devastating

Serious injuries occur during ‘Gladiator’ game Streaming site Twitch and PC merch manufacturer Lenovo came under fire this weekend, following a series of serious and devastating injuries that occurred at the former’s live event TwitchCon 2022 — The separately occurring accidents all took place at Lenovo’s “foam pit”, where attendees were taking part in pugilistic combat similar to that of ’90s TV game show Gladiators. The battles, which were live streamed by Lenovo and other con attendees, saw players fight it out on…

via Warner Bros. Dramatizing devastating real-life events requires a delicate balancing act that needs to pay tribute to the tragedy at the center of the story without sensationalizing something that had a massive impact on a huge number of people, with 2012’s The Impossible straddling that tonal tightrope in riveting fashion. One of the most horrifying natural disasters in recorded history, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami claimed almost 230,000 lives across 14 countries, so there were naturally…

Credit: Marvel Studios This week kicked off with some truly fandom-shaking news in the form of the first full trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which went ahead and finally gave us our first glimpse at the MCU’s new protector of Wakanda. Yes, just as most fan theories suggested, the much-missed King T’Challa’s genius sister Shuri was depicted in her own upgraded Black Panther suit in the trailer’s last moments. So, there we go, case closed, the mystery is solved… Or is it? While it’s not outright…

66 million years ago, an asteroid collision almost ended all life on Earth when it slammed into the Mexican coast. While many of the ancient beasts within the general vicinity of the impact zone from the eight-mile-wide asteroid were instantly vaporized, things only got worse for every other species on the planet, according to science.Scientists researching the Chicxulub impact crater (via CNET) under the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico have used a supercomputer to crunch new extinction numbers and…

Climate change likely worsened the devastating floods that inundated Pakistan this summer, according to a new scientific analysis. Extreme rainfall has intensified across the country, and warming probably played a role. The study also finds that these kinds of extreme rainfall events may grow even more severe as the planet gets hotter. The findings were published Wednesday by the science consortium World Weather Attribution, an international initiative specializing in the links between climate change and extreme weather…

In this case, however, just how big a role climate change played isn’t clear. It’s relatively straightforward to conduct an attribution study that assesses the influence of warming in heat waves, where hotter average temperatures push up the baseline that such sweltering events take off from. The group has precisely calculated how much climate change altered the odds of the blistering Pacific Northwest heat wave last year (such conditions would be “at least 150 times rarer without human-induced climate change”), the…

Opening a new frontier in fighting autoimmune disease, researchers have successfully treated five lupus patients with a novel cell therapy that turns run-of-the-mill immune cells into specialized hunters of rogue cells helping fuel illness. The patients treated with the new therapy all saw their severe symptoms, including kidney and other organ dysfunction, largely disappear. The results “are phenomenal,” says Betty Diamond, an immunologist and rheumatologist at the Feinstein…

An aggressive plant pathogen that wipes out olive trees is projected to cost Italy billions of euros over the next 50 years. Xylella fastidiosa—a bacterium named for its pickiness when grown in the laboratory—was detected in southern Italy in 2013. It is now designated a “quarantine organism” in the European Union: infected trees, some hundreds of years old, must be cut down to prevent the disease from spreading in places such as Italy's Apulia region. “We are obliged to destroy Xylella-positive plants, but people in…

The Boys star Karl Urban has described a scene that was deleted from the 2017 superhero film Thor: Ragnarok.In the hit Marvel sequel, Urban played Skurge, the keeper of the Bifrost after Heimdall (Idris Elba) left the post.Over the course of the film, Skurge is seen teaming up with the villainous Hela (Cate Blanchett), before eventually redeeming himself at the end.Speaking to GQ, he revealed the emotional scene featuring his character which did not make its way into the final film.“There was actually a scene that didn’t…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Teresa Watkins worked to salvage a few mud-caked belongings from her home on a Breathitt County branch of the Kentucky River after July 28 floods slammed her neighborhood for the second time in 17 months. …