I definitely should have known better than to take on fans of Spider-Man whose knowledge of the story, including Peter Parker's background, is so much greater than my own. Trust me, in the Broadway musical, any scientific interest on Peter's part was so minor it was virtually imperceptible. And since this musical is today's incarnation of the Spider-Man story, I think we need to concern ourselves with what, if anything, it says about attitudes toward science now. I maintain that the evil scientist is such a convenient villain because it plays on a stereotype that is deeply embedded in our society. And it's holding us back from getting us where we need to go to create an innovation economy that will assure that the standard of living we enjoy today will be maintained for future generations of Americans.

Some readers felt that Spider-Man reflects the precarious balance between good and evil in science. Yes, as I said, there is ample evidence in the Nazi experiments, Tuskegee, and the ever-spiraling arms race, to name just a few examples from the past, of the evil uses to which science has been put. Even when intentions are golden, scientific advances often have unintended and unforeseen negative consequences. But I think a good case can be made that the good to which science and engineering have been put far outweighs the bad. But whether or not you accept that, it's undeniable that our future is linked to innovation, and innovation is a direct outgrowth of basic science.

I have a picture on my office wall at NOVA brought to me by producer Doug Hamilton when he returned from shooting our documentary First Flower in China. It shows two Chinese children watching television, and across the screen it says "Love Science." That image is symbolic of a society that sees its future and the future of its children in knowledge and innovation. President Obama recently described this time as a "Sputnik moment" for our own society, but will we rise to the occasion? I may be over-thinking a comic book character brought to the Broadway stage, but attitudes are important. If when we think "scientist" we could think less nerd and evil and more progress, innovation, and wealth, maybe we would be further along the path to an economically sustainable future.

Just some food for thought, along with fervent wishes for a speedy recovery for Christopher Tierney, one of the actors playing Spider-Man, who fell from a platform during a performance on Monday when his safety tether snapped.

I recently went to see the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. The show was still in previews. The opening had been delayed because there were so many technical problems. In fact, the matinee I attended had to stop while the main character, Peter Parker, Spider-Man's alter ego, hung from a rope, wanly waving at the audience. Despite that, the show was a spectacle, with exquisitely costumed creatures rising up from beneath the stage and flying around the enormous theater. A couple of times, I thought Spider-Man might wind up in my lap.

If this show can get itself together, it will be a technical tour de force and provide some imaginative entertainment for kids and their families as well as old Spidey fans nostalgic for their hero. I will leave comments on the story and acting to more qualified critics, but I do have a bone to pick with this show--the choice of villain.

Spider-Man has a long tradition of "mad scientist" super-villains, starting with the comic books, going through the movies and now, the musical. I say it's time to get over it and to update this anachronistic obsession with evil scientists. But why be so bothered with a harmless fantasy? Well, anyone who has seen the latest results of international testing should be, considering that U.S. students ranked 23rd in science and even lower in math in the latest results of the international educational assessment PISA. If our future lies in the innovation economy, based on products that emerge from science and technology, our students need to step up their game. And to help make that happen, not only does our society need to invest in science education, we need to create an environment more receptive to scientific ideas and one that inspires boys and girls of all ethnics groups to consider science and engineering careers.

The Spider-Man super-villain scientist may be fantasy, but it is rooted in a distrust of science that pervades our society. To be sure, some wariness is justified; there's certainly ample evidence throughout history that science can be used for evil as well as good. But science and engineering have brought us longer and healthier lives, enabled us to learn about worlds beyond our own, and given us all the electronic gadgets we love so much, including the one I'm typing on right now. And if we want this progress to continue to improve our lives and to bolster our economy, let's stop picking on scientists and find another villain. There are certainly plenty of real ones out there.

The eclipse is coming! If you live in North America, don't mind staying up past your bedtime, and have obligingly clear skies, tonight is your chance to see a total lunar eclipse--your last chance, unless you are up for some serious globetrotting, until April 2014. The moon will start passing behind Earth's shadow, or penumbra, at 1:33 am EST, and will be totally in shadow at 2:41 am EST.

The expert stargazers at Sky and Telescope have full pre-game (pre-eclipse?) coverage here, and NASA will be hosting a live web chat with experts from Marshall Space Flight Center until 5:00 am EST.

More evidence that this is the most social-media-savvy eclipse ever: Astrophotographers can post their photos to NASA's lunar eclipse flickr group, the forgetful can sign up for text-message reminders via the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "I'm There" campaign, and Twitterers will be tagging their loony (get it?) tweets with #eclipse

Just be sure to lift your eyes from your smart phone long enough to actually see the eclipse!

In Alien From Earth, which premiered back in 2008, NOVA took viewers to the Indonesian island of Flores to meet the "hobbits"--or rather, the 18,000-year-old bones of the creatures formally designated Homo floresiensis. These diminutive hominids, which might or might not represent a lost human species, were not the only exotic fauna on ancient Flores. They shared the island with Komodo dragons, dwarf elephants called pygmy Stegodon, and, scientists announced earlier this week, giant, carnivorous storks.

