Who do you see in this massive silhouette in space? [Space Porn]
The fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the young stars of NGC 3324 has carved this giant cavity in space. And, thanks to our old friend pareidolia, that boundary between different gases looks an awful lot like a person's profile.
In fact, the astronomers at the La Silla Observatory in Chile's Coquimbo Region have taken to calling this the Gabriela Mistral Nebula, after a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1945. (Actually, there is a bit of a resemblance.) For anyone who enjoys seeing large, illusory profiles and who missed out on seeing New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain, this is a more than worthy substitute. So what created the stark boundary between the different parts of the nebula? In a statement, the European Southern Observatory explains:
A rich deposit of gas and dust in the NGC 3324 region fuelled a burst of starbirth there several millions of years ago and led to the creation of several hefty and very hot stars that are prominent in the new picture. Stellar winds and intense radiation from these young stars have blown open a hollow in the surrounding gas and dust. This is most in evidence as the wall of material seen to the centre right of this image. The ultraviolet radiation from the hot young stars knocks electrons out of hydrogen atoms, which are then recaptured, leading to a characteristic crimson-coloured glow as the electrons cascade through the energy levels, showing the extent of the local diffuse gas. Other colours come from other elements, with the characteristic glow from doubly ionised oxygen making the central parts appear greenish-yellow.
Handwritten pages from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, illustrated by Lewis Carroll [Art]
Lewis Carroll's first iteration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a much shorter work titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Although the final product is well known for John Tenniel's memorable illustrations, Carroll himself illustrated his original manuscript.
In fact, many of Tenniel's illustrations were actually based on Carroll's own. Carroll gave the original, handwritten manuscript to Alice Liddell, the girl for whom his heroine was named. It currently resides at the British Library.
Need your jaw removed? Why don't you just print out a new one? [Medicine]
That's what an 83 year old woman in Belgium did. Her seriously infected jaw needed to be removed, but reconstructive surgery would have been too dangerous for such an elderly patient. That's when the doctors fired up the 3D printer.
The announcement comes from researchers at Belgium's University of Hasselt, who say this represents the first time an entire lower jaw has been replaced with a printed implant. The four-hour operation was performed last June, and it took just one day for the woman to begin talking and swallowing again. Both of those compare favorable to traditional reconstructive surgery, where a patient would have to be in surgery for up to twenty hours and then remain in hospital for at least two to four weeks. The site 3Ders explains how the jaw was made:
The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The mandible was finally given a bioceramic coating compatible with the patient's tissue by BioCeramics in Leiden. The artificial jaw weighs 107 grams, it is only 30 grams heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it.
Printing out custom implants is a promising breakthrough, and one that could have a serious impact on medicine in general if these sorts of results hold up. Of course, if you're still not totally convinced of the awesomeness of 3D printers, I have three words for you: TARDIS cookie cutters. One way or another, these damn things are taking over the world.
Grimm's best episode yet harvests horror and teenagers' organs [Video]
Finally! After two episodes of CG monster face of the week, Grimm is back and getting its hands dirty! I was genuinely surprised and highly entertained by the route and translation of this week's fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Instead of a cannibal witch hungry for the flesh of little boys and girls, Nick must fight an underground organ harvesting gang who get off on the screams of their victims! This was easily the best episode of Grimm yet.
The episode titled "Organ Grinder" had a lot of great things going for it. For one, it was actually pretty scary. After a dead teenager is discovered floating down a river, the death is connected to a black market organ trafficking operation that preys on homeless teens. Or at least the cops THOUGHT it was organ trafficking. What Nick discovers is a clan of Geiers, monsters who rip out and sell dried-up human organs for monster sex-making etc. — "like powdered rhino horn." The best part, they like to cut open their victims while they're still alive. Nasty little beasties.
The Geier brood had a pretty clever, running the town's free clinic, thus giving them the pick of the homeless teen litter. Valerie Cruz cameoed as the "evil witch." And as a nice nod to the source material, she meets her end in a giant pit of fire while fighting with Nick. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Another quality cameo in this episode was, Daryl Sabara who played Hansen, brother to Gracie. GET IT? You get it. Sabara is a brilliant up-and-coming actor in Hollywood. If you don't believe us, go watch World's Greatest Dad; he's absolutely insane in it. It's a good day whenever we get to see Sabara on screen, and he played protective brother very well.
Based on a puka shell necklace in the victim's pocket, Nick and his partner track down Hanson and Gracie (ha!), the sellers of the ancient 90s wares. The two kids reveal that a bunch of their friends have gone missing, after a lovely double date with Nick and his girlfriend Juliet. Happy to see Juliet being utilized to fight crime and getting a little bit of character development at the same time. Meanwhile Nick's Grimm powers must have finally kicked in, because the human form of Princess Eric spent the better part of this episode ordering around and threatening various magical creatures. About damned time. What's the point of being a terrifying Grimm if you're never going to cash that check? We did a cartoony spit-take when Nick smashed up the apothecaries stash of human bits. Absolutely amazing. And the fun didn't stop there — later on Nick threatened one of the Geiers with this excellent line, "Look at me, very closely. I know what you are...I'm not asking you as a cop so don't expect me to behave as one!" Good for you Nick! We'd rather he break the law this way, as opposed to his usual "entering with out a warrant" antics. Be the bad ass Grimm.
Meanwhile, Pilates Wolf finally called out Nick for being a selfish piece of garbage. It's about time.
Yes, we know this whole scene was more or less a funny "oh look they're just like a married couple" bid, and it was cute. But the lasting impression we got from this interaction was that Nick might be a shit friend. Nick is our point of reference for Monroe, the best character on the series. And when we know oh so very little about the only reason for tuning in each night, that's a problem. I'm glad someone said something, even if it was unintentional. Nick constantly asks Monroe to put his life in danger. He could stand to be a little nicer to Monroe or at least pay him back the $300 he owes him. Anyone else think Nick might be a little weird about money? Let's not forget he made sure to mention to Juliet that the necklace he bought her was a whole $20!
In the end, Nick saved the day (thanks to a trail of puka shells Hanson scattered in the woods), there was an excellent fight, and Valerie Cruz was burned alive. But not before a few more ghastly shots of the Geirers throwing naked dead teens into the fire pits, yikes.
And after all that amazing work, a fantastic fight scene, a lovely and clever fairy tale translation, and even a little bit of Juliet character building, Generic Partner Cop tries his hardest to flush it all down the toilet with one "Yeah, this town definitely is getting weirder," quip. This is his big takeaway? This is what he thinks while eyeing the jarred remains inside the human body shop? There are piles of burning bodies not 15 feet outside the front door, weird doesn't even begin to describe this horror. This guy has just got to go, or find better things to say ASAP. Everyone else is kicking it up a notch, Nick found his inner Grimm, the Big Bad Police Chief appears to be coming back into the fray, raise the bar Generic Partner Cop or die a terrible death at the hands of your boss.
Overall, "Organ Grinder" is best episode we've seen from Grimm. Fairy tales are horrific; murders are horrific, and for the first time, it felt like Grimm was shooting for real horror, and hit the mark.
Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:00:00 PST
Pin-up calendar ladies survive the sexy apocalypses [Concept Art]
They're not appropriately dressed, but these ladies are managing to get by in the apocalypse all the same. Illustrator Andrew Tarusov created a doomsday calendar, with a different gal and a different apocalypse for every month of the year.
Apocalypse Tomorrow is a 2012 calendar with a goofy take on the end of the world. It doesn't look like the calendar is available in print — maybe Tarusov should make desktop wallpaper-sized versions of these images.
No, a Chinese boy doesn't have glow-in-the-dark cat eyes [Video]
A three-year-old video in which a young Chinese boy appears to demonstrate night vision is making the rounds once again, with news sources wondering if the boy really has mutant night vision or freaky alien powers. Yeah...this shouldn't take long.
We had a little fun with this story when it first hit back in February 2009, but now the newsreel itself has emerged. The video up top has about 2.5 million views on YouTube, and its extremely reasonable and well-supported title - "Alien Hybrid Or Starchild Discovered In China? 2012" - gives a pretty good sense of the sort of over-the-top reactions stories like this can provoke. So, in the interest of presenting the "Not Alien Hybrid Nor Starchild" side of the story - what is going on here?
The video makes two key claims: that the boy's eyes shine in the dark like a cat's, and that he can see well in near total darkness. Of course, the video actually fails pretty spectacularly to back up that first point - they spend about ten seconds of the video in a dark room pointing a flashlight at his eyes, and there's no sign at all of any shine. This isn't an effect a camera should have any trouble picking up - the shininess is simply the result of a thin layer of cells called the tapetum lucidum, which is found in nocturnal animals like cats and will reflect back the light that hits it.
