Transformers. There's maybe no more iconic toy, especially if you're a child of the 80s and 90s. And while the memories of making them shapeshift are indelible, the process of actually building one from scratch is far more involved (or exactly as involved, if you spent your entire childhood dreaming of this) as you'd imagine.

We were fortunate enough to get a peek behind the curtain of where everyone from Optimus Prime to Megatron is dreamed up, designed, and brought to life.

So how are Transformers conceived? A lot like many humans, it seems: with some rough play and an exchange of body parts. At least, that's how Transformers Senior Design Director Josh Lamb and Product Designer Lenny Panzica did it, as we sat down with them in a workshop at Transformers HQ just outside Providence, Rhode Island, and started tearing apart old Zoids and Transformers.

Robots in Design

Hasbro's headquarters are home to the design teams for some of the most popular toys in the world: Star Wars, Marvel, My Little Pony—all the way down to Scrabble and Monopoly. We're in a conference room, away from the cramped offices where the teams work on hundreds of designs every year, and the team has laid out the evolution of a few the new Beast Hunters Transformers, from conception to final models. And that process kicked off, like most do, with the dismemberment of a battalion of old robots.

The only thing Lamb and Panzica, who headed design for Beast Hunters, knew for sure going in was that the robots had to be, well, beasts. Everything else was fair game. So they ripped apart previous generations of Transformer toys—painted grey, so they were just working with the geometry of the pieces—and went about Frankensteining them back together into new creations. A Zoid head might end up on an old Optimus body, or Starscream's arms might wind up on a body with a Tyrannosaurus head and a dragon's tail. Which, yes, is as fun as it sounds.

Once some general concepts were in place for each figure, Panzica sketched up how the final products might look. That's harder than it sounds; remember, he's figuring out the key features for multiple modes of being. Will the dragon spit fire missiles? What kinds of features you can cram into one form without screwing up the other? The one constant to the process? The robot comes last:

"You get your alt mode (the vehicle or animal mode) first, and then reverse it into the robot," Panzica explains. "With a normal transformation, you know the basics. The tires can fold back and expose the feet, or you can make the chest into the head for the robot."

This means free-drawing how you want both modes to look, and more importantly, what features you're going to include, and how those mechanisms are going to work.

"For Predaking, we were going to originally have a fire breath for the dragon, but that turned out to be a problem mechanically for the robot form," Panzica says. "So we started thinking, what's better than a dragon with one fire breathing head? A dragon with three heads!" And just like that, the robot dragon had three heads instead of one. It's a gentle reminder that for all the real design work that goes into these—both Panzica and Lamb went through the competitive Fashion Institute of Technology Toy Design program—they're still, at their core, toys for kids long on imagination who aren't questioning the logic of why the dragon from Cybertron has so many heads.

Panzica's been around long enough that he knows intuitively what pieces can go where. For example, when he was sketching out Predaking, he knew where the head would be, and that the tail could be used as a weapon—as could the additional heads—and that the arms and legs were more or less already in place. A chest in one mode becomes a back in the other, wings can stay wings; these are things you intuit pretty easily while playing with a Transformer, but take considerable foresight while mocking up two separate designs from scratch.

Making It Work

Hasbro works closely with venerable Japanese toy company Takara Tomy, which it has partnered with since 1984, when the two first brought Takara's Transformers to the United States. Takara handles the actual engineering of the parts, along with scale and articulation, but the design process is a back and forth between the folks in Japan and Rhode Island.

While the aesthetics and concepts of the design process take place at Hasbro, Takara is still the CPU crunching the numbers on how to actually make these things work. The recent Triple Changers announced at Toy Fair, for example were the product of Takara mastery. Triple Changers are Transformers with three modes instead of the standard two, and are traditionally a huge pain in the ass to engineer for all the reasons you would expect.

"They took about twice as long to develop as a typical Transformer," says Lamb, who's been with Hasbro since the mid-90s, when Kenner and the Star Wars toy line were acquired. "But usually you get two modes that are great, and the last one is, ehhh, sure, it works. Not here. All three are awesome."

Indeed, the troublesome triple changers—and notably the new 24-inch Metroplex—were strong enough that they even got the nod of approval from legendary Transformers guru Hideaki Yoke (Yoke-san to Transformers nerds), who still blows through from time to time to pass judgment on the newer creations.

Piece by Piece (by Piece)

That's not to say Takara goes it alone once a Transformer goes into assembly; the collaboration just kicks into overdrive. Panzica's Japanese counterpart, for example, might send back a proposal to ditch a joint that doesn't seem necessary, or add a millimeter of depth to a piece that will be under a particular amount of stress during the transformation. Design flourishes are added here—does that forearm need some more spikes?—and the complexity of the individual molds will get more or less involved. Or maybe Lenny wants to shift a piece that's set to be ABS plastic—the standard, colorful plastic that can withstand the whims of the average toddler—and change it to PVC. Materials matter, and for Transformers, they matter more than most.

The pieces are laid out in what's called a mold breakdown, which shows every individual piece that goes into the toy. It breaks down by material, mold type, and color. The Hasbro and Tanaka designers will then hunch over the breakdown for days at a time to figure out how to make the coolest, most fun, and best quality toy without sticking so many materials into it that it costs as much as a PlayStation.

It might sound like a boring phase—pushing numbers back and forth, more or less—but this is really the heart of making toys that don't feel like junk. Pick the wrong type of plastic for an arm, or make a wing piece a few millimeters too thin, and kids will be able to tell. "As a kid, you knew which knew which if your toys were really well made and which were a little junkier," Lamb says. "We do our best to make the quality stuff."

You'll use a softer PVC plastic for the sharper details on a toy, for example, so that they'll bend a bit instead of simply impaling your dad's foot during a midnight bathroom run. But for joints, you'll use celcon plastic, which is strong enough to trust with critical moving parts on Transformers, but can't be painted. And no, no metallic paint jobs, either. They're pretty, but the infusion of the metallic paint was causing the plastic to weaken and become too brittle.

"We're always mindful of how many molds we're using, how much plastic, how many color breaks, even package size" Lamb says. "Each of those add cost, and while we obviously need to hit costs, we do our best to make sure you've never got a Transformer that feels cheap."

That's why you won't see any metal Transformers any time soon, outside of possible limited collector's editions. They just cost too much to produce. "We've looked at metal and die-cast, but the cost has skyrocketed," Lamb says. He hinted at some limited edition vac-metal editions coming soon, but don't hold your breath for any major changes to materials on the main line Transformers. "We'll do new plastics to solve a problem," he said, "but we'd never really highlight it."

Autobots, Assemble!

Once all that's taken care of, the plans get shipped across the street for the model stage. Which means it's time to actually build the thing.

At this point, the Transformer is nearly complete. It's made into a CAD drawing that's to scale and will transform functionally if assembled. But unlike traditional action figures, which would get a sculptor to etch out the details on the new piece, Transformers prototypes are literally grown in Hasbro's on-site workshop. It's a former factory, where some of the first G.I. Joe action figures were manufactured, and remains now as a sort of incubator for one-off toy prototypes. We'll have a more complete look inside the workshop tomorrow, but suffice to say it uses some of the most advanced 3D-printing gear in the world, ranging from repurposed jewelry-making rigs to specially designed do-it-all machines that crank out toy parts as simply as an office printer spews TPS reports.

Once a prototype is fully assembled, it goes two places. First, it heads to a master model maker, who will poke and prod at all the functionality, and if anything's a little too loose, or at all janky, he'll adjust the CAD drawing accordingly, and try again. It's basically a one-man QA process.

After that, it heads over to Mark Maher, who hand-paints each master sample Transformer before it goes into mass production. The figure on the back of every Transformers box? It was painted here in Providence. We'll check in more with Maher, a former graffiti artist, tomorrow too, but he might be the biggest fanboy on the whole campus. He couldn't wait to get in front of a camera, yank down the neck of his t-shirt, and show everyone the Autobot logo tattooed right over his heart.

And from there, it's off to the factories. The toys themselves are manufactured off-site, which is just as well; by this point, everyone's already knee-deep in starting the whole process again several times over.

Trial By Five Year Olds

Transformers designers at Hasbro are typically working on about 200 figures at any given time, ranging from products that are coming up that year, to ones that won't be seen for two or three more years. "We're predicting what kids will be playing with in 2015," says Lamb. It isn't easy.

In fact, it's hard enough to figure out what kids like right now. To that end, Hasbro has set up what it calls the "Fun Lab" at its Providence location. Here, local kids from grade schools, middle schools, and daycares are ferried in—after their parents sign strict non-disclosure agreements—and given the toys of the future to mess around with. There's some structure to the sessions, but mostly, they just revolve around a simple idea: Figure out what's fun.

The design process is hugely informed by what goes on in these play sessions. If a bunch of kids all agree that beast Transformers biting stuff is awesome, or that fighter jets without missiles are idiotic—these are "play patterns," in toymaker parlance—Lenny will be armed with that information going in. These are focus groups, more or less, but with audiences that are uniquely qualified to give answers—Hey, is this toy fun to play with or not fun to play with?—instead of a room full of grownups who just happen to have a bunch of free time during the middle of the day.

It's a little like a Willy Wonka's Toy Factory hidden away in the middle of New England, right down to the litigiousness. "What happens if a kid signs the thing and then tells someone?" a student asked a Hasbro PR representative at a recent career day. (Hasbro employees are always a hit, shockingly.) "We'd sue them," the rep deadpanned to me. That sounds extreme, but when you consider that basically every planned product the company is working on is being paraded in front of and prodded by a bunch of kids sipping on Capri Suns, you sort of get it.

We weren't allowed on-site at the Fun Lab when we visited because they hadn't been prepped for our arrival. We asked if we could ditch the cameras and just pop our heads in, but no dice. It's that secretive. "Stuff being tested in there won't be out until 2015, 2016," a PR rep told me. Still, it's crucial step for Transformers in particular.

So what will the next generation of Transformers look like? You can help decide for yourself by voting in a new poll Hasbro just released. But in a broader sense, the Transformers of the future will be built the same way the Transformers of the past have been: figuring out what works, what's fun, and how to balance the two into pliable playtime perfection.

Photos and video by Michael Hession

Last year, James Cameron became the third person in history to venture to the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep. He was also the first person to ever make the trip alone – a trip he made in a badass submersible, fittingly named the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. Now, one year after his historic dive, he's donating the sub to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Cameron explained the donation in a statement:

The seven years we spent designing and building the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER were dedicated to expanding the options available to deep-ocean researchers. Our sub is a scientific proof-of-concept, and our partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a way to provide the technology we developed to the oceanographic community.

WHOI is a world leader in deep submergence, both manned and unmanned. I’ve been informally associated with WHOI for more than 20 years, and I welcome this opportunity to formalize the relationship with the transfer of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible system and science platform. WHOI is a place where the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER system will be a living, breathing and dynamic program going forward.

Last year, Cameron lamented the sorry state of deep sea research funding, calling today's ocean exploration "piss poor." He's right, of course – and things are perhaps more dire now than ever. Let's hope his donation does some good in the hands of America's largest independent oceanographic research institution.

Meet Amy Demicco. She's wearing the coolest dress in Boston this weekend at the PAX East convention. Her dress is made almost entirely out of playing cards for Magic: The Gathering. She estimates that she's got about 800 cards in this ensemble, mostly in the helmet.

Check out the video above and she'll explain why and how she did it.

Here's a close-up shot of her axe, which is also made of Magic cards:

There's one downside to all this: Magic cards, she told me, aren't all that sturdy. Sweat separates the fronts from the backs, and by the end of the weekend, her ensemble won't be wearable. For now, though, it's awesome.

Check out Amy's tumblr for more about this and other Magic-card outfits she's made and worn.

The wonderful zombie film Shaun of the Dead starts out with a running gag where it's clear that a zombie apocalypse is going on, but the heroes don't notice. As they walk down the street, we can see obscured scenes of undead carnage in the background, but Shaun is too wrapped up in his girlfriend-troubles to see.

Sometimes, a bad video game can feel a bit like that. You're playing, preoccupied with tutorials and introductory cinematic sequences, not yet fully aware of the jankiness that lurks in the shadows. Eventually, the game hits its stride and its crappiness gets right up to your face, groaning and snapping its teeth.

Terminal Reality's new game The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct does not indulge in such ambiguity. Both the zombie apocalypse and the game's utter badness are readily apparent within the first five minutes.

I spent last night playing through the first couple of hours of the first-person survival horror game, which came out yesterday for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Survival Instinct begins with a weird, cordoned-in tutorial that first sends you in pursuit of a false objective, then puts you into an unwinnable fight against a bunch of zombies, or "walkers" in The Walking Dead parlance. You die. Then comes the big reveal—spoiler alert?—that you were in control of the father of well-known characters Daryl and Merle Dixon, and your terrible shooting and running skills got him killed. It's a crap tutorial even among other crap tutorials, and a precursor to all the crap to come.

But first! Comes the credits sequence. Which, if you're a fan of the popular AMC Walking Dead TV show, will feel mighty familiar. Bear McCreary's six-note violin motif and string-section dive-bombs push through an evocative collection of rural imagery accompanied by the names of the actors who appear in the game. It's almost like you're watching a TV show!

And then, back to the game, which is very clearly not a TV show. You take control of Daryl Dixon, the man you'll command for the rest of the game. Side-note on Daryl—it's interesting that the most popular character on the TV show is this guy who has no counterpart in the comics. I like Daryl on the show, too. His low-drama badassery stands in welcome contrast to the whining and carrying on of the majority of the cast, and Norman Reedus manages to inhabit the role with a sharp, morally ambiguous intelligence. And he does seem like the most obvious character on the show to base a video game around, what with his signature crossbow and mysterious backstory.

But even if Daryl deserves to star in his own video game, it shouldn't be this one. I've spent two hours playing Survival Instinct, and those two hours were filled with frustration, boredom, and that peculiar form of bleak hopelessness that accompanies the worst games.

Of course, it's not a huge surprise that Survival Instinct is bad. Its promotional campaign has been festooned with warning signs—in particular the fact that they've been cagey about actually showing the game. The introductory trailers made a far bigger deal about the fact that the game stars Reedus as Daryl and Michael Rooker as his brother, Merle (Wow! Real actors from a TV show! In a video game!) than anything related to the game itself. We were unable to secure an early copy of the game for review, which is never a good sign. And early footage that hit the web was… well, it wasn't promising.

So, yes, the game is a steaming pile and an utter waste of time and money. On the off-chance that this is all new to you, allow me to demonstrate a few of the ways it comes up short.

Survival Instinct looks and moves like an Xbox 360 launch title, with inconsistent performance and flat colors and textures. On PC, it offers the following advanced graphical options:

Here's what the game looks like without light shafts:

And here's what it looks like with them:

Okay then!

