The infamous Star Trek Voyager episode "Tuvix" aired 25 years ago today, beginning an ethical debate among fans that is still contested—Captain Janeway's decision to kill a transporter-created sentient being to restore two of her crewmates' lives. | Continue reading
On March 22nd both William Shatner and Captain James Tiberius Kirk celebrate their birthday—so to mark the occasion we look back at 10 classic episodes of Star Trek that all speak to different facets of the iconic Captain of the starship Enterprise. | Continue reading
Gina Carano, who plays Cara Dune on Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandalorian, will no longer be on the show. A Lucasfilm spokesperson told io9 she "not currently employed by" them. | Continue reading
As revealed in a fascinating report by The Times in the United Kingdom, some of the ashes of James Doohan, Star Trek’s original Scotty, now live on board of the International Space Station. They’ve been there since 2008, and until now it’s been a secret. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Lin Qi, the founder of Chinese gaming giant Yoozoo and co-producer of Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, checked into a hospital reporting symptoms that led doctors and police to believe that he’d been purposefully poisoned by … | Continue reading
Alan Dean Foster, who ghostwrote the first novelization of the original Star Wars and kickstarted the Expanded Universe with "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" has accused Disney of reneging on contracts by refusing to pay him royalties. | Continue reading
The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doe … | Continue reading
Cows are quite possibly the most important domesticated animal in human history, providing vast quantities of meat, dairy products, leather, and let's not forget manure for fertilizer. And yet DNA analysis reveals ancient humans almost didn't succeed in domesticating cows … | Continue reading
The Matrix is regularly lauded as one of the most inventive and influential sci-fi films of all time. It put Lana and Lilly Wachowski on the map as filmmakers and remains so popular today, a fourth film is currently in the works. | Continue reading
Comic books often take inspiration from the real world—but most of them are not hiding actual conspiracy theories within their pages. In Amazon’s upcoming series Utopia, however, that’s exactly the case. Biological warfare! String beans! A viral pandemic and... bunny masks? Check … | Continue reading
Studio Ghibli fans are well familiar with Hayao Miyazaki’s 1989 film Kiki’s Delivery Service, about a young witch who flies to a new town for a series of adventures. But have you ever read the book that inspired the movie? Emily Balistrieri’s brand-new translation of Eiko Kadono’ … | Continue reading
Robert Zemeckis’ animated/live-action hybrid noir murder mystery broke boundaries of filmmaking technology and technique, and 32 years later it’s every bit as fresh, warm, and funny as it ever was. Starring Bob Hoskins as gumshoe PI Eddie Valiant on the trail of a sex scandal inv … | Continue reading
Are you a quarantined Star Wars collector craving social interaction as well as new merch? Do what I’ve been doing: In recent weeks, I’ve once again found myself enamored with Star Wars Card Trader. | Continue reading
Star Trek. It’s one of the most quintessential pieces of science-fiction television around. And there’s a whole damn lot of it, even if you cut it down to the current eight different shows in the franchise (there’s even more on the way!). Want to start, but need a little guidance … | Continue reading
For its first official collaboration with Nintendo, Lego could’ve just rolled out another series of collectible minifigures featuring beloved video game characters and fans would have been very happy. Instead, the toymaker is introducing a new way to play with its iconic bricks, … | Continue reading
Marvel overlord Kevin Feige and his two heralds imbued with the Power Cinematic—the Russo Brothers—all made guest appearances on this week’s episode of The Simpsons with a special message befitting the company that gobbled up 20th Century Fox in its quest for global domination: “ … | Continue reading
Deepfake technology continues to weird me out. It seems just a matter of time until it changes how we experience visual media. These just look so damn persuasive, and I have to imagine they’re only going to get better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. | Continue reading
In the last twenty years, fandom and mass culture have basically merged. Fans and fandom spent the 2000s fighting for legitimacy and proving their combined worth. And corporations? Well, they spent the 2010s learning how to co-opt fandom to silence critics, manipulate press, and … | Continue reading
In the 1900s, a millionaire who could, at best, be considered eccentric, declared war on gravity. He wrote tracts with titles like, "Gravity: Our Enemy Number One," and founded an institute to roll back the power of this deadly force. | Continue reading
We credit much of the success of Star Trek to the vision of Gene Roddenberry, crafting a hopeful future for the heroes of his TV series to boldly go about in. But so much of what we love about the original Trek, its heart and its cleverness, is down to the work of writer and scri … | Continue reading
The idea of making a sequel to one of the biggest animated films of all time somehow seems more than just “obvious.” “Essential” is likely a better word. And yet, the filmmakers behind Frozen and the upcoming Frozen II say making a sequel wasn’t their first instinct and the road … | Continue reading
This National Geographic honey badger video, with a hilarious voiceover from "Randall," went viral a few months ago. Seriously, though, why can the honey badger wake up from a cobra bite and be on his merry way? And why can it get stung repeatedly by a swarm of bees and "not gi … | Continue reading
“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about … | Continue reading
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Because literally, that’s what they’re doing, they’re rebooting Battlestar Galactica again. | Continue reading
Star Wars, at its core, is a very silly franchise. A delightfully silly one, more often than not, fascinated with minutiae and over-explanation in few ways other sagas would be. But one of my favorite, most enduring silly facts about it is the galaxy far, far away’s fascination w … | Continue reading
People who diligently follow their horoscopes may claim that it's all just good fun. But on closer examination, this claim falls flat. Here's why astrology is potentially damaging to our understanding of science, relationships — and even our place in the universe itself. | Continue reading
Bag End, the home of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, is where The Lord of the Rings Saga begins and ends. It’s there the dwarves come to meet about traveling to the Lonely Mountain and where Samwise Gamgee settled after the Baggins leave Middle-earth. There are few more important p … | Continue reading
In August of 1953, a British-built Centurion tank drovethrough the brutal desert terrain of South Australia, its destination a parkingspot a few hundred yards from an atomic bomb test. That was just the beginningof this tank's amazing, and perhaps tragic, operational life. | Continue reading
It doesn’t matter if it’s 2019 or 1319, we’re always afraid of the dangers of “technologee.” This comedy video imagines Black Mirror in ye olden times—when it was less about the dangers of smartphones or virtual reality, and more about “holy shite, puteth down thine book!” | Continue reading
Have you dreamed about this man comforting or befriending you over the past five years? Then you are one of thousands across the world who have dreamed "this man." And they have a website to describe their experiences. | Continue reading
Computer interfaces in the real world are, generally, frustrating, boring, and at best functional. No one has great joy in using Google Chrome, and everyone is always mad at whatever update Twitter is rolling out. But in sci-fi? In science fiction, user interfaces aren’t just use … | Continue reading
The man who crafted the languages of Essos for HBO’s Game of Thrones is heading to Arrakis. Dothraki and Valyrian language builder David J. Peterson is doing language work for Denis Villeneuve’s highly-anticipated Dune. Now, how do you say “the spice must flow” in High Valyrian? | Continue reading
Nerds: they’re what makes the world go round. Well, the smart ones do, while the rest of us just watch lots of Star Trek. | Continue reading
This remarkable image was captured just off the western point of France's Isle of Rhé. It's a beautiful demonstration of a natural phenomenon known as a cross sea — one that can be explained by a little bit of physics and math. | Continue reading
House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) won the race for New York’s 14th congressional district by leading with her democratic socialist politics and running on a progressive platform advocating for an increased marginal tax rate on the wealthy and universal health … | Continue reading
You’re a Vermont book publisher who owns the rights to a well-known series of books. A new movie on Netflix uses the general concept for the books. Do you wish to sue them? | Continue reading