Indeed, for him to have cat-like eyes or night vision in any real sense, the boy would have to have a tapetum lucidum, and that's sort of mutation is pretty much completely impossible in a single generation. The good folks at Life's Little Mysteries have a thorough debunking of this story, including this explanation from James Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist at SUNY Buffalo:
Furthermore, there is no single genetic mutation that could produce a fully formed and functioning tapetum lucidum, Reynolds explained; such an ability would require multiple mutations, which wouldn't occur all at once. Evolution happens incrementally, he said, not by leaps and bounds. "Evolutionarily, mutations can result in differences that allow for new environmental niche exploitation. But such mutations are modified over long periods. A functional tapetum in a human would be just as absurd as a human born with wings. It can't happen."
Assuming the whole thing isn't just a hoax - and there's no reason to rule out that possibility - then the child's apparent night vision can be explained fairly easily. He might have an unusually high concentration of rods in his retinas, which would enable him to see well in the dark. He might have a mild form of ocular albinism, which would explain the unusual blue color of his eyes and also account for his difficulties in bright light. As a bonus, that condition would actually give his eyes a slight reflective sheen, which with a little imagination could easily be built up into shining cat eyes.
Sky diver plans supersonic jump from suborbital space [Space]
Could space jumping be the next extreme sport? After all the objects that have gone into suborbital space: teddy bears, Lego men, plates of sushi, one man plans to send himself up to the edge, and then leap back down again.
We first told you about Felix Baumgartner's quest to be the first supersonic man two years ago, and now it looks like his potentially record-breaking jump has a date. This week, Baumgartner's jump team will announce plans to send the sky diver up with a suborbital balloon this coming August. He'll travel 120,000 above ground, and then spend ten minutes traveling (we hope safely) back to Earth. It's believed that he will travel 690 miles per hour, allowing him to break the sound barrier.
This death-defying (again, we hope) project is sponsored by Red Bull, which is funding the team and equipment needed to ensure Baumgartner comes back alive. The project was temporarily cancelled when a promoter filed suit, claiming the jump was his idea, but now that the case has been dismissed, the stunt is back on.
The world's largest museum collection of brains is on display in Peru [Biology]
There's only one place in the world where you can view row after row of brains afflicted by mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, and alcoholism. It's Lima's Museo de Cerebros, home to the largest collection of gray matter that can be viewed by the public.
More than 3,000 samples of diseased brains and fetuses have been assembled by neuropathologist Diana Rivas for the Brain Museum. The museum is part of Peru's Institute of Neurological Science, and while academics come from around the world to examine Rivas' collection, she's much more interested in educating the public about brain disease. She hopes that, if folks can see her damaged brains firsthand, they'll think more about the health of their own noggins.
The Brain Museum isn't quite the largest collection of brains in the world. Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital has around 7,000 specimens, but it's brains aren't open to the public. So just how has Rivas amassed such an impressive collection? It helps that she supervises 100 autopsies a year, giving her the first look at potential new candidates.
The New Orleans Saints hired a Voodoo priestess to fight a ghostly football curse [Secret History]
Today, the New York Giants and the New England Patriots battle for football supremacy, while fans sit at home with their lucky jerseys and their game day rituals. But some teams need a bit more mystical help than others. In 2000, the New Orleans Saints called in the big guns to combat the ghostly curse on their football stadium.
Sports curses are nothing new. There's the famous Curse of the Bambino, in which Babe Ruth supposedly cursed the Boston Red Sox, which was blamed for the Sox's failure to win a World Series for 86 years. The Curse of Billy Penn, which allegedly kept Philadelphia sports teams from winning championships because the city built a skyscraper higher than William Penn's statue atop city hall, was believed to have been broken when iron workers attached a small figurine of Penn to the final beam of the Comcast Center. But the New Orleans Saints' curse has a particularly spooky bent, thanks to their stadium, the Superdrome, being built atop an old cemetery.
You would think an institution as superstitious as a sports team would know better than to build on hallowed ground, but the plans went forward, and most (although perhaps not all) of the human remains were moved to other locales. In 1967, the Saints franchise was born and the Superdrome plans were drawn up. For the next 33 years, the team failed to win a single playoff game, and many wondered if the displaced spirits of Girod Street Cemetery were holding the football franchise back.
In 2000, the team called in a little spiritual help. They contracted Ava Kay Jones, a Voodoo and Yoruba priestess, to appease the spiritual world and remove any ghostly impediments to the Saints' victory. Jones performed a series of rituals and prayers, calling upon the ancestors for their football support. The most public ritual took place before a playoff game against the St. Louis Rams. Jones draped a boa constrictor around her neck and performed the ceremony at midfield in the Superdrome. That day, the Saints won their first-ever playoff win, defeating the Rams 31-28. Jones claims that, after that, she became the official Voodoo priestess of the NFL.
However, just because the spirits were temporarily appeased didn't mean the curse was broken. In 2001, the Saints called Jones back to perform another ceremony before another Rams showdown. This time, however, things did not go so well. Promoters billed the event as "Who dat gris-gris?" and handed out 70,000 fliers, which referred to gris-gris, which Voodoo practitioners use as a protection against evil, as a hex or jinx. Jones felt the fliers were blasphemous, and that the team didn't appreciate her or her religion. Reportedly, she told one outlet, "I think the Saints cursed themselves."
Of course, in 2010, the Saints went on to win their first Super Bowl. After all the destruction that Hurricane Katrina brought on New Orleans, perhaps even the ghosts of Girod Street thought the city could use a championship.
Ava Kay Jones told her story about helping the Saints to playoff victory at one of The Moth's storytelling events. You can listen to her story on The Moth podcast.
To round out their squadron of flying boats and UFO project, an estimated 3,500 Iranian women are training in Japanese ninjutsu, according to a state-run news station. It's official — the Iranian government is in cahoots with COBRA from G.I. Joe.
The Iranian channel Press TV has produced the above 6.5-minute segment about these shinobis-in-training. The women in the video show off their fighting stances, defensive gymnastics, and stealth techniques, all set to a pulse-pounding techno-orchestral soundtrack.
Ninja training allows Iranian women to demonstrate their martial prowess in a society that marginalizes them with governmental and religious sanctions. As The Atlantic notes:
In 2007, when Iranian women began qualifying for the Olympics, an official publicly warned, "severe punishment will be meted out to those who do not follow Islamic rules during sporting competitions." Only three made it to Beijing; Sara Khoshjamal Fekri, the first-ever Iranian women to qualify in taekwondo, rose to the quarter-finals. International women's competitions in wushu, a Chinese form of exhibition martial arts, routinely see Iranian champions.
In Sarah and the Seed webcomic, a woman gives birth to a giant seed instead of a baby [Comics Review]
When an older woman becomes pregnant, there are always a lot of concerns. Will the baby be born healthy? Will the labor be difficult? In Ryan Andrews' short and sweet webcomic Sarah and the Seed, a woman's pregnancy results in something her husband never thought to worry about: a giant seed.
Sarah and the Seed is a self-contained webcomic in five parts that explores the fears of pregnancy, especially when that pregnancy is unexpected. After years of trying failing to have children, aging Sarah finally becomes pregnant. Her shocked husband frets over the health of the baby, but Sarah has an easy labor and gives birth to a perfectly healthy baby seed. Her husband is horrified, but Sarah is perfectly content with her hard-shelled offspring, and goes about planting and tending to her child.
Sarah and the Seed manages to pull off a strange combination; it's at once sweet and unnerving. Even as you suspect that Sarah's right in her confidence that everything will turn out alright, it's easy to sympathize with her husband's sense of dark dread. And, though the ending seems inevitable, Andrews manages to hang on to a bit of suspense through his long and dark canvases.
What do you name an adorable two-faced kitten? Meet Harvey Dent [Video]
There's a new two-faced character in the world, and he's a lot cuddlier than Aaron Eckhart. Newborn Janus cat Harvey Dent has four eyes, two noses, two mouths, and one appropriate name.
Little Harvey was born in this week in Port Charlotte, Fla. Janus cats are frequently plagued with health issues, which can be especially pronounced if the cat has a duplicated esophagus. Fortunately, all of Harv's duplicated parts seem to be working, and he has a role model for the long-lived Janus: Frank and Louie, the 12-year-old two-faced cat who was recently won a spot in the Guinness World Records. Still, the owners are continuing monitor him for health problems, even as neighbors are complaining that their "abomination" of a black cat should be put down.
I believe in Harvey Dent. We're pulling for you, little guy.
Sad edit: Apparently, poor Harv passed away yesterday from complications. Thanks to Laura for the update.
Are there really more people alive now than have ever lived? [Maths]
There's a popular claim that the seven billion people alive today outnumber all other humans who have ever lived. It's meant as a stark reminder of humanity's population explosion over the last 200 years...but is it true, or total crap?
This idea has gained a bit of new currency with the recent UN announcement that humanity has crossed the seven billion mark just thirteen years after we reach six billion and 25 years after we reached five billion. Considering humanity only crossed the billion person threshold around 1800 and the two billion mark in 1923, it doesn't seem totally impossible that all the people alive today might really outnumber their deceased counterparts going back to the very beginnings of humanity.
