Towering

It’s billed as a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. But “biopic” seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy latest. Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie.…

Giant party speakers are the easiest way to bring the tunes to wherever your guests are hanging out, but once everyone has gone home, you’re probably not going to drag it around to listen to NPR every morning. They’re usually only rolled out for specific occasions, but Sony’s latest party speaker is useful for more than just parties or karaoke, as it can also be used as a standing soundbar for your TV.Image: SonyStanding a little over 28-inches tall, the new SRS-XV800 stretches the definition of a portable wireless…

The rocket Elon Musk wants to one day use for a Mars mission is poised for an initial flight attempt to space, a landmark test for the vehicle and Mr. Musk’s SpaceX. The company plans to blast off Starship, as the rocket is called, on the demonstration launch as soon as Monday, SpaceX said in a tweet not long after air-safety regulators said they issued a license permitting the flight. Liftoff might happen at 8 a.m. Eastern time, starting what the company has said would be a roughly 90-minute flight…

Film: Tar Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noemie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Mark Strong Director: Todd Field Rating: 4/5 Runtime: 158 mins Todd Field’s latest is a long-drawn… yes, but a brilliant character study of a magnificent musical polymath, a fictitious world-famous conductor of a major German orchestra, Lydia Tár (Blanchett), a woman very self-aware of her own rarefied talent and without any humility whatsoever. She chairs a scholarship fund run by an investment…

The Williams Flats fire in northeastern Washington state generated a fire cloud, or pyroCb, that injected smoke into the stratosphere on August 8, 2019. A NASA aircraft flew in to investigate. Credit: David Peterson, NRL Images of vast clouds of wildfire smoke towering into the sky have become all too familiar during the recent years of record-breaking fires across the western United States and elsewhere. Now, a team of…

When the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope entered low-Earth orbit in 2008, it opened our eyes to a whole new Universe of high-energy radiation.One of its more curious discoveries was the Fermi Bubbles: giant, symmetrical blobs extending above and below the galactic plane, 25,000 light-years on each side from the Milky Way's center, glowing in gamma-ray light – the highest energy wavelength ranges on the electromagnetic spectrum.Then, in 2020, an X-ray telescope named eROSITA found another surprise: even bigger bubbles…

If Michael Caine is the quintessential London actor, Romain Duris could become his Paris equivalent. Born and raised in the city, he rose to international fame in 2005 playing the real-estate hustler with ambitions to be a pianist in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Quick to the punch but nifty in his fingerwork, dropping rats in a sack on unwanted tenants while wearing Cuban heels, he was Parisian squalor and glamour in one snake-hipped paradox. Then he cashed in his tousle-haired bourgeois-bohème cachet…

No Man’s Sky has a major new free update releasing today, developer Hello Games has announced. The new Endurance update is focused on the game’s freighters and frigates, the large ships in the game that players can use as a mobile base of operations and to complete missions. Endurance is the twentieth major update for the game, which was originally released in 2016. Improvements coming with this major update include a new ship bridge that offers instant access to warping and teleportation to navigate the game’s…

Ethan Hawke has said considering Paul Newman’s career helped him decide to accept his Marvel role. The actor – who has mostly appeared in independent films as of late – recently starred as the villain Arthur Harrow in Marvel’s TV series Moon Knight, which was released in March earlier this year. Hawke said he accepted the part after having a chat with his family about Newman. At the time, he had been in the process of filming his forthcoming six-part documentary The Last Movie Stars about Newman and his wife, the actor…

By Sara E. Pratt, NASA Earth Observatory June 10, 2022May 29, 2022Bezymianny, a stratovolcano in Russia’s Far East, ejected a towering plume that streaked the snow with dark ash.A stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, is a tall, conical volcano built up by many layers (strata) of hardened lava, tephra, pumice, and volcanic ash. Unlike shield volcanoes, stratovolcanoes have a steep slope and occasional explosive eruptions.They are among the most common types of volcanoes, in contrast to the less common shield…