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Surgeons Get Better Playing Nintendo Wii

According to the experiments by the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre team, playing some Wii games improve surgeons’ performance. The study pitted a group of eight trainee surgeons, who spent one hour on the Wii, against normal trainees in a surgery virtual reality simulator. However, only a few games help this: According to researcher Kanav…

Tech News Jesus Diaz

Trek’s Rumormongering Eats Itself

With all the announcements of minor actors in minor roles, costume leaks and interviews with Zachary Quinto about how awesome it is to play Mr. Spock, it’s understandable that you may be confused about where to go for reliable news, rumors and spoilers about JJ Abrams’ Star Trek movie. Thankfully, someone has thought of building…

io9 Grae

Hype Sheet: Apple Goes, Quite Gently, for the Jugular

The Pitch Apple sticks with the “dance with the one that brung ya” philosophy for the start of ’08, churning out yet another Mac-versus-PC chestnut. This time, though, the tone’s a notch more acidic than in spots past—John Hodgman’s PC comes off as more flummoxed than usual, readily admitting to Vista’s many faults. (Sound like…

Tech News Brendan I. Koerner

Eight Reasons Why The Hero’s Journey Sucks

We’ve been somewhat shocked to see so many people defending Joseph Campbell in the comments on our hero’s journey post. Hey, we got stoned and read The Hero With A Thousand Faces in college, just like everybody else, and we thought it was super deep. All those primal archetypes and spiritual patterns were totally hardwired…

io9 Charliejane

All-You-Can-Eat Broadband Is Dead: Time Warner to Charge by the Byte

Reason number 149 I won’t move to Texas: Time Warner confirmed it’ll be testing a new pricing plan in Beaumont that’s based on how much bandwidth you eat up. That’s right, hard caps. Totally made-up example, since they haven’t released details on the package tiers: Pay $50 a month for 500 gigs, and if you…

Gadgets Matt Buchanan

io9 Talks to Kathleen Ann Goonan About Nanopunk and Jazz

Science fiction author Kathleen Ann Goonan was writing about nanotech before most people even know it existed. Her Nanotech Quartet, including her celebrated first novel Queen City Jazz, is about a future United States where nanotech has gone wild and turned cities into living entities — and reprogrammed people to reenact scenarios from US history…

Books & Comics Annalee Newitz

Scientists Invent Robots That Lie, Real Bender Closer Than Ever

Holy crap! The Age of The Machines is nigh: a bunch of scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other. Okay, so they don’t swill beer or put bends in girders—they just communicate to each other with benign flashing lights, thank goodness, instead of using lasers to destroy humans: The…

Artificial Intelligence Kit Eaton

Will Ferrell’s Male Bonding Among The Lizard People

Will Ferrell will star in a remake of 1970s dinosaurs-and-campy-lizards show Land of the Lost. Marilyn Manson’s favorite TV show is about a family that gets caught up in a mega-earthquake during an expedition and falls into a prehistoric little enclave full of ape-kids, dinos and lizard guys called the Sleestaks. How will Ferrell’s slapsticky…

Movies Charliejane

Thor’s Helmet Is A Supernova Waiting To Happen

It’s easy to see why astronomers call this interstellar object “Thor’s Helmet.” It even has the little thunder-god wings, and you expect a cosmic voice to shout “I say thee nay!” from its center. But it’s actually a 30-light-year bubble, blown by the wind from a huge central star, which scientists think is on the…

io9 Charliejane

Metallic Tree Provides Shade in Switzerland

In Lausanne, Switzerland, people don’t congregate under real trees. They sit under the branches and on the steel roots at the base of this giant metallic tree designed by Samuel Wilkinson and Swiss design firm Oloom. Images by Milo Keller Oloom via Dezeen

io9 LISA KATAYAMA

Pizza Hut Starts Text Message Delivery

Pizza Hut, ever expanding both waistlines and accessibility to their greasy goodness, has launched a new mobile ordering service allowing users to text message 4 pizza. Apparently online pizza orders have really taken off, accounting for 20 percent of total sales (that stat is either from Pizza Hut or Papa John’s, we couldn’t discern from…

