Future Stories

Image: Marvel Studios Does it feel like we’re getting too much Marvel? It feels like we’re getting too much Marvel. Just a few days ago, we got the Disney+ release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with Thor: Love & Thunder finally hitting theaters next week, just a few days after the penultimate episode of Ms. Marvel . Come August, we’re meant to be getting She-Hulk, later to be followed by Black Panther 2 in November, the mysterious Halloween special , the holiday special for Guardians of the Galaxy, and so on. And this isn’t counting Spider-Man: No Way Home   going back to theaters in September, simply because it feels like it needs even more money. At least one piece of Marvel media per month can feel dizzying, especially in the year 2022, where it feels incredibly surreal that it’s already the end of June . Perhaps obviously, the reason for this is covid-19. High off the victory of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios proudly announced a new slate of

Thermal storage is a bridge to Molten-Salt Reactors. They can be set up rapidly and cheaply and they are an off-the-shelf item. They can use wasted curtailed “renewable” power, and might even be paid to take the power. Thermal storage allows us to learn how to make big hot corrosive things that take on and ... Read more

Photo: John Johnson/HBO The marketing for Westworld season four made it clear that Evan Rachel Wood—whose formidable Host character , Dolores, was obliterated at the end of season three —would return. Now that the first episode has aired , we’ve met Wood in her new role: Christina, a shy single gal in the big city. Westworld is known for throwing curveballs , but this might be its biggest one yet. Obviously Wood can’t divulge much about what lies ahead for Christina, even though every Westworld fan who’s been following the show since the beginning (and is therefore very familiar with its love of misdirection) knows there’s got to be more to her than what we’ve seen so far. In a recent roundtable interview, io9 and other press got a chance to ask Wood and Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy about what’s in store for Christina. It’s apparent that her character will be tied into the show’s larger themes revolving around storytelling—particularly as it pertains to who’s in control of

H2SITE, is a pioneer in on-site hydrogen (H2) production, and just raised 12.5 Million euros in a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), with participation from Equinor Ventures, ENGIE New Ventures, TECNALIA and institutional investors from the Basque Country (Capital Riesgo País Vasco (EZTEN FCR) and Seed Capital Bizkaia (SCB)). This ... Read more

Captain Pike doesn’t know how bad his day’s about to get. Image: Paramount Strange New Worlds has prided itself in its first season on a somewhat sense of ephemerality —that even at its direst of stakes , our enterprising heroes would come out the other side and move on to the next big adventure. This week’s penultimate episode of the season proved just how scary and incredible the series can be when it confronts arguably its truest idea of horror: lasting consequence. “All Those Who Wander” starts out both innocently enough and tinged with a sadness that will become much more tangible as the episode progresses. Beginning with another dinner in Pike’s quarters, we’re told that Uhura and another cadet, Chia, are nearing the end of their tours of duty on the Enterprise —and with it, Uhura’s reassurance that in spite of all that she’s learned aboard the ship , she’s ready to let go of Enterprise and Starfleet alike. But before she can be too certain—even without our own metatextua

Inset of the cover to The Penultimate Truth. Image: Philip K. Dick Estate Philip K. Dick is one of the most important and influential science fiction authors of all time, having written masterpieces like The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly , and the novels that inspired the movies Blade Runner , Minority Report , Total Recall , and more. Dick was also a very troubled man who suffered from drug abuse, hallucinations, a suicide attempt, and many other psychological ailments. Now the author’s tumultuous real life will get its own movie. Based on a biography of the same name written by Paul Williams, who managed Dick’s literary estate after the author passed away in 1982, Only Apparently Real will be centered around an event in 1971, where Dick returned to his home and discovered his safe had been opened and the personal papers in it were missing. While it was initially investigated as a robbery, the police began to suspect Dick did it himself for unknown reasons. Ei

Gif: Lucasfilm Bill Murray said it in 1978 and we’re still saying it today: “ Star Wars ! Nothing but Star Wars ! Give me those Star Wars ! Don’t let them end...” Star Wars is everywhere these days, with multiple movies and TV shows in the works from Disney and Lucasfilm. This article will give you the most up to date Star Wars release dates so you know exactly when every new Star Wars movie or Disney+ show will be in your eyeballs. May was a huge month for Star Wars news. It began on May 4 (when else?) when an   Obi-Wan Kenobi trailer dropped. May 25 marked the 45th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope . And then the Star Wars Celebration happened! Over the course of four days, new Star Wars news was revealed including updates on The Mandalorian, Andor, and Ahsoka. You can find all of io9's coverage of the Celebration here , but all the general release date updates are below. Will June follow suit? We’ve got the finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi coming and maybe, just may

