Nicholas St. Fleur, in The Atlantic: To demonstrate his methods, Taylor and his colleagues planned to use the unique signatures they found to make a Jackson Pollock fake good enough to dupe art experts. “However, we concluded that to generate this work would represent the dawn of a new and unwanted era,” Taylor told me in…
From Phys.org: While the distance was not huge, the technology could pave the way for mankind to eventually tap the vast amount of solar energy available in space and use it here on Earth, a spokesman for The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said. “This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of…
Mike Fleming Jr, for Deadline: Expect good things to happen fast on this one. As is his usual practice, King grants a 90-day option period for $1, contingent on a writer being set, and concrete moves made in development at a pace that shows the author knows the film company is serious. I’m glad that’s…
John Timmer, for ArsTechnica: The discovery is a masterpiece of indirect detection, using Hubble Space Telescopes observations of the aurora that lights up above the moon, then using that data to work out its magnetic properties and in turn using those measurements to work out its interior structure. Ganymede is a very large moon, bigger…
A great in-depth piece on Baker, by Megan Farokhmanesh, in Polygon: Baker says his process is to not have a process when it comes to acting. As soon as he starts to think about it too much, he’s doing a disservice to the character. “A really great director told me one time, ‘That moment that you’re…
While I remain a bit hesitant to see a classic universe transmogrified into a Marvel-like franchise, look how much good came out of the various guises of Star Trek. Not all of it was good — oh no — but so much of it was. And I’ve always been more of a Star Wars fan,…
Dave Tach, for Polygon: A single painting by Olly Moss, an artist perhaps most famous for his gorgeous Star Wars trilogy posters, set the visual tone that you can see above. An FAQ on the budding developer’s official site revealed that former Double Fine Productions environmental artist Jane Ng was also at work on Firewatch. At a 2015…
Nathan Grayson, for Kotaku: The fantasy RPG plops specially selected players onto a single server and divides them into two teams of four. This means only eight players will ever be playing Upsilon Circuit at any given moment, and their adventures will likely come to swift, brutal ends. Sounds terrifying, right? Every move you make can literally be…
William Herkewitz, for Popular Mechanics: Astrophysicists working with NASA’s Saturn sweeping Cassini spacecraft have just announced that Enceladus has a warm ocean at its southern pole with ongoing hydrothermal activity—the first ever discovered outside of Earth. This new research, published in the journal Nature, builds upon last year’s discovery of the moon’s 6-mile-deep ocean, which is also believed to…
Jacob Kastrenakes, for The Verge: The show focuses on Tudyk’s character as he attends conventions and other events. It’s supposed to be based in part on the experiences — strange, funny, or otherwise — that he’s had over the years while interacting with fans and others in the convention world. “If you’ve gone to a…
Matt Simon, for Wired: Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Those finches, for instance, each live on a different Galapagos island, where their special circumstances have resulted in specialized bill shapes. Yet the…
University of Cambridge release: The newly discovered objects are a billion times dimmer than the Milky Way, and a million times less massive. The closest is about 95,000 light years away, while the most distant is more than a million light years away. According to the Cambridge team, three of the discovered objects are definite…
Jada Yuan, for Vulture: Broad City is often compared to Girls because both depict early-20s female friendships in New York, but tonally it’s much sweeter, more like the exhibitionist little sister of Seinfeld and Laverne & Shirley. The characters are fun and fresh: horny, sometimes bi-curious young ladies, rolling joints and scraping by, keeping it casual with the men in their lives…
Michael Cavna, for the Washington Post: The occasion for this interview is linked to the Bill Watterson retrospectivecurated by Robb and exhibited last year at the Billy Ireland galleries (in a dual show with a Richard Thompson retrospective) and this year at Angouleme. Tomorrow, Andrews McMeel, the parent company of Watterson’s syndicate, is publishing “Exploring Calvin and Hobbes,” the…
Kristyn Bates, for The Conversation: The latest advance in human BBIs represents another leap forward. This is where transmission of conscious thought was achieved between two human beings in August last year. Using a combination of technologies – including EEG, the Internet and TMS – the team of researchers was able to transmit a thought…
Clive Thompson, on Medium: What’s happening now is different. Now we’re messing around with syntax — the structure of sentences, the order in which the various parts go and how they relate to one another. This stuff people are doing with the subordinate clause, it’s pretty sophisticated, and oddly deep. We’re not just inventing catchy new words. We’re…
brian wang, for Next Big Future: General Fusion is nearing significant milestones. General Fusion’s Approach is Magnetized target fusion (MTF). Magnetized target fusion is a hybrid between magnetic fusion and inertial confinement fusion. In MTF, a compact toroid, or donut-shaped magnetized plasma, is compressed mechanically by an imploding conductive shell, heating the plasma to fusion conditions….
ustwo studio: Over the last year we’ve seen a lot of new thought about in-car HMI. We’ve seen considered critique about the elements and design considerations (especially in the centre console), with safety rightly at the forefront. There were 10 automakers at CES this year, with 50 products designed to reduce accidents. In the course…
Joshua Rothman, for the New Yorker: American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity’s imagined future often looks a lot like America’s past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely…
Natalie Wolchover, for Quanta Magazine: The future of RHIC, which employs 850 people and costs the Department of Energy about $160 million annually, is uncertain. In a 2012 white paper making the case for continued operations, scientists argued that “RHIC is in its prime” with new upgrades poised to answer key questions in nuclear physics….
Composer Jonathan Berger, for Nautilus: In recent years, numerous studies have shown how music hijacks our relationship with everyday time. For instance, more drinks are sold in bars when with slow-tempo music, which seems to make the bar a more enjoyable environment, one in which patrons want to linger—and order another round. Similarly, consumers spend 38…
John Brownlee for Fast Company: Many of her designs proved so universal that they have established a sort of universal grammar for computer GUIs. Although the cut-and-paste icon, the save icon, and the volume icon on your devices are probably a lot more colorful and higher resolution than the monochrome, 8-bit icons Kare designed during…
Weta Digital: The scope and diversity of visual effects work in the final film of the Hobbit trilogy was astounding. The integrated fx simulations produced for the destruction of Lake-town and new virtual stage tools developed to bring the epic CG battle sequences to life are notable highlights. See how it all came together in…
NASA release: In addition to being the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, Dawn also has the distinction of being the first mission to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. From 2011 to 2012, the spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta, delivering new insights and thousands of images from that distant world. Ceres and Vesta are…
Ian Sample, for The Guardian: The infrared maps show that water near the Martian ice caps is enriched with deuterium. The high concentration means that Mars must have lost a vast amount of water in the past, equivalent to more than six times that now locked up in the planet’s frozen ice caps. The scientists…