bombs

NCP MP Supriya Sule on Friday alleged that apps like Google Pay and PhonePe are "two ticking time bombs" and sought to know what steps the government is taking to check money laundering. Participating in a discussion on 'The White Paper on Indian economy' in Lok Sabha, Sule said whatever happened in Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL) is "very alarming" and is almost like money laundering. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last month directed PPBL to stop accepting deposits or top-ups in customer accounts, wallets, FASTags and…

February 1, 20243min readPlutonium-pit secrets, growing up in parallel universes, the strange aftermath of a fictional wildfire, and more books out nowBy Amy Brady Credit: fotograzia/Getty ImagesNONFICTIONCountdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons by Sarah Scoles Bold Type Books, 2024 ($30)The central premise of Sarah Scoles's fascinating new book is at once straightforward and disconcerting: the U.S. is in the middle of a massive refurbishment campaign to upgrade its geriatric nuclear arsenal—and…

Sally Rooney: In the middle of November, as the catastrophe in Gaza intensified, I was asked to take part in a public event with the British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad. We were invited to discuss our work as novelists, and the role of writers and artists generally, in the context of current events. I was unable to travel at the time, but I suggested that we might conduct a conversation over email instead, with the intention of publishing our exchange.In both her novels and her nonfiction – such as her recent…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freePredicting which movies will set the box office alight seems like an easy task, but there’s a reason studios get paid the big bucks to do so. However, every so often, an acclaimed film can come along that absolutely tanks after being unveiled for the public.Over the years, there have been a startling number of films that have struggled, or indeed failed, to recoup their budget, and…

Image: Getty ImagesIf you want to know what average online folks are trying to learn about, then perhaps the total view counts on Wikipedia might offer us a glimpse into what most people want to learn about. If the top 25 most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2023 are anything to go by, then people really cared about the rise of AI and the father of the atomic bomb.At the top of the list, as expected, is ChatGPT with a whopping 49.4 million pageviews. OpenAI’s chatbot has been making multiple top lists this year, including…

This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.Within every American nuclear weapon sits a bowling-ball-size sphere of the strangest element on the planet. This sphere, called a plutonium pit, is the bomb's central core. It's surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives blow, the plutonium is compressed, and its atoms begin to split, releasing radiation and heating the material around it. The reaction ignites the sequence of…

It is thought that the Antikythera mechanism, rebranded the “dial of destiny” in the latest Indiana Jones movie, was a device invented by the ancient Greeks to predict eclipses and monitor the movement of the sun. Whether its prescience can be applied to box office takings isn’t known: some estimates date the contraption to as early as 200BC, when there was a dismaying lack of interest in domestic grosses and opening weekends. But, if it could, it might have revealed that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was heading…

Image via Warner Bros. Thanks to Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash cratering at the box office and losing hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars for Warner Bros., the chances of Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom suffering a similar fate has risen exponentially. Through no fault of their own, the franchise’s remaining 2023 releases are fighting an uphill battle to convince audiences they’re worth watching, and history has shown in startling terms that paying customers are quickly losing…

Image via Walt Disney Studios/Pixabay/Remix via Apeksha Bagchi Looking at the poor box office performance of the likes of Elementals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania often makes us wonder how Disney is dealing with the hard blows. Well, the Mouse House has had plenty of practice. The recent string of disappointments is hardly the first time — and obviously, not the last based on Disney’s increasingly nonsensical antics — that the studio has had to power through jaw-dropping financial losses courtesy of its…

via Warner Bros. The current incarnation of the DCU looks set to go out with a whimper, rather than a bang. Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash have all been box office catastrophes for Warner Bros. That’s especially true for the latter, which was hyped to high heaven as “one of the greatest superhero movies of all-time,” but may lose the studio an incredible $200 million. The immediate future isn’t looking so hot, either. The Blue Beetle trailers are actually pretty fun, though nobody is…