More Proof That Brave And Bold Is The Greatest Show On TV

I was pretty much bowled over by last week’s first episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, with its pop-art combination of fun, action and villains with cosmic-powered gongs for weapons, but this pic from Friday’s second episode promises that even better is to come. Yes, that’s Batman turned into an ape, ready for…

New X-Men Trailer: Days Of Future Awesome!

Is it wrong that I’m more excited about the cartoon Wolverine And The X-Men than the live-action Wolverine movie, after watching this new trailer? January’s new animated series has all the crucial elements: the fear-mongering Senator Kelly, the dystopian glimpses, the swaggering Brotherhood of Evil Mutants… and Wolverine getting the X-Men back together. (Can’t wait…

The BBC Tried To Ruin Doctor Who – Before It Even Began

The BBC has released the earliest planning documents for its time travel dramedy Doctor Who – and they pitched a show very different from the one we love. This treasure trove of notes from 1963, online for the first time, presents the BBC’s three unbreakable rules for good science fiction, including no robots and no…

Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler

Click to viewNext month sees the release of Valkyrie, a film about Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Plenty of time travelers have had the same idea, although their plan was to kill Hitler before he enacted mass genocide. Their intentions may be noble, but the plans always seem to…

Twilight Should Shed Its Vampire Drag And Embrace Its Sappy Self

Let’s get this out of the way first: Twilight isn’t as bad as you think it is. I know, I know; you all want me to tell you that it’s the worst thing ever made, two hours of extreme embarrassment that I will never be able to get back, and by the way, Robert Pattinson…

Live Piracy Map Reveals Seas Are Still a Pirate’s Paradise

Want to know where you’re most likely to have your ship hijacked by pirates this year? Now you can, with the help of the International Maritime Bureau’s “live piracy map,” a Google map mashup that gives you quick, real-time details on all the acts of piracy taking place on the Earth’s high seas. Just drill…

Giz Explains: Every Video Format You Need to Know

Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they’re trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or…

Final Spirit Poster A Casserole Of Sexual Innuendo Leftovers

This is it, folks — the final poster for Frank Miller’s The Spirit, which means there’s no stopping it now. The latest mostly black-and-white image is a sort of collage of all those past posters, with weird sex-chat lines scrawled across the actresses’ faces. Click to enlarge, and start practicing your Rocky Horror-esque responses to…

Google Creates Plague Prediction System

Google doesn’t just help you find the nearest pizza place anymore – now it helps doctors find where flu epidemics are going to strike next. Working with a group of epidemiologists, the tech megacorp has revealed a new system for tracking disease outbreaks by checking what people are searching for. By tracking the rise in…

Looking to reconcile your Christian faith with your fascination with flying saucers? Here’s a guide to Christian science fiction sites online, including fiction webzines, discussion forums, review sites, writing tips, and a couple of blogs about the intersection between faith and futurism. [The Ultimate Guide To Christian Science Fiction And Fantasy On The Web]

Load Up On Boba Fett Ewok Slaying Action

Get your fill of Die-Hard-quoting, over-compensating Boba Fett stop motion action – Robot Chicken’s Star Wars II is now online over at Adult Swim. So kick back relax and watch Luke and Vader kick some major stormtrooper butt in the father and son dance competition. [Adult Swim]

iGEM, or How to Build a Biological Organism in a Single Summer

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition brings undergraduates from around the world to MIT’s campus to share the results of a summer’s worth of synthetic biology research. Each team tries to create the best synthetic organism. Here you can see the iGEM participants (photo courtesy of David Appleyard and iGEM). I’m one of the folks…

The Universe May Actually Be Teeming with Life

Click to viewMost of the the search for life on other planets has focused on finding a world just like ours: rocky and covered in liquid water. But as astronomers learn more about exoplanets, some are beginning to suspect that life can evolve under a wider range of conditions than anyone had thought before. Far…

A Step-By-Step Guide to Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth

As our grasp of genetics and cloning grows, the one question everyone asks is, “When can we recreate an extinct species from old DNA?” It just so happens that scientists have quite a bit of woolly mammoth DNA lying around, and now science journal Nature has got the resurrection process all figured out.Mammoths lived and…

How Coraline’s Designers Created an Entire World from Thread and Buttons

Neil Gaiman’s movie adaptation of novel Coraline, about a young girl who finds a parallel universe inside her own home, has an amazing behind-the-scenes story. In these clips, you’ll discover how the crafty designers used stop motion to create a beautiful orchard filled with cherry blossoms made of popcorn. You’ll also find out how 5…

The Texture of Martian Geography

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a satellite spinning over the surface of Mars, has revealed the tremendous variations in Martian geography. Here you can see slices of the bizarre surface features created by atmospheric conditions that don’t exist on Earth. Want to see more? The textures above are colorized images taken by the MRO. According…

Harsh Reality Behind the Gizmodo/Reader Symbiosis Revealed by Dilbert

It’s not often that a simple three-pane comic strip says something meaningful and true about your life, but I think it’s safe to say that today’s Dilbert strip essentially sums up what this here website and its readers are all about. We post about gadgets, sometimes cool, sometimes not, and you read about them either…

The Return Of Fat, Farting Mad Scientist Eddie Murphy

Who needs an Oscar when you can prance around in old lady boobs making fatty fart jokes? Not Eddie Murphy. Nuts to that whole Dream Girls phenomenon where he used his genuine talent to tell a story – there weren’t enough fat suits. Lucky for fat suit lover Murphy, rumor has it that Nutty Professor…

Heroes’ Kring Avoids Time Travel To Return To The Show’s Roots

Hope is just around the corner for those of us burned out on time travel plots in NBC’s Heroes, according to the show’s creator Tim Kring. Talking to an audience of screenwriters and press at last weekend’s Screenwriters Expo in LA, Kring explained why the show won’t have that plot crutch to rely on for…

J.J. Abrams’ Trek Confessions, Summer Glau’s Terminator Warnings

Spoilers rule! J.J. Abrams did a shot-by-shot analysis of the Star Trek trailer, and wound up giving away tons of plot details — including who’s spying on Uhura as she undresses. Meanwhile, Isabel Lucas fueled speculation about her mysterious character in Transformers 2. There are half a dozen clips from Monday’s Heroes episode, plus the…