Care for a bite of hobbit? A contemporary Marabou stork. By Ltshears (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons

To anyone who associates storks with the delivery of sweetly-bundled little babies, the whole carnivorous thing may come as a surprise. Yes, the 19 known species of stork eat worms and bugs, but many also dine on small mammals and other birds, and the Marabou stork, to which the new Flores behemoth is most closely related, has a particular taste for carrion. As the writers at the National Zoo point out, though, it's not picky: "Marabou Storks will eat just about any kind of animal, dead or alive."

Modern Marabous are nearly five feet tall, and their Flores cousins stood even taller: At six feet, they would have towered over the three-foot hobbits. Based on the heft of the bones, which were discovered in the same cave which held the hobbit remains, the birds probably weighed about 35 pounds and didn't do much flying.

Take vulnerable hobbits, throw in some giant meat-eating storks, give it all a good shake in the science-headline-machine, and what do you get? Frodo Eaten Alive By Storks! and Some Storks Deliver Babies, These Storks Eat Them! I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Since there is no evidence that these giant storks fed on the hobbits of Flores, the fact that almost every headline on the story screamed Hobbit-Eating Storks! seemed a little sensational.

I emailed Mike Morwood, the Australian archaeologist who headed up the team that discovered the hobbit bones, to get his take. To my surprise, Morwood sided with the hobbit-eaters: "Undoubtedly, Komodo dragons and possibly giant storks occasionally killed and consumed Hobbits. In fact, Komodo dragons still occasionally kill people."

But, says Morwood, the storks were probably more afraid of hobbits than the hobbits were of them: "There is clear evidence that Homo floresiensis was butchering and eating this stork--bones have cut marks on them and one skull had been smashed. This should not be surprising however, because other items of Hobbit diet included Komodo dragon, another formidable predator, and lots of pygmy Stegodon. All great accomplishments for a hominin just one meter tall. Despite her small brain, Hobbit was smarter than Big Bird."

As for the suggestion that the storks nibbled the hobbits to extinction, says Morwood, "We now have evidence that hominins, presumably of the lineage that culminated in H. floresiensis, were on Flores for at least a million years, so it is very unlikely that storks (or Komodo dragons) were responsible for their extinction."

Why are the creatures of Flores so weird? Animals on remote islands often grow or shrink over many generations, isolation being evolution's answer to Alice in Wonderland's magical cakes and mushrooms. Naturally big fellows like hippos and elephants are most likely to shrink down to pygmy proportions, perhaps so that they can survive on limited resources. Small fries, like rodents, swell up like hairy Hulks, perhaps to better defend their territory and devour larger prey. Peter Tyson, editor in chief of NOVA Online, examined on the history of this "island rule"--and its many exceptions--in Gigantism & Dwarfism on Islands.

Does the door close button in your elevator actually work? In Trapped In An Elevator, one expert said the button was a sham. But after viewers wrote to us disputing that, we decided to run a little citizen science experiment. Dozens of our blog readers and Facebook fans chipped in by putting their favorite elevators to the test, using stopwatches to time the elevator doors with and without a press of the door close button. (Catch up with Part I of this series.)

Here's our own contribution to the debate. Take a look.

So, is the button a total fake? Not necessarily. First, based on reports from our readers, some elevators really do have working door close buttons. Plus, we didn't consider every possible scenario in which a rider might press the button. What if she'd been holding the door open button for a while before pressing the door close? What if a stream of passengers had entered the elevator? What if she'd sent the elevator up to a new floor? What if the elevator was operating in a manual or emergency mode? We only tested one particular scenario in one particular elevator.

The NOVA team sadly notes the passing of Brian Marsden, Senior Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a longtime friend of NOVA. Marsden died on November 18 after a long illness.

As director of the Minor Planet Center from 1978 to 2006 and the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams between 1968 and 2000, Marsden served as a sort of celestial traffic reporter, broadcasting the bearings of comets and asteroids to amateur and professional astronomers worldwide. Thanks to his occasional predictions of (possible) asteroid collisions, the New York Times once called him a "cheery herald of fear," "a scientist so sanguine, so droll that he can make possible global catastrophe sound like good news."

Marsden was also a vocal advocate for the "demotion" of Pluto, which is how we convinced him to join Neil deGrasse Tyson in an unorthodox football game at Harvard Stadium for The Pluto Files earlier this year. Marsden faced off against astronomer colleague Mark Sykes, scoring (intellectual) touchdowns in defense of Pluto's classificiation as a dwarf planet. (Skip to 4:30 to see the astronomers take to the gridiron.)

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

The New York Times shared this story of Marsden's personal connection with Pluto:

For years he had proposed that Pluto, which was discovered in 1930, should be demoted from planet to asteroid. That proposal was not accepted. But in Prague in 2006, at their meeting held every three years, members of the International Astronomical Union created a new category of "dwarf planets," which included Pluto. Also at that meeting, Dr. Marsden announced that he was stepping down as director of the Minor Planet Center. "He was quite entertained," his son-in-law said, "by the thought that both he and Pluto had been retired on the same day."

All of us at NOVA are grateful to Dr. Marsden for his service to astronomy and for sharing his sharp wit and good humor with our filmmakers over many decades.