The topics:

• Stephen has been reading the Ain't it Cool News website since 1997. So when he got to Austin he had to check out Harry Knowles' hang out, The Alamo Draft House on 6th Street. Great food, great location, and a good theater. And no kids!

• At the Draft House Stephen and his wife Sheralyn saw Tropic Thunder. Stephen thought it was very funny, but beware. The humor was very raunchy and was very non-PC.

• Stephen and family had a fun time watching the bats fly from the Congress Street bridge in Austin.
  

  This from Wikipedia:

  In Austin, Texas, a colony of Mexican Free-tailed bats summers (they winter in Mexico) under the Congress Avenue Bridge ten blocks south of the state capitol. It is the largest urban colony in North America with an estimated 1,500,000 bats.[3] Each night they eat 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects. Each year they attract 100,000 tourists who come to watch them.

• Stephen, incredibly, was able to find a picture of the Bat Cheerleader on Flicker. Apparently he's out there all the time.

• Michael Darling saw "Clone Wars." It appealed to the kids, but wasn't great for adults. He thinks Star Wars geeks will want to see it even though its not great. It might be the set up for better episodes to follow. A cartoon series is planned for this fall.

• Phil is opening up a new FastForward Radio contest. The listener - in this show or next week's show - that comes up with the best idea for a long shot future development wins a Freakin' Huge FastForward Radio coffee mug! So leave comments, call in, or participate in the text chat!
  

  And Brian Wang gets a coffee mug also for the ideas he emailed before this show.

• Our first long shot was alpha lipoic acid (APA) as a weight maintenance tool. APA has already been proven in mice. The hope is that weight lost with dieting can be maintained with APA in humans as with mice. Much more here in Phil's post.

• Stephen mentioned a non-long shot. Brian Wang's post "How long can Uranium last for nuclear power? 5 billion years at double current world electricity usage."

  Turns out there's plenty of uranium in the world's oceans.
  
  

• Phil first covered the Blacklight Power story in his post "Things We'll Never Understand." See also this CNNMoney story "BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water."

• Another long shot brought up by Phil - will human augmentation allow us all to perform like the olympic atheletes we're saw this week?

• Robert Bussard's reactor design.

  Bussard's model is significantly different from the Tokamak design.

  Here's Robert Bussard speaking to Google a year or so ago:

• Matt Duing in the text chat brought up faster-the-light travel. Matt and Stephen both stated that they think its a true long shot (8 or 9 on the long-shot scale of 1-10). But Phil is going to explain to us in the coming week why FTL travel is more likely than that.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Yuma House. The song is "Red Car."

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