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Watch the Star Wars logo evolve right before your eyes

There are few symbols as iconic as the Star Wars logo. Just looking at it brings a sense of romance and adventure. But it went through a lot of variations before becoming the sleek piece of text we know today. Here’s one video that sums up the whole process, including some weird offshoots. Check out…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

Star Trek: The Wine is now a thing that exists

Behold three Star Trek-themed wines, dubbed “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Mirror Mirror” and “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I’d make a crack about how the wines probably taste like Harlan Ellison’s rage, Leonard Nimoy’s goatee and furry flesh balls respectively, but I love it anytime someone combines nerdiness and booze. You can pre-order…

io9 Rob Bricken

1 in 13 humans has chimp-like feet

When our ancient ancestors left their arboreal homes, they ditched their flexible feet for rigid tootsies best suited for walking on the ground. But according to a new study, 1 out of every 13 people may have bendy, tree-ready feet, without even knowing it. Though chimp feet may look pretty different from human feet, they…

io9 Joseph Bennington-Castro

Del Toro goes inside the heads of Pacific Rim‘s Jaegers (literally)

There is literally nothing that has made me more impressed about Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim — and it’s has some mighty impressive trailers — than this featurette revealing the massive, unbelievable, almost zero-CG sets used as the Jaeger’s cockpits. Seriously, they’re almost as insane as if del Toro has just gone ahead and built…

Movies Rob Bricken

This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon

Do you have, say, ten years to spare? Then you could probably design a functional nuclear weapon. We know that, because of a very odd experiment conducted in the 1960s by the United States government. In the 1960s World War II was well over, and the United States and the Soviet Union were both settling…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell

This Saturday, 6/1: io9 Meetup in San Francisco!

It’s time for another io9 meetup in San Francisco, the city that got rich on asteroid mining and used all those credits to build the first public nanofabricators. Come out to meet your fellow io9ers at San Francisco’s Borderlands Bookstore Cafe this Saturday afternoon! It’s hard to imagine we used to worry about earthquakes here.…

io9 Annalee Newitz

Nathan Fillion comes inbetween Mike and Sully in new Monsters U. clips

Bros don’t let girls come between then, but two things: 1) in this new clip from Monsters University, Mike and Sully aren’t quite bros yet, and 2) that ain’t no lady, that’s Nathan Fillion — as a monstrous jock and member of hoighty-toighty frat Roar Omega Roar! Luckily, it appears that Mike and Sully manage…

Movies Rob Bricken

Here’s what Pangea looks like mapped with modern political borders

Pretty wild, right? It’s a map of Pangea — a supercontinent that formed roughly 300 million years ago — mapped with contemporary geopolitical borders. What you see here is an anachronistic mashup — a modern map, complete with geological features that did not exist 300-million years ago, with its various parts relocated to the general…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

The First Images of Molecules Breaking and Reforming Chemical Bonds

Microscopy is advancing in leaps and bounds these days. It was just last week that scientists produced the first image of a hydrogen atom’s orbital structure. Not to be outdone, Berkeley chemists have now captured a series of images showing molecules as they break and reform their chemical bonds. It looks almost… textbook. https://gizmodo.com/the-first-image-ever-of-a-hydrogen-atoms-orbital-struc-509684901 It’s…

io9 George Dvorsky

A Strong Candidate for Greatest Science Fiction Dance Sequence Ever

Science fiction is full of great dance sequences and supervillain musical numbers. But this scene from The History of Future Folk is still a strong contender to be the best of the bunch. There’s a cop-and-criminal tango, interspersed with a balletic alien kickpunching fight. Awesome. https://gizmodo.com/the-greatest-scifi-dance-routines-of-all-time-349053 https://gizmodo.com/the-36-greatest-supervillain-musical-numbers-of-all-tim-5978701 Like The Wall, The History of Future Folk…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders

Things are looking bad for Space Battleship Yamato, but awesome for us

In case you were wondering if Japan’s new Space Battleship Yamato remake was still looking phenomenally badass, well: If you consider massive space battles with giant guns, Gamilons, dogfights, explosions, and people on starship decks yelling orders and freaking out to be badass, then the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” Behold the new trailer for…

io9 Rob Bricken

Warning: This brief clip from The Wall will creep you the hell out

Seriously, there’s something intensely creepy about this scene from The Wall, a new movie coming out in New York today. The premise is similar to Stephen King’s Under The Dome, but the execution is a lot more low-key… and kind of intense, for all that. The Wall is opening today at IFC Center in New…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders

Alien teens can be just as godawful as human ones in CW’s Star-Crossed

Like the play the inspired its name, the CW’s Star-Crossed features two young lovers who belong to groups — in this case, two species — that hate each other. Of course, in Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and Capulets didn’t force all their teens to go to the same high school together. In this riduclous…

Television Rob Bricken

The 10 Totally Awesome Rules of Evolution in Science Fiction

Evolution may be one of the most controversial scientific ideas in recent history, but it sure is boring to watch it happen in real life. That’s why science fiction stories adhere to these 10 very special rules for evolution, just to make a long, complicated process into something totally rad. 1. There is a “next…

Movies Annalee Newitz

Travelers to Mars would face a lifetime’s worth of radiation exposure

We knew that a trip to Mars would expose astronauts to excessive amounts of radiation, but new data from Curiosity’s Mars Science Laboratory is showing that it’s worse than we thought. According to a new NASA study, Martian-bound astronauts would be bombarded with as much cosmic radiation as they’d get from a full-body CT scan…

io9 George Dvorsky

Google Honors Inventor of Petri Dish with Gross/Awesome Doodle

Today, Google honors German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri (born May 31st, 1852), the scientist credited with the invention of the Petri dish – a ubiquitous research tool particularly suited to raising cell cultures and revealing how gross-and/or-fascinating the world is, generally. The animation shows a series of Petri dishes sprouting Google-spelling bacteria after being swabbed.…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

Shyamalan’s new film is a huge disappointment (because it’s not awful)

Admit it: You were secretly hoping for After Earth to be a trainwreck. It’s M. Night Shyamalan’s first movie since the oh-god-my-eyes Last Airbender. It’s Will Smith trying to jumpstart his son Jaden’s career. It has a ridiculous backstory. All signs pointed to another MST3K-worthy outing. Except After Earth is… actually okay. https://gizmodo.com/the-alien-backstory-you-didnt-see-in-the-after-earth-t-509618063 (There will…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

New Theory Explains Moon’s Wonky Gravity

A strange thing happens to satellites when they’re in the Moon’s orbit. When passing over certain craters, they’ve been known to suddenly change course and plummet towards the surface before pulling back up. Scientists now know how these gravitational anomalies formed. These craters are called mass concentrations, or mascons for short — impact basins that…

io9 George Dvorsky

Holy crap it’s a hot pink slug

Fluorescent and vaguely obscene-looking, this technicolor terrestrial molusk lives on Mount Kaputar, a remote mountaintop in New South Wales, Australia. It is the only place on Earth slugs like this are known to reside. “It’s a tiny island of alpine forest, hundreds of kilometres away from anything else like it,” said Michael Murphy, a national…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

The time the Hulk battled baseball, capitalism and a giant rooster

In this golden age of comic-based entertainment, it can be easy to look back at shows like 1978-82’s Incredible Hulk TV series and feel that it somehow paved the way for today’s hit superhero shows and movies. Easy… but wrong, at least if you’re looking back at The Incredible Hulk episode “The Phenom.” Our story…

Television Rob Bricken

Watch the Star Wars logo evolve right before your eyes