Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-Ho returns to the big screen this weekend with the sci-fi film Mickey 17. If you're expecting the subtly devastating social commentary of his 2019 drama/horror/thriller-hybrid Parasite, I suspect you'll be disappointed. Mickey 17 is a very different beast in both aesthetic and tone. When the first trailer dropped, I wrote that the film felt like a darkly comedic version of Duncan Jones' 2009 film Moon, with a dash of the surreal absurdity of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) thrown in for good measure. I stand by that assessment, and it proves to be a winning combination.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The film is based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Ashton's inspiration for the novel was the teletransportation paradox—a thought experiment pondering the philosophy of identity that challenges certain notions of the self and consciousness. It started as a short story about what Ashton called "a crappy immortality" and expanded from there into a full-length novel. (Ashton also penned a sequel, Antimatter Blues, which was published in 2023.)

Read full article

Comments

Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania boasts sediment layers dating back to about 1.8 million years ago. Those layers contain simple stone tools that marked one of the earliest recorded technological transitions. Now, researchers have uncovered a substantial cache of prehistoric bone tools in the same region dating back 1.5 million years. It's the oldest collection of mass-produced bone tools yet known, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. And while it's still unclear which hominin species crafted the tools, the discovery suggests that our early human ancestors had some advanced reasoning skills a good million years earlier than previously thought.

“The tools show evidence that their creators carefully worked the bones, chipping off flakes to create useful shapes," said co-author Renata F. Peters, an archaeologist at University College London. "We were excited to find these bone tools from such an early timeframe. It means that human ancestors were capable of transferring skills from stone to bone, a level of complex cognition that we haven’t seen elsewhere for another million years.”

As previously reported, species on the hominin family tree have made and used stone tools for about 2.6 million years. For instance, Homo habilis was an early member of our genus who walked upright and had a mixture of human and ape-like features. Starting around 1.2 million years ago, a later hominin species called Homo erectus made more complex stone tools, like hand axes.

Read full article

Comments

Disney+ dropped the first action-packed teaser for the second season of Andor just last week. The streaming platform followed up today with a special three-minute featurette on the making of the Star Wars series' sophomore outing—including a hint that we'll probably be seeing a major tragic event in the Star Wars canon this season.

(Spoilers for season 1 below.)

As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire's destruction of Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) home world, and follows his transformation from a "revolution-averse" cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.

Read full article

Comments

There's little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It's possible to perceive both images by shifting one's perspective, but it's the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.

But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.

In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the "rabbit-duck illusion," in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one's perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.

Read full article

Comments

Anthony and Joe Russo have their hands full these days with the Marvel films Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret War, slated for 2026 and 2027 releases, respectively. But we'll get a chance to see another, smaller film from the directors this month on Netflix: The Electric State, adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag.

Stålenhag's stunningly surreal neofuturistic art—featured in his narrative art books, 2014's Tales from the Loop and 2016's Things From the Flood—inspired the 2020 eight-episode series Tales From the Loop, in which residents of a rural town find themselves grappling with strange occurrences thanks to the presence of an underground particle accelerator. That adaptation captured the mood and tone of the art that inspired it and received Emmy nominations for cinematography and special visual effects.

The Electric State was Stålenhag's third such book, published in 2018 and set in a similar dystopian, ravaged landscape. Paragraphs of text, accompanied by larger artworks, tell the story of a teen girl named Michelle who must travel across the country with her robot companion to find her long-lost brother, while being pursued by a federal agent. The Russo brothers acquired the rights early on and initially intended to make the film with Universal, but when the studio decided it would not be giving the film a theatrical release, Netflix bought the distribution rights.

Read full article

Comments

Droplets bouncing off surfaces are an everyday phenomenon, like raindrops bouncing off lotus leaves or water drops sizzling in a hot pan, levitating and sliding around—aka the Leidenfrost effect. There is also an inverse Leidenfrost effect, first described in 1969, that involves a hot object such as a droplet levitating above a cold surface. Understanding the mechanisms behind these phenomena is crucial to a broad range of practical applications, such as self-cleaning, anti-icing, anti-fogging, surface charge printing, or droplet-based logic systems.

Droplets usually only bounce if the surface is superheated or engineered in some way to reduce stickiness. Physicists from the City University of Hong Kong have figured out how to achieve this bouncing behavior of hot oil droplets off almost any surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Newton.

As we've reported previously, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his observation of the unusual phenomenon. Normally, he noted, water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly. But if the pan's temperature is well above water's boiling point, "gleaming drops resembling quicksilver" will form and skitter across the surface. It's called the "Leidenfrost effect" in his honor.

Read full article

Comments

It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. February's list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of "map" to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic "dance" when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

Read full article

Comments

For several years now, we've been following a tantalizing story indicating that the high heat of the ash cloud generated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD was sufficiently hot to turn one of the victim's brain into glass. It remains a matter of debate in the archeological community, but a fresh analysis of the physical properties of the glass-like material found in the remains lends more evidence to the hypothesis, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

As previously reported, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. The vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash.