Not totally impossible...but also not correct, either. BBC News spoke to the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC, and they estimate that about 107 billion people have been born since humanity first emerged, which they set 50,000 years ago. (That sounds like an underestimate, considering the current scientific consensus favors a date more around 200,000 years ago, but the tiny population means that even an extra 150,000 years would only tack on another few million or so.)
The key to this relatively high figure is the amount of births per thousand people per year, which today is about 23. Throughout much of history, lots of people died before reaching reproductive age, which meant many more children had to be born to keep the population growing. The Population Reference Bureau says the figure in the Middle Ages was probably at least 80 births per thousand, and it might have been significantly higher than that.
The BBC also points out that these figures actually vindicate the most famous population estimate in science fiction history - that of Arthur C. Clarke in the beginning of the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he observes, "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." While the 2012 version of that statement would have to refer to 70 ghosts, Clarke was absolutely correct when he wrote it back in 1968, when the population was 3.5 billion - and the ratio of dead to living was about 29 to 1.
All this probably means that the living will never outnumber the dead, unless humanity's population explodes by several orders of magnitude beyond what we've already experienced. For what it's worth, one path to this might involve this estimate from the UN Population Division, which notes that, should 1995 fertility rates hold constant, the world population in 2150 would be 256 billion - not that that was meant as a serious estimate.
Our one planet almost certainly couldn't actually hold 107 billion people all at once, so the only real way to prove this old chestnut true would probably be to take to the stars and colonizing other worlds...and then start breeding like rabbits, because what the hell else are you going to do once you've colonized an alien planet?
SNL journeys to Moon President Gingrich's lunar utopia [Video]
Life will be sweet on Newt Gingrich's moon base. We'll all wear awesome retrofuturistic jumpsuits, children will serve as janitors at their own schools, and Vice-Admiral Herman Cain will be there to greet us with a warm secret space handshake. And, of course, President Newt will rule over it all, defending truth, divorce, and the lunar way.
This was last night's Saturday Night Live cold open. I'll say this for Gingrich's secessionist moon base: they wear some snazzy uniforms.
Perhaps the most well-researched map ever of The Hunger Games' Panem [Hunger Games]
Part of the fun of Suzanne Collins' dystopian Hunger Games series is trying to figure out where in North America the districts of the future nation of Panem are located. One Hunger Games fan took a crack at mapping the fictional country, looking not only at information in the book, but also tectonic plate formations and possible ways huge swaths of the continent might flood.
There's a spoiler in here for folks who haven't finished the second book.
V. Arrow, also known as aimmyarrowshigh, isn't just a Hunger Games fan; she's a Hunger Games enthusiast, and author of Smart Pop's The Panem Companion: An Unofficial Guide to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, due out in December. In an attempt to better understand Collins' world, Arrow decided to map out Panem's thirteen districts.
Arrow put a great deal of thought into the layout of her Panem, and came up with some fun musings on geography and when considering the rising North American sea levels:
I chose to center part of the cataclysm in the Gulf of Mexico as a tectonic shift and moved the Yucatan Peninsula, rather than sinking it. Mostly this is because I ♥ Finnick/Annie and wanted them to have a little island for the D4 Victor's Village. Plus, it doesn't really alter the topography of any other District, so hey! :P
While feasible, it wasn't really jelling for me. badguys [her collaborator] brought up that there would be a natural floodbreak at the Sierra Nevadas and, likely, the Grand Canyon. (Incidentally this went into a long discussion about the Mississippi River being the dam that broke in the 70th Games, but that's not really pertinent!)
It's a entertaining read, and Arrow makes a good argument for her Panem map. Alas, it seems that in the Hunger Games future, my house is securely underwater.
The Avengers team up with Jake and Finn for Avenger Time [Video]
If the Avengers are Earth's mightiest heroes, and Adventure Time's Jake and Finn are the bravest adventurers of the post-apocalypse, what happens when they meet face to animated face? In this segment from Cartoon Network's Mad animated sketch show, the Avengers travel through their cartoon history until they're suddenly thrust into the surreal Land of Ooo.
Jim Bakker's Christian amusement park is now a post-apocalyptic ghost town [Modern Ruins]
In 1986, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA was the third most-visited amusement park in the US, behind only Disney World and Disneyland. Now the park that once entertained millions of guests is falling to pieces, and looks more like the scene from a post-apocalyptic movie than a place for family fun.
Heritage USA opened in Fort Mill, SC, in 1978, and by the mid-eighties drew in six million visitors each year. The park was perhaps best-known for "Jerry's Slide," a 163-foot water slide that Falwell slid down in his suit, resulting in one of the most famous photographs of the televangelist. But those water slides and fairy tale castle were, in part, responsible for Falwell's downfall. After scandals regarding Falwell's fundraising efforts to build the park's never-completed hotel and the IRS's revocation of its tax-exempt status, Heritage USA was hit by another, more physical blow. Hurricane Hugo wreaked havoc on the park's buildings in 1989, and Heritage closed for good shortly afterward.
These photos all come from Tommy and James. Visit their site for even more photos of the abandoned park.
Greek fire. Damascus steel. These are two technological innovations whose secrets are said to be lost to time. Even the original schematics for the Apollo missions have disappeared into the mists of history, forever hidden inside hopelessly obsolete computers. More »
Joss Whedon loves to remind us that the Avengers are just one big dysfunctional family, and if there's one thing that family does, it's send horrible text messages to one another. More »
This newly discovered planet is just 22 light-years away. Its discoverers are calling it the "new best candidate" to support water, and possibly life. More »
This was awesome.Tony Alleyne's infamous Star Trek apartment inspired us all to up our geeky interiors to the next level. Sadly, the Trek fanatic's majestic apartment is no more. More »
Seriously. This map suggests that unless you live in California, a smattering of states out East, or a small handfull of other states sprinkled across the country, you're looking at a very grave problem when it comes to scientific illiteracy in your community's youth. More »
Around 1,500 BCE, a student in ancient Babylon inscribed six riddles on a tablet. 3,500 years later, these proto-jokes lose a lot in the translation, but one thing's for sure. More »
We've heard murmurs of the so-called Watchmen 2 project, and even an image or two mysteriously traipsed into the internet wilds a few weeks back. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, DC Comics has surreptitiously unleashed the full list of Before Watchmen prequel comic books slated for Summer 2012. More »
There's a secret code hiding in many a scientific research paper, but it's not the key to immortality or a way to turn maple syrup into rocket fuel. No, it's the code that tells you precisely what was going through the researcher's head as he or she was writing the paper. More »
Alvin Schwartz's collection of haunting tales Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is an important gateway drug into the world of the supernatural. And as terrifying as the stories about brides locked forever in an attic trunk truly are, it's the artwork by Stephen Gammell that kept you up at night. More »
Is the sexapocalypse really something to fear? Or could it actually usher in a new era without the old sexual hangups and oppression that many of us struggle with today? We asked a group of brave scientists and science fiction writers what they think the coming sexapocalypse will bring. More »
Case Western Reserve University biochemist Erik Andrulis has just published a paper about a discovery that goes way beyond the RNA he usually researches. More »
We've seen plenty of clever and quirky artwork centered on Disney's stable of princesses, but what about their other halves? The Disney princes finally get their due, taking center stage on the covers of familiar magazines. More »
This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it's actually something even stranger. More »
In my opinion, the most jarringly inexplicable scene in The Shining is when Shelley Duvall stumbles upon a well-groomed man receiving fellatio from a silent individual wearing what resembles a bootleg Scooby Doo costume. More »
Sure, sugar's bad for you. But should we establish a drinking age for sugary sodas? According to UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, the answer is emphatically yes. More »
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:15:09 PST
The experiment to determine whether an astronaut could fall like a cat [Space]
How did astronauts learn to walk in space? In part, they learned from the animal kingdom's master of the freefall: the common house cat.
In the 1960s, Stanford University professor Thomas R. Kane spent two years studying the mechanics of feline falls. His equations were able to predict the overturning of cats as they bent at the waste and moved themselves to side, and eventually down to achieve the four-point landing that lets cats land on their feet. Believing Kane's research could prove valuable to spacewalking astronauts, NASA awarded Kane a $60,000 grant to develop weightless cat-like maneuvers. Kane would film a cat bouncing on a trampoline, study its movements, and then a gymnast in a spacesuit would try to reproduce the cat's movements on the trampoline. Kane was able to develop several maneuvers that allowed his bouncing faux astronaut to twist his body by moving his arms and hips. You can see comparisons of cat and astronaut falls below.
Kane and his cat-astronaut experiments appeared in Life magazine in 1968.
Why the new Star Wars Volkswagen Super Bowl ad is a travesty [Video]
I was excited as the next Star Wars fan to get a sneak peek this week of the new "The Dog Strikes Back" Volkswagen ad that's set to debut at the Super Bowl. Like the big hit of last year, "The Force," a clever ad that featured a Darth Vader-dressed kid frustrated when his Dark Side powers don't work (until Dad makes his day by starting up the family's VW Passat with his remote), I was thrilled to see how my beloved Star Wars franchise might be subtly referenced this year.
