But as the iPhone becomes its own sort of Multipass, and those funny lopsided cigarettes Bruce Willis smokes in the movie become a real design, it’s interesting to see how Luc Besson’s legendary sci-fi movie was more prescient than we would’ve guessed in the 1990s.
The Fifth Element Is Starting to Come True
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According to the criminal complaint, one of the girls told an investigator they began planning to kill their friend in December. The other girl told police they decided to kill her so they could become proxies of Slender Man, who would accept them and let them live with him in his mansion in the Nicolet National Forest.
The other girl said she sees Slender Man in her dreams. She said he watches her and can read her mind and teleport.
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No word if they’ll be calling @catvincent as an expert witness.
12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girls Charged in Stabbing
Read more "12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girls Charged in Stabbing"Despite the staggering distances to other planetary systems, in recent years researchers have begun to develop techniques for collecting spectra of exoplanets.
When one of these worlds transits, or passes in front of its host star as seen from Earth, some of the star’s light travels through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, where it is changed in subtle, but measurable, ways.
This process imprints information about the planet that can be collected by telescopes. The resulting spectra enable scientists to tease out details about the temperature, composition and structure of exoplanets’ atmospheres.
Robinson and his colleagues exploited a similarity between exoplanet transits and sunsets witnessed by the Cassini spacecraft at Titan. Called solar occultations, these observations allowed the scientists to observe Titan as a transiting exoplanet without having to leave the solar system.
Many worlds in our solar system, including Titan, are blanketed by clouds and high-altitude hazes. Scientists expect that many exoplanets would be similarly obscured.
Clouds and hazes create a variety of complicated effects that must be disentangled from the signature of these alien atmospheres, and present a major obstacle for understanding transit observations. Due to the complexity and computing power required to address hazes, models used to understand exoplanet spectra usually simplify their effects.
“Previously, it was unclear exactly how hazes were affecting observations of transiting exoplanets,” said Robinson. “So we turned to Titan, a hazy world in our own solar system that has been extensively studied by Cassini.”
Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets
Read more "Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets"The second characteristic: Our Black Market Generation has had wide access to outside media and information. The private market has provided more than food and clothing — it has also provided TVs, bootleg South Korean movies and K-pop videos, USBs and DVDs. As a girl in North Korea, I saw “Titanic,” “Cinderella,” “Pretty Woman” and “Snow White” — not to mention WWE wrestling.
As American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: “It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”
Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’
Read more "Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’"An all-seeing Internet is a potent specter because it threatens to enforce normality. Risk, weirdness, lawbreaking—all the mutations that fitfully evolve society’s DNA—are more dangerous in a world where every choice you make is watched and therefore has the potential to define you. Yet the residents of the ctOS-blanketed Chicago don’t care. Most of the time, when you eavesdrop on someone, you find them breaking the law, or engaging in some low-level sexual perversion, or mistreating a woman somehow. (Once again, developers fill in the cracks with misogyny, the game industry’s storytelling spackle.) The people you observe also say “fuck” and “shit” a lot; the latter profanity seems to have replaced the comma in the English parlance of Watch Dogs’s future. In essence, the Chicagoans of the game embody a 12-year-old boy’s idea of what people do behind closed doors. They don’t behave like the subjects of an ominous technological overseer.
Watch Dogs takes a great idea and bludgeons it with normality · Game Review · The A.V. Club
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m1k3y, who has no lack of speculation about possible societal collapses, admits he considers the neoreactionaries’ goals and “can’t imagine anything more terrible.”
As for his own vision, beyond magnets and garage science, the sky’s the limit:
“Saving the world as penance for the sins our fathers, building a life worth being near immortal in, then exploring the galaxy. It’s a plan.”
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Interview we did late last year finally went live. I said a few things.
Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship
Read more "Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship"The “burdensome” problem for the scientific community in describing a habitable zone is that scientists know little about where life forms, Marcy said.
“There’s a split brain that we scientists have right now. Half of our brain says there’s a habitable zone and it lies between a region inward of where the Earth is and a region outside the Earth’s orbit [for stars our size],” he said. “The other half of our brain knows perfectly well that excellent destinations for our search for life lie elsewhere in the Solar System.”
Are ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Habitable Zones’ Misleading Terms?
Read more "Are ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Habitable Zones’ Misleading Terms?"According to Thorne and Żytkow, it is possible for a red supergiant star to collide with a superdense neutron star, the remnant of a supernova, swallowing it. A red supergiant can merge with a binary partner neutron star, or that both occupied a dense globular cluster.
Once the neutron star is eaten, it settles in the core of the supergiant, interrupting normal fusion processes inside the star’s guts. This, according to the theorists, should create a very specific chemical signature in the “host” star’s chemical make up. What’s more, there should be a few dozen Thorne-Żytkow object specimens in our galaxy.
Has the Weirdest Star in the Universe Been Found?
Read more "Has the Weirdest Star in the Universe Been Found?"But the samples also showed a small, unusual anomaly following the year 2200 B.C. Paleoclimate research has suggested a major short-term arid event about this time.
“This radiocarbon anomaly would be explained by a change in growing season, i.e., climate, dating to exactly this arid period of time,” says Manning. “We’re showing that radiocarbon and these archaeological objects can confirm and in some ways better date a key climate episode.”
That climate episode, says Manning, had major political implications. There was just enough change in the climate to upset food resources and other infrastructure, which is likely what led to the collapse of the Akkadian Empire and affected the Old Kingdom of Egypt and a number of other civilizations, he says.
“The tree rings show the kind of rapid climate change that we and policymakers fear,” says Manning. “This record shows that climate change doesn’t have to be as catastrophic as an Ice Age to wreak havoc. We’re in exactly the same situation as the Akkadians: If something suddenly undid the standard food production model in large areas of the U.S. it would be a disaster.”
Now we just need a leader to step up and say: MY FELLOW CITIZENS, TODAY WE ARE ALL AKKADIAN.
Climate change caused empire’s fall, tree rings reveal
Read more "Climate change caused empire’s fall, tree rings reveal "The researchers cautioned that interbreeding between modern humans and other lineages of humans might influence the results of this new study. For example, instances of interbreeding with the now-extinct Denisovan lineage might have introduced ancient genes into certain modern human groups, perhaps making them look as if they left Africa earlier than they actually did.
“Our study did not specifically test for hybridization with archaic humans, and, of course, it is possible that such admixture could contribute to our results,” Harvati said. “We feel, however, that the very low levels of admixture that have been proposed are not sufficient to drive our findings.”
The researchers said continued fieldwork and genetic advancements might help confirm this model of multiple, relatively isolated waves of migration.
“The story of human evolution tends to be simplified,” Harvati said. “However, more complex models, such as multiple dispersals versus a single dispersal out of Africa, gain strength as more data and new methods become available.”
Waves and waves of hominids
Early Humans Migrated From Africa Far Earlier Than Previously Thought, New Study Suggests
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 