But a 2001 study in Nature, co-authored by Italian archaeologist Pier Paolo Petrone, estimated a temperature of 500° Celsius (932° Fahrenheit) for the pyroclastic surge that destroyed Pompeii, sufficient to kill inhabitants in fractions of a second. Back in 2018, we reported on Petrone's conclusion that inhabitants of Herculaneum may have suffered a similar fate. There was fracturing in the bones and "cracking and explosion" of the skullcaps, consistent with forensic cases where skulls burst from extreme heat.

Read full article

Comments

Imagine heading out for a run on a cold winter day clad in athletic gear with sensors and microelectronics woven into the very fiber to constantly monitor your vital signs, even running the occasional app. MIT scientists have manufactured a single fiber computer embedded with all the components to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health," said co-author Yoel Fink, a materials scientist and engineer at MIT. "Unfortunately, most if not all of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?”

As previously reported, consumers scooped up more than 100 million units of such wearable devices as smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, and similar tech in the first quarter of 2021 alone. Sales in the category increased 34.4 percent in the second quarter from Q2 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing categories of personal electronics. But while these devices do produce useful data, there are drawbacks. They can be heavy, uncomfortable when worn for long periods, and inaccurate since they usually only measure bodily signals from one spot (e.g., the wrist, chest, or finger).

Read full article

Comments

That comforting hot cup of tea—or refreshing glass of iced tea on a hot summer day—could help reduce the amount of toxic metals in drinking water, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Food & Science Technology.

“We’re not suggesting that everyone starts using tea leaves as a water filter,” said co-author Vinayak Dravid, who studies sorbent materials at Northwestern University. “Our goal was to measure tea’s ability to adsorb heavy metals. By quantifying this effect, our work highlights the unrecognized potential for tea consumption to passively contribute to reduced heavy metal exposure in populations worldwide.”

Some 2 billion people drink tea on a daily basis worldwide, and numerous studies have suggested various health benefits from regular tea consumption. Most nutrition studies focus on things like polyphenols, caffeine, or other chemicals released during brewing, but such research overlooks a unique aspect of tea: unlike most food and drink, tea leaves are not directly consumed, and the brewing process allows tea leaves to adsorb chemicals as well as release them—most notably heavy metal toxins like lead, arsenic, or cadmium. (Adsorption is when a substance adheres to the surface of something; absorption is when a material takes in a substance.)

Read full article

Comments

The first season of Andor, the Star Wars prequel series to Rogue One and A New Hope, earned critical raves for its gritty aesthetic and multilayered narrative rife with political intrigue. While ratings were a bit sluggish, they were good enough to win the series a second season, and Disney+ just dropped the first action-packed teaser trailer.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire's destruction of Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) homeworld and follows his transformation from a "revolution-averse" cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.

Read full article

Comments

It's hard to believe it's been 50 years since the release of The Stepford Wives, a film based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Ira Levin. It might not be to everyone's taste, but its lasting cultural influence is undeniable. A psychological horror/thriller with a hint of sci-fi, the film spawned multiple made-for-TV sequels and a campy 2004 remake, as well as inspiring one of the main characters in the hit series Desperate Housewives. The term "Stepford wife" became part of our shared cultural lexicon, and Jordan Peele even cited the film as one of the key influences for his 2017 masterpiece Get Out.

(Spoilers below for the novel and both film adaptations.)

Levin's novels were a hot commodity in Hollywood at the time, especially after the success of his most famous novel, Rosemary's Baby (1967), adapted into a 1968 horror film starring Mia Farrow. (The novels A Kiss Before Dying, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, and Levin's play Deathtrap were also adapted to film.) The plot of the The Stepford Wives film follows the novel's plot fairly closely.

Read full article

Comments

On May 16, 2024, a powerful derecho swept through Houston, killing seven people and causing significant damage to several of the city's towering skyscrapers. Those buildings were constructed to withstand much stronger hurricane-force winds up to 67 meters per second, as one would get with a Category 4 hurricane. The derecho's winds peaked at 40 meters per second, well below that threshold. And when Hurricane Beryl hit Houston that July with roughly comparable wind speeds of 36 meters per second, the damage wasn't nearly so severe. Why would that be the case?

Engineers at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami think they've found the answer, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Built Environment. "We show that a type of highly localized strong winds called ‘downbursts,’ which were generated during the May derecho, can significantly impact tall buildings and facades due to their unique characteristics in comparison to hurricanes,” said co-author Amal Elawady. This is particularly the case for skyscrapers that are close together, creating a "wind-channeling" interference effect that increases pressure on walls and windows.

One might assume that hurricanes and derechos are similar in that they both produce markedly intense winds, but the origin and characteristics of those winds are very different, per the authors. Hurricanes are vast tropical storms that form over warm ocean waters and affect large areas, usually lasting for several days, accompanied by heavy rains, storm surges, waves, and yes, high winds. By contrast, derechos and downbursts are much more localized convective systems, producing hurricane-force winds but over a much smaller area and shorter period of time.

Read full article

Comments

Crafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes down their bodies. And individual cuttlefish seem to choose different preferred hunting displays for different environments.

It's well-known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin's unique structure. As previously reported, squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin's surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It's a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles are pulling in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, changing the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.