Combat in the game is a disaster, plain and simple. In the early stages, you'll have a couple of guns and a knife. One of the guns uses a scope and is essentially useless, as the zombies are never far away enough to require you to use it. The shotgun is more useful, but is so loud that it attracts far more zombies than you could ever kill with your limited ammunition. That leaves you with the knife, which lets you get into a kind of hilarious slap-fight with a zombie until you kill it. As seen here:

Or, you could sneak up behind the biter and stab it in the brain. You will do this a lot. In fact, the ol' "Punch the zombie in the face to stun it, then run around it and stab it in the brain" trick was just about the only trick I used. Well, unless I got caught in...

One of the weirdest elements of Survival Instinct is the "grapple" move, which happens when a zombie gets too close to you. Daryl starts to wrestle with the zombie, and you jam the right trigger and, if you can get the cursor over the zombie's head, Daryl will stab it in the brain. It's kind of a neat idea? Except it fails in execution. The levels I've played usually end with me making a run through a pack of walkers. And if I get even remotely close to one of them, I get sucked into an unending zombie scrum, stabbing zombie after zombie after zombie, almost always until I die.

Here's a video:

Survival Instinct also features a lot of sweat. Sweat? Yes, sweat. Normally in games like this, when you "sprint" for a while, you'll run out of breath. Maybe, if you're playing Far Cry 2, your vision will swim a bit. In Survival Instinct, you'll start to see a weird water effect run down the side of the screen. That is, I have to assume, supposed to be Daryl's sweat, pouring down the camera lens. Weird! And kinda gross!

Survival Instinct is loaded with all kinds of shoddy video-game bullshit. The levels are very hemmed in and the world never feels reactive or real, and as a result the whole thing feels cheap and unfair. You'll carry around sports drinks that replenish your health, but equipping and using them is a nuisance. Checkpointing is a bummer and there's no quicksave option, and at least once the game crashed to desktop and forced me to restart an entire level. The heads-up display is laughably fug, a giant oblong compass in the corner of the screen that points, surprisingly unhelpfully, to your next objective.

Level design is awful—I'd run into a room and more often than not would get cornered and die. Doors are inconsistent—some will open, but most are glued shut. And there are invisible walls everywhere.

Check out this doozy from the end of another early mission:

I'm standing on the car, the dude I'm supposed to get to is right there, and yet I have to run into the glowing green area to end the mission. Man.

When you travel from level to level in the game, you'll have to make some decisions about which route you take. You can take backroads, regular streets, or the highway. Each one uses a certain amount of gas, and each one brings with it a chance of a breakdown. If you run out of gas or break down, you'll have to explore a small side-mission area to find more gas or locate whatever part from your car needs to be replaced.

It's an interesting risk/reward idea that falls flat because no matter what happens, you're going to have to do the same thing: Enter an area, dodge some zombies, grab a thing, and run back to the glowing green square. Basically, these side missions give you more game to play. Because the game is terrible, they feel more like a punishment than a bonus.

You can also manage the survivors in your crew, which is another odd idea that doesn't work but could've maybe been interesting in another game. You can give your companions weapons and even send them out on errands to get gas or food. You can also just tell them to "stay at the car," which, if you follow the TV show, is kind of funny, albeit unintentionally so.

But really, this whole aspect of the game is a mess, and just adds some unclear, unfun micromanaging to deal with in between unfun action missions. I'd love to play a post-apocalyptic resource management/travel game like Oregon Trail, but this ain't it.

There's certainly no opportunity to get attached to your friends, and their deaths are treated about as ignobly as could be. Check out the end of this mission (more spoilers, if you care):

So not only does the cutscene trigger before I touch the green box, it ends with a hilariously anticlimactic death scene. Bang! End-of-mission screen! Ha.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a slipshod, uninspired mess. I have to feel for the developers at Terminal Reality—whatever rushed production schedule or other behind-the-scenes shenanigans must have gone down, no professional game-maker could be happy with this final product.

There are so many superior alternatives: If you've got a hankering to kill some zombies in a southern setting, play Left 4 Dead 2. If you love The Walking Dead and want to spend more time in that world, play Telltale's wonderful adventure game from last year. And if you want to play a tense, terrifying first-person zombie game that relies on smarts and sneaking as much as on firepower (and you own a Wii U), play ZombiU.

I can think of no compelling reason why anyone should play this game. Ugly, flat, boring, aggravating and often broken, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is the purest form of video game garbage. It's utterly unworthy of your time and money.

Ever wondered what it looks like to set a gas-filled camper on fire? Or drop a piggy bank on the running blades of an upside-down lawnmower? Or light 60,000 matches all at once? Wonder no more.

In the run-up to their second season on air, the folks at Danish TV show Dumt & Farligt (which literally translates to "Stupid and Dangerous") have released a sequel to Stupidity Captured at 2500 Frames Per Second — a fantastic highlight reel of things getting blown up/ripped apart/tattered to shreds/lit on fire in slow motion. Like the original, this movie was shot using a Vision Research Phantom Flex camera, a piece of video equipment capable of shooting scenes at over 2,000 frames per second and at 1080p resolution.

Full screen, hi-res, headphones if you got 'em.

[Dumt & Farligt - Igin]

J.J. Abrams reveals why Benedict Cumberbatch's Star Trek villain is nothing like Nero. New cast member Dane DeHaan praises the Amazing Spider-Man 2 script. The Evil Dead reboot could get a sequel. Plus everything you need to know about Arrow's future!

It's nothing but spoilers from here on out!

Top image from Star Trek Into Darkness.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Director J.J. Abrams contrasts Benedict Cumberbatch's villain John Harrison with the previous film's bad guy, Eric Bana's genocidal Romulan Nero:

"[Nero] was just a raging, vengeful lunatic. All he wanted to do was destroy Vulcan, Earth and the Federation... He had backstory but was kind of irrational. The beauty of Benedict's [John Harrison] is that he's completely rational. He's someone that you can have conversations with. You couldn't sit down and talk to Nero - he'd bite your head off!"

Cumberbatch himself adds:

"I did a lot of close combat training. He's a kick-ass warrior, as masterful with his hands and body as he is with weapons... You will have a great discovery during this film."

[Total Film via Comic Book Movie]

Producer Bryan Burk discusses the use of IMAX and 3D in the film:

They're both challenging. IMAX is a wonderful format in the sense that it's such a crazy-clear image. So few films have shot with it. Chris Nolan did it for The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. We did it for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and I believe one of the Transformers had parts in IMAX. There's a reason so few movies shoot like this, the cameras are big, old and bulky. They're loud... 3D is just an interesting format, you realize the limitations of shooting with 3D cameras, you realize the laborious process it takes to finish the film. Particularly if you don't want to just slap on 3D in post and really make it an experience. It takes a tremendous amount of manpower and great artists.

It sounds like you're being quite ambitious and aggressive with the use of 3D?
"Well, Avatar was a different thing because that was a whole world being created. What we wanted is if we're going to do 3D, we want the stuff to leap off the screen and push further. We want people to leave and say, 'Well, I got my money's worth.' This film is a rollercoaster so we're really trying to push the limits."

He also suggests there will be plenty of references to the original series for longtime fans:

"Yes, one of the things is that the movie will always be for Star Trek fans. In the process of all us five producers working together, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof, to a slightly lesser extent, are crazy-hardcore Trekkies. They understand the world so we had long conversations where they put things in and would be laughing hysterically. I had no clue why they were! There are tonnes of references and nods."

[Digital Spy]

Star Wars: Episode VII

Bryan Burk also offers a brief update on J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot's other huge movie project:

"We're very new to the process. We've only been on the movie a few weeks. The script we're still working on with the writers and Kathleen Kennedy, who's a genius. It's hard for me to comment on anything. We're still figuring things out."

[Digital Spy]

Iron Man 3

In previewing Guy Pearce's role as Aldrich Killian and Rebecca Hall's role as Maya Hansen, writer-director Shane Black hints at how each might challenge Tony Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts:

"We approached [Pearce] to play one of our villains, and he's incredibly menacing as this guy who is insanely jealous of Tony Stark. He wants to possess everything Tony has, including his girl... Rebecca is a talented, funny and beautiful actress. We needed someone who could be believable in the role of a scientist, who's a little in spite of herself, and has a lot of charm. She was perfect. Maya Hansen is an old friend of Tony Stark from the past that resurfaces. This is not strictly a rival for Pepper Potts, but she has a real bond with Tony that goes way back."

[Premiere via Comic Book Movie]

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Chronicle star Dane DeHaan, who plays Harry Osborn in Marc Webb's next Spider-Man movie, offers some praise for the sequel's screenplay:

"It's awesome. It really is. It's human and it's deep and it's also epic and still a huge superhero movie. But it all makes sense and it all comes from very human elements and I think people are really going to love it."

[Collider]

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Star Martin Freeman says he still has to film new scenes, either for this next entry or for the (presumably) final film, The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Considering the final film just had its release date pushed back, it's perhaps more likely the extensive reshoots are for that film, but Freeman doesn't specify — though he does reveal he doesn't even have the script yet for these new scenes:

"I am going back at the end of May for all of June and July. I suppose the thing is, this is not finished. We literally have to go and finish it. It's not a new adventure like on a television show. It's the same story. It's the same gig I started in January 2011. I think it'll be really fun because the crew is quite close and the cast are close and we like working on it. I'm anticipating it... You just pace yourself, you do learn to take your time and converge energy. I don't think it feels like new demands, but then again, I haven't seen a shooting script yet, so they might have me walking through fire!"

[Hollywood.com]

Evil Dead 2

Reboot director Fede Alvarez says he has plans for a sequel, though he's not yet signed on to make the film:

I think it's going to depend on where we take it. Right now, we just got to write it. For me, it's if we manage to agree, but we're just starting to build a story and figure out what kind of movie it's going to be, and it depends on what it is. It depends on the story we find, because personally, I think it has to shock everybody. It has to go to a different place just like Army of Darkness did with Evil Dead 2. It has to do that switch that every Evil Dead movie did with the previous one....

The new one — the next one — is going to be a completely new, fresh, 100% original, you bet. Because this one has so many ties to the first one that at the end of the day, being what it is, it's like a sound of the original movie. But this next one, it's not a remake of Evil Dead 2. It's something completely new and different. I'm so excited to see where that's going to go.

There's more at the link, including some vague hints about Sam Raimi's oft-discussed plans for an original-continuity Evil Dead 4. [Collider]

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Here are three more brief character profiles for Adrianne Palicki's Lady Jaye, D.J. Cotrona's Flint, and Channing Tatum's returning character Duke, who is thought to have just a cameo in the sequel.

Transformers 4

Michael Bay's latest Transformers movie — which I'm increasingly disappointed hasn't been renamed Trans4mers, because apparently some things are just too perfect for this Earth — will be darker and grittier than what came before. At least, that's the implication from new star Mark Wahlberg's response when asked if the film will indeed be darker and grittier:

"Yeah...I don't want to get fired before I get started, but you're on the right track!"

[Total Film via Comic Book Movie]

For those who were wondering about the all-important question, "How does Josh Duhamel fit into this?" — a question that future scholars will one day ask about all the key events of the 21st century — Josh Duhamel himself has the answer:

"[Michael] said he wants to put me in it someplace. I don't know if he was just saying that because he had me on the phone and he felt obligated or what, but you know what? I got to do three of those. It changed my career, it changed my life getting to be a part of something that big, so I'm grateful for even doing the first three of them."

[Hollywood Reporter]

Monsters University

Here's a trio of tie-in viral videos for Pixar's upcoming Monsters, Inc. prequel. [Coming Soon]

Bond 24

Skyfall co-writer John Logan discusses what he would like to build on if he works on the next film's script:

Fleming's courage in showing Bond's fear and vulnerability and depression was really interesting and something that a modern audience can accept. I think Skyfall demonstrated that they want more layers to that character. And those are the layers that Fleming wrote.

[Financial Times]

Person of Interest

Episode twenty-one will reportedly be called "Zero Day." [SpoilerTV]

Once Upon a Time

Here's an interview with Captain Hook actor Colin O'Donoghue. [BuddyTV]

Arrow

There's a great interview over at Collider with the entire cast and creative team. It's well worth reading the whole thing, but let's run through some quick highlights, starting with executive producer Marc Guggenheim's preview of the rest of the season:

It gets big and bigger. Episode 17 basically marks the third and final chapter of our saga, so from 17 to 23, we're just on rails, going great guns to the season finale. Each episode will build on the episode prior to it, and it will get bigger and bigger, not just in terms of scope, but also emotionally. There will be a lot of big emotional things that happen, in the wake of Tommy discovering that Oliver is The Arrow. We're going to start, in Episode 18, paying off all the mythology that we've been laying in since Episode 2. Big revelations will start coming at the audience, pretty fast and furiously, and that's going to be the rocket fuel that just propels us to the end.

Fellow executive producer Andrew Kreisberg offers some more specific details about what's ahead on the island and in Starling City:

Both stories have a big bad and an arc for the season. What's always exciting about the island is that we know, from the pilot, that Oliver survives the island. What's interesting is that you don't know what's happened to anyone else. You don't know what happens to Slade Wilson. You don't know what happens to Shadow. You don't know what happens to Yao Fei. You don't know what happens to Fyers. So, watching how that's all going to play out is really exciting. And then, in the present-day story, obviously there's the plot with The Undertaking and what that's going to entail, the ramifications of Tommy finding out Oliver's secret, and how Roy Harper plays into things. We've thrown a lot of plates up in the air, but we have an idea about how to catch them all. We're really excited because it feels like everything we've been doing has been this slow burn, building up to this big climax.

And here's third executive producer Greg Berlanti and Guggenheim on how the first season finale will provide the foundation for the second season:

Berlanti: Absolutely! There will be a lot of questions. I'm not a fan of things being pure cliffhanger-y, personally. I think you want the sense of satisfaction and of, "Wow, I watched a storyline that really had a beginning, middle and end." But within that, we're setting up a lot of stuff for next year.

Guggenheim: What we are doing is striving to have a finale that both gives you a sense of closure that you've finished a chapter, but at the same time, leaves you with enough little cliffhangers and nuggets that it makes you lean in and go, "God, I can't wait to see Season 2!" And we've already started talking about Season 2 in the writers room. We have very clear ideas about what Oliver's emotional arc for the season is going to be, and how the finale is going to affect him, both as Oliver Queen and as The Arrow. That's really the big thing for us. The finale will be the end of a chapter, but you'll look at Season 2 and go, "Oh, that all started because of the events of the finale." The finale kicks everything off.

There's still plenty at the link, including thoughts from stars Stephen Amell and David Ramsey. [Collider]

The Vampire Diaries

Here's a promo clip for the next episode, "Bring It On." [EW]

American Horror Story

Returning actress Frances Conroy says she will have an expanded role in the third season:

"It's going to start up again in July or August in New Orleans, I'll be part that and will have a fairly substantial part in it. I'll be in 10 of the episodes of what I think will be a 13-part season. That will be interesting to see what's written, the writers are so good and I can't wait to see where it goes. "I know there's been a little bit of teasing [about a witchcraft storyline], they're trying to keep it all hush hush so there are surprises. I'm interested in seeing what world we'll inhabit."

