Scientists Try To Calm '2012' Hysteria

Amanda Peet, with Morgan Lily and Liam James, stars in "2012," opening next month. The movie's viral marketing campaign has blended seamlessly with websites spreading doomsday theories. (Columbia Pictures)

From The L.A. Times:

As an upcoming action movie fuels Internet rumors, several scientists make public statements: The world will not end in 2012, and Earth is not going to crash into a rogue planet.

Is 2012 the end of the world?

If you scan the Internet or believe the marketing campaign behind the movie "2012," scheduled for release in November, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Dozens of books and fake science websites are prophesying the arrival of doomsday that year, by means of a rogue planet colliding with the Earth or some other cataclysmic event.

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The Tech Behind Surrogates's All-Robot World

Director Jonathan Mostow with a surrogate used in the film to show buyers the mechanics of their potential proxies.

From Popular Mechanics:

PM's Digital Hollywood sits down with Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow to discuss the unexpected challenges of filming a world where everyone looks like a perfect robot. Plus, a chronology of movie androids.

When robot stand-ins populate the world in a movie—as they do in Touchstone Picture’s Surrogates, out Sept. 25—­every character in the frame has to look perfect. And that turned into a headache for director Jonathan Mostow. “Usually you hire background actors off the street,” he says. “We were flying in models.”

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Real Science Sets Up Surrogates‘ Futuristic Robot Action

From Underwire:

HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.

The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.

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How Last.fm Inspired A Scientific Breakthrough

From The Guardian:

I first saw Mendeley pitch two weeks ago – now it is on the way to changing the face of science.

The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science?

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First Avatar Trailer Reveals Pandora’s Intoxicating Alien World

From Underwire/Wired Science:

The new Avatar trailer gives the world its first glimpse of the alien world dreamed up by James Cameron for his coming sci-fi epic.

The fast-paced clip is short on dialogue and long on brief flashes of the dazzling flora and fauna that inhabit Pandora, the distant moon where the movie’s sweeping action unfolds.

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The Final Frontier: The Science of Star Trek

Image: "STAR" SHIP: A glimpse of the newly built Enterprise from the latest Star Trek film, opening in theaters this week. PARAMOUNT

From Scientific American:

As the new movie warps into theaters this week, we ask physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, how the sci-fi franchise keeps it real, and also how it bends--or breaks--a few laws of nature

Ever since the starship Enterprise first whisked across television screens in 1966, Star Trek has inspired audiences with its portrayal of a future, spacefaring humanity boldly going where no one has gone before.

Creator Gene Roddenberry's vision went on to spark five other TV series and now 11 movies, as a new film hits multiplexes this week. This prequel, simply titled Star Trek and directed by J. J. Abrams—the force behind TV's Lost and Fringe, among other projects—chronicles the early years of Captain Kirk and some of his Enterprise shipmates, including Spock, McCoy and Uhura.

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Knowing Blends Science Fact With Fiction (Beware: Spoilers!)

From Popular Mechanics:

In Knowing, numbers predict every major disaster for 50 years—and the upcoming end of the world. But just how much can scientists predict? PM talks to MIT physicist Dr. Edward Farhi to find out. Beware: Spoilers ahead!

In Knowing, Nicholas Cage plays John Kessler, an MIT astrophysicist who believes that the universe's course is caused by random events and circumstances with no grand plan—until a mysterious numerical code, unearthed from a time capsule buried for half a century, correctly predicts every major disaster of the last 50 years. The catch? It also predicts the upcoming end of the world. Knowing's plot is part real astrophysics and part mysticism; PM's Digital Hollywood got to the bottom of what is fact—and what's science fiction.

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How Scientifically Accurate Is Watchmen?

WHY SO BLUE? Dr. Manhattan's color and (some of) his powers can be explained by quantum mechanics, thanks to your (self-proclaimed) "friendly neighborhood physics professor," Jim Kakalios. WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT

From Scientific American:

The anticipated film Watchmen, based on the 1980s DC Comics 12-part comic book series (later adapted as a graphic novel), hits theaters tomorrow. Die-hard fans of the original publication may fret over its faithfulness to the series, but studio execs also worried about their movie's faithfulness to science. To set their minds at ease, they placed a call to Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota.

Kakalios, 50, began advising the film's makers in the summer of 2007 on everything from the quantum mechanics of Dr. Manhattan (one of the superheroes of the story) down to the details in the laboratories. "They wanted to know what was around the corner at the end of the long corridor, even if the audience wasn't going to see it," he says.

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Stunning Pictures And Photos

(Photo from Smashing Magazine)

From Smashing Magazine:

Photography is a very powerful medium and a very difficult craft. Excellent photos don’t only display some facts — they tell stories, awake feelings and manage to share with the audience the emotions a photographer experienced when clicking the shot button. Taking excellent pictures is damn hard as you need to find a perfect perspective and consider the perfect timing. To achieve brilliant photography you need practice and patience. However, it is worth it: the results can be truly stunning.

Below you’ll find 50 brilliant photos and stunning pictures — some pictures tell stories, some are incredibly beautiful, some are funny and some are very sad.

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