New York improv comedian and writer DC Pierson just sold a novel that’s being billed as “Superbad meets E.T.” The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Didn’t Have To, forthcoming from Broadway, is about two outcast teens who bond over their love of comic books and science fiction. One of them never sleeps, and instead just…

The Official NASA Guide To Drinking Your Own Urine

Click to viewIf you’re going on a long space trip, you’ll soon realize that you can’t carry all the fresh water you’ll need with you. The cost of getting all that water into space would destroy your budget before you ever built a single photon torpedo launcher. The answer, of course, is recycling. Those childhood…

2012 Viral Marketing Just As Terrible As Movie

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 teaser trailer has dropped, and right behind it is the wave of viral marketing that I can only imagine will continue to slam our computers like his terrible monk-hating apocalypse. Right now, you can go to the Institute For Human Continuity and register for a lottery number that I assume will be…

Smallville’s Big Wedding Day, Plus A Must-See Stargate Atlantis

It’s the most nerdtastic week ever, as Pushing Daisies finally returns, we get a Walter-filled Fringe, Chloe marries her little Jimmy, and scientists fill the sets of Stargate Atlantis, including Dave Foley who plays McKays arch nemesis. Seriously if there was a better yin to McKay’s yang, I can’t think of one. Also Jar Jar…

10 Robotic Pets That Deserve to Live in the White House

Click to viewEver since Barack Obama announced that he would be getting his daughters Malia and Sasha a puppy, dog-lovers have speculated on the breed of the future First Pooch. But we suspect the perfect dog for the Obamas is, in fact, a robot. A robotic pet won’t aggravate Malia’s allergies, and it would help…

Ian McDonald’s “Thriller Of Ideas” Up For Literary Prize

Ian McDonald’s novel Brasyl has already won a British Science Fiction Association award, and now it’s in the running to cross boundaries and win a mainstream literary award, the £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing. Brasyl intertwines a Jesuit explorer in 1732 Brazil, a present-day story of journalism and Brazillian football, and a tale of quantum…

Clooney Stares At Goats, Who Want To Eat His Wig

George Clooney dons a man’s Farrah Faucet wig and handsome mustache on set for Men Who Stare at Goats. Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges are starring in the adaptation of Jon Ronson’s 2004 nonfiction book about the Army’s First Earth Battalion, a group that tries to use psychic abilities for warfare. And…

Structures with Unspecified Functions

This is what an M.C. Escher painting would look like if it became an architectural blueprint. On BLDG BLOG, Geoff Manaugh calls our attention to the work of Belgian photographer Flip Dujardin who creates fictional buildings out of photographs of real ones. We’ve got a couple more images below. Mark magazine calls Dujardin’s structures “informal…

Could The Day The Earth Stood Still Steal Bay’s Exploding Thunder?

With every passing week, Fox’s remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still looks more and more like Independence Day, and less like the original. The remake still seems like a bad idea, but if Keanu and co. want to go down this splodey path, they’d better be ready to bring it, Michael Bay-style. Producer…

Knight Rider Racing Towards Hoff

Finally, a reason to hope that NBC’s Knight Rider makes it to a second season. Sources are reporting that should the troubled reboot survive its mid-season shake-up then a second season would include the addition of a new regular character: Michael Knight, as played by David Hasselhoff. That’s right: we may finally get the father-son-car…

More Watchmen Ending Details, And A Telltale Transformers Toy Pic

MTV premiered its new quarterly movie show Spoilers on Friday night, and it looks like they’re a little unclear on the concept. Taylor Lautner wears a wig in Twilight? That’s a major spoiler, worthy of a flashing banner! Luckily, we’ve got some real spoilers here: Zack Snyder explains a bit more about the controversial changes…

Hottie Russian Invites Werewolves To Interstellar Space Party, Undead Exes And Creepy Splice Baby Pics

This week, take a closer look at Russian scifi epic Inhabited Island to see the bad boy side to the curly headed hero in the new trailer were we finally able to get – Looks like he’s not afraid to smear some blood all over those baby blues and kick some werewolf butt. Plus, we’ve…

Six Ways Pushing Daisies Made Your Inner Nerd Cry Tears of Geeky Joy

Click to view Nerds are renowned the world over for our extensive knowledge of possibly useless trivia, our obsessive devotion to our favorite books and films, and our resulting difficulties communicating with non-nerds. Thanks to modern internet culture, however, these days everyone is a nerd. And nowhere is that more evident than in these great…

Can’t All The Commenters Just Get Along?

My lesson is learned. Never accuse a comic of being arguably racist, unless you want people to ask unexpected, and slightly flamey, questions in the comments section. The comic in question? Kick-Ass. The controversy? Whether or not white people are less likely to break laws.Following on from a comment I made about the worrying lack…

Is Robert Downey Jr. Really The Entertainer Of The Year?

Entertainment Weekly has named Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. as their choice for the entertainer of 2008 – and while we may have loved Jon Favreau’s metal Marvel hero movie, we’re unconvinced that Downey Jr.’s necessarily the right man for the title. What about Heath Ledger, the unintentionally-entertaining Michael Bay (C’mon, “Bayhem” is definitely the…

Watchmen Goes Disco!

MTV got an exclusive tour of the sets for Zack Snyder’s movie version of the classic graphic novel Watchmen. And it looks like our tarnished heroes will be chanting “We want you as a new recruit!” The lovingly reconstructed sets in the movie include Studio 54, the notorious disco club where debauchery and insane fashion…

Free Flaming Lips For Christmas

Want to hear the soundtrack to the Flaming Lips’ new movie Christmas On Mars for free? Ain’t It Cool has a streaming version of the music for the beardie weirdie band’s latest project – which we told you about back in August – available right here. It’s no Buggin, but it’ll do for now.

Five Major Flaws in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (And How to Fix Them)

Few sacred cows of classic science fiction remain, largely because science-fiction fans love sacred hamburgers, but also because we are surly lot, possessed of a discerning critical eye and the highest of standards. One such metaphorical bovine, however, has gone unsavaged by the community for nearly 30 years. That ends today. We’re all familiar with…

Leave Buck Rogers In The Past, Please

This year sees the 80th birthday of time-traveling American hero Buck Rogers, the comic strip and movie serial hero who also made the 25th century both a weekly destination and strangely sexy for a generation of children in the early 1980s (Okay, that last part may have had a lot to do with Erin Gray’s…

The World’s Most Depressed People Watch the Most TV

We’re presented with an interesting conundrum this fine afternoon. Exhibit A: A new study says unhappy people watch more TV. Exhibit B: People dealing with the switch from analog to digital TV are probably the most unhappy TV watchers on the planet right now, next to anyone who’s been hoodwinked by the HDTV department at…