[Shock Till You Drop]

Additional reporting by Katharine Trendacosta.

We're amped that Clark Gregg will be reprising his role as Agent Phil Coulson on Joss Whedon's S.H.I.E.L.D.. But why, after the events of The Avengers, did Whedon decide to bring back a character who was busy being dead? It's because Whedon felt Gregg was the perfect guy to represent the Marvel Universe's non-superpowered heroes.

Cinema Blend reports that, at Whedon's SXSW panel, he confirmed what has been clear for some time now: Agent Coulson is very much alive in the world of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is set after The Avengers. How is it that Coulson is alive? "I'll tell you guys this," he joked, "Heimlich." So we don't know for certain whether Coulson's death in The Avengers was faked.

In talking to Deadline a few days ago, however, Whedon did discuss why Coulson had to be the man at the head of S.H.I.E.L.D.:

The idea of the Little Guy is something that I am very fierce about, and there has never been a better Little Guy than Clark Gregg. That intrigued me, this world around the superhero community. It's the people whose shop windows get blown up when the Destroyer shows up. It's the more intimate stories that belong on television that we can really tap into the visual style and ethos, and even some of the mythology, of the Marvel movies. I think we've put together another really great ensemble headed by Clark.

[via Bleeding Cool]

Taxidermy is a skill and art form that many think is plenty weird all on its own, even though it was practiced by luminaries like Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt. It stretches from the lows of PT Barnum's Feejee Mermaid to the highs of the myriad museums of natural history to the macabre artistry of rogue taxidermists who transform animal furs with gems and mechanical parts and phenomenal works of chemistry. But beyond Walter Potter's anthropomorphic weirdness and Damien Hirst's suspended sharks, there are taxidermic works with some truly odd backstories.

Top photo by Ed Schipul.

The Platypus: The Hoax That Wasn't

In 1798, when Captain John Hunter sent a platypus pelt along with a sketch of the animal to England, British scientists thought they knew a hoax when they saw it. George Shaw, who was Keeper of the Department of Natural History at the British Museum, wrote up a description of the creature based on the pelt and Hunter's notes in Naturalist's Miscellany, but said he could not be certain that such a peculiar beast existed in nature. Others shared Shaw's skepticism; surgeon Robert Knox (the beneficiary of the infamous Burke and Hare murders) suggested that since the platypus had come by way of the Indian Ocean that the platypus was likely the invention of some Chinese taxidermist who had sewn a duck's bill onto a furry mammal's body. Shaw even went so far as to take a pair of scissors to the pelt, hunting in vain for stitches. It wasn't until more platypus pelts appeared on the scene (and no stitches were found) that British scientists accepted the perplexing reality that is the platypus.

That first platypus specimen described by Shaw still exists—and it's in good shape. It lives at the Natural History Museum in London, but is considered too valuable to be on public display. Instead, it inhabits a locked cabinet in the museum's Mammal Tower, far from the sideshow treatment genuine taxidermic hoaxes have received.

The Lion of Gripsholm Castle

Modern taxidermy is serious business, with careful attention paid to making the dead animal look much like it did in life. Especially skilled taxidermists will examining living animals in the field, studying the craning of a neck, the extension of a wing, the movement of muscles between fur and skin. But in the 18th century, a taxidermist might be confronted with the challenge of mounting the pelt of an animal he had never seen before. Such is the case with the cartoonish Lion of Gripsholm Castle.

In 1731, the Bey of Algiers gifted King Frederik I of Sweden a real, live lion—along with another big cat, three hyenas, and a freed slave to serve as their keeper. The lion lived out its days in Djurgården, the royal game park, and when it died, the hope was that the Bey's gift could live on as a stuffed monument to the lion's power. Sadly, the taxidermist had never seen a lion with his own eyes and had, it seems, only a loose idea of how a lion was meant to look. The result, with its lolling tongue and goggly eyes, was something that looked better prepared for a nightmarish cartoon than the royal halls. Still, as its name suggests, the stuffed lion continues to adorn the interior of Sweden's Gripsholm Castle in its sad mid-stalk.

Jeremy Bentham and His Hard-Partying Head

Not all taxidermy has been performed on non-human animals; every now and then a human body would join in on the post-mortem fun. Long before the plastinated anatomical wonders of Body World and its many imitators, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham sought to see his own body preserved beyond his demise. Bentham's "Auto-Icon," which sits in a wooden cabinet in the main building of University College London, isn't truly taxidermy; the consists of a skeleton wearing clothes filled out with hay. Bentham's head was mummified, which is probably why it makes for the best part of this story.

Something went awry during the mummification process, rendering Bentham's head grotesque and expressionless. A smiling wax head sits atop the Auto-Icon's body and Bentham's real head was, at first, placed between his feet. But what happens when you mix mischievous undergrads with a mummified head? Hijinks. In 1975, students from King's College London stole the head and demanded a £100 ransom. (It was returned in exchange for a £10 ransom.) The second time it was stolen, it was allegedly found in a luggage locker in a Scottish train station. According to legend, the head was finally put in storage after it was discovered being used for football practice. (A more likely reason is that the university didn't feel it was appropriate to have a human head lying around.) Now Bentham's head comes out only on special occasions, such as the meetings of the College Council, of which Bentham is a non-voting member.

Photo of the Auto-Icon by Michael Reeve via Wikimedia Commons.

El Negro of Banyoles

There is true human taxidermy, but unfortunately much of it doesn't come with Bentham's merry history. El Negro of Banyoles was made from the remains of a Khoisan man likely stolen from his grave in Botswana and mounted by the French taxidermists Jules and Edouard Verreaux in the early 1830s. It was acquired by the Darder Museum of Banyoles, Spain, in 1916. Although many were aware that the remains of a modern African man were on display in Banyoles, no one objected to the presence of El Negro until 1991. When they became aware of the exhibit, the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity decried it as racist and demanded its removal. There was talk of some African nations boycotting the Barcelona Olympics. Many in Banyoles, however, were loath to see the display go, making t-shirts and balloons expressing their affection for El Negro and, bizarrely, eating chocolate effigies of the taxidermic human as an Easter treat. However, El Negro was finally repatriated to Botswana in 1997 and his remains were laid to rest more than a century and a half after his demise.

Other Verreaux mounts that are still in existence may have contained human remains at some point in their history. For example, Jules Verreaux's famous "Arab Courier Attacked by Lions," which resides at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, now features a plaster human mannikin. But Stephen P. Rogers, who was preparator-in-chief at the Carnegie Museum between 1897 and 1908, has cryptically said that the display may have contained real human remains prior to its refurbishment in 1899. You can purchase a snow globe of the diorama from the museum's online store.

Nobody Ever Suspects the Butterfly

In the early 20th century, natural history museums frequently sent naturalists and taxidermists to far-flung corners of the world to "collect" specimens—which was a polite way to say killing them. As some of these naturalists learned, however, sometimes you're the collector and sometimes you're the specimen. Carl von Hagen was one such naturalist; he went to Papua New Guinea to collect butterflies and vanished while on the hunt. According to Melissa Milgrom's Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, von Hagen was captured and eaten by cannibals. His sacrifice was not in vain however; the butterflies he collected earlier on the trip made it back home. His mounted bright green Onithoptera paradisea still lives (edit: so to speak) at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Like his specimens, he gave his life to see animals scientifically preserved.

Taxidermy with a Taste for Human Flesh

Not all taxidermy ends up in the Hall of Mammals by chance; some animals got there because they had a nasty habit of eating people. The infamous Tsavo Man-Eaters were a pair of maneless male lions who haunted the Tsavo River in Kenya where, in 1898, construction crews were building a railroad bridge. According Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, who eventually killed the lions, they killed and ate ten people—though other reports put the number at 24. There are a variety of theories as to why these two turned to human flesh: they may have previously scavenged dead humans from passing slave caravans; they may have been attracted by cremations of deceased rail workers; they may have poor hunters unable to catch tougher prey. After Patterson killed them, the lions were immortalized twice: once by the Field Museum in Chicago, which paid $5,000 for the specimens, and once in the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness, in which Val Kilmer played Patterson. The Smithsonian is in possession of an 11-foot-long Royal Bengal tiger that noshed on a few human parts before falling to big-game hunter David Hasinger in 1967. And it's likely that at least some of the 33 documented man-eating tigers and leopards killed by hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett still remain in mounted form. (Corbett would eventually trade in his gun for a camera and advocate for the preservation of tiger habitats to help prevent the sort of encroachment that leads to man-eating.)

The occasional mounted cat has a tragic, domesticated backstory. Thomas McCarte was a lion tamer who was killed by his feline performing partner in 1872. The lion was summarily put down and mounted by the famed British taxidermist Rowland Ward. But you can't help but wonder if McCarte was to blame for his own demise; at the time of his death, the so-called lion tamer had already lost one arm to an earlier lion attack.

Photo by Jeffrey Jung via Wikimedia Commons.

The Panda Who Would Not be Mounted

Could a work of taxidermy create an international incident? That's the question the Smithsonian has considered with Hsing-Hsing, one of the Giant Pandas gifted to the US government by China. Hsing-Hsing died in 1999, but according to Milgrom's book, his carcass, cape (pelt), and head have been kept frozen at the Smithsonian for years. Ken Walker, a champion taxidermist, told Milgrom that the Smithsonian is hesitant to mount it for fear that the mount will insult China. So instead, Hsing-Hsing hangs in the cold. Milgrom described it as resembling "a bloody snowman." During the course of her research, however, Hsing-Hsing's pelt was sent to the tanner's, so the panda may be mounted still.

Even if the real Hsing-Hsing doesn't live on in taxidermy, a close copy of him does. Walker made a recreation panda, using Hsing-Hsing as his model. The recreation, cheekily named "Thing Thing," was made from two bear bear skins—one of them bleached. Walker took home the Best in World Recreation prize at the World Taxidermy Championship.

The Nickel Buffalo's Celebrity Steaks

Black Diamond was a bit of a celebrity in New York City. He was born in the Central Park Menagerie (now the Central Park Zoo), and at the time of his death in 1915, he was the largest buffalo (North American bison) in captivity. His likeness appeared on the $10 dollar bill, and according to some stories, he was the model for the buffalo nickel (although that's in great doubt). What's especially odd about Black Diamond, though, is what became of him in death—the least of which is the taxidermy. His head was mounted by taxidermist Fred Santer and his pelt was turned into an automobile robe (a blanket for the car). At the age of 22, though, he was sold to a butcher for slaughter, and Black Diamond steaks were sold at a premium. Granted, it's not odd to eat buffalo in general, but the symbolism of this end was enough for the New York Times to describe it in sorrowful tones, reporting that, "this finest specimen of Western plains wild life was going to be disposed of in a slaughter house."

The Taxidermist Who Strangled a Leopard

Carl Akeley is often called the father of modern taxidermy, and it's not for nothing that one of the halls at New York's American Museum of Natural History is called the Akeley Hall of African Mammals; after all, he killed plenty of the animals inside. Akeley, who got his start doing hatchet jobs like stuffing PT Barnum's elephant Jumbo (and making Jumbo even larger than he was in life), became a highly sought after taxidermist, and, during the era in the West when hunting and conservationism overlapped (after all, you had to kill and mount the animals before they were all gone), Akeley joined the likes of Theodore Roosevelt on African collecting trips. (Incidentally, a very young Alice Bradley, who would grow up to become the acclaimed science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., was a guest on one of these expeditions with her parents.)

Akeley studied and collected numerous species during his African treks, and was nearly crushed by an elephant in the process. But his most unusual specimen was the jaguar leopard he fought to the death with his bare hands. If Akeley's own reports are to be believed, he was startled by the leopard and didn't have time to reload his gun. He and leopard wrestled until he shoved his right hand in the leopard's mouth and managed to hold down the leopard's throat with his left until it finally gave up the kitty ghost.

Africa did eventually get the best of Akeley. His marriage to his first wife (and fellow hunter), Delia, dissolved with the help of J.T. Jr., a wild monkey Delia brought home to New York. And Akeley died in 1926 of a fever in the Congo, but not before he enacted some conservation efforts directed at living animals. He lobbied King Albert I of Belgium to create Albert National Park, now Virunga National Park, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was the continent's first national park.

Photo of Akeley via The Field Museum.

Skeleton's Best Friend

This one isn't truly a taxidermy story (since it involves no "derm" to "tax"), but it's strange and sweet and it did require the talents of a talented taxidermist to pull off. Grover Krantz was a professor of physical anthropology at Washington State University, and a bit of an oddball. He was an earnest Bigfoot researcher, one who courted the ridicule of other academics by suggesting that evidence of the cryptid warranted serious study. Before he died, Krantz told the Smithsonian's anthropology collections manager David Hunt that he wanted to continue to teach in death as he had in life. He decided to donate his bones to the Smithsonian, just as he had donated the skeletons of his three beloved Irish Wolfhounds.

Krantz hoped that his bones would be placed on display, and in 2009, that hope became a reality. Krantz's skeleton was included in the National Museum of Natural History's "Written in Bone" exhibit. Sculptor and Smithsonian taxidermist Paul Rhymer didn't just reassemble Krantz's skeleton; he posed it with the skeleton of Clyde, one of Krantz's Irish Wolfhound, arranging the pair in an affectionate embrace they had shared in life.

Photos from the Smithsonian.

Additional Sources:

Kirk, Jay, Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals.
Madden, Dave, The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy.
Milgrom, Melissa, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy.

Last night, Fede Alvarez's remake of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead premiered at South by Southwest, and now that the critics have recovered from the haze of fake blood, they are furiously typing up their reviews. The verdict so far? Alvarez may not hit the glorious highs of Raimi's comedy-horror franchise, but he pays loving tribute to the original while entertaining horror fans with his wild and endlessly inventive take on movie gore. Spoilers ahead.

Variety neatly sums up what many of the reviewers are saying about Alvarez's Evil Dead, calling it, "the cinematic equivalent of a cover-band concert tribute to a supergroup's greatest hits - albeit with a lot more gore." This Evil Dead will be most enjoyed by those with an intimate knowledge of the original, who will get a kick out of Alvarez's many winks and nods to Raimi's films. Bloody Disgusting says it will be best enjoyed in the theaters with other Evil Dead fans, adding, "it might very well be the first "event film" aimed squarely at the heart of those who've been craving blood for all these years." (Although the reviewer admits that Evil Dead is ultimately a better experience than it is a movie.)

Most of the reviewers seem to enjoy the mild twist on the "kids going to a cabin in the woods" trope. Mia (Jane Levy) is a long-time addict who has wrangled her brother and a group of her friends into helping her detox in the middle of nowhere. When evil is unleashed on the little cabin, Mia's friends initial mistake her odd behavior for symptoms of her detox, but soon they're dealing with a mess of demons and buckets of blood.

