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Hacking is a noble pursuit — it's what tinkerers do to create cool new machines and innovate. But the media is obsessed with using the word "hacker" interchangeably with "criminal." That's why IEEE Spectrum magazine has created this helpful chart (click to enlarge), in which they try to separate out the good hacks from the bad. See if you can guess which ones are good and which are bad . . . answers are on the interactive chart at IEEE, where you can check the boxes to show only good hacks, bad ones, or neutral. More »
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Space epics almost always play fast and loose with science, treating the laws of physics like suggestions. But some movies dismember Newton and Einstein with way more gusto than others. Here's our report card for bad science in 18 movies. More »
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The good people at Orbit Books have analyzed which dragon colors were most popular on the covers of fantasy books. More »
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Mad scientists have haunted science fiction since Mary Shelley created Victor Frankenstein in the 1810s. But what kinds of research have fictional mad scientists done since? I was determined to find out. This chart shows what I discovered. More »
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The New York Times posted a detailed infographic last year visualizing data gathered from the American Time Use Survey. Apparently, as you age, you spend less time working and more time watching TV and movies. More »
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It seems like periodic tables are the genre charts de jour, but this one — breaking down the various and sundry building blocks of Episode V — is pretty neat, especially the "strangled by Vader" subset. [Scifi Wire] More »
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Need to figure out how much energy you'll need to escape the gravitational pull of the solar system's planets and moons? This chart compares the gravity wells of our neighboring celestial bodies. [xkcd] More »
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If you ever find yourself trapped inside a movie or a video game, you may wish you had studied Olly Moss' strategy guide poster, which offers a quick reference on the easiest ways to dispatch enemies from AT-ATs to zombies. More »
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This supersized infographic from Koldcast TV charts superhero movies from Superman to Wolverine, examining the earning power of costumed heroes, the biggest hits and flops, and superhero firsts, as well as adding the occasional interesting factoid. More »
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When did robots become more popular than cold fusion? Will nano out pace micro as academia's prefix of choice? PHD Comics charts out the changing popularity of various buzzwords in academic papers over the years. More »
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Today's xkcd takes an unusual approach to explaining epic movies: diagraming the interactions between the characters. He charts out Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, and the original Star Wars trilogy, and takes an amusing crack at Primer. More »
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Need help on your chronopunk novel about a journeyman inventor in a post-apocalyptic Antarctica? Look no further than David Malki's Genre-Fiction Generator, a simple flow chart that will have you concocting that perfect science fiction story in no time. More »
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When have TV aliens been more popular than magic? Do shows featuring time travel fare better than those about space exploration? We chart the popularity of television's most common themes, and see how scifi television has changed since 1970. More »
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If all time travelers existed in the same timeline, it might look something like this infographic, which outlines which time traveler arrived in which year, how they got there, and what time travel paradoxes could arise. More »
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It's the first official day of annual pop culture preview fest Comic-Con. Want to know more? We've created this helpful flowchart showing what most people are doing here. Bonus: We include some tips on getting laid and/or meeting Joss Whedon. More »
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Click to viewThe original Star Trek only managed to make 80 episodes before running out of Dilithium. Not enough! So we mixed up the show's most frequent plot twists, to create a foolproof Trek story generator. More »
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There's been a huge spike in the production of zombie movies lately, and many of them seem to be inspired by war. Everything from 28 Days Later to Zombie Strippers make explicit reference to wartime, as did seminal 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. Is there really a connection between zombie movies and social unrest? We decided to do some research and find out. The result? We've got a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910 — and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval. More »
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For decades, scifi movies and futurist documentaries have promised us domestic bliss via flying cars and housecleaning droids. We may not have home heliports yet, but several old movies actually got it right when it came to predicting the crazy gadgets that would be in our homes today. We've whipped up an infographic for you (just click it to expand) that shows what nine movies predicted, and how accurate they were. More »
