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Someone Made an R-Rated Stop Motion Animated Film About Going to Hell

The R-rated, Hollywood animated film is a rare form, indeed. Other countries release them but in the U.S., a decade could pass between two. The next one is coming sooner than you think, though, and it’ll get even more niche by using stop-motion animation to take you directly to Hell. The film, a comedy if…

Captain America: Civil War Already Has a Meme

The clash of superheroes movie doesn’t come out until May 2016. That hasn’t stopped the Internet. Fans of Captain America and The Avengers franchise are awaiting Civil War with anticipation—so much so that any release of information is hotly debated and pictures are fast transformed. After Comicbookmovie.com posted an on-set snap of The Winter Soldier/Bucky…

You’re biased about your biases. “We judge whether we have a bias by examining our thoughts, and because we believe our thoughts are rational, we often think we’re not biased when we are… And the more we convince ourselves that we don’t have certain biases, the more likely we are to exhibit them.” [Nautilus] Contact…

Tesla Is that Rarest of Things — A “High-End Disruptor”

Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla has defied expectations and succeeded — despite having an expensive, experimental product that nobody was sure even had a market. How did it happen? One analyst says it’s all about destroying the car market from the top down. Over at Forbes, business professor Jeff Dyer has a fascinating, in-depth…

Here’s A Book That Adds a Fascinating New Dimension to Posthuman Space Opera

By now, the stories of humans transcending their limitations in space have become pretty much ubiquitous. We’ve had space cyborgs, space immortals, and tons of other posthumans in space. But the new novel Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper still represents a fascinating new approach. In Edge of Dark, a young woman named Nona goes…

Why Disney/Pixar Hired One of Its Biggest Critics to Work on Its New Movie

Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz just announced that he’s joining the crew of Pixar’s Coco, an upcoming movie inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead. Why is this news? Well, in addition to being a fantastic artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha, Alcaraz is a political cartoonist who’s been sharply critical…

This Neural Network Is Hilariously Bad At Describing Outer Space

Lion fish. Petri dish. Dough. According to one very befuddled artificial neural network, all of these things can be found in the short intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The animation isn’t exactly a photorealistic depiction of space—but it’s close enough that most of us can recognize its planets, spacecraft, and other details. Yet…

Amazing Video Tour of a 1985 Home Automation System

YouTuber Avboden has a home automation system from 1985, and he recently created this video to show people how it worked. It actually has a pretty great UI, with touchscreen — and it even allows you to give commands from your 1980s ultra-modern, push-button phone. Watching this actually begs the question of why we haven’t…

Science and Post-It notes power this Rube Goldberg machine

3M used 25,000 post its, 75 rolls of that blue painter tape, and a whole bunch of other stuff to make this wildly complicated Rube Goldberg machine that’s actually really fun to watch. Unlike other Rube Goldberg machines, it’s not totally obvious how it’ll progress from one level to the next, like a slow burn…

Pent-Up Energy Causes Drops to Hurl Themselves Off a Teflon-Covered Thread

When you see a droplet resting on a counter or coalescing around a thread, you don’t generally think of it as a coiled spring, but under the right circumstances that’s what it is. In this video, we can see how the spring releases. A droplet beading on the floor, or on a spider’s web, looks…

James Cameron’s Thoughts About VFX Will Change How You Look at Movies

Few people have been as influential in the realm of digital effects as James Cameron. Seemingly with every film he releases, Cameron pioneers something new in the field. And while he may get the credit, he’s not the one doing the work. He’s not a true master of visual effects. Masters of FX is a…

The World’s Largest Version of Minesweeper Has You Trying To Clear Over 38,000 Mines

An Atlanta-based company called CineMassive who builds giant multiscreen video walls has created what is easily the world’s largest version of Minesweeper. On its hardest setting players will have to clear 38,799 mines without blowing the whole thing up and having to start over from scratch. The game is played on 24 high-definition screens that…

These DC Superhero Cafes Will Feed You Bat-Waffles

And Superman pancakes. Malaysia has two licensed DC Super Hero Cafes, with a third scheduled to open in Singapore next month. The casual dining joints, run by a company that owns a chain of DC retail stores across Asia, feature flashy comic-book theming and signature superhero dishes and drinks. It seems Batman’s domination of the…

On This Week’s Zoo, the Team Faces Down a Mob of Rampaging Rats Hungry For Human Flesh

Rats rats rats raaaats! Furry ones … and human ones too! There was all kinds of squealing on this week’s excellently creepy-crawly episode of Zoo, the network television show that’s actually a B-movie from the 1970s in disguise. Spoilers ahoy… Since we missed last week’s recap, here’s a summary of episode seven, “Sleuths,” in photo…

The CO2 In Our Atmosphere Can Now Be Transformed Into Carbon Nanofibers 

Carbon nanofibers are an incredibly exciting material. They’ve been around for a long time, but still aren’t common, partially because they’re difficult and expensive to make. Now, a team of engineers say it figured out a simple way to make them–by sucking carbon dioxide straight out of the atmosphere. The research, which was published in…

Shutdownify is Fake 

On Wednesday a website called Shutdownify.com went viral on Twitter. The site supposedly allowed tech startups facing a shutdown to craft an automated notice about their imminent demise. Shutdownify itself announced that it was closing shop. But the site is 100 percent fake. The domain for Shutdownify was registered today and has no other posts…

This Is the Curiosity Rover’s Newest Selfie—and There’s Something Unusual About It

The Curiosity rover has snapped a brand new self-portrait and, like any good newbie selfie-taker, it’s figuring out its best angles—not only to show itself off, but also to show us something new about the Martian landscape it lives on. This newest selfie was made, like the others, by stitching together panoramic shots from the…

Please Stop Saying It Follows Is a Horror Movie About STDs. It’s Not.

It Follows is rightly credited as being one of the scariest horror movies in recent years. It’s also frequently described as a film about an STD that turns supernatural. And I completely disagree with that description. Warning: Spoilers for the entire movie. Most people, including Cheryl Eddy, who did the fantastic review of It Follows…

The Internet Is Gleeful About Your Impending #AshleyMadisonHack Divorce 

Yesterday hackers dumped 10 gigs of personal info from “life is short, have an affair” dating site Ashley Madison. Twitter’s first reaction is to crack wise about divorce. Ha ha. While security researchers continue to parse the hack and pundits wonder about what the attack on a company’s “morals” means to the future of data…

This cool Christmas tale features love, spaceships, and scary meteors 

Anomaly is an unusual Christmas tale, set in the late 60’s, which tells the story of a group of people connected by the same astronomical event: A frightening meteor that will enter and exit the atmosphere. It is weird and sad and hopeful and just really interesting to watch. Anomaly is an independent short film…