Day-and-date does wonders, huh?

In case you were wondering if digital comics were a passing fad, they made $500,000 in 2009, $8 million in 2010, and the numbers in for 2011 are $25 million.

That’s still only a single digit percentage of the market…but consider that DC was only selling digital comics day-and-date for a third of the year, and that Marvel wasn’t fully onboard with this day-and-date thing until after DC demonstrated it would make them lots and lots of money. In fact, Marvel is still pretty gun-shy with their digital strategy; digital availability is spotty at best at the House of Ideas.

2012 promises to be an interesting time for digital comics, to say the least.

image courtesy DC Comics

Comets are interesting: basically giant snowballs hurtling through the void of space. But, being giant snowballs hurtling through the void of space, they are pretty difficult to get a close look at.

Unless you happen to be on the International Space Station, that is. Here’s some video of a comet from 240 miles away…along with some footage of a lightning storm on Earth. From space.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, we knew how awful this movie was going to be but…holy crap. Holy crap.

We’ve literally got no words.

We’ve got a full suite of images under the cut, all taken from toy prototypes, which were in turn based on the actual designs of the suits. But what baffles us is just how these things would have looked on the big screen with early 2000s CGI technology. Probably awful, especially that suit at the end. So the next time you’re complaining about “Superman Returns”, maybe remember the bullet we actually dodged. Photos under the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

17 year old high school senior Angela Zhang just earned a $100,000 scholarship at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for designing a nanoparticle which targets cancer stem cells. It’s somewhat similar to this, but rather than attacking messenger RNA it instead delivers a dose of the drug salinomycin directly to the tumor cells. In addition, the nanoparticle is gold and iron-oxide based, so it can also be used to detect cancer with noninvasive means such as MRI and Photoacoustic imaging. A particle that delivers targeted doses of meds directly to affected cells, lessens side effects, helps prevent cancer resistance, and doubles as an MRI contrast solution to diagnose/monitor progress? Holy crap, that’s awesome.

Zhang said her research was partly motivated by losing her grandfather to lung cancer when she was in the seventh grade. She started working on the project when she was 15 and estimates she’s spent 1,000 hours researching. Her top school picks are Stanford and Harvard and she’s planning on majoring in physics or in chemical or biomedical engineering with hope to become a research professor. Whatever she does, it’ll be awesome. And, even if it’s not awesome, she still designed a nanoparticle already. She can pretty much eat Cheetos and play Halo for the next 70 years and she’s still ahead of the rest of us.

Oh man, this makes me feel so lazy. At age 17, she’s a high school senior who invented a cancer-fighting nanoparticle. When I was 17, I was just a sophomore in college OH IN YOUR FACE HIGH SCHOOLER. Seriously though, she totally wins. I just had to Google the correct spelling of “sophomore” and couldn’t find a nanoparticle even if you hid it in a bag of Cheetos, and I f–king love Cheetos.

[Sources: TheMarySue, MSNBC, ABC7]

We’ve seen plenty of large-scale Minecraft projects before, like the downloadable Zelda game, the recreation of Middle Earth, a giant Bender, a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit, and a Rube Goldberg device, but this next one might just take the cake. It’s an animated video of Super Mario Land for the Game Boy made from hundreds of still pictures created thanks to three guys, eighteen million blocks, and a pizza place Minecraft.

Tempusmori, a 29-year-old in the Netherlands, made a 1:1 replica of a Game Boy. The replica’s screen size is 160 x 144, the same pixel height and width as the a Gameboy screen, so it could be used to recreate every pixel from the original game. This replica was used by James Wright (a 21-year-old carpenter in England) and Joe Ciappa (an unemployed 29-year-old in the U.S.), who created the video for their website, Minecrafta2z.net. They played the game in an emulator, getting a screengrab of each frame, and then they rebuilt each frame with blocks of dyed wool in Minecraft. Each Game Boy screen is made from 23,040 blocks of dyed wool, and they made 800 individual screens to animate the video.

Wright tells Kotaku that it took him and Ciappa more than 500 hours of work over four weeks to create the video below. I’m going to refrain from snarking about what else could have been done with those 500 hours because this ended up being pretty awesome:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, remember that fuss about neutrinos moving faster than light? Yeah, that’s a big deal. Want to hear something else that’s a big deal that you may have missed? They may have to completely rewrite particle physics.

Why, precisely? The Large Hadron Collider is showing us that matter produced by the collisions are acting substantially different from anti-matter, namely committing charge-parity violations at .08 percent. That doesn’t fit into the current Standard Model, so, if the results hold up, we could be seeing some tasty new physics fairly soon.

Still, don’t start taunting your high school science teacher just yet: they’re only about 85% sure this is happening, and they’re going to have to repeat the experiment a few more times before they start editing the basic laws of the universe.

[ via the physicist at Space.com ]