While Alvarez plays on many of Raimi's key symbols, his main contribution is his approach to gore, which goes several steps beyond the usual R-rated fare. Says FearNet:

The humor of the piece lies mostly in the over-the-top nature of the graphic violence, but make no mistake: the new Evil Dead is admirably serious about getting under your skin. To this end it employs simple jump scares, elaborate attack sequences, some crazily creative carnage, and (best of all) a pace that dances around for about 25 minutes before getting down to the dirty stuff and never letting up. This is an intense, grotesque, and thoroughly enjoyable piece of horror cinema that pays due homage to its predecessor while also concocting some memorable insanity of its own. That's what horror fans generally want from remakes: respect for the old mixed with an enthusiasm for something new.

Cinema Blend agrees:

The gore factor is what ultimately makes Evil Dead such a raucous crowd-pleaser. Alvarez not only completely drenches the film is the red, sticky stuff, he does so with impressive creativity and has an impressive knack for building tension. Whether it's a character puking blood all over another, cutting on their own face with a piece of glass, stabbing someone with a hypodermic needle, or making good use of an electric carving knife, once the blood starts flowing it never really stops. But even when the scenes are heavily set up with foreshadowing or text straight from the evil book (which happens quite often), the audience still cringes and reacts, as you can't believe what they actually get away with showing on screen.

However, despite Alvarez's deft direction of the gory visuals, many reviewers have complaints about the script. Film School Rejects, for example, says:

But the script by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues (with conspicuously invisible punch-ups by Diablo Cody) is flat, generic and utterly idiotic. Just as slasher films had to evolve or die after Wes Craven's Scream, movies like this need to be smarter in a post-Cabin in the Woods world. Alvarez and friends apparently missed that memo though as everything about the script is lazy and the characters are far from compelling. The five friends act stupidly and unrealistically throughout. The film simply moves through a series of checked boxes to appease fans of the original and get to the action through the path of least narrative resistance.

ShockTillYouDrop echoes their disappointment, saying that, "Evil Dead is slickly put together, but it is also vapid and vacuous," describing the film as "entertaining" but wishing it added a little more to the genre.

/Film notes that this failure does much to highlight the genius of the original and Raimi's intuitive approach to filmmaking:

The approach we see in this version underlines why Raimi's movies appeal to audiences beyond die-hard gorehounds. Raimi, [Bruce] Campbell, and [Robert] Tapert may claim that they were just goofing and working intuitively, but their intuition was sharp. They had a great handle on audience manipulation not only within a scene, but from one scene to the next, all linked by Campbell's winning presence. Alvarez crafts a few setpieces, both new and recreations, that trap the audience between dread and excitement. But the connective spark, that underlying intuition, rarely flares.

The Evil Dead remake opens April 5, 2013.

The latest trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness, attached to showings of Oz: The Great and Powerful, goes light on the Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead, it takes us to the disperate venues where this movie's action takes place: a bright pink forest, a volcano, underwater, and, of course, space, where Kirk gets to fly sans ship. Meanwhile, he gets some fatherly love—and tough love—from Rear Admiral Pike.

[via Comic Book Movie]

This week in the world of cartoons, Finn & Jake get a visit form an old pal on Adventure Time, Archer spends some time at the U.S. border, and Fishlegs takes the spotlight on Dragons: Riders of Berk.

We also pay homage to what are very likely the next to last episodes of Green Lantern: TAS and Young Justice: Invasion. They will be missed.

TMNT & Gravity Falls are off this week, but should return on March 15th. Ultimate Spider-Man is currently on hiatus. As always - minor spoilers ahead!

Green Lantern: The Animated Series – "Ranx"

In the next to last episode of Green Lantern: TAS, the Lanterns learn that the decapitated head of the Anti-Monitor is indeed in working order.

Young Justice: Invasion – "Summit"

It's the next to last episode of Young Justice: Invasion , so sparks will be flying as the team battles the Reach.

Check out this clip for some Light versus Reach action.

Adventure Time – "The Great Bird Man"

Finn & Jake head into the Bad Lands this episode from Monday in search of the Great Bird Man.

Along the way Finn & Jake meet an interesting character, the former Goblin King Xergiok, who is now much, much more chill.

Regular Show – "That's My Television"

Staying in line with the quirkiness of the Regular Show, Mordecai and Rigby attend a panel celebrating their favorite 1980s television star, a talking robot named RGB2.

It turns out that RGB2 is a prisoner of the television studio, so Mordecai and Rigby attempt to free him in this episode from Monday.

Dragons: Riders of Berk – "Gem of a Different Color"

Fishlegs takes the lead in this episode, as he uncovers a glowing gemstone and becomes the target of a pack of Changewings.

Archer – "Coyote Lovely"

This week, ISIS sends out Archer, Cyril, and Lana stop a human trafficking operation.

Archer falls in love with one of the ring-leaders, shoots Cyril, begins to believe he is autistic, gets some unlicensed surgery, and befriends a loving new mother figure. That's one hell of a show.

Top image courtesy of FX. Dragons: Riders of Berk airs Wednesdays on Cartoon Network. Green Lantern, Young Justice, and Clone Wars air Saturday mornings on Cartoon Network. Archer airs Thursday nights on FX, while Adventure Time airs Monday night on Cartoon Network.

We are about to see what happens when stars come to life. On March 13, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub Millimeter Array (ALMA) goes online. It's the most powerful such telescope ever built, and is part of a class of "very large telescopes" that combine the power of several massive antennae to gather information about distant regions in the universe. ALMA is in northern Chile's high desert, 16,500 feet above sea level. And it will show us things about the universe we've never seen before.

EarthSky's Emily Howard has the story:

According to the scientists, one nation alone couldn't build ALMA. Working with the host country Chile, some of the largest observatories in the world joined together for ALMA. These include the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in North America, the European Southern Observatory, and observatories in Japan, Brazil and throughout Latin America.

Sixty-six large radio dishes connect together to form ALMA. These dishes are located 30 minutes by car from the town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile – at the top of the world – at an altitude of 16,500 feet, or 5,000 meters.

At that height and in the desert, there is little water vapor in the air. Those conditions are perfect for ALMA because water in the air blocks starlight in the portion of the "electromagnetic spectrum" that scientists want to study.

ALMA will observe starlight at wavelengths invisible to your eye – the long infrared wavelengths of starlight. Space observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope, orbit high above the blanket of Earth's atmosphere to see the universe at these wavelengths. Astronomers hope that ALMA will be even better than space telescopes at exploring the infrared universe – because they can build it much larger on land than they can in space today.

Because ALMA can pick up these long wavelengths of light, it will help astronomers explore the cool, chemically complex dust that surrounds newborn stars and planets. One goal of the project is to understand star formation — and, hopefully, a phase in our early universe when galaxies went through what you might call a "star boom." Basically, many stars were spawned at once. ALMA may help astronomers understand what catalyzed this boom.

Before all of ALMA's telescopes had been constructed, the array had already provided data to scientists that allowed them to discover how galaxies make new stars when they collide. The image above is of the Antennae Galaxies, which are in the middle of a smashup. Below, you can see ALMA's millimeter and submillimeter light view, which reveals areas of intense star formation in the dust. Remember, this was an image created when ALMA wasn't complete — images from the fully functioning array will be much sharper.

ALMA isn't the only giant telescope that's coming online in the highlands of Chile. Over at the Simons Foundation, Natalie Wolchover has a great overview of the next generation of extremely large telescopes. She writes:

The huge telescopes will look back in time at some of the earliest light ever emitted by objects. The universe inflated like the surface of a balloon shortly after the Big Bang, and some places stretched so far from here that their first bursts of light are only now arriving. Resolving this light would reveal the structure and chemical makeup of the universe's first objects, which, as faint images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest, developed much earlier than current theories would predict. Better observations are likely to lead to new theories of the birth and evolution of space and time, Gilmore said.

At projected costs ranging from $900 million to $1.6 billion each, the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope - which will have segmented mirrors measuring 24.5 meters, 30 meters and 39.3 meters across, respectively - will dwarf existing optical telescopes (the current largest is 10.4 meters). They will be between 5 and 200 times more powerful, depending on the telescope and the task.

These telescopes will be able to explore everything from galaxy formation to weather on planets in other solar systems. They'll also be able to peek into the history of our universe, plumbing the mysteries of the origins of space and time as we know them.

Learn more on the ALMA website.

Images via ESO

(Thanks for the tip, Jesse Burns!)

I think we can all agree that this week's episode of Walking Dead was a triumph. How can television's best post-apocalyptic adventure build on that fantastic hour of television — and avoid sliding back into second-season territory?

There are just four episodes left to this season, and so much we're hoping to see. Here are six things from the Walking Dead comic that we'd like to see the show use, to end its season with a bang. Warning: comics spoilers and possible TV spoilers ahead...

1) A More Badass Andrea

Lately, this character is becoming TWD's answer to King Joffrey — the character everybody wants to see die in the bloodiest manner possible. We cannot stand to listen to one more minute of this character's excuse-making prattle. But we'd like to see more of the badass bitch from the comics. Remember her? The woman that described her shooting skills as insanely good? Laurie Holden certainly has great knife skills, and it's fun to watch her disassemble a Walker in front of the innocents of Woodbury. So why not more of that? Let's bring back Andrea the badass and spend time with that person, not the person who stands naked in front of a window at all hours of the day.

2) More Morgans

Yes. This. This is the crazy we want. No more chasing waify white dresses in the grass, Rick. This is how you play crazy. Morgan doesn't want to be saved, he doesn't want to be around other people. He's ashamed and angry that the "weak" (himself) are all that's left in this horrible new world. So he's going to do the only thing he can: Kill everything in his path. Clear the world. Let's meet more people that are actually scary and yet have sympathetic emotional responses to the end of the world. Walking Dead prides itself on its gritty realism in this fantasy world, so there should be a whole lotta mental Morgans running around, and we want to meet them all. Where's Dr. Eugene Porter at?

3) Show the Point of the Prison

In the comics, the prison is a safe haven. It takes some time to secure and even more time to settle in, but the slow transformation of the prison from creepy disciplinary center to home/fortress was (dare I say it) fun. It was pretty riveting to watch the clever group of survivors utilize whatever they had to turn their new digs into a pretty killer post-apocalyptic pad. Bodies were cleaned (and burned) out of a gym area, some folks made clothes out of the prison jumpsuits, they found a library, people slowly started to feel comfortable in their cells, and Hershel even planted crops in the yard! But right now on television, the prison looks like a piss-smelling hell hole that isn't even remotely safe. Walkers are still roaming parts of the "tombs," and they never really plugged up the problems from the last leak. Why do the survivors want to defend this place? Why does the audience care if Rick's people lose it? Right now it looks like a flimsy bit of fencing that can't even defend its inhabitants from one man with a gun. We want to spend time in the prison, do the whole post-apocalypse dinner night where people let their guard down for a second and you see that maybe this place is worth the fight. That's probably not going to happen right away, because the Walking Dead has four more episodes of dragging out this final battle to do, but it seems like the series is hinting at humanizing this nightmare space. The singing helped, let's do more of that.

4) More Slow Decline of Humanity

How brilliant was the hitchhiker bit? It's easy to recreate the zombie gladiator ring, and sexy. Who doesn't want to watch an episode where humans duke it out surrounded by walkers for sport? That's an easy sell. But it's also so ridiculously Mad Max and far-fetched, it doesn't seem real. Ignoring the backpacker is real; hell, some people do it every day on the train. This was a chill-inducing little scene that not only demonstrated Rick, Carl and Michonne's slow slip away from basic human kindness into the brutal mindset of the kill-or-be-killed world. Ignoring this hitcher is the smart thing to do, but it gets harder every time he pops up, until eventually he's dead. And then they steal his backpack for supplies. Notice they didn't steal his backpack while he was still alive (something they easily could have done). This was the first time we really got to see how much this world has changed the personal relationships with strangers, without making it a panic-filled situation. This was just a guy on the side of the road — he wasn't being chased by walkers or other humans, so this was just the slow decline into self-preservation. We'd love to see more decisions just like this, without looking down the barrel of a gun. This way, when Rick and the gang hold down a local cannibal and begin to carve into them searching for their own version of justice, we may even root for them. Spare us the warning signs made out of body parts, this is way better.

5) Let Tyreese Be Tyreese

Remember how excited we all were when Chad Coleman was cast as Tyreese? That was a GREAT day. A fantastic actor getting put in a fantastic part? We did somersaults all over our living room, upon hearing the announcement. But then Tyreese showed up and was promptly locked away in some terrible "we'll deal with this later" writer's cupboard. This is Rick's bestie! This is the muscle and heart of the comic (for a time, anyway). Why hasn't Tyreese been allowed to be Tyreese? He was kicked out of the prison almost as quickly as he was locked away in it. There's mountains of drama just waiting to be uncorked from this man. Plus, he was the only person able to give Rick's tribe hope. Something we've already touched on as a severely lacking part of this group. Nobody wants to cheer on a corpse. And if Maggie is going to sit in her cell and not talk to Glenn all day (understandable, but arguably boring television) then we're kind of out of any sort of new emotional character growth to explore. Hell we've already circled the Carol-and-Daryl dance 1,000 times over. And Merle and Daryl had their showdown in the woods. Rick has been (hopefully) shocked out of his catatonic state by Morgan... we need something!

6) Unleash the Governor

Are you afraid of the Governor? I mean, really? Merle was the one who mercilessly beat the ever-loving piss out of Glenn. Merle was the one who seemed to get off on it. So far the only truly disturbing stuff the Governor has done is shoot a bunch of defenseless men, stare at some heads in an aquarium, and hover over a naked Maggie. The sexual assault was by far and away the most terrifying, and the heads probably would have been pretty creepy, had Andrea not shrugged it off and hopped back into bed with "Phillip." David Morrissey is an amazing actor — so lets let him off the leash! The comic book Governor is infinitely more intimidating, and not just because he cuts off Rick's hand. But let's not forget the guy CUTS OFF RICK'S HAND very early into their first meeting, clearly indicating he was mental — so let's do it. Right now we're more afraid that Rick will spend the rest of the season chasing Ghost Lori than of anything the Governor could inflict. Oooh, he shot that convict no one was emotionally attached to in the head from yards away, gasp! Who cares? Kill or maim someone who matters, or step back and let a real villain in.

The Oxford definition of the word "outrageous" lists two meanings: "shockingly bad or excessive" and "wildly exaggerated or improbable." I'd say both of those apply to the Jem and the Holograms episode "Journey to Shangri-La," in which Jem nearly kills both the Holograms and the Misfits — all for the sake of a magic set of bongos.