Cha Cha and Hazel in The Umbrella Academy ’s first season. Image: Netflix So you’ve figured out how to time-travel . Don’t abuse your new skill by messing up the timeline! Irresponsible space-time shenanigans can have a devastating effect on you   and the future—which is why so many sci-fi stories have law enforcement agencies ready to intervene when things start careening off the rails. The Commission Photo: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix Space-time regulators the Commission played a major role in the first two seasons of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy , sending teams of assassins to try and prevent the Hargreeves family from stopping a pair of apocalyptic events. With the elimination of power-hungry boss lady the Handler (Kate Walsh) at the end of season two, we didn’t get as much Commission time in season three . But we did see what kind of chaos reality can slip into without their oversight, not to mention their handy supply of time-travel briefcases. Time Variance Autho

Contact could have been a George Miller movie, if a few things went differently. Image: Warner Bros. Hollywood is filled with fascinating “What if? ” scenarios. So and so director almost made so and so movie. Actor X was the second choice for role Y. It’s an infinite rabbit hole and director George Miller is often a big part of it. He famously got very close to making a Justice League movie long before anyone else would attempt such a feat and he also got very, very close to adapting Carl Sagan’s landmark book, Contact . This fact has been covered in media before but a new oral history of Contact celebrating its 25th anniversary over at Vulture dives much deeper into Miller’s journey. The director of Mad Max boarded the project in 1993 and, a year later, read the adapted screenplay by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. He loved it and began developed a movie that, according to eventual star Jodie Foster, was much different from the eventual film director Robert Zemeckis would make.

Sandy Munro and his team have a video showing a teardown of the Tesla Model S Plaid batteries. The Model S Plaid uses 7920 smaller 18650 battery cells. It has superior cooling and more cells in parallel. This gives the Plaid more power. The increased power requires more cooling. Sandy and Cory discuss the construction ... Read more

Image: Hasbro Pulse The great thing about leveraging nostalgia to sell toys is that your customer base is all grown up with jobs and disposable money for making exorbitant purchases. This isn’t the first time Hasbro has resurrected the Cobra HISS tank from its classic G.I. Joe ‘80s toy line, but it is the first time the company has scaled it up, added loads of detailing, and is charging $300 for it . It was just earlier this year that Hasbro revealed a fun G.I. Joe x Transformers mashup toy with a new version of the Cobra HISS that transformed into the Decepticon leader Megatron while a Cobra operative Baroness figure was behind the steering wheel. At $90 it was easily the most expensive version of the iconic G.I. Joe vehicle released to date, but that now seems like a steal compared to the new G.I. Joe Classified Series Cobra HISS.   It’s another super-sized and super-detailed remaster of a classic Hasbro toy realized through the company’s HasLab crowdfunding platform. In

Zap Energy creating the first plasmas in their FuZE-Q prototype. They achieved Q=1 where the process of nuclear fusion inside a plasma yields more energy than was consumed to create the plasma. In 2021, Zap Energy used sheared-flow stabilization to extend the lifetime of Z-pinch plasmas at 500 kiloamps (kA) of current. Zap’s sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch ... Read more

“I was always here, Obi-Wan. You just... were not ready to see yet.” Screenshot: Lucasfilm There’s been a bit of a strange recurrence in Star Wars recently: more often than not, people just don’t die . The Rise of Skywalker , infamously perhaps, is predicated on the return of the Emperor with little explanation as to how he got out of a one-way trip down an exploding reactor shaft. Obi-Wan Kenobi just gave us not one, but two people surviving mortal lightsaber wounds through sheer determination. So yeah, people are having a bit of a hard time not sticking around in the galaxy far, far away at the minute. But it’s also not exactly a new thing, really: Darth Maul infamously survived becoming Half Maul when he returned in The Clone Wars with some sick robo-spider legs. Anakin, of course, managed to endure the loss of several limbs and being burned alive long enough to be evacuated by Palpatine after fighting Obi-Wan on Mustafar . It’s all kind of silly, and in a certain way, for

The United States is the largest market for stationary (battery) storage in the world. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that annual demand for lithium-ion batteries will surpass 2.7 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030. 800 Gigawatts of battery storage at current prices is about $1.5 trillion. Prices will be high for the next two to three years ... Read more

Some of the best films of 2022, so far. Image: Various Somehow, 2022 is a little over halfway over. It’s been a wild year for so many reasons and the movies that have come out have followed suit. We’ve seen everything bagels , flying tigers, fanboy murderers , and giant red pandas , just to name a few. The unpredictability and originality of the films has been over the top but incredibly welcome. With summer in full effect, sure there are plenty of mega-blockbusters to go and check out in theaters. Some of them are even really, really good . But if you don’t want to pay for a sitter, drive to the theater, and buy expensive popcorn, but still want a great genre experience, we’ve got 12 excellent films that came out earlier this year that you should seek out. Everything Everywhere All at Once Everything Everywhere All At Once | Official Preview HD | A24 You knew this was going to be on here, right? The Daniels’ fantastic blend of science fiction and martial arts action with rela