg

[thatguy]

Unsolved mysteries...solved?





--tg

[Drunk Monk]

[Drunk Monk]

It’s a Spider, Not a Doctor, Captain or Vulcan
On their mission to seek out new life, scientists have named three new spider species Kirk, Spock and McCoy — after characters from the original “Star Trek” series.

From left, the Roddenberryus spiders, named Kirk, McCoy and Spock after “Star Trek” characters.Credit...European Journal of Taxonomy

By Christine Hauser
Sept. 13, 2023

Star Trek fans and spider enthusiasts have unexpectedly converged on a new frontier.
Scientists in Brazil announced that they had identified three new species of spiders and subsequently named them Kirk, McCoy and Spock after some of the main characters of “Star Trek.”
The trio of spiders are part of the Roddenberryus genus, a taxonomic classification named for Gene Roddenberry, who created the 1960s science fiction television series that spawned decades of films, sequels, comics and a community of devoted Trekkies.
Mr. Roddenberry, who died in 1991, “inspired generations of kids to pursue scientific careers,” wrote Alexander Sánchez-Ruiz, a zoologist, and Alexandre Bragio Bonaldo in their article in European Journal of Taxonomy, published on Sept. 6, explaining how a science fiction franchise became the basis for the spiders’ names.
The nomenclature was not entirely frivolous. Dr. Bonaldo, a researcher at the Paraense Emílio Goeldi Museum in Brazil, said in an interview that the spiders’ wide, fused heads and thoraxes, known as the cephalothorax, and long abdomen of the spiders “make them ideal candidates for names inspired by the Star Trek universe.”
“They somewhat resemble Star Trek spaceships,” Dr. Bonaldo said. “Arachnologists have a long tradition of giving interesting scientific names for new genera and species, as most of us believe it is a great opportunity to acknowledge people or draw parallels with pop culture and local customs.”
Once Dr. Bonaldo and Dr. Sánchez-Ruiz agreed to call the genus Roddenberryus, naming the three species after the main characters “became, as Spock would say, ‘only logical,’” they said. “Kirk” honors James Tiberius Kirk, the captain of the series’s spaceship, the U.S.S. Enterprise. “McCoy” was named for Dr. Leonard McCoy, the ship’s chief medical officer, and “Spock” shares a name with Kirk’s pointy-eared Vulcan First Officer.
McCoy, Spock and Kirk now belong to a family of spiders known as Caponiid, which is unique for having only two eyes instead of the more common eight, and rows of teeth, bristles, orange carapaces, pale abdomens and claws.
The spiders are found across the Americas, Africa and Asia, but they are commonly within a single location, such as on an island or in another strictly defined area. Roddenberryus Kirk is from the Guanacaste and San José provinces of Costa Rica, while Roddenberryus mccoy hails from Baja California Sur in northwest Mexico. Roddenberryus spock is found in Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico.
Dr. Bonaldo added that the discovery of new genus and species provided the team with material to study the evolution and diversification of their subfamily, Nopinae, “and potentially illuminate the intricate biogeographic history of Central America and the Caribbean.”

It is not unusual for arachnologists to name newly identified spiders after a celebrity, pop culture icon and now, even a fictitious human-Vulcan hybrid. The climate activist Greta Thunberg was the inspiration for spiders of the Thunberga genus of Madagascar in 2020. Peter Jäger of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, said the spider named after Thunberg was meant to draw attention to the threat that climate changes pose to species diversity in Madagascar and elsewhere.
Image

From left, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock; DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy; and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. They stood in front of the transporter machine in the 1968 Star Trek episode, “A Piece of the Action.”Credit...CBS, via Getty Images

In 2022, Dr. Jäger announced that he had named a genus of spiders after the music of David Bowie, adding 54 new species including Bowie ziggystardust, Bowie majortom and Bowie heroes, the latter referring to ground-dwelling spiders from the Himalayas, Papua New Guinea and northern Australia.
He said in a statement that he meant to “commemorate this incomparable artist who left us much too early, but what matters most to me here is the idea of conservation.”
“We only protect what we know — and an attractive name is much more likely to be remembered,” he said.
Dr. Bonaldo said that his favorite unique names include Strotarchus beepbeep, a fast-moving spider named after the Road Runner cartoon from the Looney Tunes series, and Myrmecium oompaloompa, which mimics ants and can be found in cocoa plantations in the Brazilian state of Bahia.
More than 51,000 species of spiders have been identified worldwide thus far — according to the World Spider Catalog — representing about a third of the estimated 150,000 to 180,000 species, said Linda Rayor, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University. Now, more than 1,000 species are identified each year, up from about 200 in 1925, she said.
“Enormous numbers of spiders are being identified constantly,” said Dr. Rayor, who is also the president of the American Arachnological Society. 
“Within that context, arachnologists have a recent history of giving them cutesy names,” she said. 
As voracious eaters and top predators, spiders are hugely important to the ecosystem. “To me, the identification is less exciting in and of itself,” Dr. Rayor said about the relevance of the Star Trek-themed spiders. “Far more important is conserving habitats.”

[Drunk Monk]

As y'all know, my door swings both ways on Star Trek/Star Wars divisiveness, but this make me luv Nic even more than before. 

[King Bob]

I though this was kind of entertaining: I Stopped Loving Captain Kirk

[Drunk Monk]

Happy First Contact Day!

We will meet Vulcans in 39 years…