Jem is having a fancy dinner party with the Holograms and Andrew, a professor/explorer/musicologist who regales them with a story about how he avoided being killed by club-wielding savages by invading their sacred burial grounds. Jem, who is somehow delighted by this story and not appalled, asks Andrew for some music advice, because she's bored with the Holograms' sound.

The disturbingly mustachioed Andrew immediately mentions Shangri-La, in which he claims "all the music, art and poetry the world has ever known" is kept, despite the fact that the city is mythological, has no contact with the modern world and thus can't possibly have any modern music, art or poetry, and supposedly no one ever returns from it so how the hell would it do Jem any good anyways. Jem, of course, will happily sacrifice her friends' lives to improve her music, and books the ticket.

This sends the ‘80s equivalent of a Google Alert to Techrat, the Misfits' weird engineering guy, who alerts Eric, the comically evil manager of the Misfits. Certain that the Holograms are going to Tibet for some music-related purpose, he flies himself and the Misfits to Tibet too, in order to do whatever Jem is doing first, even though they have no idea what the hell that is.

Andrew and the girls land, meet Andrew's Sherpa pal Moki, and begin the long hike to a village that supposedly knows the way to Shangri-La with a song titled, coincidentally enough, "Shangri-La." Sample lyrics:

Shangri-La (Shangri-La)
Where are you hiding?
Shangri-La (Shangri-La)
Where can you be?
If I keep searching, I will find you
Shangri-La, show yourself to me

Are you just a fantasy?
So it would seem
But somethin' in my heart says
You are more than just a dream

Oddly enough, they actually find Shangri-La on the way to the village that's supposed to lead them to Shangri-La, but it disappears before they can reach it, because Shangri-La is kind of a dick.

The Misfits, wearing their best hiking high heels, arrive in Tibet. Eric has hired an evil Sherpa — because the Misfits are evil, you see — to take them to follow Jem, because, again, they have no clue what is happening.

Meanwhile, Jem's team is lost, and then meets a goddamned Yeti. Despite the fact the Yeti is screaming and waving its arms angrily, Jem somehow susses out that the creature is friendly and merely curious, and manages to hug the beast while it touches her butt. But when Andrew tries to touch the Yeti it runs off, frightened, becoming the Abominably Homophobic Snowman (in the Yeti's defense, Andrew's mustache is super-creepy).

The Sherpa says legend has it that the Yeti can lead them to the very real, presumably cartographically established village that will supposedly lead them to Shangri-La. This stupid, exceedingly specific legend cannot be tested because the Yeti has gone to watch the Misfits try to climb a 200-foot sheer cliff wall. Unsurprisingly, the Misfits fail and end up dangling precariously; the Yeti, who seems to be sexually attracted to Misfits band leader Pizzazz, runs back to Jem and leads them to the Misfits.

Jem and her pals obviously help save the Misfits, but in a way that leaves them dangling on the cliff instead, while the Misfits run off to the village. They cackle triumphantly, even though they still have no idea why Jem wanted to go here in the first place. They are surprised, however, to learn theisremote village on top of the Himalayan mountains has no electrical outlets to plug in their recording equipment.

A grumpy old woman, accompanied by her great-granddaughter, are seemingly the village's only occupants; the old woman basically asks the Misfits what the fuck they're doing up here. Pizzazz very cunningly asks to hear the old lady's music, because she's pretty sure this whole thing has something to do with music, and the old lady finally clues them in that they're looking for - the music of Shangri-La. But the grumpy old woman refuses to show them the way to Shangri-La because they are "unworthy."

But the granddaughter Ly-san, who has no idea where Shangri-La is, decides a bit foolishly to try and lead them there anyways while they sing "You Oughta See The View From Here." Sample lyrics:

You oughta see how things appear
When you are up in the stratosphere
You oughta hear how the people cheer
When you are fabulous (Like us)

We feel right at home
Looking down on those below
All you little people
With your dreams so small
(We are totally above it all)

This ends up with Pizzazz and Roxxy poisoned by snow briars and about to die. Somewhat luckily, the yeti has been stalking the girls, and he picks up the two unconscious women and brings them back to the village, where Jem and the Holograms have arrived, only for the old lady to refuse to show Jem the way, claiming she's "false."

Alas, the snowbriar poison can only be cured by the music of Shangri-La, and the Grumpy Old Lady does not give a shit. She's completely okay with letting them die, because she is absolutely not showing the "false" Jem the way. In desperation, Jem takes off her magic earrings (only in front to the old lady, obviously) revealing her true identity as Jerrica. Despite the fact that revealing her lie doesn't mitigate her having lied in any way, the Grumpy Old Lady becomes Impressed Old Lady and hands Jerrica a very unconvincing map.

After turning back into Jem and becoming exactly as "false" as she was previously, she and the Holograms take the poison snowbriar-less path to Shangri-La. As it turns out the people of Shangri-La are super happy, despite their city being completely bizarre. Apparently Shangri-La grants people who stay there immortality, but kills them after they leave. Somehow, guests like Jem are exempt from this; it's only the people who decide to stay that get the immortality thing, although how the city knows when people decide is unknown. As for Andrew's previous assertion that no one ever comes back from Shangri-La, it's bullshit, because they end up leaving without incident.

But first, the High Lama is more than happy to teach a random white woman their magic music. Now, this is a bit hard to convey in words, so I invite you to watch the nearby YouTube video to experience the scene. But what it boils down to is this: The magic music of Shangri-La — which is the sum of all musical knowledge in the entire world and also somehow an antidote to a specific poison — consists of one chord played on a sitar and some light bongo tapping.

I'm just assuming the instruments are magic because 1) somewhere a background chorus starts singing "Shangri-La" over and over again (the word, not the Jem song), 2) there's no other way this music could heal a papercut, let alone poison, and 3) the Lama gives Jem the bongos and sitar, which indicates to me they have some special properties. When the bongo-laden Jem finds the rest of the Holograms, they've decided to stay and let Pizzazz and Roxxy die. Jem points out this would be bad, and the Holograms reluctantly leave.

At the village, Jem plays the same damn chord (with Raya on the bongos), which somehow turns into another song, "Let the Music Play" with a faux-psychedelic video. Sample lyrics:

(Let the music play)
The music will soothe you
(Let the music play)
It'll help to make you whole
(Let the music play)
The music will help restore your soul

Pizzazz and Roxxy spring back to life, and the Misfits immediately run off to find Shangri-La for themselves, despite the fact that Jem has brought the music of Shangri-La with her, meaning there's no fucking reason to go. Here's the kicker... the Misfits actually find Shangri-La. No map, no yeti, no nonsense, they just walk right up to it… and then it disappears, because the Misfits are bad people and because Shangri-La is a dick.

And Jem never used, played or even mentioned the music of Shangri=La ever again.

What Did We Learn?

• Very, very little.

• Seriously, the Holograms were lost in the Himalayas and could have frozen to death; the Misfits nearly fell from a cliff and were poisoned. All so Jem could get a new set of bongos.

• The Misfits' desire to beat the Holograms far exceeds their common sense.

• Yeti are helpful and friendly, possibly because they want to have sex with our women.

• This episode would have been a lot goddamn shorter if everybody had just rented a goddamned helicopter.

• Jem had an entire episode about Shangri-La without mentioning the band The Shangri-Las once.

• At one point, Pizzazz calls the Holograms "Wimpograms." It's kind of sad. "Whore-ograms" would be more cutting, I think.

• If the Misfits were smarter, they could have just waited at the airport with a baseball bat and taken the bongos from Jem after she landed. Would have been a lot easier.

• The ultimate result of the sum total of all the world's music from the beginning of time sucks ass.

One of the more extraordinary things about the universe is that it has produced beings who can observe it — namely, us. Its laws and constants are so precise that, if they were even slightly modified, no human would be here to see it. Many cosmologists and philosophers have wondered if we should read anything into all this preciseness: Are the finely-tuned physical laws that surround us mere coincidence, or does it imply that we are somehow meant to be here? That's where the Anthropic Principle comes into play.

Top image via Luc Perrot.

The Anthropic Principle (AP) is that hazy grey area where philosophy meets science. And in fact, many scientists loathe it for this very reason. It's untestable, they argue, and tautological — a skewed form of reasoning in which the principle is basically being used to prove itself.

And indeed, the AP does seem like a strange concept at first. It essentially states that we will only find ourselves in a universe that's capable of giving rise to us. Put another way, observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.

It's a principle that makes perfect sense — and for some, no sense at all. But like so many things in science and philosophy, the devil is in the details.

The AP forces us to take a giant step back and evaluate the conditions of the universe in consideration of our presence within it. For scientists, it's a kind of ‘40 foot perspective' that can help illuminate — and even possibly explain — some of the more surprising aspects of cosmology. And at the very least, it serves as a constant reality check to remind us that we will always be subject to observational selectional effects; no matter where we go, we will always be there.

A good thought experiment in this regard comes from the Canadian philosopher John Leslie. In his book, Universes, he asks us to imagine a man facing a firing squad of fifty expert marksman. After aiming and firing, the executioners miss their mark.

Now, there are two ways in which we can evaluate this surprising outcome. We can either shrug our shoulders and point to the obvious, that they they simply missed. Or we can come up with some explanations as to why they all missed. This latter point is very much at the heart of anthropic reasoning.

Origins

The AP has been around for quite some time, though it only really took on its modern form in the last forty years.

Early efforts to come to grips with observational effects were expressed in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Kant's ideas about how our experience of the world is formulated by our sensory and intellectual faculties. Back in the 1920s, James Jeans observed that, "the physical conditions under which life is possible form only a tiny fraction of the range of physical conditions which prevail in the universe as a whole." Likewise, his contemporary, Arthur Eddington, speculated about "selective subjectivism," the idea that the laws of nature are indirectly imposed by the human mind, which in turn determines (and constrains) what we know about the universe.

More recently, some scientists have used it to explain the series of bizarre "large-number coincidences" in physics and cosmology. These are the surprisingly large order-of-magnitude connections that exist between (apparently) unrelated physical constants and cosmological parameters.

For example, the electromagnetic force is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. If it was any closer in strength, stars would have collapsed long before life could emerge. Or, the universe's vacuum energy density is about 120 orders of magnitude lower than some theoretical estimates, which, if any higher, would have blown the universe apart. And the neutron is heavier than the proton — but not so heavy that neutrons cannot be bound in nuclei where conservation of energy prevents the neutrons from decaying. Without neutrons, we wouldn't have the heavier elements needed for building complex life. There are many other examples, each one pointing to extreme specificity.

In 1961, Robert. H. Dickie used a prototypical version of the AP to explain away these coincidences, saying that physicists were reading too much into it. These large numbers, he argued, are a necessary coincidence (or prerequisite) for the presence of intelligent beings. If these parameters were not so, life would not have arisen. And in turn, we wouldn't be here to marvel at the ‘surprisingness' of these physical constants and laws.

Enter Brandon Carter

Then, in 1974, the philosopher Brandon Carter kindled the modern interpretation of these ideas, what he dubbed the Anthropic Principle. But rather than settle on just one perspective or definition, he said there were two different ways we can approach the issue.

Specifically, he proposed the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP) and the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP). Both approaches imply that these anthropic coincidences were not the result of chance, but were instead built directly into the structure of the universe.

Of the WAP he said:

We must be prepared to take into account the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.

And of the SAP he said:

The universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must
be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.

Indeed, the SAP is a bit of a mind frak. Carter essentially argued that, if the SAP is true, the universe must to give rise to intelligent observers. The WAP, on the other hand, simply implies that the universe we observe must have the conditions to support intelligent life, but that life doesn't necessarily have to arise.

So, if the SAP is true, then the universe is indeed here for us.

Keep in mind that these are philosophical thought experiments, and not scientific statements per se. To a certain extent, philosophers are the conjurors of proto-scientific concepts — musings that should in turn be proven or disproven through the application of the scientific method.

Moreover, this doesn't imply or prove that God or some other Prime Mover exists, though many have taken it to that extreme. All the AP does in this regard is tell us that the laws of the universe should be understood through the context of the presence of observers.

Interestingly, Carter later regretted using the word ‘anthropic.' It has misled some into thinking that he was referring to Homo sapiens specifically (or that observers were limited to carbon based life). But his principle applies to any observer anywhere in the universe.

For example, a dolphin, which is a conscious being, can be considered an observer. Same goes for a self-aware robot on the other side of the universe. Or more conceptually, imagine a universe in which only evolving streams of information can exist. Eventually, a self-aware algorithm could emerge that's capable of assessing its surroundings. This would be an observer, too, but one far removed from our own experience.

Image at left: "Wonder - Zena Gazing at the Moon" by Alex Grey (1996) .

Since Carter's original elucidation, the AP has literally been re-interpreted and re-defined hundreds of times. Other proposed names include "self-locating belief" and "indexical information" (not difficult to see why these didn't catch on). The "fine-tuning argument", however, has gained traction as a kind of substitute term, or correlated area of inquiry.

One of the more interesting re-evaluations of Carter's original idea comes from the mathematician John Barrow and physicist Frank Tipler. They devised a third principle, the Final Anthropic Principle, which states that intelligent information processing must come into evidence in the universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.

If this is true, not only is the universe here for us, but its configuration is such that we will become its permanent residents (in some form or another).

Welcome to the multiverse

As noted, many scientists hate the AP — and often with a passion. Critics contend that it's a product of cyclical thinking, and that's its self-evident — or that life should be simply be thought of as mere epiphenomenon (our presence in the universe is merely a side-effect, or coincidence).

Others, like physicist Lee Smolin, argue that the characteristics of the universe can be explained in other ways, such as his theory of cosmological natural selection. As Smolin told io9, "The Anthropic Principle is simply incapable of making a falsifiable prediction for any kind of testable experiment."

At the same time, however, scientists like Sir Martin Rees have found it to be quite helpful, particularly when applying Carter's WAP to some modern interpretations of cosmology. In fact, some physicists, like Rees, use it when explaining (and reconciling) the multiverse theory.

According to this theory, our universe is not the only one, and also not the only kind. Given the possibility of a near infinite set of variable universes, there could be alternative universes out there with different constants and parameters. In some universes, gravity will be stronger, or the speed of light slower, and so on.

In the space of all possible universes, therefore, there will be a small subset of universes in which life can exist, and a larger subset in which life is impossible. Clearly, we find ourselves in one of the life-friendly universes. Other life-friendly universes with slightly different laws, or alternative modalities, may allow for other types of observers, but observers nonetheless; they too will be subject to the anthropic effect.

On the other hand, universes that are unfriendly to life can never be observed — but that doesn't mean they're not out there. It's just that nobody will be able to document such universes and record their unique characteristics. Unless, of course, as some interpretations of quantum physics suggests, universes can only exist in the presence of observers; no observer, no universe.

The inescapable observation selection effect

Critics and proponents aside, there's one last aspect to the AP that needs to be brought out — and that's its role as an observational principle.

