Future Stories

After last week’s excellent “The Calm Before,” you might expect the season nine finale, titled “The Storm,” to bring the storm. It does, in the form of a massive blizzard the likes of which we have never seen on the show, which puts everyone in danger. But compared to last week’s shocker, “The Storm” was a low-key but… Read more...

The new Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier has been delayed to repair Ford’s nuclear propulsion system, Advanced Weapons Elevators and software. The carrier will be capable of carrying up to 90 aircraft, including the F-35 stealth fighter, F18 super hornet fighters and more. Sortie rates for the Gerald Ford will increase to 160 sorties a day compared with 140 a day for the Nimitz Class. There is 25-30% a higher sortie rate at 160 sorties a day with surges to a maximum of 220 sorties a day in times of crisis and intense air warfare activity, has led to design changes

The US Congress has authorized a new bill that supports the development of advanced nuclear power. Billionaire Bill Gates says “I cannot overstate how important this is”. The bill includes: long-term nuclear power purchase agreements advanced nuclear reactor research and development goals the establishment of a long-term nuclear power purchase agreement pilot programme a nuclear energy strategic plan a versatile, reactor-based fast neutron source advanced nuclear fuel security programmes; and a university nuclear leadership programme Nuclear energy is one of these critical technologies. It’s ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s

Dominion Energy could spend $4 billion over the next decade on the Surry-North Anna relicensing program and plant maintenance. The two nuclear units at Surry Power Station are both three-loop Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that produce 1,676 net megawatts. This is about 14% of the electricity used in Virginia. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission could extend the operating license for the two reactors by 20 years to 2052 and 2053. Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) president and CEO Maria Korsnick said digital technology, 3D printers, big-data analytics, and artificial intelligence are enabling upgrades existing nuclear plants for extended operation. Westinghouse was recently

World Energy consumption increased 2.3% in 2018 with 70% of the increase coming from China, the USA and India. The growth was double the average increase from 2010-2017. Global Electricity demand increased by 4% to 23000 Terawatt hours. Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew 1.7% in 2018 to reach a historic high of 33.1 billion tons of CO2. Nuclear power generated 2724 TWh in 2018 which was up 3.3% year-on-year. Nuclear was 10% of electricity generation, down from 17% in 2000, according to the IEA. Half of that was due to new plants entering service in China. 45% of the new

I’m always interested to see what objects from a film’s production get a second life in the real world, becoming personal mementos, auctionable collectibles, or being re-used in some other way. For Shazam , director David F. Sandberg got a costume—but not in the way you might expect. Read more...

There aren’t a ton of authors that could fill an entire Sunday Kindle Gold Box deal , but C.S. Lewis is definitely one of them. Today only, download a dozen of his greatest hits for just a few bucks each, including The Screwtape Letters , The Great Divorce , and of course, The Chronicles of Narnia series . Read more...

If you’re an Amazon Prime user, you got another perk this week: a free subscription to Nintendo Switch Online for the next 12 months. Read more...

Saturday Night Live often goes pretty broad with their parodies, striking at absurd instead of on point, at least lately. But their parody of Us , in the form of a credit card identity theft commercial, is very specifically observed, and pretty funny if you’ve seen the film. Read more...

For nearly the entirety of Arrow , Emily Bett Rickards has portrayed Felicity Smoak, one of the show’s primary leads. But after its seventh season, Arrow will be losing Rickards and, presumably, Smoak along with her. Read more...

Elon Musk tweeted pictures of a Tesla Semi delivering Tesla passenger electric cars. The Tesla Semi was not expected to be in full production until 2020. However, it appears that Tesla will be using a few dozen of the Tesla Semi’s and could start delivering some pre-order Semi trucks in 2019. Tesla will start making to version of the electric semi truck. There will be a 300-mile range version with a starting price around $150,000 and a 500-mile range for $180,000. There is a $20,000 base reservation fee for each vehicle. Regular diesel oil semi truck typically have a cost

Whether you played the original or not, the recent remake of Resident Evil 2 is worth picking up if you don’t mind feeling terrified . Today on Amazon, it’s marked down to $40 on both PS4 and Xbox One , an all-time low. Just be sure to get the deal before Mr. X grabs it. Read more...

Sometimes, you really should just not go into the room. Read more...

Tyrion kills Tywin with a crossbow. Read more...

Chucky is a chaotic legend , and to really sell the new Child’s Play , the film’s creators had better shell out for a great voice a—Oh, they got Mark Hamill? They got Mark Hamill . Read more...

A huge storage sale for World Backup Day , Mr. Beams spotlights , and the best price ever on Michelle Obama’s Becoming lead off Sunday’s best deals from around the web. Read more...

The superhero film train never ends. Now, Netflix is getting on board with a new superhero film that seems very close to having its stars: Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer . Read more...

As March draws to close, so does our celebration of the World Wide Web’s 30th birthday, making it as good a time as ever to take a look back at some the features and formats that bit the dust along the way. Read more...

