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Feast your eyes on the architecture of Thomas Heatherwick. He's a soft-spoken British architect who explains to the TED conference audience how he thought it was a shame that drawbridges became "broken" in order to do their drawing up, so he created one that turns into a circle. "We liked the fact the two furthest bits of it would end up kissing each other," he says. He'll also show you a sculpture made of 1 million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of golf balls. As if that wasn't enough, he's working on new buses for the city of London that will have an open platform reminiscent of the iconic Routemaster buses, and use 40 percent less energy. Also don't miss the incredible-looking UK Pavillion his team designed for the Shanghai 2010 Expo, which resembles a giant detonated cotton ball mid-explosion. More »
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Oblong Industries recently unveiled its new "spatial operating environment," a computer interface that lets you pluck, stroke, and shuffle onscreen data with nothing but a pair of gloves. If you've ever wanted to punch the Internet, that day is approaching. More »
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This week the world gets a closer look at the city of Caprica, the Chuck teasing continues, and Dollhouse brings back those who have already passed on. Spoilers, and tons of clips, below. More »
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Just when you thought we were rid of yet another woman vying for old floppy-head's attention, Chuck brings back Brewster. And Lost's Miles outshines that Sixth Sense kid. Clips and spoilers below. More »
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This week Lost's Ben must atone for being the world's most compulsively watchable villain, while Fringe finally comes back. Also, it's the season finale of T:SCC, and Macaulay Culkin makes his Kings debut. Clips/spoilers ahead... More »
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Turns out the Dean-and-Sam Supernatural fanfic comic has already been created, and this week's episode is all about it. Plus Smallville has a Lex Luthor flashback, and Tricia Helfer gets rough with Chuck. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5189859&view=rss&microfeed=true "Science Fiction has become an exclusively literary genre, with books inspired less by new scientific research than by previous science fiction books, and, regrettably, movies. Ideas turn into tropes, and instead of extrapolation, we get variation: of the generation star ship, the space alien, the artificial brain, the parallel universe. More »
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Back in the mid-twentieth century, a bunch of NASA engineers had a dream — a highly-classified dream — about taking a nuclear-powered rocked to Saturn. They even went so far as to plan the entire device, create design specs and concept art (some of it pictured here), and name it "Project Orion." Now science historian George Dyson has unearthed a bunch of the recently re-classified papers related to Project Orion, which his father Freeman Dyson was involved in, and put them together into a short, entertaining presentation. Essentially he's unearthed an alternate history of the space program that might have been if NASA hadn't canceled it. Check out his entertaining story below. More »
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