visions

For very long interstellar trips—things that are farther than the closest star—continuous fusion, antimatter, and sails are the only thing that will let you get there. But the better the thrust performance, the worse the efficiency it has, with every system we’ve looked at.What motivated you to write this book, A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars?I go back to what motivated me to study science: It was our achievements in space, going to the moon. It was the dreamers, science fiction writers, and television shows, and this…

Image: Getty Images/Yagi StudioWe're already well into the season of tech product launches, which runs for the next few weeks as the big vendors set out the products they want us to buy over holiday season and into the next year.But something that's recently changed is that many big vendors don't want to sell you just one product. Instead, they want to sell you on their bigger picture – a whole way of life that could be yours. Naturally it's a way of life that is only enabled by their gadgets - and the subscription…

Brennan Sellner (R) and Dani Goldberg, students at Carnegie Mellon University, watch GRACE, a prototype mobile robot, as it moves down a hall July 15, 2002 at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Photo: Chris Hondros (Getty Images)Humans have been waiting for a robot servant for over a century now. But even with the developments in robotics of the 1980s and ‘90s, they were still just a dream. By the early 2000s, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University invented a robot…

Video games have played as much of a vital role in the creation of grime as the sounds and styles of dancehall, UK garage, and jungle music. Most of the genre’s early hitmakers will tell you they used the Playstation game Music 2000 to make their icy, earth-splitting riddims on, while super-fans on forums such as reddit claim the very first grime instrumental was made all the way back in 1994, via Wolverine: Adamantium Rage—a game for Super Nintendo and the Sega Megadrive.The jagged synths, square wave bass and…

Star Wars creator George Lucas has never been shy of acknowledging his debt to the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. In the early ‘70s, as Lucas began developing the first film, he looked to Kurosawa's 1958 Edo-era period drama The Hidden Fortress. It tells the story of a civil war through the eyes of two peasants, the lowest characters. It's why Star Wars is told from the viewpoint of two droids, the lowest characters. The Jedi, meanwhile, are essentially Lucas' take on ronin — masterless samurai — who were…

| The solicitation for the upcoming Star Wars Visions series by Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki being published by Marvel Comics read as follows; FROM THE CREATIVE MIND BEHIND THE STAR WARS: VISIONS EPISODE "THE DUEL" COMES THE SEQUEL: RONIN AND THE BLIND! TAKASHI OKAZAKI (Afro Samurai) is continuing his storytelling from the acclaimed STAR WARS: VISIONS episode "THE DUEL," featuring the Ronin! The mythology of STAR WARS infused with elements of Feudal Japan makes this issue a MUST READ for STAR WARS and MANGA fans…

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company's design.Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens…

While live-action announcements grabbed most of the attention during this year’s Star Wars Celebration, the event came to a close with more than a handful of new developments on the animation front that are set to broaden the Star Wars canon in the near future. Though most of the news out of this year’s Celebration was focused on stories about the adult heroes and villains who’ll be duking it out across Star Wars’ history, the conversation turned toward younglings on Friday as Michael Olson and the rest of the creative…

Image: LucasfilmThe animated side of Star Wars has served as home to some of the franchise’s most interesting works. When Star Wars Visions was released last year, it offered us different glimpses of George Lucas’ science fantasy world, through the eyes of powerhouses in Japanese animation such as Studio Trigger, Science SARU, and Kinema Citrus. It was also pretty freaking sweet, which is why it’s an extremely good thing that it’s coming back for a second season.Revealed on Sunday during the final day of Star Wars…

Encrypted messenger services have been quick to condemn the Commission’s proposal. Julia Weiss, a spokesperson for the Swiss messenger app Threema, says the company was not willing to undermine its users’ privacy in any way. “Building a surveillance system to proactively scan all private content was a terrible idea when Apple proposed it, and it's a terrible idea now,” added Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, in a Twitter post. In August 2021, Apple announced a proposal to scan its users’ photos for child sexual abuse…