Gadgets Mark Wilson

Doctor Who’s Future Bright, Uncertain

Just what is going on with Doctor Who? Following rumors surrounding the departure of producer/head writer Russell T. Davies and star David Tennant at the end of this summer’s fourth season, Davies has taken to making cryptic comments in the opposite direction. Talking to UK website Digital Spy, Davies is quoted as saying that “a…

io9 Grae

Confirmed: Change Your System Time, Watch Your iTunes Rentals Forever

Click to viewUpdate: That was fast. It’s busted—or fixed, depending on your POV. See the jump. Movie rentals from iTunes 7.6? Awesome. That pesky 24-hour viewing window once you’ve started the film? Not so much. And even if you get a little trigger-happy and click play only two MB into the download, the self-destruct timer…

Tech News Matt Buchanan

Justice League Movie Punched Out By Studio

The hammer came down yesterday for the Justice League movie, and Warner Bros. has now officially put the project on “indefinite hold.” That sound you may have heard was a billion JLA fans around the globe sighing in relief. But what, aside from the writers’ strike, made studio execs decide to activate the lasers and…

io9 Kevin Kelly

Science Fiction Will Rule the Oscars This Year

The Oscars will be all about science fiction this year — at least, if you look at the Awards ceremony poster. It was painted by celebrated poster artist Drew Struzan, who also created posters for The Phantom Menace, designed the ILM Logo, and was designated by Spielberg as “the only artist who was allowed to…

io9 Kevin Kelly

Gloo Urinals Inspire Good Aim, Bad Taste

You don’t have the ultimate bachelor pad unless you own a urinal. And as long as you’re going all out with the theme, the urinal might as well glow like the slutty fluorescents of a cheap motel sign. The Gloo urinal is built from plastic and filled with LEDs, at last bringing the same style…

Gadgets Mark Wilson

Sandpendel, a Desktop Foucault Pendulum Toy For Stressed Physicists

Stressed-out scientists can now relax with the Sandpendel, a mashup Zen sand-garden/physics-experiment desktop toy. Designed by Jürg Näf, the Sandpendel is based on Léon Foucault’s famous 19th-century experiment that demonstrated the Earth’s rotation. Details, plus another pic, are below. The pendulum of Näf’s creation swings in a little orbit and traces fine track patterns in…

Gadgets Kit Eaton

Industrial Beauties of the 1940s

It’s 1942, and these women are in Long Beach, California, inspecting massive pieces of jet wings for cargo transporters. They’re real-life Rosie the Riveters, making sure these wings are ready to be assembled on the fuselage. This is one of thousands of images released to the public through a new project of the Library of…

io9 Annalee Newitz

Torchwood Does The Kissy-Fighty Dance

This clip shows everything that’s great — and everything that’s awful — about Torchwood, the naughtiest Doctor Who spinoff. First it serves up outlandish sexual innuendo mixed liberally with alien creepiness. And then it suddenly veers into drama and jealous bickering, which is really just the grotty barnacle-covered underside of campiness. Don’t watch the clip…

io9 Charliejane

Pioneer MEP-7000 and SEP-C1 Software Is Digital DJ Dream, Purists’ Nightmare

Rather like some of my Swedish girlfriends, Pioneer is going after mobile DJs and bars with their new MEP-7000 player and matching SEP-C1 controller. The MEP-7000 allows to play anything except vinyl (which will probably cause a Macbook-Air-sized conflict), including MP3, WAV, AIFF and AAC files, from any source, including hard drives, CD, DVD, USB…

Tech News Jesus Diaz

Surgeons Get Better Playing Nintendo Wii

Trek’s Rumormongering Eats Itself

Hype Sheet: Apple Goes, Quite Gently, for the Jugular

Eight Reasons Why The Hero’s Journey Sucks

All-You-Can-Eat Broadband Is Dead: Time Warner to Charge by the Byte

io9 Talks to Kathleen Ann Goonan About Nanopunk and Jazz

Scientists Invent Robots That Lie, Real Bender Closer Than Ever

Will Ferrell’s Male Bonding Among The Lizard People

Thor’s Helmet Is A Supernova Waiting To Happen

Metallic Tree Provides Shade in Switzerland

Pizza Hut Starts Text Message Delivery

Doctor Who’s Future Bright, Uncertain

Confirmed: Change Your System Time, Watch Your iTunes Rentals Forever

Justice League Movie Punched Out By Studio

Science Fiction Will Rule the Oscars This Year

Gloo Urinals Inspire Good Aim, Bad Taste

Sandpendel, a Desktop Foucault Pendulum Toy For Stressed Physicists

Industrial Beauties of the 1940s

Torchwood Does The Kissy-Fighty Dance

Pioneer MEP-7000 and SEP-C1 Software Is Digital DJ Dream, Purists’ Nightmare

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