potent

Chilean director Maite Alberdi really gets elderly people and those with mental health problems. One of her previous works, The Grown-Ups, focused on adults with Down’s syndrome struggling with independence, while her international breakthrough The Mole Agent featured residents of a care home, some with dementia. This latest painfully potent film, The Eternal Memory, carves a snug room for itself in the director’s thematic wheelhouse with its portrait of a Chilean couple, utterly devoted to each other, but challenged by…

“Insecure people are dangerous,” says Julianne Moore’s character in this movie. She should know. Todd Haynes has come to Cannes with this amusing and elegant drama, Highsmithian in its intimacy and malice; a darker shade of Haynes’s Carol, maybe? It’s an unacknowledged duel between two women, played by Moore and Natalie Portman, who have found a potent frenmity at an important stage in each of their lives. Periodically Haynes will present us their faces side-by-side in closeup as they gaze at themselves and each other in…

How do you manage to look so fantastic at 87? I’m not 60 yet and look rough. RomeadI hardly think fantastic is the word for me nowadays, but I’ve spent a lot of time outside and eaten honey all my life.Folk music used to be a potent political tool. Does it still have that power? JonathanKentPotent political tool? I would say “My arse”, if you wouldn’t mind. For me, Pete Seeger bashing his bloody banjo and exhorting an audience to join the chorus of We Shall Overcome never seemed to advance any causes. It just made people…

Gaming on an iPhone for most is a vertical wonderland of taps and swipes as you sit on the bus or pass time on the toilet. However, the power of iPhone gaming, and in particular cloud gaming, has never been stronger. To that end, we’ve seen a massive rise in the number of people using their iPhones as portals to Xbox Cloud Gaming, landscape Apple Arcade titles, and more. Controller gaming on iPhone is all the rage right now, and there are plenty of solutions. Do you buy a PlayStation or Xbox controller, and wirelessly…

SpaceX is set to launch its Starship spacecraft into space in its first test flight, marking a crucial milestone in Elon Musk’s efforts to bring humans to far-off destinations such as Mars. The launch is the first major test of the company’s deep-space rocket Starship and is 20 years in the making. SpaceX plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to other planets, and it will be the most powerful rocket ever built, capable of generating 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The 120-meter-tall rocket system will…

A warning to those of you looking forward to celebrating 4/20 in style this year: Your weed might not be as potent as advertised. In a new study this week, scientists found that cannabis products bought from legal dispensaries in Colorado were often much lower in THC levels than their labels indicated.Won’t Virtual Reality Make Me Sick?THC, or Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, is the ingredient in cannabis primarily responsible for the high we get from taking it. Studies have found that the reported potency of THC in…

Birds likely aren't the first things that spring to mind when you think of poisonous animals, but two common species in Papua New Guinea have been found hoarding a toxic arsenal in their feathers.The regent whistler (Pachycephala schlegelii) and rufous-naped bellbird (Aleadryas rufinucha) have been caught in possession of a potent neurotoxin. Batrachotoxin causes muscle cramps and near-instantaneous cardiac failure on contact at high levels. The brightly colored birds store a metabolized version of the poison in their…

CLIMATEWIRE | NOAA is celebrating a rare event: progress by the United States in detecting what is believed to be the world’s most potent greenhouse gas, and then working with businesses to reduce its emissions. It is called sulfur hexafluoride, or SF6. While its abundance in the atmosphere is relatively small, according to a NOAA report released last week, the gas traps 25,000 times more heat in the atmosphere than CO2 does over a centurylong time scale. And its emissions are likely to influence the Earth’s climate for…

Somewhere in the darkness, something moves. Your heart beats a quick percussion inside your chest. Panic rises. It's hard to think straight. And deep inside your gut, there's a queasy feeling that something terrible is about to happen.According to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study led by researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome, that stomach-churning, visceral reaction to horror is more than just nerves – your gastric system really is preparing for the worst.Evolution, for some reason, seems to have decided the…

Tit-for-tat: attacks on Russian and Ukrainian barracks are reported to have killed hundreds, but reports vary. Credit: UN Office for the Cooperdination of Humanitarian Affairs The war in Ukraine is shaping up to be one of the bloodiest of the 21st century, with both sides reported to be losing hundreds of soldiers each day as the conflict moves towards its first anniversary. But quite how many people are dying in this bitter…