So when I watched till the end of 2012′s entry (and yes, you have to watch till the end), to the moment where the pumped-up-dog-chasing-the-car commercial suddenly cuts to a replica Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, I chuckled to myself at the whole world-warping, reality-fantasy meta-joke Madison Avenue is playing on us. "Oh, those funny ad folks," I thought to myself. "Oh, that George Lucas (or, minions of George Lucas)." I felt that surge of geeky glee that only a fan can feel when all of his or her buttons are being pushed, tweaked and twiddled.
"Well done."
But then I thought, "No. Wait a minute. This is horrible."
George Lucas, I didn't think you could sell out any further. But you did. For while a mash-up can be fun, playful and ironic, the idea of erecting billboards inside our cinematic fantasies goes too far. Get your stinking paws off my memories, you damned dirty Mad Men!
I know. I overreact. But here's the thing. I don't generally object to companies merchandizing the heck out of every Lego, Halloween costume and Happy (or Sad) Meal. Go to town, I say. Clone away. Even if it's clear that Lucas will try anything to suck every gazillion from his seemingly bottomless IP, I liked the kid-as-Darth-Vader ad. Harmless, right? I liked the new "teaser" ad featuring dogs barking out the tune of the Imperial Death March, aka "the Bark Side." (Yes, it's ridiculous that we now have ads that tease ads that are going to be featured at the Super Bowl - a fact made more ironic when, in fact, the ads are leaked a week in advance, so the whole point of watching the Super Bowl to see new ads has become moot. But I digress.) And I'm even cool with the recent cartoon ad of Yoda and Darth Maul shilling for Brisk iced tea. So cute!
I don't even mind (too much) that Volkswagens and iced tea have absolutely nothing to do with anything in the Star Wars universe. Sure, if there was a real beverage company like Pepsi that wanted to market, say, that weird blue-green liquid, "Bantha milk," that Luke, Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen are drinking in Episode IV, then a cute commercial with Darth Maul and Yoda battling next to a giant soda machine and Bantha Milk spilling all over poor Darth Maul would make more sense. Not like that's going to happen. ("Hello Lucasfilm? I've got this great new idea for a sports drink. It's got caffeine. And ginkgo biloba. And BLUE MILK … Hello? Hello?")
Back to the VW ad. Here's my gripe. It's one thing to see a cute kid dressed like Vader trying out his evil powers in the real world. Or a choir of dogs barking Star Wars theme music in the real world. But what is not cool is to remake a scene from a beloved movie - down to every eerie detail and character - and have those characters and scenes and places exist fully in the fantasy world - in this case, the cantina - in order to sell us a real-world product. A flipping car.
Certain lines should not be crossed.
Check out this new commercial. The dog chasing the car ends, and we pull back from that "real world" to see that, in fact, we've been watching the ad on a TV screen in a "fantasy world," in the Mos Eisely cantina (which, if you recall, unlike every drinking establishment in America, did not have TV screens above the bar). You see the weird guy with the deformed face, the same one who antagonizes Luke with the line "I don't like you," and brags that he has a "death sentence on twelve systems." (Turns out his character's name is Doctor Cornelius Evazan. I love the Internet.) There's the "Walrusman" (aka Ponda Baba), whose face looks half-fly, half-baboon butt. We see old "Hammerhead" (remember him?), and the white-furred, yeti-like "Muftak" with the straw-like probosis, and a other key favorite cantina-dwellers. We even get a glimpse of those big-brained, swinging alien band mates, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, and hear their musical "cantina theme" number. The production values are as good, if not better, than the 1977 original. Cool … or creepy?
Then, Doctor Cornelius Evazan and the generic pilot guy next to him argue over which ad is better, the Vader kid or the dog. "Danger, danger," you think.
"The dog is funnier than the Vader kid." Vader disagrees.
Then enters Darth Vader, into the cantina (where, incidentally, in the real Star Wars, he never once set foot). Not a fake Darth Vader. Not a kid dressed up like Darth Vader. Not a cartoon Vader. For all intents and purposes, he IS Darth Vader. Real. He's even got the heavy scuba-like breathing. And he's in the "real" cantina. It's yourcantina, remember, as much as it is Lucas's.
Vader's makes his psionic choke move on the Doctor. All is quiet except the gurgling sound of him gasping. The music stops. The argument ends, and Vader releases the Doctor from his death grip. Then we get the happy Volkswagen logo, and the cantina returns to normal.
Nooooo-oooooooo!
Mr. Lucas, you've disappointed me for the last time. Once again.
Don't get me wrong. I love fan films. Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager is wonderful, as is the recent crowd-sourced Star Wars remake project. These are homages. Love letters. Testimonials. They are fun, and making fun, as a way to honor how much Star Wars and the Lucas creation has influenced and warped and informed us all. But they aren't ads. They don't exist to sell a product. And they don't attempt to recreate, and then wreck, a sacred memory of a place we've all seen in a movie and inhabited in our imaginations and now see in our mind's eyes. What I call "memory-places."
Yes, I know these are fantasy places, but they are real places in many of our hearts and minds. Is there nothing sacred anymore? Must everything be reduced to selling things?
It's a bitter pill to swallow, especially when the lesson of Star Wars always was that material things did not matter? That the Force, that belief and hope mattered, not new automobiles?
I object to this travesty, in the same way I would object to a car ad for a Range Rover featuring Elijah Wood and Sean Astin driving across New Zealand in hobbit regalia to destroy the Ring of Power. In the same way I would draw the line at a commercial showing a perfect replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, only so that Kirk, McCoy and Spock could hawk the benefits of a laxative or anti-depressant. Or how about an ad chock with every beloved actor from the Harry Potter movies - Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Alan Rickman, etc. - all dancing and singing to promote Glee? Or insert your favorite world and fictional characters selling any ridiculous consumer product. You get my point.
Marketers, you're my only hope. It's OK to wink at, nod to, and reference your lucrative IPs. I'll give you that. But a little goes a long way. Please don't trick us. Please don't reproduce our realms, our imagination, our memory-places, for the sole purpose of setting up a kiosk and selling your products in them. Please don't painstakingly re-create the lands I inhabited so you can drive your VW Passats across them. So you can toss Happy Meal tchotchkes from the windows as you speed across Tatooine, The Shire and all the memory-places in between. Please, keep your paws off my fantasy worlds.
This article originally appeared on Geekdad. Republished with permission.
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:00:00 PST
Milk Man is the world's worst (and most disgusting) superhero [Video]
With dairy-based powers far beyond that of a mortal man, Milk Man is a surprisingly effective crimefighter. But you may want to politely decline his projectile milk-spewing aid if you have a delicate gag reflex. [via Laughing Squid]
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:30:00 PST
Real-life "Human Centipede" contraption used electric shocks to keep frat pledges in line [Video]
Believe it or not, someone managed to put the words "human" and "centipede" next to each other more than 80 years before the infamous surgery horror film. This human centipede wasn't nearly as disgusting, but it was a torture device, albeit a mild one designed for hazing rituals.
This novelty item appeared in the DeMoulin Bros mail-order catalogue in 1928. DeMoulin was a sort of proto-Think Geek, filled with oddball high-tech gadgets. "The Human Centipede, or Night Mare" was designed for fraternal hazing rituals. The man in the front was in control of the device, while three men rode behind him. Any time he wanted to make life uncomfortable for the other riders, the front man could turn up the dial, leaving his fellows to squirm. I'm not sure if this video includes original footage or is a wholly modern recreation, but it gives you a sense of what its unfortunate riders were in for. Of course, it still beats anything that happens in The Human Centipede sequences.
Re-creating Noah's Ark, with lizards, for science! [Biology]
After a hurricane wiped out all the lizard species on certain islands in the Bahamas, scientists re-populated the small islands with two lizards of each kind. They then sat back and watched how those lizards evolved to get an up-close look at the Founder Effect.
Four years ago, a hurricane swept across islands near Great Abaco, in the Bahamas. The local lizard populations were, on many small islands, swept away entirely. In came a team of scientists from Harvard, Duke, the University of California at Davis, and the University of Rhode Island. They grabbed brown anole lizards from a heavily forested island that had an intact population, and took them across the ocean, in a boat, to deposit two of each kind on small islands in the area. (Yes, the Bible has seven or nine or some prime number of each kind. Give them some scientifo-poetic license.) The islands that they put the lizards on were mostly planted with scrub bushes and grasses. Brown anole lizards can live in both, but they do specialize according to body type. The lizards with long legs make their way through trees best. Shorter-legged lizards do better in bushes close to the ground.
By moving the lizards from a mostly-forested island to mostly-scrub islands, the scientists wanted a chance to observe the Founder Effect. Although evolution, over time, can produce extreme diversity, it is always hampered by what came before. Animals can only diverge from what they have. The Founder Effect is the degree to which 'what they have,' influences them. If there is a large population of lizards on an island, then they have a large degree of genetic diversity to diverge from, even within the same species. If there's just a pair, then the genetic legacy of that pair will be carried down through generations, since the subsequent lizards don't have any other genetic variation to draw on. Obviously, this is tough to test in everyday life, unless you Noah a pair of lizards onto an island, and observe their characteristics over the next few generations.
