Future Stories

HTD (Hydrogen terminated diamond) is a candidate topological Mott material. The ARPES measurements on HTD were done with low energy resolution of 100 meV and could not resolve a possible Dirac cone for which higher resolution ARPES measurements at low temperatures are needed in the future. Diamond is an insulator in the bulk and has both ... Read more

Image: HBO HBO’s House of the Dragon is keeping the Game of Thrones train going along, but it’s not the only spinoff for the fantasy series in the works. In a newly released blog looking back on 2023, author George R.R. Martin revealed he and HBO have a number of animated series in unofficial development—as in, they haven’t been greenlit yet, but he’s fairly positive they will be—and now one of those shows will be hopping over from the realm of live-action. According to Martin on his Not a Blog blog, the upcoming series Nine Voyages is jumping over to animation, a move he “supports fully.” The reason for the shift is because of budgetary concerns: because half the show is planned to be set in the sea, a live-action version would’ve been “prohibitively expensive,” noted Martin. Animation can also be expensive, but with the medium, he said the show “have a lot better chance” of fully realizing the show. Voyages is set to focus on Corlys Velaryon , played by Steve Toussaint in Dra...

Image: Warner Bros. & Marvel Studios In terms of entertainment, 2023 was a big year all around. We got many wholly new things that were excellent in their own special way, while the majority of reliable brands and franchises stayed firm in greatness or took a few hits with their new entries. And on this, the final day of the year, it’s time to think about what’s next, because entertainment waits for no one. For film and some TV, 2024's going to be a bit of a catchup year. Studios delayed some of their bigger films out of this year due to the Hollywood strikes not fully wrapping until this past November—after all, why release  Dune: Part Two and Kraven the Hunter  if your stars can’t do promo and you didn’t stock up on pre-strike material to put out in the interim? Even movies that were always meant for 2024, like Deadpool 3 and Venom 3 , played a little chicken with their release dates because the strikes went on longer than expected. Some of 2024's big hits are c...

Image: Warner Bros./DC Comics Before and particularly after the movie starring Halle Berry, it appears to be a rule that you don’t have Catwoman in a live-action movie without Batman getting top billing. But that wasn’t always the case—back in 2018, we learned the thief very nearly got her own spinoff film where she would’ve been played by Michelle Pfeiffer after the release of Batman Returns in 1992. During a recent Q&A, Returns writer Daniel Waters shed some light on his plans for the scrapped movie. The most interesting bit about it was that he and director Tim Burton had very different ideas on where to take things. Burton’s vision as similar to “an $18 million black-and-white movie...of Selina just low key living in a small town.” That version, he continued, was inspired by the 1942 horror film Cat People, which told the story of a fashion illustrator who believed she descended from an ancient tribe of Cat People who shapeshift into Black Panthers when aroused. Conv...

Humanity needs to simplify the technology and products for our civilization but make them fully scalable and self-replicating. The technologies that we pick to scale need to be ones that we can increase to a thousand times our current levels with manageable pollution and side-effects at those scales. We will soon have billions or trillions ... Read more

Image: Marvel Studios Today marks the season two finale for Marvel’s What If...? . I haven’t watched it yet, but by several accounts, it sounds like this has been a pretty solid season with a standout episode that focuses on the Mohawk woman Kahhori . Ahead of this season’s premiere, Marvel Studios revealed a third season was in the works, and it doesn’t sound like they’ll be wasting any time in getting it out the gate. Before the finale dropped, a clip for What If...?’s third season went around online showing Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and Red Guardian as secret agents trying to play at being regular dudes. That goes to hell the moment they cross paths with Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), the former Goliath in the prime MCU universe, but reimagined here as a cop looking to hunt down any supersoldier spies in the area. Where are the two men headed, and what’s our big pitch for this episode? We won’t find out until season three is closer to release. What’s also unknown is ho...

Earth orbiting satellites have the speed to counter the Earth’s gravity. The mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s (4.8 mi/s), which translates to 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph). However, this depends on the exact altitude of the orbit. A statite, or static satellite, would use a solar ... Read more

1. AGI could be achieved or we will get even closer. There will OpenAI releasing GPT5 and updates of Google LLM like improved Gemini. Definition’s for AI AGI = artificial general intelligence = a machine that performs at the level of an average (median) human. ASI = artificial superintelligence = a machine that performs at ... Read more

Screenshot: Lazer Entertainments Ltd Cinema and Theatre Seating Ltd The title Bloody New Year feels overly obvious: surely, this is yet another holiday-focused slasher movie in which shrieking teens get picked off one by one . And while there’s a bit of that, this 1987 British release—also known as Horror Hotel and the far more spoiler-y Time Warp Terror—is also far, far weirder than you’d expect. After a brief opening depicting a New Year’s Eve party bidding “good-bye 1959, hello 1960,” rendered in “vintage” footage, we cut right to the ‘80s, where a group of friends are killing time at a seedy seaside carnival. After they rescue an American girl, Carol (Catherine Roman), from a trio of leering, chain-wielding bullies—freaking out a fortune-teller and causing untold amounts of property damage in the process—they speed away and then are suddenly at sea. When their sailboat runs into some rocks, they escape to a nearby island, where they discover a curiously empty resort hotel tha...

Image: Respawn/EA/Lucasfilm Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi games are firmly embedded in the years before the original trilogy, and keep the focus on a core cast of wholly new heroes and villains. It’s what made Star Wars Jedi: Survivor from earlier this year so excellent: the games take advantage of that relative freedom from the timeline and offer up an interesting array of original characters for audiences to love. One of the newest additions for the sequel was Bode Akuna, a mercenary who shows up early in Survivor and becomes one of Cal Kestis’ key allies. For much of the game, he’s got a fun rapport with Cal and is more than handy in a fight. He’s the kind of guy Star Wars tends to have: a charming dude who fits into the Mantis crew fairly well and serves as another reliable heavy hitter. But not all friends are friendly in Star Wars. It’s eventually revealed Bode is both an Order 66 survivor like Cal, and also a double agent for the ISB. From there, the rest of the game becomes ...

