Over the past few weeks, space headlines have been dominated by other worlds: Clear images of Pluto for the first time, the “closest cousin” to Earth ever discovered, the ongoing exploration of our planetary neighbor Mars. With all this excitement, it’s easy to forget that we live on a pretty amazing and mysterious planet of our own.
US president Barack Obama has been on something of a “hot streak” recently. In the last month alone, he visited a federal prison (the first sitting president to do so), the US signed a nuclear deal with Iran, his monumental healthcare law survived scrutiny by the Supreme Court, and he helped formalize diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time since 1961. And his somewhat recent support of gay marriage was bolstered when the Supreme Court effectively legalized it across the US, even if he played little to no part in making that happen.
Fantasy sports is an unstoppable juggernaut in the United States. Once a cultish underground hobby, it has ascended to the mainstream of American culture—the subject of sitcoms and multimillion dollar Las Vegas tournaments.
Might ESPN—the most lucrative entity in sports media, and a longtime stalwart of the traditional pay TV bundle—be offered directly to consumers, without needing a cable subscription? Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney (which owns ESPN), says yes, but not within the next five years.
Spending a month eagerly awaiting Christmas when you’re five years old feels roughly the same as waiting a year when you’re 54. At five, a month is almost 2% of your entire life lived up to that point. At 54, you need to experience a full year to “live” that same amount, relative to your much older age.
Before Jurassic World hit theaters in June, it was already very likely to get a sequel. After it passed $1.5 billion at the box office—the third most of any movie ever—it all but guaranteed that we would be getting dinosaur sequels roughly every three years until we’re all dead. The first of these will soon be upon us: Universal announced on July 23 that it will release a sequel to Jurassic World on June 22, 2018. And yes, actor Chris Pratt will return to star in the film.
The American Revolutionary War is an intensely proud moment in history for most Americans (perhaps too proud). It’s taught as a major subject in history classes as early as elementary school, and it’s brought up again and again in different contexts in middle school, high school, and college. Along with the Civil War, it fills up more pages in history textbooks than any other event in American history.
NASA scientists say they have found perhaps the most Earth-like planet ever discovered.
Bill Simmons, possibly the most famous figure in sports media, has found a new home. The former ESPN personality has signed a multi-year, multi-platform agreement with HBO, where he’ll host a weekly talk show (starting in 2016) and be involved in a variety of other projects, including podcasts, documentaries, and other shows for the network.
Given that Earth has gravity, it’s difficult for astronauts to learn what it will be like once they’re floating around in the endless expanse of space, in which there is essentially no gravity. The ocean is the next best thing. Not only because moving through water is somewhat similar to weightlessness, but also because it provides an extreme, isolated environment akin to outer space.
They call him the Bearded Wonder. Okay, no one actually calls him that (that we know of), but they should. He’s the greatest living Scrabble player in the world, and he’s at the height of his powers. Tennis has Serena Williams. Golf has Jordan Spieth. Soccer has Lionel Messi.
Sepp Blatter just got punked. At a press conference in Zurich today (July 20), British comedian Simon Brodkin flung a stack of American $1 bills at the outgoing FIFA chief; Brodkin said the money was for a 2026 World Cup bid for North Korea. Blatter looked startled and then walked off stage.
It’s that time again. Every summer, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announce the nominations for the Emmy Awards—purportedly the list of the best in American TV over the last year. Depending on whom you ask, every set of nominations is either easily the best one ever, or by far the worst one of all time. In truth, there’s just too much excellent television for it all to be recognized, and shows are bound to be left out.
In an era when the media whips itself into a frenzy over how to make things go viral, and marketers take their cues from big brands, a government entity has quickly and quietly become the darling of the internet.
The New Horizons team at NASA has brought what was previously a blurred point of light into focus. The spacecraft has already traveled over a million miles past Pluto, but not before it managed to send some incredible new images back to Earth.
Nine years and three billion miles in the making, NASA spacecraft New Horizons returned a beautiful photo of Pluto today—by far the most detailed one ever taken. This morning at 7:49 AM ET, New Horizons sped past Pluto at 30,800 miles per hour, while its suite of instruments gathered data about the dwarf planet. Pluto’s strange heart-shaped region is featured prominently:
Only 85 years after its discovery, Pluto is getting its close-up. Tomorrow, July 14, around 8am ET, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the dwarf planet at 31,000 miles per hour, snapping detailed images and studying its fascinating geological features. It’s a huge moment in the history of space exploration.
The streaming TV revolution is happening, whether traditional cable companies like it or not. Thus far, most cable and satellite TV companies have been fairly reluctant to embrace the cord cutting phenomenon—but there are a few exceptions. Now, Comcast—the largest cable company in the US—will offer streaming TV of its own. The service, fittingly called Stream, will give Comcast internet customers access to HBO, a dozen broadcast networks,and cloud DVR storage for $15 per month. It will be available in select US cities later this year before rolling out across the country in 2016.
It goes without saying that the US Central Intelligence Agency can’t tweet about ongoing operations. What it can do, and often does, however, is dole out interesting little history lessons, based on declassified reports.
Yesterday (July 8) will go down as perhaps the most ludicrous day in the history of the National Basketball Association. And it all began with this emoji by Chandler Parsons, a forward for the NBA team Dallas Mavericks owned by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban:
Han Solo, the intergalactic smuggler and captain of the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars played by Harrison Ford, has long been a favorite of movie fans around the world—even those who wouldn’t consider themselves to be Star Wars fanatics. Now, he’s getting his own origin story as part of an anthology of Star Wars spinoff films that Disney is developing alongside J.J. Abrams’s Episode VII – The Force Awakens. (One of the others, called Rogue One, is about the origin of the Death Star, and another is rumored to be a Boba Fett backstory).
You can now watch Homeland, Masters of Sex, Penny Dreadful, and thousands of hours of other shows and popular Hollywood movies online in the US without needing a cable TV subscription. CBS-owned Showtime, the premium US cable channel that some believe rivals HBO in quality of programming, has launched its new streaming service (also called “Showtime”) on Apple devices, Roku, Hulu, and PlayStation Vue.
Google’s image recognition software, which uses artificial neural networks to simulate an actual human brain, is very capable of dreaming. When Google engineers fed photos of random objects to a network taught to identify images of animals, the network “dreamed” of disturbingly distorted dogs and other hybrid creatures, set against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of clouds and mountains.
File this under “potential hideaways for the villain in the next James Bond movie.”