Jason Kolbe, the director of the research, was pleased to see that the lizard pairs all survived to make icky incestuous lizard babies over the next few years. The populations increased, on each of the small islands, for two years before leveling off. Scientists went in regularly, counted the population, and took a look at the average leg length.
"We noticed a founder effect one year after starting the experiment, which resulted in differences among the lizards on the seven islands," Kolbe said. "Some of the islands had lizards with longer limbs and some had lizards with shorter limbs, but that was random with respect to the vegetation on the new islands."
Because the structure of the vegetation on the islands differed from that of the source island, the scientists predicted that natural selection would lead the lizards to develop shorter limbs. As expected, the leg length decreased, with shorter-legged lizards surviving and breeding more in their scrubby new worlds. Kolbe noticed a very telling thing, though:
"Over the next four years, the lizards on all the islands experienced a decrease in leg length that is attributable to natural selection. But those that started out with the longest hind limbs still had the longest hind limbs. The fact that the populations maintained their order from longest to shortest limbs throughout the experiment means that both founder effects and natural selection contributed to their current differences."
The Founder Effect was observable generations down the line, even in such trivialities of a few millimeters of leg. Try as you might, there's no getting completely away from your ancestors.
Bin Laden leads undead terrorists in the explosion-filled Osombie trailer [Trailer Frenzy]
The biggest issue on tap for the 2012 presidential campaign season? Dealing with zombie terrorists. In the independent horror film Osombie, Osama Bin Laden will emerge from his water grave to convert Afghanistan — and eventually the world — to his zombie fundamentalism.
This lunatic idea comes from the brains of Arrowstorm Entertainment, which is looking for funds on Kickstarter to complete post-production on this feature-length film. The trailer looks like B-movie fun, which seems the best match for its bizarre premise:
The story follows Dusty, a yoga instructor from Colorado, who is on a desperate rescue mission to save her crazy brother Derek, a conspiracy theorist who is convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, despite having been buried at sea. In Afghanistan, Dusty falls in with a team of NATO Special Forces on a secret assignment. Turns out Derek is not so crazy after all, and that Osama has returned from his watery grave and is making an army of zombie terrorists. When the group crashes headlong into the growing zombie apocalypse, Dusty and the troops must find and destroy the root of the zombie insurgency before it infests the rest of the world.
1950 letters from wannabe space travelers hoped for canine astronauts and Venusian dinosaurs [Retro Future]
In 1950, the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium promoted its Conquest of Space exhibition with a peculiar stunt. They solicited letters from the general public, inviting them to reserve seats on the first flight into space. Letters poured in from around the country, reflecting the public's grand space age dreams.
The planetarium received letters and sketches from aspiring astronauts young and old, and today they serve as a time capsule for how people imagined space travel. It's a largely optimistic vision, where ordinary Americans believed they might someday work their fare aboard a spaceship bound for Mars or the moon.
There are a few more unusual entries, however. One letter indicates that the writer believed we might find dinosaurs on Venus. Matt Novak of Paleofuture suspects he might have gotten the idea from a story published in a 1950 issue of Coronet magazine, "Mr Smith Goes to Venus," which featured a Venus where dinosaur zoos and big game hunts were a reality.
I can't help but agree with the letter writer who hoped to book passage into space with her dog. I want to see my boxer's jowls flopping around in zero gravity.
Is Harrison Ford starring in the Blade Runner sequel? [Blade Runner]
With Ridley Scott giving us a Ripley-free Alien movie, it wouldn't be surprising if his new Blade Runner project didn't include Harrison Ford's replicant hunter Deckard. But Harrison Ford may be picking up the blaster for a direct Blade Runner sequel.
Twitch is reporting that Ford is in talks to appear in the Scott-helmed film. This contradicts an earlier statement by Alcon Entertainment producer Andrew Kosove, who said the movie was envisioned as an entirely new, Ford-less take on the Blade Runner universe (although he said he couldn't speak for Scott).
If Ford does appear in the next Blade Runner film, will it be a direct sequel to the original? Will he play an older, decidedly human Deckard? Or could he be playing an aged-up replicant? (Or will he visit the CG fountain of youth, like Jeff Bridges did in Tron Legacy?) And would the new movie utterly destroy the ambiguity of the original?
The rise of the Amazons, and the fall of Dean, on Supernatural [Video]
I like to watch teenage Amazons eat weirdly poop-looking chunks of human flesh as much as the next person, but still last night's Supernatural didn't do much for me. "The Slice Girls" was a welcome respite from the heavy, depressing arc following Bobby's death, but it also gave us weirdly flat monsters who might have been more at home in a Hammer film circa 1970. That said, this episode gave Jensen Ackles a chance to shine as we watched Dean sliding deeper into depression and desperation.
Spoilers ahead!
You shook me all night long
As you can see from my favorite montage of the episode (above), complete with one of the best songs in the English language, this week's monsters like to fuck and kill. I'm OK with that, and I'm especially OK with seeing Aunt Jenna from Vampire Diaries fooling around with Dean.
The premise is that Sam has found several newspaper stories about men being killed in a pretty supernatural way - they've been beaten by a preternaturally strong something, their hands and feet cut off, and their chests have been carved with something that reminded me of the Prince symbol. Despite the obvious weirdness, Dean resists going to investigate - all he wants to do is take deep swigs from Bobby's old hip flask. Even after they fake Fed their way into the local coroner's fridge and find out that the DNA left on the bodies doesn't match anything human, Sam is still left trying to convince Dean it's a legit case. Which is why Sam does a bunch of research and Dean goes off to the bar to hook up with Jenna.
Aaaand of course Jenna is their monster, who gets pregnant and gives birth like a day after her hookup. Dean comes by her place to pick up Bobby's flask - which he somehow left behind - and catches Jenna's baby, Emma, speaking like an adult. He's starting to believe that something seriously creepy is going on, and that maybe the superbaby might be his.
Dean's defunct
As I said earlier, I think the best part of the episode was Ackles' often subtle performance. We're starting to realize that Bobby's death may have been the straw that broke big bro's back. Dean's drinking; he's not interested in hunting; he's filled with rage every time they come across a clue that Bobby would have understood.
This is all made so much worse by the anthropology professor they have to consult about the Prince symbol on the dead bodies. Instead of Bobby, they're dealing with a fussy jerk who wants a green card for his maid in exchange for figuring out that the Prince symbol comes from ancient Amazonian religious rituals. Later, when the boys are at wit's end, a ghostly wind whips through their room and surfaces a paper in Greek - which Professor Fussy also translates. It turns out to contain information about an Amazonian group who survived by making a bargain with their goddess. They'll grow an army fast, if they promise that their daughters will kill their baby daddies.
Of course one good way to grow an army quickly might be to have babies that grow to adulthood in a few days. Also, what was that wind that brought that Greek note to the Winchesters' attention? Was it Bobby's ghost, helping them out?
Hey girls, let's party with blood and sperm!
Our Amazonian patricidal cult is as silly as it is aimless. So they've been building this army since the days of ancient Greece, with superbabies, and they still haven't taken over the world yet? Instead they've got women with dyed black hair in business suits telling a group of adolescent girls to eat pieces of turd-looking flesh with their milk, in order to become strong warriors. Later, we see Suit Amazon branding Emma with the Prince symbol and telling her to endure pain, dish out pain, and watch Purple Rain. OK, time to go kill Dean.
Cut to Dean trying to deal with Emma, who cons her way into the boys' hotel room by saying that the Amazons are making her do icky things and she wants to escape. Dean is feeling all soft about his daughter, and even when she pulls a knife he finds it hard to shoot her. Luckily Sam arrives just in time, and shoots Emma dead. The two race to the Amazon hideout and find it abandoned. So the rest of the Amazon tribe is still out there, and let's just say they're not selling books and underwear online.
And now it's time to process our feelings
"Bobby was right - you're head's not in the game," rages Sam as the two drive away from the abandoned Amazon lair. The two are arguing about whether Emma really was Dean's daughter, and Dean feels conflicted. Sam points out that their credo is "you kill the monster," which is why Dean had to kill Sam's childhood girlfriend earlier this season, after she tried to heal her sick son with brain juice from a few guys she brought home. (FYI, he was healed; he's not dead; and somewhere out there is a really pissed off kid who has vowed to kill Dean.)
At any rate, Sam and Dean are now even in the "I killed that monster you liked" department. And Sam has finally gotten it out in the open that he thinks Dean's next performance review for the Hunter Human Resources Department is going to be less than stellar. It's the same old tension. Which brother is crazier? Who is going to help them out now that Bobby and Cas are dead? Let's hope next week they can deal with their issues without us having to headslap ourselves over a bunch of Evil Slutty Female Separatists Who Kill Their Fathers.
