Guess How Many Explosions Are In The First Transformers Movie?

Go on, guess! And then watch Dylan Browne’s supercut, which counts out exactly how many times things blow up, large or small, in the first installment of Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise. Here’s a hint — the movie is 144 minutes long, and don’t bother guessing less than that. Yes, there are 208 explosions featured in…

This Big-Toothed Fossil May Represent A Primitive New Human Species

The first known prehistoric human from Taiwan has been identified and may represent an entirely new species that lived as recently as 10,000 years ago, according to a new study. Top image: The recovered jawbone of Penghu 1 reveals it belonged to a new species with large teeth. (Y. KAIFU) The newly discovered big-toothed human,…

New Rumors About Ghostbusters‘ Villain and Independence Day 2‘s Hero

Robert Downey Jr. hints at how Age of Ultron will naturally lead to Captain America 3. Margot Robbie talks about Harley Quinn’s voice in Suicide Squad. Get a description of HBO’s Westworld straight from the producers’ mouth. And hints from the finale of Agent Carter. Spoilers now! Top image: Agent Carter Ghostbusters Now that we…

Over on The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates has written an essay on why he hopes to see the marriage of Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker restored to comics. It’s an excellent personal essay about what that relationship meant to him.Go read it.

Nick Jonas Joins the Super-Eclectic Scream Queens Cast

Fox’s new horror comedy show has added another well-known name to it’s motley cast: Nick Jonas. He joins true scream queen Jaime Lee Curtis and Lea Michele, Joe Manganiello, Abigail Breslin, Keke Palmer, Emma Roberts, and Ariana Grande. This is an insane cast. Back when Michele, Palmer, and Grande were announced, we guessed that there…

The Most Deadly And Disgusting Liquors In Science Fiction And Fantasy

With fictional worlds come fictional alcohol. But not just alcohol that’s bad for you in the usual ways — bad for you in the “this will kill you if you drink it” kind of ways. These are drinks bartenders need hazmat suits to prepare and serve. These are not just the drinks that are part…

Dogs Could Love Frolicking In Snow Simply Because It’s New

One of the benefits of living where it snows, or taking a trip to snow with your dog, is watching a joyful dog frolic in it. But why does snow elicit such a response? Well, Scientific American has taken the time to ask a bunch of experts that question. Image: Mischling Jack by Maja Dumat/flickr/C.C.…

Watch the First Two Installments of Haphead, a VR Gamer Dystopia

For the first time ever, io9 has teamed up with indie filmmakers to bring you a science fiction web series. Created by Jim Munroe (Ghosts with Shit Jobs, Infest Wisely), Haphead is the tale of a gamer who is willing to do anything to get her hands on a new “haptic” VR system for games.…

Danger 5‘s Parody Of 1980s High School Movies Is Both Absurd And Spot-On

At long last, a new season of the insane spies-vs-Hitler show Danger 5 has started airing in Australia. We brought you a sneak peek a month ago, but now the first four episodes are on YouTube in their entirety. Here’s our favorite: a totally perfect (and yet nonsensical) spoof of 80s high-school movies. Warning: This…

Remembering The Legacy Of “Badlands” Killers Starkweather and Fugate

Fifty-seven years ago this week, Americans were gripped by either terror or fascination (depending on where they lived) with Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate — teen lovers on a murderous crime spree that cut across the Midwest. The duo’s first crimes occurred January 21, 1958, when the 19-year-old Starkweather shot and killed his 14-year-old…

Can You Guess The Subjects Of These Extreme Close-Up Photographs?

Photographer Pyanek takes photographs of everyday objects — book pages, sugar, bags of tea — at high magnifications, rendering some of his subjects nearly unrecognizable. Watch this video and see how many of the super-magnified objects you can identify. Want to study the photos more closely? Pyanek has made them available for download (the music…

As The Landscape Beneath It Shifted, The One City Became Two

The two halves of the city still maintained trade, but as it became harder and harder to travel between them over the centuries, each developed its own language and customs. They became two places united by history, architecture, and geography, but separated by everything else. This architectural dream, titled “Rocky Mountains,” comes from the mind…

A Clip That Shows Why The Originals Is Amazing PhD Dissertation Fodder

Seriously, some media studies grad student somewhere has to be writing a thesis about race, gender and politics in vampire media — and she or he must be just drooling over The Originals right now. Just watch this clip, in which Marcel turns a segregated World War I unit into vampires, and see for yourself.…

Insanely Beautiful Photos From Jupiter Ascending Took Us By Surprise

We know very little about Lana and Andy Wachowski’s next scifi feature Jupiter Ascending. We know it stars Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum as a dog person trained to find her in the future. But we did not know it was this beautiful. Take a look at this massive gallery of gorgeous looks into the…

One Of Our Most Popular Special Effects Originally Came From Anime

If you’ve been near a theater in the last few years, you’ve seen it happen: Somewhere deep in the middle of a bustling city an ill-defined ball of crackling “energy” swells. But just where does this rapidly-spreading trope come from? Here are its origins. After taking a much closer look at the scenes in the…

How To Photograph An Exploding Star

This is SNR E0519-69.0, an expanding shell of debris around a star that exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. The red lines are the outer edges of the explosion (visible light) and the blue glow is the superhot gas (millions of degrees hot, in X-Ray). This is just…

A Guide To Visual Symmetry In Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange

One reason why director Stanley Kubrick is a legend is because of his beautiful shots, which feature symmetrical framing, or one-point-perspective — which means that all lines lead to a single point in the distance. We’ve made a supercut of all the scenes with one-point perspective in the legendary A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Kill La Kill Is Coming To Toonami, Everybody Get Naked And Party

The spiritual successor to the beloved anime series Gurren Lagann, Kill La Kill will make its U.S. television debut at 12:30 p.m. on February 7th! Given how saucy the show is — that’s main character in her battle outfit, and that’s not even mentioning the show’s revolutionary nudists — this is just a touch insane.…

Big Hero 6 Deleted Scene Shows Something You Should Never Do To Your Cat

We found out a while back that, in an earlier version of Big Hero 6, the Hamada brothers put rocket boots on their cat, Mochi, transforming him into ROCKET CAT. Now, thanks to a deleted scene from the film, we can finally see Rocket Cat in action. https://gizmodo.com/concept-art-reveals-best-thing-that-wasnt-in-big-hero-6-1656169733 These storyboards reveal an alternate intro for…

Thor Battles Thor In An All-Out Thor-War In This Week’s Comics

The original Odinson returns this week, and is a wee bit miffed to discover that someone has taken his hammer. But that’s not all! A new creative team hits Adventure Time, Batman goes after Selina Kyle’s Underworld empire, and Sex Criminals ends its second story arc! DC Effigy #1 – A former child star turns…