Cats, Echo, Superman, Preacher, and The Mummy are streaming this month. Image: Universal, Marvel, WB, AMC, Universal Happy New Year! Let’s watch some movies. Welcome to io9's latest edition of the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most. (And sometimes, just the ones that we like most.) As always, we’re including the best new films and TV coming to Netflix , Hulu , Prime Video , Disney+ , and Max —as well as Paramount+ , Shudder , and Peacock, including several new releases. Here’s the best of what’s streaming in January 2024. If you’re only interested in the services you subscribe to, you can jump directly to that page with these links: What’s coming to Netflix in January 2024 ? What’s coming to Prime Video in January 2024 ? What’s coming to Hulu in January 2024 ? What’s coming to Disney+ in January 2024 ? ...

Image: Warner Bros. We snickered at the concept when we first heard about Wonka , and we scratched our heads once we saw the trailers —especially the parts revealing Hugh Grant’s Ooompa-Loompa character. But one should never doubt the power of chocolate... or a singing, dancing, Timothée Chalamet, because Wonka is a hit. Directed by Paddington and Paddington 2's Paul King, Wonka—released in theaters December 15—has already crossed the $100 million mark in the U.S. Variety reports the film’s global haul has topped $270 million, which is great news for Warner Bros., a studio that has another big film anchored by Chalamet coming in March. But while Dune: Part Two is expected to do well, considering the success of its predecessor, Wonka’s triumph is a bit more surprising. Maybe it shouldn’t be, given the timing and the current box-office landscape: Wonka is a family-friendly musical that fills in the backstory of the beloved Roald Dahl character, so it holds great appeal for p...

Image: Netflix Pokémon fans of all ages will delight in the island vacation vibes of Pokémon Concierge and wish it was a real place after binge-watching the series on Netflix. The stop-motion animated show is a gem that makes the world of Pokémon feel even more magical with funny and heartfelt mini-stories. The colors and textures in the character design make the artistry a sight to behold—and also explain why there are only four episodes clocking in at 19 minutes each, since stop-motion takes pretty long to shoot. The collaboration between the Pokémon Company and Dwarf Animation Studios is endearing, hilarious, and an inspired concept. It’s well-executed, taking the beloved game and anime property and putting it into a clever and soothing medium. If you’re a fan of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing and comedy vibes in a resort setting like White Lotus (but minus the murder), Pokémon Concierge is for you. The show follows Haru (Karen Fukuhara of Suicide Squad and The Boys), a new arriv...

Image: HBO Piracy is a fact of life in the entertainment industry, no matter how much studios try to fight it—and in an age where the streaming industry is feeling more and more like cable television by the day —it’s going to remain that way for the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to see what audiences were looking for on the high seas ... and how a lot of that hasn’t really changed. Torrent Freak’s annual look at piracy in 2023 saw the top 10 shows once again dominated by familiar faces from the world of streaming sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero material. It’s a running trend for the last few years since the age of Game of Thrones’ climax—which dominated torrent sites for pretty much the entirety of its run, a legacy continued now by House of the Dragon, which took the crown in 2022—gave way to pirated streaming content. Here’s the list for 2023: 10) Ted Lasso ( Apple TV ) 9) Gen V ( Amazon Prime Video ) 8) Tulsa King ( Paramount+ ) 7) Monarch...

Tony Seba describes the cost charts where supercheap electric cars become dominant. He observes that $11500 non-subsidized electric cars with over 300 kilometers of range exist now in the form of the BYD Seal. There needs to be more production expansion for electric cars to reach 80+% of all new cars and then to expand ... Read more

Image: Marvel Universe, Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., 343 Industries, Lucasfilm/Paramount Sometimes, you need a little comfort food—and at io9, that can mean “re-watching a favorite Star Wars show ” or “guzzling midnight margaritas while watching Sandra Bullock play a witch ” or “picking up a book and rediscovering the joy of reading .” We love new releases, don’t get us wrong, but we also dig revisiting past favorites. This year, that included... Andor Image: Lucasfilm There has been a lot of Star Wars this year, and honestly, not much of it has really clicked with me , especially when it comes to the streaming side of the galaxy far, far away . So this year I took comfort in revisiting Andor, a series that rejuvenated my love of Star Wars just last year, and found it still just gripping and engaging as it was the first around. In fact, being able to sit with the series as this singular entity, instead of having to wait and wonder “are they going to keep getting away with this?” we...

The U.S. military’s X-37B space plane is set to launch Thursday, Dec. 28 in the evening on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The spacecraft has a four-hour window starting at 7 p.m. to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The SpaceX Falcon heavy is at pad 39A to prepare for tomorrow’s launch. Falcon ... Read more

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images Even though every year has managed to feel more eventful than the last, 2023 especially was a roller coaster that went extremely off the rails. It feels like something eventful happened at least twice per week (if not considerably more), particularly in the entertainment space. The pair of Hollywood strikes courtesy of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA hung over 2023 as nearly every production ground to a halt while the two unions demanded better pay, conditions, and AI protections. This was the WGA’s first strike in 15 years, and unlike back then, it was considerably easier to understand who the good and bad guys were here. It wasn’t just that studios were reportedly holding out until writers became desperate for any deal, though that also played a part in things. Everyone could feel something slipping in the way TV was being made these days, even if they couldn’t entirely articulate it: a rushed character turn here, a constricting episode count there. On...