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:00:00 PST
Concept Art Writing Prompt: A submarine decays in the middle of the desert [Open Channel]
It's time again for the Concept Art Writing Prompt, where we ask you to write a piece of flash fiction in response to an unusual piece of artwork. This week, we're headed into the desert, where, of all things, a submarine lies rotting. You're the author, so tell us: How did it get there?
This piece of concept art comes from Pene Menn, via reddit. If it inspires you, write a brief story and post it in the comments.
Here's what I came up with:
I hated desert jobs. I had to leave my bicycle in Rem Hareth, and even though I'd triple-locked it to the storage unit at Jem's, I feared she was already stripping it down to sell for parts. But with new Borzaroth Armada ships being uncovered every week, it made sense to stay until I'd cleaned up as many boats and subs as I could. But as my feet sank into the sand, I longed for the touch of the pedals.
The scavenger-merchants were nomadic, always building their shops directly into the wreckage of whatever tub they came across, and staying until the place was emptied of navy-issued dinner plates and clean linens. When there wasn't a scrap of good merch left, they'd sell the place for a few tabs to a family that needed shelter more than proximity to civilization. This wreckage had a cozy, if crude, bamboo house jutting from its guts. It almost reminded me of the beach vacation homes I'd seen in ancient photographs.
I did a lap of the sub, inspecting the markings still visible on its decaying hub. I pulled out my journal to double-check, but they were clearly from the third wave of submarines from Ba-oul, a small city-state that had attempted to secede from Borzaroth during the water wars. I consulted my journal for the proper incantation before walking inside.
The floor gave a little as I stepped inside the shop, rattling the goods lining the shelves. The place was packed with neat rows of spoils: glasses, silverware, metal gears — all the things no one bothered to make anymore. I shook my head at a folded stack of crinkled officers' uniforms, their decay-resistent fabrics freshly laundered. Despite their obvious utility, a small wooden placard labeled them "pajamas." Nobody wants to learn about the past anymore. Everyone just wants to sell it.
A petite clerk raised her eyes from an issue of last month's Kultura and quickly pulled a scarf over her hair. "Are you the exorcist?" she asked, rising from a table covered in knick-knacks from the submariners' quarters.
I used my half-dead arm to lift a St. Christopher medallion from the table, trying not to smile as her eyes widened. I swept the arm in an exaggerated arc, letting it flop through the air like a speared rattlesnake. "So you have a ghost problem," I said.
She nodded, her eyes still as wide as tea saucers. "We didn't think this sub had one. We got it half-unloaded before it showed up, screaming and howling. My brothers won't go back there anymore."
I didn't blame them. The ghosts themselves were harmless, but they were a symptom of an active AI. Touch the wrong bit of equipment and you'd have a few hundred volts traveling up your arm. "What did you do with the bodies?" I asked.
Her eyes drifted to the table. "We…we burned them."
I laid down the medallion. "Lazy," I muttered. Most scavenger-merchants were superstitious enough to bury dead bodies when they found them, although sometimes they didn't bury them deep enough to dampen the ghost operator's neural chip. Burning the bodies did no good. The chip was paper-thin and immune to fire; it got tossed around the wind with the ashes and was probably sitting just a few miles away under a millimeter of sand. "I'll have to confront the ghost directly, then," I told her. "It's a more dangerous procedure. More expensive."
She brightened at that. "That's no problem!" She bent over, fishing for something beneath the table. Strands of black hair spilled from beneath her scarf. She stood back up and thrust a filing cabinet drawer into my arms. "We found these in the pantry."
I balanced the drawer with my good arm and peered inside. Dozens of glossy brown packages shimmered in the low light, each stamped with words "Meal, Ready-to-Eat." My mouth watered.
"They're the good kind," she said. "The ones that heat themselves."
Of all the technologies we had lost, self-heating meal packets was the one I regretted the most. "It's a deal," I said. "Where's the ghost?"
The clerk ran to the front door and yanked it shut, bolting the lock behind her. "I'll show you to the engine room."
"Aren't you afraid?" I asked. Most people left the boat entirely while I did my work, not wanting to be tainted by the spectral energy. I preferred it that way. I hated the idea of concocting some pointless show to alleviate their fears.
She wobbled her head from side to side. "I want to see you do it."
I inhaled the familiar chalky smell of the engine room, wondering, not for the first time, if it had smelled that way when the sub was in use. These rooms were my office space — different from boat to boat, but comforting with their familiar pipes and dials. We walked to the back, to the silver podium that sat on the far end of all those tubes. The AI lived here, I knew, where we'd have the best chance of making contact with the ghost.
"Is that his home?" The clerk pointed to a faint light on the podium, which blinked green every few seconds. Amazing to think that, even after thousands of years, the bulb hadn't burned out.
"More or less," I told her.
"Are you going to destroy it?"
I laughed, wobbling my half-dead arm at her. "I made that mistake once, a long time ago."
She shrank back, clutching her hands against her chin. "So what are you going to do?" she asked.
I sighed, wishing I had a less humiliating ritual for this. "Hey, ghosty!" I shouted. "Officer Ghosty!" Nothing. I consulted my journal. "Freedom for Ba-oul!"
That did it. The ghost materialized, and I heard the clerk gasp behind me, her fingers digging into my half-dead arm. Most of the ghosts I encountered were senior officers, middle-aged men with hard-lined faces. This man was younger, earnest. No wonder he had screamed at the clerk's brothers; he was probably as afraid of them as they were of him.
I looked down at my journal, quickly reviewing the incantation. "Barzaroth pushed the Pementhian fleet in the Battle of East Klemor, but the battle would not have been successful without the help of the Ba-oul navy. In gratitude, Barzaroth awarded Ba-oul its independence, and the city enjoyed a thousand years of prosperity."
We waited a moment, and finally the ghost opened his mouth, his small whisper pumping from the sub's speaker system. "So we did it?" he asked with a tentative smile. "We won?"
I nodded. "You won. Mission accomplished, sir."
The ghost vanished, and my eyes shot to the podium. The light had stopped blinking.
As we headed back toward the shop, the clerk asked, "Is it true, what you said? About the ghost's city?"
I replaced my journal in my pack. "No."
"Don't you ever feel bad? Lying to ghosts like that?"
I shook my head. My journal was a collection of alternate histories from dead civilizations, hundreds of ways the world could have been different. But in the end, they all landed here, in a time where the seas had turned to deserts and we couldn't make self-heating meals, much less submarines. "No ghost's truth is any better than any other's."
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:30:00 PST
Second Mona Lisa may have been painted at the same time as the original [Secret History]
Does the Mona Lisa have a twin sister? For years, art historians thought a second version of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting was a copy created years after the original. But now that the painting has been restored, it appears it may have been painted at the same time — and in the same room — as its more famous sibling.
This junior Mona Lisa, which featured a blacked-out background prior to its restoration lives at the Prado in Madrid. The museum's conservators had long believed the painting was a much younger copy of the Mona Lisa, but after comparing infrared images of the Prado Mona Lisa with similar images of the painting at the Louvre, they realized that the paintings' underdrawings were strikingly similar. This indicates that the Prado Mona Lisa was most likely composed at the same time as Da Vinci's, probably by a student carefully studying his master's great work in progress.
So what is the significance of this twin Mona Lisa? Well, Da Vinci's original has been obscured over the centuries, and some of its details are difficult to make out. The restored copy has already offered historians insights into the original composition, giving us a better sense of how the original painting might have looked when it was fresh off the easel.
The Prado will be placing its Mona Lisa copy on display in mid-february.
Last night's moment of Olivia-on-Olivia Banter, from Fringe [Video]
We couldn't help giggling at this scene where the Olivia Dunhams of two universes both check out Peter Bishop, and then debate whether he's either of their types, in last night's Fringe. It's also a nice reminder of just how great Anna Torv is at differentiating the two Olivias — the one diligently searching for the link between the latest freak-of-the-week's victims, the other goofing off and speculating that maybe it's all just random.
Spoilers ahead...
"Making Angels" was a solid enough episode of Fringe, but nothing special. Even the awesome prospect of the two Astrids meeting turned out to be a bit underwhelming, in the end. I love Jasika Nicole, and it was great to watch the two Astrids interacting. But the Astrid subplot felt a bit... half-baked. Like the writers couldn't think of an interesting story to tell about Astrid. Nicole didn't get all that much screen time, and her arc in the episode felt perfunctory.
Alt-Astrid crosses over to our universe because her father has just died and she's freaking out. She doesn't know how to handle the emotional intensity she's feeing, so she seeks out her alternate self, who she's heard is more in touch with her emotions. And in the end, we learn that alt-Astrid felt like her father never really loved her, because of her autistic savant thing. This could have been a fascinating arc, but it felt underplayed, to say the least. Mostly, we got to see the other Astrid interacting with our versions of Walter and Olivia, plus Peter once again, and it was cute but nothing special. Alt-Astrid gets to have coffee, which they don't have in the other universe.
Both Astrids were ciphers before this episode, and they still kind of feel like ciphers at the end of it. We learn a few things, like the fact that both Astrids' mothers died of cancer. And "our" Astrid has apparently gone on a date with some guy who says he'll call but probably won't. We do meet "our" Astrid's father, who apparently has a warmer relationship with his daughter than his alternate-universe counterpart — although Astrid lies to her alternate self about this, to be kind.