Tautology or not, and regardless of whether multiverses exist, it highlights a fundamental problem or limitation that all scientists face when they're making any kind of proclamation about the nature of the cosmos — and that is, as observers, we will always be subject to observational selection effects.

Consequently, it serves as a kind of reality check, one that's somewhat akin to a soft interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or even Plato's Cave. It's the oppressive realization that everything we observe is being observed. And that in order for it be be observed by that something, the environment has to be conducive for that something to exist. We can only take measurements and formulate judgements in a modality in which that can happen.

As Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has said, "all observations require the existence of an appropriately positioned observer." Indeed, our data is not only filtered by the limitations of our instruments, "but also by the precondition that somebody be there to ‘have' the data yielded by the instruments (and to build the instruments in the first place)." The biases that occur due to these preconditions are what's referred to as observation selection effects.

So, in answer to the headline of this article — is this universe here just for us — the Anthropic Principle alone cannot provide the answer. But it does force us to take pause and acknowledge the efficacy of the suggestion. Whether science can now run with it and provide us with an answer is an open question.

In the meantime, take solace in the fact that you're a piece of the universe that's observing itself.

Sources not cited: Anthropic Bias and "The Origin of the Modern Anthropic Principle."

Images: Ase/shutterstock, galaxy/dna: physics.sfsu.edu, "Unraveling the Riddle of Plato's Cave."

In between making the disastrous Spider-man 3 and Oz the Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi made what The Middleman once called "a zombie palate cleanser": the masterfully nuts B-movie Drag Me to Hell. As you watch the plodding action in Oz unfold, you'll find yourself wishing it had a bit more of the anything-goes spirit of a B-movie. There is a lot to love in this prequel to the famous 1939 movie, but the whole thing feels strangely defanged. Which is a problem in a flick that needs some darkness to fuel its light.

The Wizard of Oz as a story is extremely weird and disturbing. We often remember the 1930s movie as all dancing munchkins and rainbows, but L. Frank Baum's story riveted generations of children because of the wicked witch, the flying monkeys, and the very adult reveal that Oz is just a bunch of bullshit and there is no great wizard after all. The story is full of unsettling images and disappointment. Though the novel was published at the turn of the century, it was a perfect fable for the Depression Era when the movie came out. All that glitters turns out to be false. Even the shattered farmlands of impoverished Kansas are better than the shiny fascism of Oz.

Instead of pulling that edgy message about distrusting authority into the contemporary era, however, Raimi chose to modernize the movie a different way. He mashed up the original film with a half-baked attempt to riff on Gregory Maguire's popular novel Wicked, which tells the Oz story from the Wicked Witch of the West's perspective. We meet said witch (Mila Kunis as Theodora), as well as her sister from the East (Rachel Weisz as Evanora), and find out about their sibling rivalry as well as their lifelong hatred of Glinda the Good Witch (Michelle Williams).

We also meet Oz (James Franco, channeling Johnny Depp), who turns out to have been a disappointing person basically for his whole life. He's a sideshow magician of some talent, whose main preoccupation seems to be seducing women by giving them music boxes he claims were once his grandmother's. Like every schtick in the film involving Oz, we are forced to see him do the music box thing over and over — just in case we didn't get the idea that he was a dull cad the first time, whose only real asset is a full head of hair. We're supposed to see that Oz aspires to be something great, and that if only he had enough self-esteem he'd be willing to settle down with the nice Kansas girl Wanda (also Michelle Williams). Unfortunately, he's just a narcissistic wanker, and manages to make the dimension-jump to the magical land of Oz by jumping into a hot air balloon to escape the angry boyfriend of one of the many women he's music boxed.

I should pause here to note that it goes without saying that this movie looks incredible. The black-and-white carnival, the scene with the hot air balloon, the tornado . . . Raimi's psychotic visual sense works marvelously here. Even the 3D effects are put to good use, which is rare. The land of Oz is supersaturated with color, and the creature effects are fantastic. The Emerald City is a gleaming, art deco delight, as it was in the '39 movie.

But unfortunately, the characters and plotting do not live up to the visuals. There's a kind of flabby nod to the idea that Theodora and Evanora have a co-dependent witch thing going on, which Oz whips into a frenzy by (you guessed it) music boxing Theodora when he first arrives in Oz. Meanwhile, Glinda has been banished from her rightful Emerald City throne by the wicked sisters, and lives (literally) inside a bubble with her munchkin, farmer and tinker friends. All of them are obsessed with Oz because there's a legend that the people of their land will "go free" when a great wizard named Oz arrives.

Now Oz will have to prove himself, with the help of a sarcastic flying monkey and a tiny porcelain girl, by saving everybody. It's your typical manchild becomes man plot, with the witch Glinda for some reason deciding that a fake, neurotic wizard makes more sense as a ruler than a good witch with superpowers who also happens to be next in line for the throne. This would actually make sense as a story arc if we ever, at any point, really found something to like about Oz — or even something concrete to believe about him at all, other than "he's a loser who needs to wave his arms around to feel better."

One might say the same thing about the witches, whose goodness and evil feel more like fashion choices than actual moral issues. Instead of plunging us into dark weirdness and doubt with this story, Raimi gives us the plot of a typical Kevin James comedy, where the schlub makes good by doing something vaguely unconventional. There is no terror, and there is no awe. Instead of delving into the disturbing implications of that man behind the curtain, Oz the Great and Powerful celebrates what's in front of the curtain. And the result is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

It's global warming, stupid. And how. In an extensive study published in today's issue of Science, researchers report that today's global temperatures are warmer than any point in at least the last 4,000 years, and show no signs of declining: analyses of weather patterns since the end of the last Ice Age presage that the coming century will see Earth's average surface temperatures soar to intensities greater than any point in human history.

The study, led by Oregon State University paleoclimatologist Shaun Marcott, provides us with the most detailed climate reconstruction ever produced for the last 11,300 years, and accounts for all but a sliver of the modern geological era. That era, called the Holocene, kicked off roughly 12,000 years ago, and has been witness to a host of monumental global changes, including the rise of human civilization around 8,000 years ago. Point being: this reconstruction is absolutely unprecedented in scope. Previous studies have rarely examined beyond the last 2,000 years of Earth's climatic history. Marcott and his colleagues have pushed back our knowledge of global climate by thousands and thousands of years.

Climate data can be derived from many sources — ice cores, cave formations, coral reefs, even the shells of marine organisms — but all of them carry chemical and physical signatures that provide researchers with a reliable record of the planet's past climate. Marcott and his team worked by combining climate record data from around the globe into one vast stockpile of information. The patterns that emerged were extremely telling of a modern spike in global temperatures.

Worldwide temperatures are higher today than at any point in the last 4,000 years, and warmer than about three quarters of anything we've seen in the last 11,000. The study reports that, on the heels of the last Ice Age, global temperatures rose gradually until around the middle of the Holocene, at which point a cooling trend (also gradual) dominated the planet for roughly five millenia. But that all ended around two-hundred years ago. Ever since, temperatures have risen. Steadily at first, then rapidly over the course of the last century or so.

Climate scientists have been communicating the last century's global temperature spike with variations of the so-called "hockey stick" graph for around a decade now (imagine a line graph, fluctuating gradually over the course of many years, only to rise sharply in the shape of a hockey stick's blade — see below). The results of Marcott's team corroborate the shape of the hockey stick, while placing it in a much more extensive historical context. In doing so, they've demonstrated that the warming we're curently experiencing is, in fact, unique — and over an even longer period that previously believed. [Below: Comparison of several different methods and reconstructions of global and hemispheric temperature anomalies, via Marcott et al.. Notice a pattern? Spoiler: it's the vertical spike at the right hand side of each graph.]

That context demonstrates two things pretty unambiguously. One: it shows that there are, in fact, points in the Holocene when humans endured temperatures warmer than they are today; taking the flipside of the 75% statistic cited earlier, roughly 25% of the last 11,300 years (all of them earlier than 4,000 years ago) have been warmer than they are today.

Two: By the end of the century, that will no longer be the case. If the planet continues to warm in the fashion that Marcott's team's data suggests, surface temperatures will almost certainly surpass any and all record-highs from the last 11,300 years. "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios," write the researchers. Translation: even if our planet's temperature increases wind up being on the low end of estimates, Marcott and his colleagues say the planet will be at least as warm as the Holocene's absolute toastiest periods. (In an interview with the NYT, climate expert Michael E. Mann, who was not involved in the research, said Marcott's team "made conservative data choices in [its] analysis.")

The models presented by Marcott's team suggest that, in the absence of human-induced climate change, the Northern Hemisphere would likely freeze over in a few thousand years. But he and other climatologists believe that humanity's continued impact on global temperatures will almost surely prevent that from happening.

As for the temperature increases projected to occur in the coming centuries, it's important to note that as we approach, and exceed, climate records set all the way back at the beginning of the Holocene, the temperatures themselves are not nearly as problematic as the rate at which we are reaching them — a point aptly summarized by Mann in his interview with the Times:

"We and other living things can adapt to slower changes," he said. "It's the unprecedented speed with which we're changing the climate that is so worrisome."

The researchers' findings are published in today's issue of Science.

Top image via Shutterstock

The head of Marvel Studios hints at the direction of The Avengers 2 and why a Doctor Strange movie might happen. Robert Kirkman reveals which character is crucial to The Walking Dead's immediate future. Mark Ruffalo discusses his Hulk future.

All that plus, the latest Catching Fire poster reveals Johanna Mason, Steven Moffat and Jenna-Louie Coleman talk Doctor Who, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a bunch of new videos, an Arrow guest star reveals her role in Oliver's story, and a Game of Thrones production video takes you behind the scenes!

It's spoilers all the way down!

Top image from Catching Fire.

Star Wars: Episode VII

A lengthy, informative Business Week article on the sale of LucasFilm to Disney suggests that Lucas had a bigger hand than previously reported in actually putting together the current Star Wars creative team and developing the stories for Episodes VII through IX:

Lucas and Kennedy hired screenwriter Michael Arndt, who won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, to begin work on the script for Episode VII. They enlisted Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, to act as a consultant. Lucas started talking to members of the original Star Wars cast, such as Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, about appearing in the films. In June 2012, he called Iger.

Once Lucas got assurances from Disney in writing about the broad outlines of the deal, he agreed to turn over the treatments — but insisted they could only be read by Iger, Horn, and Kevin Mayer, Disney's executive vice president for corporate strategy. "We promised," says Iger. "We had to sign an agreement."

When Iger finally got a look at the treatments, he was elated. "We thought from a storytelling perspective they had a lot of potential," he says.

Check out the link for more. [Business Week]

The Avengers 2

Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige discusses writer-director Joss Whedon's recent comments that the sequel would "go deeper, not bigger":

"I don't know exactly what he meant when he said "deeper". But, similar to Iron Man 3, we're not saying, "Now it's gotta be even bigger and more aliens come and there's a giant monster!" The most exciting thing to us about the Iron Man franchise is Tony Stark and his journey. The most exciting thing to us about the Avengers franchise is the interaction amongst those characters. It's putting them in situations that you wouldn't expect to see them in. It's that kind of fun; and the relationships between the characters in the Avengers, which I loved. Almost whatever the heck else is happening is gravy in that franchise, because all I care about is Bruce and Tony, Tony and Steve, Widow and Bruce – and how Thor fits into it, because he's always the outsider amongst outsiders. So I think that's where the value lies. And going deeper amongst those characters in those relationships."

[SFX via Comic Book Movie]

Doctor Strange

From the same interview, isn't yet ready to commit to a Doctor Strange movie, but he does say that if the cinematic universe is going to get into magic, it'll be through the Sorcerer Supreme:

I'm not looking at Phase One as grounded and Phase Two as cosmic and Phase 3 as magic. The films are all so eclectic and different from each other that you can't overarchingly categorize them like that. If and when we enter the magic arena, it will be through Doctor Strange. Sure, obviously. And that's to me what's exciting about Doctor Strange.

There are still some more tidbits at the link. [SFX via Comic Book Movie]

Hulk

Bruce Banner actor Mark Ruffalo offered a pair of tweets about the prospects of a new Hulk solo movie:

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Young Professor X actor James McAvoy says he's received the script, and it's totally on his to-do list to read the thing:

"The X-Men script? It's in my inbox... I've still got to read it. I'm very excited about it but I've just been doing so much of this (interviews) and working at night (in Macbeth in London's West End) so I'm starting work at 9 and don't finish until midnight so I'm not being flippant... I honestly can't wait to read it and find out what I'm doing but I've just got no time right now."

[Hey U Guys]

James Flemyng says he likely won't reprise his X-Men: First Class role Azazel:

"I don't think I will be back. Initially I was gutted, but then, I remembered I had to get up at two in the morning, I had to be painted red and be slightly out of focus and posed a lot, and that was sort of it. Now I don't have to do that. I've had twins so I'm quite glad to stay at home. It's filmed in Canada and it takes about seven months so I'm quite glad to be at home."

[Independent.ie]

Catching Fire

Here's one of the latest character posters, featuring our first look at Sucker Punch's Jena Malone as Johanna Mason. Check out more right here. [Coming Soon and /Film]

After Earth

Here's the latest poster for M. Night Shymalan and Will and Jaden Smith's post-apocalyptic movie. [Coming Soon]

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Here's a pair of character featurettes on Bruce Willis's Joe Colton and Byung-hun Lee's Storm Shadow.

Friday Night Lights star Adrianne Palicki discusses her role as Lady Jaye:

I love the character and she's very well-written. She's a tough girl. She's got a little bit of a chip on her shoulder. She's like the only chick around all these guys so she kind of has to hold her own. She's the intelligence in the group; she's the weapon specialist. So there's a lot to carry with that.

She also plays down the reports of massive reshoots:

A lot of that was false: We did like two days of reshoots. They added one scene. It wasn't really a big deal - it was like the normal reshooting situation. Actually we lucked out because it was only two days. But I think it adds to the film completely.

[EW]

Maleficent

Producer Joe Roth discusses the upcoming, Angelina Jolie-starring take on the Cinderella story:

We flipped it on its head. Linda Woolverton wrote that, who also wrote Alice in Wonderland, and she also wrote Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. So, I'm trusting her imagination and understanding of telling a story that the curse on Sleeping Beauty wasn't made by someone who was completely evil, and that she also had a story.

Was the casting crucial then, so that audiences would feel sympathy for that character?
Yes. It would have been really difficult to make Maleficent without Angie (Angelina Jolie). And I think that movie will be Elle Fanning's coming out. People will be like, "Oh, I remember Elle Fanning when she was in Maleficent. That was where I first saw her."

[Collider]

Doctor Who

Steven Moffat discusses the premise of the upcoming mid-series debut episode, "The Bells of St. John":

It's the traditional Doctor Who thing of taking something omnipresent in your life and making it sinister, if something did get in the Wi-Fi, we'd be kind of screwed. Nobody had really done it before, so I thought, ‘It's time to get kids frightened of Wi-Fi!