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Sometimes you just want to escape into a heroic universe of wish fulfillment, with just the right kind of angst. And let's face it, some heroes do a better job of hitting your escapism sweet spots than others. We've put together a chart comparing the great action heroes, and seeing which ones hit most of the sweet spots of escapism. The categories in the chart should be pretty self-explanatory. But here's some explanation anyway: We love our heroes to be super rich, and to have an excuse for self-pity. If your fabulously wealthy parents got killed in front of you when you're a kid, so much the better. (Seriously, a tragic past seems to be a crucial ingredient for many escapist heroes, because it lets you project all your own real-life pain onto your hero, even as you're imagining rising about that pain and becoming a mega-adventurer. ) And it makes us happy when our heroes have two or more devoted acolytes/sidekicks, who follow almost without question, and awesome gadgets. Superhuman powers means what it says. "Gets laid" doesn't just mean your hero hooked up one time. "Marked for greatness" requires slightly more explanation. If your hero is the subject of a prophecy (like Starbuck), or is "the One" like Neo, then he/she is marked for greatness. Captain Kirk wasn't marked for greatness on the original Star Trek TV show, but we have a strong suspicion that the new Trek movie, by revisiting his origins, will show that he was marked for great things from the beginning. "Not tied down" doesn't just mean being single: it means that you get to roam around having adventures. And at the end of an adventure, you jump in your spaceship and zoom off to the next adventure somewhere else. Captain Kirk wasn't tied down, but Captain Sisko was. "Becomes a god or king" means your character ends up with a lot of people looking up to him/her. The Hulk, for example, is destined either to become a ruler, the Maestro, or the last survivor of Earth. Captain Kirk becomes an admiral, but more importantly he becomes a legend in his own time. The Doctor becomes the last of the Time Lords, and gets called a god a lot. Neo turns into the blind buddha Jesus monster, or something. More »
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Today, a satellite was involved in your life. Whether you checked a weather report, watched SportsCenter or looked for your mom's house on Google Maps, you did something that would have been impossible without an automated spacecraft orbiting hundreds of miles above your head. But how many of these satellites do you know by name? Here are the top ten you need to know, because they make modern life possible. More »
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A little while back, io9er Ed said Titan was "The Awesomest Moon in the Solar System." Well where I come from, them's fightin' words. What about Earth's Moon? Mars' Phobos? Europa?? There are boatloads of kickass moons in the solar system. We break down ten contenders in a highly scientific chart to settle this debate, once and for all. More »
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It's practically a truism to claim that the giant monster movie craze of the 1950s was inspired by the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the hundreds of atomic tests done afterwards. And some have argued that the Cloverfield monster's attack on New York was a not-so-subtle reference to the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center in 2001. But is there a real historical basis to these claims? We've charted some of the biggest disasters of the last century, and lined them up next to a timeline of giant monster movies, to see what the temporal correlation is between giant disasters and giant monsters. The results revealed an interesting giant monster cycle in pop culture. More »
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Dale Peck and Tim Kring's alternate-history novel is just the latest in a long history of mainstream authors lifting ideas from science fiction. But what sci-fi concepts have been most in vogue with literary publishers — and when did those fads peak? We decided to look at the biggest novels by literary authors that involved time travel, alternate history, or post-apocalyptic futures. And then we threw in larger political, cultural or literary events that could have influenced authors, publishers or readers. We discovered a shocking connection between real-life wars and the popularity of time-travel stories. More »
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TV watchers tuning into the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica tonight have more accurate information about humans killed in the show's space battles than they do about civilian deaths in Iraq. This fetish for numerical exactness is part of what makes the show so realistic and appealing to non-scifi fans — but it's also what makes fans so freakishly devoted. Because you can track every single death. And we've done that for you here, in a chart revealing the strangely detailed information Battlestar offers about its fictional population of spacers fighting robots. More »
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The cardinal rule in the Star Trek universe is the Prime Directive, which forbids the super-advanced Federation from interfering with the development of less-advanced cultures. Of course every crew breaks it regularly, but some crews have broken it more than others. Since Star Trek often tries to make reference to current U.S. politics, we decided to see if there was a relationship between these imaginary violations and what the US was doing in the world. Click through for a comparison of U.S. overseas troop levels and Star Trek's meddling, which may surprise you. More »