I feel like many of the "freak of the week" characters on this show have gotten more compelling backstories than Astrid has, to be honest. This episode was an attempt to fix that, but it came too late to make a difference. You could see the writers straining to come up with something interesting — "Oh, I know. Her mom died. Her father loves to cook." It all feels terribly generic. Isn't Astrid supposed to be a genius, in both universes? Couldn't she have had some really weird formative experience? This show has two modes: dull, and weird. And with Astrid, they've settled on "dull."
Meanwhile, a lot of the episode is taken up with Walter bickering with Peter, and with Fauxlivia. Now that Walter has agreed to help Peter get back to his own universe — which I'm predicting will never actually happen, because that universe no longer exists — Walter is dragging his feet and being extra petulant. He wants eggs. He wants to play chess. He misses Lincoln Lee, who's off doing something godfathery in Connecticut. And then later, there's a random subplot where Peter is being too competent, and it's threatening Walter — Peter knows the right questions to ask at the crime scene, Peter can help with the autopsy, etc. It feels like it comes out of nowhere, and will probably go back there pretty quickly. Alt-Astrid gives Walter a helpful lecture about human emotions, so that Walter can have a realization that he needs to accept Peter as his son, even though he isn't.
Meanwhile, Walter sees Fauxlivia, and it sets him off into full-on petulant mode. The episode strains to find a Walter line as good as "vagenda," which the show carefully inserted into the "previously on" montage to remind us how funny that was. Of course, in the previous timeline Walter was pissed at Fauxlivia because she seduced his son, and that's no longer true. So now he's just pissy, and doesn't want to let her have any of his red vines. It never quite reaches "vagenda" levels of humor, or interest. Walter does discover a new type of mint. Actually, this episode, more than most recently, made me miss the old chemistry this cast used to have before the "alternate universe" storyline.
Meanwhile, the episode's "freak of the week" character, Neil, starts off quite promising — the opening sequence in which a man receives a cancer diagnosis with a 95 percent survival rate, only to hear from Neil that he's doomed, is quite chilling and well done. But then the episode doesn't seem to know what to do with Neil, and it culminates in a weirdly stilted scene in which Neil vents at his mom. Oh, and Neil wants to be an angel, hence the episode's title. I'm kind of tired of episodes where the Fringe team catches the bad guy when he's already basically done with his crime spree. Whatever happened to escalating the threat? You know, that whole "rising action" thing? (And yes, I know that Neil is only done because he knows hte Fringe team is coming for him. But he can see the future — he could get away easily, if he wanted to.)
By far the most interesting scene in the episode comes at the very end, when the Observer August finds out that September didn't erase the last traces of Peter Bishop from the universe, and in fact Peter Bishop is back. (For people who can see all of the future and past, the Observers are kind of slow on the uptake. It's been weeks since Peter returned.) The fall-out from this revelation should be interesting to witness. Oh, and apparently September didn't die from his gunshot wound a while back, since they say "he'll be interested to learn" what happened to his gizmo.
Anyway, this was a perfectly solid episode of Fringe, I guess — it just didn't engage me the way the show normally does. I think it was a combination of the Astrid subplot feeling weirdly slight and unformed — full of telling rather than showing — and the fact that the "freak of the week" plot devolves into mysticism and a guy ranting at his elderly mother. This definitely had the feeling of a show that's going through the motions rather than bursting with storytelling energy, which has been true of Fringe a lot lately.
But as always, your mileage may vary, and the AV Club loved this episode. And at least next week, there's a town full of zombies or something.
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:30:00 PST
What if supervillains entered American politics? [Concept Art]
Although supervillains tend to cause their mayhem in the private sector, a handful of superpowered schemers find more success pulling strings inside the government. How might supervillains change the American political landscape? For one thing, we'd have more lightsabers.
Something Awful's latest Photoshop Phriday challenged members to insert supervillains into American politics. Yes, you might argue, American politics are already sufficiently villainous, but they created some inspired images of evil elected officials. Check out all the images at Something Awful.
by djwetmouse by Stein Rockon by blazinaznx by Roundabout Route by Mulefisk
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:00:00 PST
Science fiction futures ruled by the popular kids [Triviagasm]
Some people's futures are determined by popular vote: American Idol contestants, class presidents, and people who want to get gay married in California. But what if every aspect of our lives was determined by our reputation and popularity? Would our futures be better, or would the tyranny of the popular spin us into dystopia?
We look at ten science fiction stories where society is organized around reputation and popularity.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow:Down and Out's Bitchun Society has done away with poverty, scarcity, and capitalism, replacing it with the Whuffie economy. Your Whuffie score depends on how much respect people have for you, and to some extent, how much respect you garner from folks who disagree with you. You won't starve with a low Whuffie score, but life won't exactly be pleasant. Without Whuffie, you can't hang on to your possessions, you get lousy housing, and elevators won't even stop for you. The Downside of Popularity: Even without money, people can still be bribed to do pretty awful things in exchange for a little esteem boost. And, as elections and reality television tell us, just because an idea is popular doesn't mean it isn't also terrible.
"The Guy Who Worked for Money" by Benjamin Rosenbaum": In the post-capitalist future, the world is controlled by Moody's. Well, not just Moody's, also Snopes and a rating system known as hUBBUB. Your followers can watch your every move and approve or disapprove of it one the fly. Instead of investing money, you invest time and emotional energy in your personal relationships. Get yourself a high hUBBUB rating and the world is your shiny cool kid oyster. The Downside of Popularity: Economics becomes personal. Say the wrong thing at a cocktail party, and you can say goodbye to your carefully cultivated wealth.
Extras by Scott Westerfeld: After the events of Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, cities struggle to restructure their social systems. In the city of Yokohama, everyone is assigned a "face rank," which measures their popularity. You can score a prime face rank by doing something incredible, or reporting a story about something incredible. Yes, it's a future ruled by bloggers. The Downside of Popularity: It encourages people to dick over their friends for a great story, or sensationalize a story before all the facts are in.
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks: The alien Dwellers live for billions of years, exchanging "kudos" to establish their social order. Although your kudos determines your status in society, to some extent, these reputation points do function like money; Dwellers can bet kudos or trade it for services. The Downside of Popularity: Kudos operates under a bizarre sort of hipster-logic; the harder you work for your kudos, the less it's worth. Conversely, seeming like you don't particularly care about kudos is a great way to earn it.
"All Around the Universe" by Howard L. Myers: Myers' Admirable Society has decided that Admiration is the basic quality that everyone pursues in life, and so the best way to keep society moving forward to treat Admiration as currency. If you have a favorable interaction with another human being, your bank account will swell. But a day and a half with a high-class prostitute can wipe out your funds if you're just an average-looking chap. The Downside of Popularity: Some people chafe at the idea of a society where people are forced to be popular all the time, and earning Admiration can get tougher as you get older. After all, when your pals hear that story about the famous chick you bedded for the 50th time, their Admiration starts to wear thin.
Distraction by Bruce Sterling: Money has by no means disappeared in this future version of America, but amidst the chaos of the crashing dollar, some gangs — such as the biker socialist Regulators — have eschewed money in favor of independent reputation economies. The reputation scoring system keeps folks honest, loyal, and polite, since the only way to achieve social wealth is by contributing to the good of the gang. The Downside of Popularity: The Feds aren't big fans of folks who try to hop off the money train. (As one character puts it, "Living without money is just not the American way.") So they go after the gangs' reputation servers, leaving their social systems prone to data loss and, consequently, chaos.
Accelerando by Charles Stross: Stross' novel sees the birth of the reputation economy as venture altruist Manfred Macx puts his funds and energies into projects that earn other people profits and benefits, while living off the favors he earns instead of money. Eventually, a reputation stock market emerges, where you can invest a portion of your reputation in an idea, and see dividends or losses based on the idea's popularity. The Downside of Popularity: Just like the monetary stock market, the reputation market is vulnerable to overinflation and lack of market confidence, and reputation investors sometimes put too much faith in marketers.
Pop Apocalypse by Lee Konstantinou: When face recognition is perfected, celebrity culture explodes into every aspect of human life. People with high-ranking Names are in great demand by the reality TV-loving public, and footage and photos of these celebs fetches a high price from media outlets, creating a 24-hour celebrity news cycle. This means that everyone who is the least bit famous is being constantly filmed and photographed. And if you've got a really valuable Name, you can IPO on the Reputation Exchange Market. The Downside of Popularity: The horrors of constant surveillance aside, once you open up your reputation for public trading you have to obey the will of your voting shareholders. You'd better be feeling really good about the invisible hand of the market.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart: The twenty-minutes-in-the-future America isn't a reputation economy, but your worth as a human being is determined by a series of statistics. In a world where all data is public, you're judged on your net worth, credit score, and disease profile. But other people get to rate you on your fuckability and personality. So folks are constantly judging you based on your statistics and contributing new statistics you'll be judged by. Sounds fun. The Downside of Popularity: Folks spend so much time focused on their statistics that they forget to be actual human beings.