Underneath the chromatophores, there is a separate layer of iridophores. Unlike the chromatophores, the iridophores aren't pigment-based but are an example of structural color, similar to the crystals in the wings of a butterfly, except a squid's iridophores are dynamic rather than static. They can be tuned to reflect different wavelengths of light. A 2012 paper suggested that this dynamically tunable structural color of the iridophores is linked to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The two layers work together to generate the unique optical properties of squid skin.

Read full article

Comments

Static electricity—specifically the triboelectric effect, aka contact electrification—is ubiquitous in our daily lives, found in such things as a balloon rubbed against one's hair or styrofoam packing peanuts sticking to a cat's fur (as well as human skin, glass tabletops, and just about anywhere you don't want packing peanuts to be). The most basic physics is well understood, but long-standing mysteries remain, most notably how different materials exchange positive and negative charges—sometimes ordering themselves into a predictable series, but sometimes appearing completely random.

Now scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have identified a critical factor explaining that inherent unpredictability: It's the contact history of given materials that controls how they exchange charges in contact electrification. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Johan Carl Wilcke published the first so-called "triboelectric series" in 1757 to describe the tendency of different materials to self-order based on how they develop a positive or negative charge. A material toward the bottom of the list, like hair, will acquire a more negative charge when it comes into contact with a material near the top of the list, like a rubber balloon.

Read full article

Comments

Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well.

As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

Like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler identifies planets using the transit method. This works for systems in which the planets orbit in a plane that takes them between their host star and Earth. As this occurs, the planet blocks a small fraction of the starlight that we see from Earth (or nearby orbits). If these dips in light occur with regularity, they're diagnostic of something orbiting the star.

Read full article

Comments

We've finally got a full-length trailer for Prime Video's epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, adapted from the late Robert Jordan's bestselling 14-book series of epic fantasy novels. (Ars has been following the series closely with regular recaps through the first two seasons.)

(Some spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

As previously reported, the series centers on Moiraine (played by Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike), a member of a powerful, all-woman organization called the Aes Sedai. Magic, known as the One Power, is divided into male (saidin) and female (saidar) flavors. The latter is the province of the Aes Sedai. Long ago, a great evil, called the Dark One, caused the saidin to become tainted, such that most men who show an ability to channel that magic go mad. It's the job of the Aes Sedai to track down such men and strip them of their abilities—a process known as "gentling" that, unfortunately, is often anything but. There is also an ancient prophecy concerning the Dragon Reborn: the reincarnation of a person who will save or destroy humanity.

Read full article

Comments

The raptors are back with a host of ravenous friends in the official trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth, the fourth installment in the Jurassic World series and seventh film overall in the franchise spawned by 1993's Jurassic Park.

(Some spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion below.)

The franchise has been lumbering along for over 20 years now with mixed success, but Jurassic World Dominion (2022) at least gave Universal a bona fide box office hit to counter all the negative reviews, grossing just over $1 billion worldwide. (It has a mere 29 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.) That film ended with dinosaurs and humans figuring out how to co-exist, the establishment of a dino sanctuary by the United Nations, and the evil corporation BioSyn in disgrace.

Read full article

Comments

Do you long for that tart fruity flavor of a sour beer but wish the complicated brewing process were faster? Norwegian scientists might have the answer: field peas, as well as beans and lentils. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, experimental beers made with the sugars found in these foods had similar flavor profiles to your average Belgian-style sour beer, yet the brewing process was shorter with simpler steps.

“Sour beer is the beer enthusiast’s alternative to champagne," said co-author Bjørge Westereng of the Norwegian University of Life Science. "By using sugars derived from peas that yeast cannot metabolize, we promote the growth of bacteria essential for producing sour beer.”

As previously reported, sour beer has been around for centuries and has become a favorite with craft brewers in recent years, although the brewing process can be both unpredictable and time-consuming. Brewers of standard beer carefully control the strains of yeast they use, taking care to ensure other microbes don't sneak into the mix, lest they alter the flavor during fermentation.

Read full article

Comments

Gecko feet have inspired many intriguing applications, including a sticky tape, adhesives, a "stickybot" climbing robot, and even a strapless bra design. Now, scientists have developed a new kind of anti-slip polymer that sticks to ice, inspired by the humble gecko. Incorporating these polymers into shoe soles could reduce the number of human slip-and-fall injuries, according to a paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

As previously reported, geckos are known for being expert climbers; they're able to stick to any surface thanks to tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. Those microscopic hairs are called setae, each of which splits off into hundreds of even smaller bristles called spatulae. It has long been known that at microscopic size scales, the so-called van der Waals forces—the attractive and repulsive forces between two dipole molecules—become significant.

Essentially, the tufts of tiny hairs on gecko feet get so close to the contours in walls and ceilings that electrons from the gecko hair molecules and electrons from the wall molecules interact with each other and create an electromagnetic attraction. That's what enables geckos to climb smooth surfaces like glass effortlessly. Spiders, cockroaches, beetles, bats, tree frogs, and lizards all have varying-sized sticky footpads that use these same forces.

Read full article

Comments