I Am Legend Is Biggest December Opening Ever

I Am Legend set a December box-office record with $77.4 million, beating the opening weekends of Lord of the Rings and Narnia. It’s also a personal best for Will Smith. Definitely worth chatting with your dog about. [Deadline Hollywood]

The Clip You Must Watch Before “I Am Legend”

Plague-ridden mutants try to talk Charlton Heston to death in The Omega Man, the template for I Am Legend, which opens today. In Omega, if the disease doesn’t kill you, it turns you into a luddite religious nut who enjoys call-and-response crap. But as this crucifixion scene illustrates, the choice in Omega isn’t between religion…

Purple Rain

This year’s Geminid meteor shower looks all purple and neon, like an old Prince video. But we’re sure the asteroid/ex-comet 3200 Phaeton never meant to cause us any sorrow by throwing off debris every December. That’s a peak from the Seven Sisters rock formation in the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada in the…

What if Sony Really Did Have Corporate DNA?

Synthetic biologist and science blogger Keith Robison is sick of seeing advertising campaigns for companies that say “such-and-such is in our corporate DNA.” So he strikes back by explaining what it REALLY means for you to have something in your DNA. The results are hilarious. Find out what Sony is really saying about itself in…

Controversial SciFi Realist Tells io9 Why Warp Drives Suck

Most science fiction movies make jumping to other star systems look as easy as stepping out for a bagel. But scientists think it’ll never be that easy. So science fiction author Geoff Ryman (Air) invented a new school of writing called Mundane Science Fiction, which avoids faster-than-light travel, time travel or parallel universes. Why is…

It’s a GMO Holiday With Glowing Red Kitty, Glowing Green Bunny

Just hold ’em under fluorescent bulbs, and they’re like living, purring holiday lights! A Korean team of genetic engineers has created a super race of glowing red kitties. What everyone seems to have forgotten is that several years ago, bio-artist Eduardo Kac had some French engineers build him a glowing green bunny. Same technique: just…

Never Lose Your Balls Again

Adidas yesterday announced the rollout of a new space-age soccer ball that knows where it is. As it rolls around the soccer field, the smart ball uses a magnetic field to figure out its location — particularly when it’s near the goal — and relays the data to the referee. No more analyzing footage to…

Hey Beaver Staters (haha, beaver) Verizon’s launched FiOS TV in your state. Well, if you live around Portland. Check the release to see if you’re eligible for bundlage. [Verizon]

Mystery Lawsuits Keep ‘Doctor Who’ Out of U.S.

The BBC is being tight-lipped about why two Doctor Who special edition DVDs, “Remembrance of the Daleks” and “The Complete Davros Collection,” won’t see a U.S. release. Earlier clearance issues with certain Beatles songs in the original shows were supposedly cleared up, but if you’ve been waiting on these for your shelves, you’ll have to…

Four Dystopian Movies Starring Adult Babies

Why do dystopian-future movies always turn their protagonists into sexless infants? Often, our hero is reduced to the mental status of a confused toddler, and may actually end up hairless and naked, like Neo in The Matrix, or everyone in THX 1138. We all secretly want to be children again, and dystopian movies indulge this…

Knight Rider + Tron = Automan

With the recent unveiling of the new Knight Rider car and a new TV movie on the way in February, we delved back into the mists of time to come up with the sadly forgotten Automan. Automan was television’s bastard child answer to the movie Tron, and featured a sentient crime fighting computer program with…

Hammer Films Bringing Old School SciFi Schlock to MySpace

Hammer Films were made infamous by their never-ceasing onslaught of schlocky 50s and 60s horror films (think Christopher Lee in Hammer’s Dracula), but they also released several great low-budget science fiction films. Now the company, defunct since the early 1980s, is back. They’ll be releasing new films on MySpace, including the forthcoming (and winningly-titled) After…

We Have Engineered You to Enjoy Being Eaten

No mouse should look into that “I’m gonna chomp you” face and not run squeaking in the other direction. And yet a mouse has done it, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers who genetically engineered it to not fear cats. Scientists claim the cat-friendly mouse they built (pictured) is proof that some fears are…

Wikipedia is No Place for Alien Civilizations

George Dvorsky reports over at Sentient Developments that the Wikipedia community has deleted a perfectly reasonable entry on astrosociobiology, “the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies.” People like Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson are counted among the ranks of astrosociobiologists, as are countless scifi creators. Luckily, Dvorksy…

90210 Meets The Terminator

Brian Austin Green will be joining the cast of The Sarah Connor Chronicles next year on Fox, which dramatically decreases our hopes for the show. The last time we saw Green he was playing a punching bag to Keira Knightley in Domino, so let’s hope he has a similar role in this show.

Watch Your Own Neighborhood Drop Dead

I Am Legend proves NYC looks hauntingly beautiful emptied of people. But if you needed more evidence, the film’s official site has a map that lets you visit various locations around the city. At each stop, you can compare the movie version to how it looks right now, courtesy of Google Street View. But we’ve…

Bionic Woman Breaks Down

It’s semi-official. NBC has pulled the plug on Bionic Woman. In totally unrelated news, NBC is having to repay tons of money to advertisers because its fall ratings were so disappointing. [SpoilerTV]

It’s Raining Big Metal Heads In Cloverfield

A new viral video for Cloverfield shows nothing new, except the Statue of Liberty’s head rolls down the street in a cool way.[Slashfilm] The hero of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth becomes a quasi-immortal genius and then splits into two personalities, who debate the future of humanity. [MoviesOnline] Heavier spoilers for Battlestar, Dark Knight…

Airborne Wind Turbines Are Floating Eco-Powerhouses of Tomorrow

Wind turbines produce energy by harnessing the wind, and usually they look like windmills. But a new breed of airborne wind turbine is heading into production. Many of them are house-sized and blimp-shaped, inflated with helium and left to churn in the rapid winds that are always blowing 1000 feet off the ground. Others are…

8 Sci-Fi Movies That Sucked As TV Shows

We all hope Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will rock our TV screens, but chances are it won’t. Over a dozen hit SF movies have morphed into live-action TV shows, and they all blew. Either the replacement cast was crappy, or the movie’s single story idea didn’t lend itself to endless episodes. Here are the…