"The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance: Everything on the planet Sirene depends on your prestige or "strakh." Strakh determines everything — how you speak with other people, what items you may take from an artisan, and where you live. Fortunately, determining another person's strakh is simple enough. Everyone on Sirene wears a mask that demonstrates their status. The Downside of Popularity: The Sirene have developed a complex, nearly inpenetrable social etiquette system, and something as simple as living in a shabby house or speaking to someone without the proper musical accompaniment can lower your strakh. Plus, the penalty for a serious faux pas is death. So chew with your mouth closed and don't walk the docks of Zundar while wearing your mask.
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:30:00 PST
Badass warrior crab amputates its own claw on the battlefield [Video]
It took mountain climber Aron Ralston (and his onscreen counterpart, James Franco) 127 hours to amputate his own limb. It takes mere seconds for this crab to pull off its own claw after an unsuccessful attack on a blue-footed booby chick.
Granted, the amputation doesn't leave it permanently one-clawed; eventually, the absent claw will regenerate. But it's still amazing to watch it dump its injured limb without a moment's hesitation. Boobies must make for a delicious snack.
Try as he might, there are some things T-Rex just can't do [This Is Awesome]
Pity the poor Tyrannosaurus. With those teeny little arms and that great big body, T-Rex is incapable of doing things that come easily to you and me.
Hugh Murphy draws the series "T-Rex Trying..." which shows a T-Rex stuck in the modern age, trying (and usually failing) to do things no short-armed creature was ever meant to do: play tetherball, paint his house, win an auction, and work baggage loading at LAX. It makes me both sad for the T-Rex and grateful for the invention of the ukelele.
I'll be shocked if "T-Rex Trying..." doesn't have a book deal by summer.
In this semi-drunk movie about Superman's death, Elijah Wood is Cyborg Superman [Video]
Remember when the Man of Steel died and came back in the 1990s? Well, this is the closest we're going to get to a live-action Death of Superman movie. And it's kind of amazing.
Max Landis (the son of famed Animal House director John Landis and screenwriter of Chronicle) has released The Death and Return of Superman, an entertaining, whisky-fueled 17-minute short detailing that bizarre 1990s storyline. And all of your favorite heroes are here, like Bloodwynd, Eradicator, and the Guardian!
Also featured are Mandy Moore as Lois Lane, Elijah Wood as Hank Henshaw, Simon Pegg as John Landis, and some other surprises. Hat tip to Ryernl.
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:30:00 PST
In webcomic Darkness, a lonely guy must neutralize his roommate's brooding, seductive superpowers [Comics Review]
Have you ever met a guy who embodies darkness? A man whose shirt is always half unbuttoned, whose disheveled hair blows in the nonexistent wind, and who is accompanied by a melodramatic caption box? A fellow whose vampire-esque brooding has women flinging themselves at him from halfway across the block? Jonas is just such a person — and his roommate is sick of it.
Boulet created Darkness for a 24-hour comic festival, although — horror of horrors — he took an extra two hours to finish up. I think he can be forgiven.
In Darkness a young man has moved into a gorgeous new apartment with a nice enough roommate. There's just one problem, his roommate, Jonas, is dark. He's a grizzled, melancholic fantasy who seemingly just walked out of a romance manga, and no woman, no matter how uptight (or how much on a date with Jonas' roommate), can resist his gloomy charms.
There's a Scott Pilgrim-like magical realist quality to Darkness. There may not be epic fights with evil ex-boyfriends, but Jonas has some pretty silly mind-altering superpowers (when he pours himself a bowl of Count Chocula, it looks like he's pouring himself a glass of whisky), and the fact that everyone can see his interior monologue is fantastic gag. And, like Scott Pilgrim, it has a rather sweet ending, one that shows you don't need seductive superpowers to have a fulfilling love life.
Captain America slaughters Nazis in this bloody Lego flick [Video]
Kick off your weekend with some cathartic superhero-on-Nazi ultraviolence. This video, by ForestFire Films, merges Lego stop-animation with Play-Doh blood to send plastic Captain America on a gory action sequence. More violent movies should be filmed in Lego.
World's largest scale model of the Solar System spans the length of Sweden [Space]
Want to take a road trip through our solar system? Warm up your Volvo and point yourself toward Stockholm, where a 950-km scale model of the solar system begins. You can tour Sweden while getting a sense of our solar neighborhood's scale.
The Sweden Solar System runs from Stockholm to Kiruna up in the northern part of Sweden, a trip that Google Maps estimates takes 15 hours, even if you aren't stopping to gawk at all the models of celestial bodies along the way. At a 1:20 million scale, it's the largest scale model of the solar system, and it all starts at the Ericsson Globe Arena in Stockholm, which is the world's largest spherical building. The rest of the solar system is represented by sculptures, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars all sitting in the Stockholm area, Jupiter in Sky City, and Pluto way up in Delsbo, with known asteroids, comets, and exoplanets along the way. It all ends with the termination shock, which sits, appropriately, at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, where you can not only say you've mapped the fake solar system with your car, but also visit the observatory and lay your eyes on the real thing.
At the moment, however, the solar system is incomplete. The model Uranus, which was located in Gävle, was vandalized and had to be removed. I was not able to find any photos of the graffiti, but I fear it was punny.
Is Obi-Wan Kenobi the toughest Bounty Hunter in the Star Wars Universe? [Video]
This week, the Regular Show comes to Saturday Morning Cartoons and John Belushi returns from the dead! Clone Wars heats up with a trial to test Obi-Wan's undercover bounty hunter skills as well - minor spoilers ahead!
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – "The Box"
In this episode, Anakin Skywalker eerily faces a similar dilemma to the one Luke battled in the Empire Strikes Back - does he rescue Obi-Wan, or be patient and wait? Yoda pleads with Anakin to stay, but with no success. Obi-Wan, still disguised as Rako Hardeen, enters a deadly bounty hunter tournament held by Count Dooku. Several interesting bounty hunters make their debut in this clip, as Rako and Cad Bane make their way through a level of the Super Mario Bros. style deathtrap called The Box.
Regular Show – "Think Positive"
Regular Show is here due to popular demand! Honestly, I never watched the show before this week, and it's a nice throwback to the silly fun of Ren & Stimpy. In the first clip, Benson is called into Pops' office and told to stop yelling at Mordecai and Rigby, or else he's going to get the axe.
This episode shows us all what happens when we keep the anger in, pressing it down a layer at time. Rigby and Mordecai love this, running amok without Benson's yelling, until Benson lets his rage out and destroys an entire park. The park is eventually spared, but Rigby and Mordecai walk away with permanently damaged hearing.
Marvel Anime: Blade – "Dead on Arrival"
This episode features a nice flashback scene showing a younger Blade defending a young girl from the vampire Baron Howard. During the battle, Blade meets Noah Van Helsing, a vampire hunter, and Noah cures Blade of his vampire cravings and teaches our favorite slayer how to hone his craft.
Mary Shelley's Frankenhole – "Robert Louis Stevenson's Belushi"
John Belushi is back!!! David Cross stars in this episode as the voice of John Belushi, who is is terrifying the town by being his loveable old self. Dr. Hyde visits Frankenstein and offers him a serum turning an individual into the worst version of himself. John Belushi drinks the serum, and becomes the worst thing imaginable...Jim Belushi.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000"
It's cider time! The Apple family is making their world renowned cider, but two out of towners, the Flim Flam Brothers, show up with a new invention to speed up the process. The Brothers want in on the Apple Family's business, but they aren't getting a taste.
The Regular Show airs Monday nights on HBO. Blade airs Friday nights on G4TV. Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Friday nights on the Cartoon Network. Mary Shelley's Frankenhole airs Sunday nights during Adult Swim. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic airs Saturday Mornings on The Hub, when cartoons should air.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:30:00 PST
Watch Liam Neeson Play A Horny Apparition With a Giant Ghost Cock [Video]
Without a doubt, the most underrated ghost movie on this planet is the delightful comedy/horror flick High Spirits. The film follows a group of misfit hotel employees (led by Peter O'Toole) who try to attempt to save their ancient castle hotel by advertising it as the most haunted castle on the emerald isle.
But as the con unfolds, tourist Jack Crawford (Steve Guttenberg) unwittingly stumbles across real ghosts, and gets entangled in the ghostly cure of Mary Plunkett Brogan (played by the poorly accented but incredibly stunning Daryl Hannah), who is doomed to spend eternity reliving her wedding night where she's murdered by the handsome and gigantic ginger, Martin Brogan (Liam Neeson).
But instead of dwelling on a centuries-old murder, Jack and Mary fall in love. And Neeson becomes infatuated with Jack's angry spouse.
Ghost sex jokes fly — they refer to it as "scalping" — and Neeson shows up to brag about his giant ghost cock! If you haven't seen High Spirits we demand you download it on iTunes immediately.
