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Amazon’s New Car Show Has a Rumored Budget of $250m

Rumours surrounding the Top Gear rival being assembled by Amazon suggest it may end up being one of the most expensive TV shows in history, with an apparent budget of $250m being handed to the production team to make 36 episodes. The news comes via an interview producer Andy Wilman gave to Broadcast, a trade…

Birds Figured Out How to Cure Malaria a Long Time Ago

Over the years, different groups of humans have learned how to prevent or treat malaria by using quinine. It seems, though, that none of us are as advanced as sparrows, which have been regularly using quinine to treat themselves during malaria outbreaks for thousands of years. Quinine is an alkaloid, one of a wide variety…

There’s a Firefox Exploit in the Wild—You Should Update Right Now

Mozilla has published a blog post explaining that a Firefox exploit is running in the wild that can search for and upload files from your computer—but you can install and update to solve the problem right now. Mozilla expalins that the vulnerability “comes from the interaction of the mechanism that enforces JavaScript context separation (the…

A Live-Action X-Men TV Show Is In The Works!

Doctor Strange will be dark and psychedelic, according to its Director of Photography. Sleepy Hollow will try to bring the focus back on Abbie and Ichabod this season. Plus, Clark Gregg teases Coulson’s prosthetic hand on SHIELD, and the new Nightmare on Elm Street reboot gets a writer. So many spoilers! Doctor Strange Director of…

Tumblr user Vermin Disciple bought a used copy of Diane Duane’s Star Trek novel The Romulan Way, only to discover that the previous owner had done a bit of censorship. The results areamazing.

This App Will Tell You If Your Phone Has the ‘Stagefright’ Bug

Worried about the security of your Android? You probably should be. But the guys that discovered the Stagefright vulnerability have now released an app that that will tell you if your phone is at risk. While Google has already created a fix—with some fanfare—currently only Nexus devices have been updated. If you use any other…

New Study Reveals Just How Sick Families With Kids Get

If you have kids, you invariably get sick more often—but how often, exactly? A new study by scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine reveals that big families have viral infections for an amazing 87 percent of the year. The Utah Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology study — or BIG LoVE to…

New Software Lets You See the World Through Animal Eyes

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to see the world as a lizzard or a bumble bee or some other animal, you’re in luck: a new peice of open access software allows you to see how other creatures see the world. Humans can only see the visible spectrum, but many animals see…

It’s “Cats In Space” Week!

The blog WTF Bad Science Fiction Covers has declared Cats in Space Week, and these are just a few examples of the riches awaiting you over there. Although nothing can be better than the cat sitting in a space command chair that has a hole for its tail. Awww.

Award-Winning Designer Picks Some of Science Fiction’s Best Book Covers

Australian book cover designer WH Chong has won numerous awards for his book designs. And speaking to Spook Magazine, he singled out some of his favorite book cover designs for classic science fiction. (Which also happen to be for some of the best books ever written.) About the book cover above, Chong writes: There is…

Vast swathes of white can make Google Maps a shock to the eyes at night. On iOS it now has a new night mode to help you see your route more easily after dark.

Cutting Emissions Through Biofuels Will Lead to Water Shortages

Climate change mitigation could actually increase water shortage in some areas rather than reduce it, according to new research. The source of the problem is clear: greater demand for biofuels, intended to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, requires massive increases in irrigation in productive but relatively arid American farmland. The study, published in the journal…

The Stormy Nebula Inside Sagittarius

Inside the constellation Sagittarius is the Lagoon Nebula, a tempestuous cloud of gas and star formation. See the full image below. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Contact the author at [email protected].

This 21st Century Cat Hunts For RFID-Tagged Prey

Outdoor cats get to massacre untold millions of mice per year, but indoor cats have to make do with balls of yarn and laser pointers. To try and bridge the gap, one man built a machine that would only feed his kitty when he ‘hunts’ down an RFID-chipped plastic ball. Ben Millam made the device…

Josh Trank Has a Defense of Fantastic Four

Director Josh Trank put this tweet up today, implying that Fox is to blame for the response Fantastic Four is getting. He deleted the tweet shortly after posting it. The reviews for Fantastic Four are not good, and it seems that Trank was driven to explain that the way it turned out wasn’t his fault.…

Sorry Shippers, Mulder and Scully Aren’t Together in the New X-Files

Love is dead. Or at least abducted by aliens. According to Entertainment Weekly, the returning show is going to turn the clock back on Mulder and Scully’s relationship. I’m more upset about this than I am some real-life break-ups. The first hint was in a clip shown at the Television Critics Association press tour, which…

HBO Now Gets Chromecast Streaming Support

HBO Now and Chromecasts are two wonderful things in a world that also contains Donald Trump; it is fitting and right that they should work together. Now, they do. Thanks to an update to the HBO Now iOS and Android apps, you can now cast Game Of Throne to the big screen using only Google’s…

iOS 9 Will Use Cell Data When Your Wi-Fi Sucks

The latest version of the iOS 9 beta has brought some goodies, among them the new Wi-Fi Assist feature, which will recognize bad Wi-Fi connections, and use cellular data instead. You can switch it on and off with a toggle in Settings, so if you’ve got spotty home Wi-Fi — or jealously guard your data…

Ancient Humans Had More DNA Than We Have Now

Our ancestors weren’t blessed with smartphones, WiFi and Amazon Prime, but for what it’s worth they did have a little extra DNA. According to a study published today in Science, Homo sapiens have shed about 40.7 million base pairs of DNA since migrating out of Africa nearly two million years ago. The human genome’s 3…

Tapeworms: Bad for your guts, good for your brain? The intestinal worm Hymenolepsis diminuta appears to protect against memory loss in rats, researchers reportinBrain, Behavior and Immunity. It’s the latest example of how parasitic worms might be harnessed for therapeutic purposes. Contact the author at [email protected].