In case you missed the news, the SEGA Genesis Mini arrives on September 19 with the same six button controller (my bad, the U.S. version only gets the three button version), 40 games, and a save state function. We still don’t have the full list of games for the U.S. version, but the initial announcements are more than… Read more...

This weekend is WonderCon, which means an opportunity for some exciting new announcements, and yesterday DC Universe dropped a whole bevy of ‘em. Read more...

The Princess Alliance is fully formed and ready to take on a tougher, nastier Horde led by Hordak and Catra. War has come to Etheria, and it looks fabulous . And sparkly. Read more...

One of DC’s most delightful D-List villains is coming right back around the bend for The Suicide Squad . Read more...

Sega will release its Sega Genesis Mini worldwide on September 19, it said today. It will include 40 games, including Sonic The Hedgehog , Gunstar Heroes, and Castlevania Bloodlines. Read more...

Girls, in my Ghostbusters ? Yeah, that’s just how things go, it’s really not a big deal. Read more...

A one-day flash storage sale , a bunch of discounted tech accessories , and an insanely popular pizza wheel lead off Saturday’s best deals from around the web. Read more...

I was at the MIT EmTech Digital 2019 conference. There was a lunch discussion which involved nuclear energy. A supercomputer and Artificial intelligence expert said that Nuclear Power was great except for the dangerous nuclear waste. Someone else at the table talked about using breakthroughs with rockets to send nuclear waste into the Sun or for nuclear waste to be dropped to the bottom of the ocean. These very intelligent people who have deep knowledge on various technical topics have been misguided on key aspects of energy technology. The truth is nuclear energy is already the safest energy based upon

This graph shows the progress in mobile cellular frequency ranges, from the first generation in the 1980s to the sixth generation that is predicted for the 2030s.

You can never have enough flash storage, especially with deals this cheap. Today only, SD cards, microSD cards, and flash drives from PNY are down to some of the best prices ever on Amazon . Read more...

Last year around this time , a movie about creatures that would kill you if you made a sound was released. This year, the same exact thing is happening. Read more...

Neanderthals are famous for having lived through the last major ice age, yet for a period of around 14,000 years they had to endure the effects of a naturally occurring global warming cycle. Struggling to adapt to the changing conditions, the Neanderthals turned to cannibalism in desperation, according to a… Read more...

I recently got back from a two-week vacation to Japan, spending most of my time in Tokyo with stops at Tokyo Disney and Osaka. It was seriously one of the best experiences of my life—mostly because my inner otaku was surrounded by some of the coolest, and cutest, things imaginable. Here are some of the neatest things… Read more...

We’ve all got at least a few deeply-held beliefs that would alarm our peers were they ever to be made public. But having faith in the wild ideas lurking in their minds is what makes the heroes of this week’s best new comics fascinating, even if they themselves don’t properly feel that way. Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals , but these were our ten favorites today. Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of all the shiny new bits of plastic threatening our bank accounts that we’ve seen on the internet. This week: Batman celebrates his 80th birthday the Lego way, Nebula strikes a pose with a new Figuarts toy, and the most perfect Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kitchen… Read more...

The late 2020’s could see the start of a new age of factory mass produced nuclear power. The DOE is putting most of its first of its kind funding ($13 million out of $19 million) for advanced nuclear power research into the Westinghouse 25 MWe eVinci nuclear reactor. The funding will prepare Westinghouse’s 25-MWe eVinci micro-reactor for nuclear demonstration readiness by 2022. New Age of Advanced Nuclear Fission The eVinci will be mostly solid-state with very few moving parts. It will be using many heat pipes to transfer heat instead of water or steam. Eventually, these microreactor modules will be

The original OontZ Angle is one of our readers’ five favorite water resistant Bluetooth speakers , and you can grab it for just $21 on Amazon right now after you clip the $4 coupon, within $1 of the best price we’ve ever seen. You can’t actually submerge this one like you can some newer Bluetooth speakers, but it can… Read more...

At one of the most important ancient graveyards on Earth in North Dakota, paleontologists unearthed the fossilized remains of fish seemingly killed by the effects of the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous. Read more...

This is real. It’s happening. Dread it, run from it, the combined mights of Sanrio and Bandai still arrive. Read more...

Don’t do it. Just don’t. And then if you end up doing it anyway, for the love of Stephen King , don’t do it again. And then... again ! Read more...

The much anticipated release of the Anker Nebula Capsule II is only about three months away, and you’ve got one last chance to preorder and save (this time on Nebula’s site) if you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign. Read more...

Some 12,000 years ago, humans chose to domesticate much of the world that surrounds us. This intervention steered our evolution and the evolution of many plants and animals, transitioning our hunter-gatherer society into settled agriculture. Can we domesticate any animal? How does domestication work? And most… Read more...

