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The Most Unrealistic Movies of 2012, According to Scientists

This year’s movies thrilled and delighted us — except for some scientists, who were distracted by all the unrealistic stuff and bad physics. Popular Science has a great rundown of the most unrealistic stuff in 2012’s movies, including Looper’s time travel, The Avengers’ helicarrier, and Amazing Spider-Man’s web-slinging. Even James Bond is not left unscathed.…

Django Unchained: What Kind of Fantasy Is This?

Two years before the Civil War, a freed slave named Django becomes a bounty hunter because he can’t think of any job more awesome than killing white guys for money. Wearing anachronistic sunglasses, accompanied by his preternaturally anti-racist white partner Schultz, he shoots his way through the South with one burning mission in mind. He…

Westinghouse is rolling out a 4K UHD 110-Inch television at CES—most likely via fork lift.

What makes people come back to life after being pronounced dead?

Could someone really come back from the dead? To some extent, it depends on what you mean by death. Sure, people can be revived through medical intervention (although that’s not as common as TV medical dramas make us think), but sometimes things get a little more mysterious than that. In something called the Lazarus Phenomenon,…

A Complete History of American Nuclear Explosions in 90 Seconds

On July 16, 1945, the US Army destroyed a small part of New Mexico by testing the first nuclear bomb in human history, the most powerful weapon of all time. It then proceeded to blow up 1,054 more. All of these detonations were part of separate operations, given cute code names like Wigwam and Teapot—hundreds…

Creationist textbooks are garbage, creationist textbooks are garbage, creationist textbooks are garbage

A report issued earlier this year by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance concluded that U.S. students are failing to bridge the educational chasm separating them from their foreign peers1. “Textbooks” like this one will help ensure that things stay that way: Are the cultural wars between creationism and evolution the only thing…

Mockingbird Lane is officially dead

I think we all saw this coming — but the official word on the fate of Bryan Fuller’s Mockingbird Lane is not good. NBC has officially passed on the show, forever. Fuller’s Munsters remake appeared as a Halloween special, with the hope that it could still launch into a full-fledged TV series if the ratings…

Here’s the scariest short film Guillermo del Toro has ever seen

We’re exceptionally intrigued by Guillermo del Toro’s next producing project, the feral child ghost story Mama. And if you still haven’t gotten the chills from this strange little production, check out the short film that inspired GDT to back the movie. Andres Muschietti, who wrote and and directed this short, is also direcing the feature-length…

12 Lessons That 2012 Taught the Entertainment Industry

This was a year of massive victories and horrendous defeats. Science fiction and fantasy rocked pop culture like never before, but that just meant the stakes were higher and the lessons were harsher. For every Avengers, there was a John Carter. Television shows struggled and died. Publishing convulsed. Here are 12 lessons that the entertainment…

The Year in Broken Gadget Promises

Every year, we’re promised beautiful, useful, innovative gadgets that will supposedly make our lives better. Then something goes wrong and we don’t get them. Humph. Google Nexus Q When the Nexus Q was announced back at Google I/O in June, it seemed like Google had thought the concept all the way through because the weird…

Instagram Says 25% User Exodus Is Bullshit

You might’ve read a story today that a quarter of Instagrams millions upon millions of users abruptly stopped using the massively-popular service over Christmas. But there’s good reason to believe this is crap—and Instagram flat out denies it. The rumor, which has already knocked down Facebook’s stock today, started with a little company named AppData,…

Robots are stealing our womenfolk in the world’s first sci-fi country music video

The Eli Young Band has have their share of country music hits, but now they’re also pioneers, thanks to the music video for their new song “Say Goodnight.” The band claims it’s the world’s first-ever sci-fi country music video — a claim they have backed up by checking on Google, making it irrefutable fact. Honestly,…

7 Tech Resolutions for 2013

The new year is only yards away, which means you’ve got a shining chance to reinvent yourself as less of a jerk. Adopt these tech principles and you’ll be a better person in 2013. 1. Turn on iMessage Read Receipts So People Know You’ve Read Their Messages We generally hate read receipts—those little notifications that…

This Awesome Optical Illusion Will Twist Your Brain Into Knots

Kokichi Sugihara loves to screw up human perception. He is the master of 3D optical illusions, designing solid three-dimensional models that do impossible things. This house is his latest creation, presented a few days ago at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Sardinia, Italy. Sugihara—a mathematics researcher and professor at Meiji University in Kawasaki,…

Everything You Need to Know about the Bizarre Genetics of Werewolves

Growing up in the 1960s, I collected monster cards: The 60-foot-man and the 50-foot woman, duplicate bodies gestating in giant seed pods, unseen Martians that sucked children into sand pits and returned them devoid of emotion, with telltale marks on the back of the neck. One card featured a very young Michael Landon in I…

Here’s the earliest known map of the Gulf Stream, created by Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin’s perspicacity never fails to amaze. In few places is his mental acuity more evident than his letters of correspondence, wherein Franklin frequently ruminated on topics scientific, technical and philosophical. What follows is an excerpt from one such letter, originally addressed to a scientific colleague in France, in which Franklin describes the process by…

Woz Totally Loves Cycloramic

Cycloramic is the new app which uses your iPhone’s vibration and sensors to rotate itself and take a 360-degree video. It’s amazing to see in action—and Woz loves it so much that a video he shot using it has appeared on Facebook. https://gizmodo.com/cycloramic-an-app-that-automatically-rotates-your-ipho-5971557 Woz emailed the video to the guys at Cycloramic, who posted it…

Senate Approves Warrantless Phone Tapping for Next Five Years

By a vote of 73 to 23, the US Senate just voted for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens until 2017. The vote, set to affirm to eradicate the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, means we’ll be living with Bush-era spy laws for another half decade. In 2007, the Senate voted to grant blanket…

ILM reveals how they assembled the ultimate Avengers movie shot

Remember that scene in the Avengers? Of course you do — that long, panning shot that showcases all six Avengers, working together to kick Chitauri butt all around midtown Manhattan, which was the greatest non-shawarma-related scene in the entire film? Well, ILM just released the above mini-doc about how they made the incredibly elaborate shot,…

Horrifying test footage from the live-action Marvin The Martian movie will ruin your day

Behold the first terrible looks of Hollywood’s updated movie versions of Marvin The Martian and Hong Kong Phooey. Released on the internet by director Alex Zamm, let’s hope the dumping of these horrifying, soul-crushing “translations” of classic Warner Bros. and Hanna Barbera cartoons onto the internet means both Marvin and Phooey movies have been mercifully…