[Doctor Who News]

New companion Jenna-Louise Coleman discusses the on-screen relationship between Clara and Matt Smith's Doctor:

When I started on Doctor Who Matt said to me "Watch Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy films!" We were talking about our dynamic and trying to figure it out, realising we were a double act . . . It's trying to find each other's rhythm... So watching things like Spencer Tracy films really feed into that. Matt always said it's about physically finding our rhythm... In a way the whole thing is like a dance, and the moment we started dancing together and finding that rhythm is when it worked.

[Doctor Who News]

Game of Thrones

Here's a new behind-the-scenes video on the making of season three, entitled "Down to the Smallest Detail." [Making Game of Thrones]

The Walking Dead

Comics creator Robert Kirkman discusses the direction of the rest of the season:

The rest of the season really is about what Andrea is doing and how she's handling this situation. The scene where she stands over him in the bed is really the beginning of her plan and what she's going to be doing and why she's doing what she's doing. The fact that she wasn't able to kill the Governor is really going to play in to a lot of the upcoming story for the rest of the season. Andrea is in a really horrible position. She has relationships with people in Woodbury. She knows there are good people there. She knows that the Governor is instigating a war between those people and other people that she has a relationship with that she also knows to be good people. She's kind of stuck in the middle and can't help either group win because that would mean the destruction of other good people but she's going to have to do something to try to make this situation resolve in a way that not too many people get hurt. So that's really what she's going to be trying to do moving forward.

He also discusses whether more deaths lay ahead (no points for guessing the right answer to that one) and whether this current arc will be resolved by season's end:

I'm afraid there may be a casualty or more still to be experienced by the end of this season. We'll see.

Will this Woodbury vs. the prison storyline be resolved by the end of the season? Season 1 was the set up and going to the CDC, season 2 was about the farm, and season 3 has been the prison and Woodbury. Should we expect a new setting next season?
That would certainly appear to be settling into a cycle. I don't want to give anything away because we have some really cool stuff planned for the finale, but I will say that there is a resolution to the storyline at the end of the season, as people would expect. It becomes a whole complete story that you've been able to experience over the course of season 3. And It will set things up nicely for season 4. There are new places to go in season 4, but whether or not that means a new setting or new story direction or simply new characters I can't really nail down any specifics.

There's more at the link. [EW]

Once Upon a Time

Here's a quintet of sneak peeks for this Sunday's episode, "The Miller's Daughter."

Arrow

Celina Jade discusses her role as Shado, the daughter of Yao-Fei, in the island flashback sequences:

"She will team up with Slade and Oliver to get on the rescue mission to save her father and escape the island. Somehow they have to come up with a way to leave the island... First of all, she's not Japanese. In the comics, Shado was the daughter of the Yakuza. Here... she's a lawyer fighting to free her father from being banished to the island by the Chinese government...

She also hints at her character's relationship with Oliver:

"Shado is an excellent martial artist. She's also trained in archery. We'll see more of that in upcoming episodes where she teaches Oliver a signature move... Slade's a little bit surprised by her marital arts skills," Jade says. "Her fighting might even be better than Slade's. Slade's been having trouble teaching Oliver how to do martial arts. Shado comes from different sort of training, so she'll have a go at teaching Oliver how to fight. In the end, they're on the same team. They want to save Yao-Fei and get off the island... We'll see some romantic tension between the two. Because Shado is a lawyer, she reminds Oliver of Laurel [Katie Cassidy]. There's a good relationship there."

There's more at the link. [TV Guide]

Lost Girl

Episode twelve is reportedly called "Hail, Hale" while the thirteenth episode and season finale is called "Those Who Wander." [SpoilerTV]

Orphan Black

Here's a behind-the-scenes video focused on one of the characters in BBC America's upcoming clone series, "Fiercely Loyal" Felix.

Additional reporting by Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders.

Tomorrow's cities may be constructed partly out of living materials that produce energy without destroying the environment. But what will transportation look like in a world where you can't tell the difference between cities and forests? We get some hints in these gorgeous images of freeways built over forests in today's world. Imagine that these are electric cars, or even ones that are powered by hydrogen-producing bacteria, and this could just be the Earth in 200 years.

Over at The World Geography, there is a fantastic collection of "incredible drives above the trees," and these are just a small sampling of the images they've collected. Above, you can see highway H-3 in Hawaii. In the future, cities might look like an enormous green mountain, and these roadways might be leading straight to downtown.

This is today's Europa Brücke, in Austria. Beneath it, you can imagine the roofs of a city powered entirely by sunlight — and by solar cells made partly from living trees.

Brazil's Rodovia is one of the most incredible elevated highways to wind its way over the forest. But what if those hills were actually covered in bacterial mats doing water purification for São Paulo? Those trees might shelter homes, or they might be homes. The roadway could be connecting the city to its energy source, or connecting one forest city with another.

This is the Denny Creek viaduct in the state of Washington in the U.S. It's the view that we might have one day from the busy streets of our living metropolises, connected by massive viaducts that guide our shared vehicles from one high-density area to another.

FURTHER READING: Is this the city of the future?

For the past five hundred years, we've been looking out at the universe and assuming that we, with our little planet and our little solar system, were nothing special. And then we sent out a probe to measure the cosmic microwave background. It gave us some data that makes it seem like we might be a bigger deal than we thought.

In the beginning was a bang. That bang gave off a lot of light. Over the years, and over the length of the light's travel through an expanding universe, that light got stretched out. It started out as high frequency radiation, like gamma waves. Eventually it stretched into visible light. And after over thirteen billion years of travel, it got pulled into microwaves. These microwaves form, from Earth's perspective, the background to the entire universe. And as far as we could see, they were fairly consistent all the way through.

This fit what we call the Copernical Principle. It reflects the mindset that has taken over astronomy since Copernicus knocked the Earth out of the center of the solar system. The Earth we live on, and our corner of the universe, is not positioned in any special way. It's not the center of the universe. It's not in and special part of the universe. It's just another mediocre speck. This isn't a scientifically proven fact. It's just a good way to dispel human ego, and it hasn't steered us wrong so far.

And then WMAP went up. Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe took a good look at the anisotropy cosmic microwave background. Although the CMB signal is pretty much the same everywhere, it has lumps of high strength and low strength. If it were perfectly even in all directions, it would be called isotropic. The fact that sometimes parts of the signal seem to vary in certain directions makes it anisotropic. The variations aren't a worry to scientists - a little variation in the entire universe wouldn't be surprising. But every little difference is worth studying. It is our only chance to look at the big bang.

One of those odd clumpings of signal strength has given people pause. There seems to be a strong signal forming a circular band around the universe. And that circle seems to be in line with the ecliptic of our solar system. The rings that the planets describe around the sun are miniature versions of that strong signal.

Looking out at the sky, we see galaxies and exoplanets orbiting their stars along planes in all directions. Why should this signal be so similar to the plane of our solar system? And how does that jibe with the principle that has been helping humble astronomers for half a millennium? In the end, we don't know. It's possible that, if this is a major force in the universe, being aligned would be more common than being unaligned, and so the Copernical Principle is in no way compromised. Some think that it was just some wrong turn in interpreting the data. It's also possible that WMAP took some other energy source - a source specific to this solar system - to be the cosmic microwave background. Whatever it is, it remains a mystery. Are we special? I'm guessing no, but it would be a kick to be proved wrong.

Top Image: Jurgen Ziewe, via Shutterstock

Via UCLA, Hindawi, and NASA.

I think it's safe to say we're not getting our hoverboards. Despite the 2015 Back to the Future Part II showed us, it's 2013 and we can't even make a non-hovering replica of the hoverboard correctly. But while the lack of hoverboards will always be its greatest disappointment, it's hardly the only thing BttF promised us that reality has failed to deliver. Here are 20 other things Back to the Future II lied to us about.

1) Flying Cars
Obviously, it isn't just Doc's DeLorean that can fly. When Doc and Marty arrive at the future, they pop in going the wrong way on a highway — a highway at about 50 feet above the ground, complete with hovering signs and street lamps (although what the hell they're supposed to be illuminating is unknown, because there's obviously no street). Since there are plenty of cars on the ground of 2015 Hill Valley, I'm not sure if every car in the future could fly, but since absolutely 0% of the cars in 2013 can fly, it's kind of a moot point.

2) Mr. Fusion
Of all the inventions in Back to the Future II, Mr. Fusion would certainly have been the most useful. The time Home Energy Reactor transforms garbage — any garbage, apparently — into power via nuclear fusion. A clean, practically limitless source of energy that also gets rid of our trash? Back to the Future II, you are cruel.

3) Alpha-Rhythm Generator
Since Marty was with his girlfriend Jennifer when Doc picked him up to go to 2015, Jennifer got to tag along. And then she started asking questions. And then Doc zapped her with an sleep-inducing Alpha-Rhythm Generator, instantly rendering her unconscious. Since this is pretty much a Pocket Date Rape Kit, it's probably for the best it doesn't exist.

4) The Weather Service
Apparently the weather is on a strict schedule in 2015; Doc knows the exact time the pouring rain he and Marty arrive in will stop, thanks to the Weather Service, presumably a government agency that takes care of such things. Something tells me if the actual government were in charge of the weather, it would still be exactly as chaotic as it is now.

5) Rejuvenation Centers
I'm sure there are plenty of places calling themselves rejuvenation centers in 2013, but I bet they're mainly spas that offer massages and facials and such. The Rejuvenation Center Doc went to de-aged him 30 years, enough that he had to wear a rubber prosthetic when he picked up Marty so he wouldn't be baffled at Doc's newfound youth. This seems somewhat more useful than a massage.

6) Power Shoelaces
Since Marty needs to imitate his son to prevent him from ending up in jail, he has to dress like him, and this includes a pair of Nike Air Mags whose laces automatically constrict, essentially tying themselves for the wearer. Not only do we not have these, but Nike actually released replica Air Mags in 2011 with non-functional power laces. If the proceeds hadn't gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, it would have been a major dick move.

7) Self-Adjusting, Self-Drying Jackets
The other part of Marty's disguise? A jacket that adjusts to fit its wearer's body with the touch of a button. Obviously, it would almost certainly be more cost efficient to just buy clothes that fit, but the self-drying feature — which activated after Marty jumps in the town square's little lake — would be pretty groovy.

8) The U.S. Mail Fax Service
Like so many films of the ‘80s that tried to peek into the future, BttF2 was convinced of the eternal viability of fax machines — to the point that even public mailbox have fax machines. For the faxes you need to send on the go!

9) Gas Robots
In Bttf2, when you get your flying car filled up, a hovering robot actually fills the tank for you and then processes your transaction. In reality, not only do we not have robot workers pumping gas, he don't have human workers pumping gas either. We have to do it ourselves. That sucks.

10) Holographic Movie Theaters
Despite the fairly recent surge of popularity for 3D movies, we still don't have genuinely holographic movies like Jaws XIV. We also don't have holographic ads for movies, like the giant, 3D, incredibly obviously computer-generated shark that launches itself from the cinema marquee to chomp/promote itself to Marty. I'm more sad about the ads, personally.

11) Pepsi Perfect
In the ‘80s themed diner Marty visits, he orders a Pepsi, and the diner automatically gives him a Pesi Perfect. I have no idea what makes Pepsi Perfect different from other Pepsi products other than its awesome container, but I'd say if there's one item on this list that might actually happen by 2015, Pepsi Perfect is it.

12) Suspended Animation Kennels
At one point, Doc mentions he left his dog Einstein in a suspended animation kennel. As a pet owner who is emotionally traumatized whenever I have to board my pet, I really, really wish these things were real.

13) Remote Hovering News Cameras
When Griff and his hooligans buddies are being led away from the courthouse they've wrecked by the police, a hovering news camera is instantly on the scene. It might not be a big deal for most people, but I imagine CNN and the other 24-hour news stations would kill for someone to invent these things.

14) Mobile Trashcans
When Doc needs to angrily throw the sports almanac away, a small trash can happily scoots by for him to conveniently put it in. Now, I'm pretty sure this trash can didn't know Doc needed it — that would take a great deal of AI that I'm pretty sure even the movie couldn't imagine — so I think these trash cans just wander around. How that's more useful than a stationary trash can that people know where to find, I don't know, but either way we still don't have them.

15) The Scenery Channel
This is the channel on the projected TV in future Marty's house, which simply displays a landscape. Honestly, since pretty much all TV providers have free music channels, I'm a little surprised no one's thought to include this as a feature. It's be better than watching E!, at least.

16) Chiropractic Hoverbelts
When Grandpa McFly arrives at Future Marty's house, he's thrown his back out. The solution? Some kind of belt — that attaches to leg cuffs — which floats and carries George McFly upside down. I'm not really sure of the science of how this works, but maybe 2015 knows something we don't.

17) Retractable Indoor Garden Center
Whenever a McFly wants a banana, he or she just reaches up and grabs one, like our primate ancestors might have. Of course, our primate ancestors were grabbing things out of trees, and the McFlys are grabbing them from their Indoor Garden Center, which comes down from the ceiling, and provides a variety of fruits and vegetables right of the vine/tree/whatever. Someone seriously needs to get around to inventing this, stat.
f

18) Food Hydrators
Besides ceiling bananas, the other item the McFlys have for dinner is a pizza, fresh from the hydrator. Of course, the pizza that Grandma Lorraine puts in the hydrator doesn't look dehydrated, it just looks like a tiny pizza; however, the hydrator both enlarges the pizza and cooks it. With, uh… hydration, I guess.

19) Phone Glasses
Despite the prevlance of fax machines, Back to the Future Part II did actually have the foresight to recognize that people in 2015 would carry around small, portable, personal phones. Of course, BttFII thought these phones would also be sunglasses, but I'll still give them an E for effort.

20) The Cubs Will Win a World Series
The big headline on the day Marty arrives in 2015? The Cubs winning the World Series after a 107-year championship drought. Come on, Back to the Future II. Some things are just too ludicrous to ever believe.

With a little work, you can make a penny glow - but only if it was minted before 1982. What was the big change in 1982 that ruined the trick forever? The answer will make you want to hoard your pre-Reagan Era pennies now, because this glowing penny trick is awesome.

So you want to make your penny glow. That can easily be arranged. A fairly simple procedure can give you a penny that will glow for about twenty minutes at a time. All you need is a little bit of set-up. First grab a penny and some fairly stiff wire. (The wire can be copper, too.) Next grab a couple of oven mitts. Wind the wire around the penny so you can hold it out like a marshmallow you're about to toast. Next? Toast it. Either put it over a propane torch, or carefully warm it over a burner on the stove. It'll heat up fairly fast. Don't let it get meltingly hot - just warm.

Next grab some acetone. You can find it in nail polish remover or paint thinner. Pour a couple of tablespoons into a jar and lower the penny down so that it just touches the acetone, or is immersed in it. Within a few seconds you'll see it begin to glow red hot.