For generations, the book series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has haunted kids and adults alike. On name recognition alone, the Alvin Schwartz series seems like a perfect choice for a film adaptation. And yet, it’s not just one story, it’s lots of stories, which made that process more than a little difficult . io9… Read more...

There’s a good chance, up until this point, you could have thought the news that Batman’s butler was getting his very own origin-story  spy show was some elaborate joke . However, if that’s the case, the joke’s now on you, because Epix just released a teaser for that exact show: Pennyworth . Read more...

I just watched Molly’s Game on an airplane, and now I want to run my own high end poker games. What could go wrong? Read more...

The colorful, spandex-clad martial artists of Power Rangers are the perfect subject for a basic but enjoyable three-on-three fighting game like Battle for the Grid. But with 26 seasons of television featuring more than 140 different heroes, the starting roster should at least be in the double digits, and not nine. Read more...

The first of two stages of the 30th annual GLAAD Awards recognizing LGBTQ representation in media took place last night—and for the first time Steven Universe took home an award. Read more...

The 2022 Foundation is a think tank which has released a report about the plan for Hong Kong integrate with Shenzhen and the other cities in the Great Bay Area. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region (Jing-Jin-Ji), the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and the Pearl River Delta Greater Bay Area (PRD) will be developed by China as three world-class city clusters. These are part of China’s 19 mega city clusters infrastructure campaign to lead the next stage of urbanization and economic development. In 2017, the bay area had a combined population of about 70 million and its gross domestic product reached around 10

Senior Scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yi Fuxian makes the case that China’s nominal GDP will peak at 84% of the US GDP in 2033. He is the author of Big Country with an Empty Nest and claims that China’s aging population will not be able or willing to innovate. Nextbigfuture disagrees and believes that the will of China’s leadership and population to adopt innovation and to make whatever changes are needed to cities and business will not diminish. I do not see how the aging of the next few years affects China’s urbanization and the economic boost that

Can you believe we’re just a couple of weeks from the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones ? It’s so close you can almost taste the dragon breath. Here at io9, we’re catching y’all up on everything major that happened so far. Take a journey with us into season six. Read more...

A Kindle Voyage , Apple Watches , MuscleTech Gold Box , and an Anker Capsule II pre-order kick off Friday’s best deals. Read more...

There’s just something about Batman. This week, the character introduced in the pages of Detective Comics turns 80 years old . And in that time, so many people have used his story to tell their own stories in ways that look different, feel different, sound different, but at their core, share one common thing: Batman. Read more...

For 35 years, a French coastal community has been haunted by the ghost of the world’s most iconic novelty telephone. Read more...

It’s oddly fitting that the final time Don Rickles will voice Mr. Potato Head will share something in common with the character itself. Read more...

Right now, Twitch Prime subscribers can get up to a year of Nintendo Switch Online benefits, including online play, access to classic NES games, and other benefits thanks to Twitch Prime. Read more...

In the heat of battle—or, rather, a fake one—even the most hardcore fighters have got to make sure they stay out of real harm’s way. That’s why Game of Thrones ’ stunt team has utilized a powerful, but also kind of adorable, safe word. One that might sound completely foreign to the people of Westeros. Read more...

Growing up in rural Oregon, Erin Lauridsen didn’t have a lot of contact with blind people like herself. She recalls there being one other blind person in her town, but they were much older and, unlike Lauridsen, had lost their vision later in life. So when her family got dial-up internet during her high school years… Read more...

Jared Leto takes flight in new set pictures from Morbius . The casting calls for the future of James Bond are getting weirdly specific. Plus, a teasery new look at Agents of SHIELD ’s next season, what’s to come on Doom Patrol , and Gotham ’s Dark Knight rises. Spoilers now! Read more...

Today’s Gold Box is discounting a number of Logitech peripherals for work and play . Inside, you’ll find a lot of mechanical keyboards, headphones, a webcam and mice. Read more...

Last week’s frustratingly messy Discovery blew open a wild field of potential disasters that the show could bring itself toward with its revelation of the Red Angel’s true identity. With that in hindsight, a lot of what happens in “Perpetual Infinity” isn’t so bad. But it still brings with it a heap of problems. Read more...

Bitmain will launch its next-generation 7nm ASIC chip, BM1397, which achieves will improve performance, chip area and energy efficiency for mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), that use the SHA256 algorithm for their Proof of Work (PoW). It needs less lower power and can offer an energy consumption to computing ratio as low as 30J/TH. This is a 28.6 percent improvement in power efficiency in comparison with Bitmain’s previous 7nm chip, the BM1391. Bitmain’s engineering team has thoroughly customized the chip design to optimize its architecture, circuit and economics. Bitmain had been the dominant cryptocurrency miner

Artist Dave Pollot does something we all want to do, but only someone like Banksy actually does. He finds kind of lame paintings and then enhances them with his own pop culture spin. The results are hilarious, often-subversive but always beautiful hybrids you won’t be able to talk your eyes off of. Read more...