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What would we have to do to our bodies if we wanted to live on Mars? io9 consulted scientists, our imaginations, and a designer, and came up with the most realistic-possible portrait of a Martian colonist who might truly exist on the Red Planet in 100 years. She's really tall, doesn't have to wear a bra, and has some pretty awesome photosynthesis and water-reclaiming implants in her exosuit. It's time to meet the first Martian woman. Click through for full frontal. More »
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Click to view Space epics almost always play fast and loose with science, treating the laws of physics like suggestions. Sound in space, unprotected bodies splatting in vacuum, and alien planets that all look just like Calabasas. But some movies dismember Newton and Einstein with way more gusto than others. We rated 18 movies based on how many laws of physics they mangled, and here's our report card. More »
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This chart compares the body mass index (BMI) of superheroes in Marvel comics with those of typical American women and men. Researchers Karen Healey and Terry Johnson used physical stats from Marvel's Web site to show that the vast majority of female superheroes are underweight, though the males are mostly normal. Just to remind you, in the BMI scale, below 18.5 is underweight, 18.5-24.9 is normal, and over 25 is overweight. Healey's analysis of what this means is hilarious and thought-provoking. More »
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Economists agree the U.S. is sliding into recession, and that can only mean one thing — fewer movies about oppressive systems that crush the souls of ordinary people. We charted the number of dystopian movies in the U.S. for each of the last 30 years, against economic downturns, and found that dystopian movies are counter-cyclical. That is, dystopian films do best when the economy is booming, and a fall in the number of dystopian movies may predict a recession. Click through more details, including a bigger version of the chart and a list of dystopian movies by year. More »
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Maybe cyberpunk isn't quite dead, but it definitely peaked a while back. There are way fewer books and movies with cyberpunk themes coming out now than there were in the golden age of the 80s and mid-90s. And we've got the statistics to prove it. We counted up the cyberpunk books and movies for every year since 1980, and charted their rise and fall. Click through to see what we found. More »
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Why do so many adventure movies seem to have the same story? A lot of the blame goes to the Hero's Journey, a cookie-cutter spiritual-ish adventure recipe concocted by Joseph Campbell in 1949. Star Wars and many fantasy sagas famously follow this treasure map step by step, but how do other science fiction stories measure up? We score scifi stories on our "Hero's Journey" checklist, after the jump. More »
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Why didn't the Doctor do anything to fix the oppressive alien society he met in the Doctor Who Christmas special? Because most of the time, the Doctor only tries to preserve the status quo. But occasionally he visits a dystopia where he launches a revolution and smashes the system. Click through for our chart showing the Doctor's waxing and waning revolutionary tendencies over time. More »
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Good magazine has whipped up an amazing chart that shows how much energy your electronic toys will suck up next year — even when they're turned off. Most electronics stay in standby mode when turned off, maintaining a clock in a microwave, say, or a timer in your DVR that tells it when to turn on. After the jump, see the full chart showing how much money people in the US will spend next year just to keep devices on standby. It ain't pretty. More »
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Sure it's cool to destroy New York, but it's even cooler to destroy Los Angeles. That's why Omega Man, the 1970s version of I Am Legend, took place in Los Angeles. Viral decimation is only one of the many ways LA has been crushed, according to a 1998 book by Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, in which the irascible social critic gives us a helpful list of how LA is destroyed in 145 scifi/disaster novels. Of course nukes top the list, with a whopping 49 books wiping out LA in a big blast. But you'll be surprised by some of the lesser-known forms of LA-elimination. More »
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An international team of scientists has crunched the numbers and predicted which areas of the world will be hit hardest by the effects of climate change. They created this map of the "socioclimatic" future of the world. The reddest areas, which include China, India, and the United States, are in the most danger because they suffer from a deadly combination of social problems and lax policies on toxic emissions (it's no coincidence that all three countries are not signatories to the Kyoto Treaty). Check out the stats for yourself. [Eurekalert] Image by Pamela Burroff-Murr/Diffenbaugh et al./Dan Annarino/NOAA. More »
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Using the deadly SARS flu outbreak as a template, researchers have created a model that can predict the spread emerging global epidemics. A team of researchers in the US and Europe incorporated travel and census data from 3100 urban areas and 220 countries to figure out where a virus would travel and how fast. More »
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