Or perhaps it won't. Only pennies made before 1982 will make this reaction work. Modern pennies are mostly zinc, with only 2.5 percent copper. Earlier pennies were 95 percent copper with just a little extra zinc added. And copper is indispensable for this reaction.

Acetone can catch fire, but it usually takes more than hot metal to get it to burn. Copper, in this case, acts as a catalyst. When a material burns it needs to grab oxygen. For it to do this, it often needs a lot of heat. Different materials need different amounts of heat, which is why they burn at different temperatures. Acetone generally needs more heat than is presented in a hot coin, but copper has a special property. It will grab hold of the oxygen itself, and pass the oxygen along to the acetone, overcoming the energy threshold generally needed to get it to burn. When the acetone burns, it releases heat and heats up the penny, which keeps the reaction going. The heat helps the copper grab oxygen, which it again passes along to acetone. The penny isn't diminished by the reaction at all. In fact, assuming it will burn off the grime that generally collects on old pennies, it should finish the reaction better than it started.

Sadly, zinc doesn't have the same effect. Another disappointment of the modern age.

Top Image: PD Photo

Via Job Foundation.

No, Carrie Fisher hasn't actually confirmed she's in Star Wars: Episode VII after all. Shane Black is taking Iron Man right back to his origins. Another Captain America costar might return for a flashback. Sam Mendes is leaving Bond behind... for now. Plus the latest details on Neil Gaiman's Cyberman-centric episode of Doctor Who!

It's nothing but spoilers from here on out!

Top image from Doctor Who.

Star Wars: Episode VII

I think we all knew this was coming, but a representative for Carrie Fisher has clarified to CNN that no, Fisher didn't really confirm her Star Wars return to Palm Beach Illustrated, even though it totally sounded like she did:

"She was joking. Nothing has been announced."

Let's just cut to the chase here, which is that, regardless of whether Fisher was actually joking — and I think we can safely assume she was joking about Leia being "in an intergalactic old folks' home", if nothing else — it's still probably more likely than not that, yeah, she and Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill are going to make some appearance in Episode VII. But until Disney and LucasFilm are damn good and ready to announce that, nothing — even confirmation from the actors themselves — is going to be "official." [CNN]

Iron Man 3

The interviews just keep on rolling out from writer-director Shane Black and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. First up, here's Black explaining how he adapted Warren Ellis's "Extremis" comics story for the film:

In the Extremis comic book, there's a type of thing that takes over and basically upgrades DNA. Sometimes you die. But if you live through the experience then you come out this changed thing. But the way they do it is the guy that does it is not some man chosen to be the super soldier — he's just a militia guy. There's an element of realism to it as well. So what we've tried to do is take this very science-fictiony concept of super people, and ground it in the type of people who volunteer for this being not necessarily super villains, but just people who upgrade.

I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit. That goes around dressed as you are right now. As for the science of it, once again we've gone back to the comic books, and I think pretty much lifted the Maya Hensen idea, that she met [Tony] long ago and had the germ of an idea, which now has come to fruition full circle, but she's afraid because it's gotten out there. And we go from there. I think you'll be interested in the effect that we generate to demonstrate what Extremis does to a human being. It's a pretty interesting special effect. But we've deliberately stayed away from defining, ‘Oh it's nanites.' What we do keep from the comic is the idea that there's a slot in the brain that seems to have been dormant, but exists in human beings, almost as though it's waiting for human beings to find a way to fill it. It's been there forever.

[SFX Magazine via Collider]

Elsewhere, Kevin Feige explains how Iron Man 3 goes right back to the franchise's beginnings:

"In a way, The Avengers liberated us in the development process, because we knew we couldn't go bigger than Avengers. We didn't want to go bigger than Avengers. What are you going to do? Crack the Earth in two, and Iron Man's gonna have to put it together? No, that's not what it's about. We were much more inspired by the first half of the first Iron Man film. We said, ‘Let's put him, metaphorically, back in a cave with a box of scraps and see how he uses his brain to get out of it.' And that's very much in Shane's wheelhouse, taking cinematic tropes and conceits, and spinning them in an unexpected way."

There's more at the link. [IGN]

Finally, Feige explains how the film addresses the fact that Tony Stark could theoretically call the rest of the Avengers for help:

It's a good question, and it's sort of half and half. I am betting that like the comics you don't have to keep – if you are reading a standalone "Iron Man" comic, they don't spend every page explaining where every other Marvel hero is. The audience kind of accepts that there are times when they're on their own and there are times when they are together. I'm betting that movie audiences will feel the same way. That being said, there is a little bit of lip service here and there to that. There is also just the very nature of Tony wants to, once he barely survives that house attack you saw today, and even you saw it in the message he left for Pepper, he's basically saying "I'm going off the grid to try to figure something out."

He also confirms that Tony doesn't yet know that Agent Coulson is alive and well and about to star on S.H.I.E.L.D. [/Film]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Dominic Cooper says there's a plan in place for him to return as Howard Stark, although it sounds like scheduling might prevent this:

Yeah, they mentioned that, they mentioned it to me. But I don't know how… I'm too busy. I'm trying to film, I'm filming at the moment, everyday, and I'm really trying to make it work but I think I'm stuck in Budapest, so at the moment its really, really tough, like I don't know how I'm going to achieve it.

I don't know how I'm going to get to… yeah, there was talk of it, and now I don't know whether I can, which will be really annoying because I loved being part of those. You know, I think it it was such an incredible time, and I think — you know the first one - they did such an incredible job of it. So, I will try my hardest to get Stark back into a flashback sequence or some description, but its proving rather difficult in terms of scheduling at the moment.

[Screen Invasion]

Bond 24

Skyfall director Sam Mendes has announced he won't be back for the next Bond film, though he does say he hopes to be involved with the franchise again in the future:

"It has been a very difficult decision not to accept Michael and Barbara's very generous offer to direct the next Bond movie. Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond. I feel very honoured to have been part of the Bond family and very much hope I have a chance to work with them again sometime in the future."

[Empire Online]

Doctor Who

Executive producer Caroline Skinner previews the penultimate episode of series seven, the Neil Gaiman-penned "The Last Cybermen":

"One of the things that Neil was initially really excited about was being given one of the classic Doctor Who monsters and being able to bring a new twist and a new way of looking at them. Certainly when we watched them on set they felt very creepy and the redesign of the masks recalls to a certain extent some of the earlier ‘Moonbase'/‘Tomb Of The Cybermen' designs. What Neil's also done in that episode is actually used the notion of being able to write a story about the Doctor in conflict with the Cybermen in a new way, to really make it a huge episode for Matt. It's a brilliant performance, that one. It's interesting what Neil does – he always delivers such wonderful visual sequences, as he did with ‘The Doctor's Wife', but one of his real strengths is that he gets right to the heart of the characters as well. In many ways that episode is as much about Matt's Doctor in conflict with one of the most classic and famous Doctor Who monsters as it is about what the Cybermen look like."

Check out the link for some cryptic thoughts on another episode, "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS." [SFX]

Elsewhere, Skinner offers some general hints about the 50th anniversary special, which is due to start shooting on March 18:

"Marcus Wilson and I spend most of our time saying to one another: ‘Oh, good God, Steven Moffat's imagination is AMBITIOUS.' ‘Wow, we've got a lot of work to do.' ‘And how exactly are we going to do that?' ‘And that?' ‘And, oooh, that?!' But more succinctly, and in just four words: ‘It. Will. Be. Big."

[Life, Doctor Who, and Combom]

Game of Thrones

Ygritte actress Rose Leslie discusses what to expect from the third season:

I was so happy to be holding a bow and arrow. I was so happy about it because I just thought it embodied Ygritte, as to who she is, being such a fiercely independent character. She's powerful and strong and I felt that a bow and arrow fitted her beautifully… I was able to kind of do some archery lessons before just so I didn't look like a right numpty [Editor's note: British slang for fool] when I was drawing back the bow… just so that I looked a little bit authentic. But it is really cool. Oh, I loved it!

She also discusses two new beyond-the-Wall actors, Rome's Ciarin Hinds as Mance Rayder and the British Office's Mackenzie Crook as Orell:

In Season 2, Mance Rayder — the name at least was certainly built up, wasn't it — to an extent where you were looking forward to finally meeting this character. And he is dominant and he is a leader, and especially from Ygritte's perspective… She has put all her eggs in one basket so to speak, when it comes to Mance Rayder.

What is it about Mance that makes her want to follow him, that she's so devoted to? Is it just because he chose the life of a free person, is he just so charismatic and strong, does he respect her?
I think it's an amalgamation of all those things that you mentioned, actually. He is strong and I feel that the kind of wildling community, because they are harsh and brutal, and of course, that is the environment that they have all been brought up in, you, as a wildling look up to that. And I think with Mance Rayder, because he is a turncloak and because he no longer wants to bend the knee, she has a huge amount of respect for him because she feels that he is now 100 percent on their side.

You have Mackenzie Crook from the original ‘The Office,' and he was in ‘Pirates'… Can you tell us anything about his character, Orell, because I imagine he's very delightful to watch.
Yes! He is absolutely incredible. He's such a lovely, lovely man. But, his character is incredibly different to who he is, obviously, which is a huge accolade to him. But Orell, oh, he's a nasty piece of work. He's vicious and he does not trust Jon Snow and not wanting to give too much away, he's incredibly loyal to who he is and his love of his people… and yeah, he's nasty!

There's still some more at the link. [Access Hollywood]

Elsewhere, Jon Snow actor Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie discuss Kristofer Hivju's work in the upcoming season as the new character Tormund Giantsbane:

Harrington I think you are going to love what he does this season. He brings this wonderful energy and eccentricity to that part [Hivju is playing Tormund Giantsbane]. He was such a joy to work with. I wasn't familiar with his work up onto working on Thrones. I hope to keep in touch with him. He is really, really good. He just is that character. He has got quite a big personality.

Rose Leslie: Yeah, definitely. He just sort of dominates the room.

[SFX]

Revolution

Here's an interview with star Tracy Spiridakos. [BuddyTV]

Once Upon a Time

Here are some tidbits from the recent PaleyFest panel:

1. Snow White is going to go dark after she vows to kill Cora in last week's episode. Ginnifer Goodwin told the Paley crowd. "What she's going through is going to shake her self identity and self definition," she said. "If she's not the Snow White she read about in story books [while] in Storybrooke, then she doesn't know who she is. But I think that does a lot for her. She can get in touch with a more involved way of protecting herself and her family."
2. Episode 17, "Welcome to Storybrooke," will be a flashback to 1983, the first week of the curse. "We're going to get more insight into what it was like that very first week in 1983 and what it was like for the Evil Queen to win and to figure out modern clothing," says [co-creator Edward] Kitsis. This episode, airing March 17, will mark the return of Jamie Dornan as the town's hottie sheriff/The Huntsman.
3. An upcoming Belle-centric episode will explore the character's cursed persona, jokingly called "Racy Lacey" during the panel. "Lacey's very interesting," said Emilie De Ravin. "She's the opposite of Belle," added Kitsis.

There's a bunch more at the link. [EW]

Supernatural

Here's a promo photo for episode seventeen, "Goodbye Stranger", which airs March 20. Check out more photos here.

Inhuman

The android cop show from J.J. Abrams's Bad Robot production company — which actually isn't called Inhuman anymore, but it's a slightly better placeholder title than "Untitled J.J. Abrams Android Cop Show" — has reportedly assembled its cast. The show "is set in the near future when all LAPD officers are partnered with highly evolved human-like androids", and it "centers on one such pairing, cop John Kennex and his android partner Dorian (Michael Ealy)." The Unit's Michael Irby has been cast as LAPD Detective Richard Paul, "who blames Kennex for the death of fellow officers in the tragic mission that casts a pall over the department." Mackenzie Crook, who previously appeared in this article in the Game of Thrones item, has reportedly been cast as the eccentric LAPD robotics designer Rudy Lom. [Deadline]

Additional reporting by Katharine Trendacosta.

Recently, the cameras on board the Cassini spacecraft caught images of meteors racing through the rings of Saturn. Or, rather, photos of the clouds of debris created as the meteors impacted the icy ring particles. These meteors were probably a lot smaller than the Chelyabinsk meteor—-let alone the monsters that rained onto Jupiter—-being perhaps only a yard wide.

The bright streaks visible in the the first pair of Cassini images were photographed in August 2009. They weren't noticed until recently simply because they are so hard to spot. But the large number that have been found is evidence that these are not rare events.

One reason these had not been observed before is that the bright clouds of particles are difficult to see against the background of the equally bright rings. The stand out more distinctly when the sun angle is very low, as it was when these photos were taken. When the sun is almost directly in line with the rings, a cloud of dust rising above the darkened ring plane catches the sun's rays directly. The contrast with the darker background now makes the cloud more easily visible. When the ring background is at its usual brightness, impacts such as these are very difficult to detect.

The impact of these objects, estimated to about 3 feet wide and traveling tens of miles per second, created clouds of tiny particles that were then stretched into long streaks by the motion of the rings.

The image above (click to see full size) shows an impact in the A ring. The streak stretches from the right of the image to the middle, and it does not quite follow the curve of the rings. The brightest part of the streak is over 3000 miles long and 200 kilometers wide (its radial extent, tip to tip) in this image.

The image above (click to see full size) shows an impact into the C ring. This streak is much smaller than the A ring streak, and it appears on the right of the image. The brightest part of this streak is 200 kilometers long (its azimuthal dimension) and 6 miles wide. Scientists estimate that the impact took place about two days earlier. Impact streaks less than a day old have also been discovered in the C ring.

Taken together, these observations confirm of a long-held belief that interplanetary debris continually rains down on Saturn's rings. These constant impacts contribute to the rings' erosion and evolution.

Communist architecture is often monumental, sometimes minimalist, and always imposing. But in the latter years of most European communist states, traditional Brutalist architecture gave way to something a little weirder — and occasionally even playful. Here are some incredible buildings from this era in late Eastern Bloc communism.

Crematorium, Kiev, Ukraine (1975)

You can see the picture above.

(via MIMOA and Archialternative)

Central Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, St. Petersburg, Russia (1973-1988)

(via PanGorod.ruand the St. Petersburg University's Museum)

Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Moscow

(via Wikimedia Commons 1- 2 )

Hotel Forum, Kraków, Poland (1978-1989)

(via Wikimedia Commons)

Museum of Slovak National Uprising , Banska Bystrica, Slovakia (1969)

(via Wikimedia Commonsand Serendipity Project)

Riga Diesel Engine Factory, Riga, Latvia (1985)

(via Riga.in)

Palace of Concerts and Sports, Vilnius, Lithuania (1971)

(via 28 Days Later)

Genex Tower, Belgrade, Serbia (1977)

(via Wikimedia Commons)

National Library, Pristina, Kosovo

(via Wikimedia Commons)