webs

Madame Web’s poor initial performance at the box office suggests that few people want to see it in a theater, let alone talk about it sight unseen. But there’s one aspect of it we should talk about anyway, because it’s so wild. Madame Web is a rarity in modern superhero cinema: a movie your friends might think you were making up if you described it to them without embellishment. Ironically, this makes it entirely faithful to the era of comic books it’s adapting. Not only does the comic book version of protagonist…

Image: Sony PicturesMadame Web is a two-hour trailer for the movie you think you’re watching, but actually aren’t. If that’s confusing, welcome to the world of Madame Web, where everyone—the characters, the actors, the audience, and everyone in between—is confused about basically everything, all of the time. It’s a film that sets specific expectations in terms of story and payoff, proceeds to seed and tease those payoffs throughout the movie, and then never delivers on them. When a film has to pretend to be something it’s…

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess. Box office tracking has somehow been even less kind to Madame Web than social media has, with estimates pointing to it having a far tougher time financially than The Marvels. All in all, it appears unavoidable that this will be the biggest Marvel bomb since, well, the last time Sony released one of these — 2022’s Morbius. Ironically, Madame Web looks to be repeating one of that movie’s most egregious mistakes; by giving away its big twist days before it enters…

As It Happens6:05Spider webs catch more than prey. They're also jam-packed with animal DNAJosh Newton probably isn't very popular with spiders. After all, the Australian scientist has a tendency to go around undoing their hard work. "I liken it to when Princess Fiona in Shrek makes some cotton candy for Shrek from spider webs, where she collects a stick and just wraps around the spider web for him. But I do it with a clean, sterile stick," Newton, a PhD candidate in life sciences at Curtin University, told As It Happens…

Anya Corazon, aka Aña Sofia Corazón, obtains her powers on her first day of high school. The Brooklyn gymnast sacrifices herself to defend a stranger who turns out to be a sorcerer in the Spider Society — the same group that chased Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) across the Spider-Verse. The Spider-sorcerer, Miguel Legar, saves her life by marking her with a magical spider tattoo that also imbues her with some of his spider powers. Later versions of the story separate the tattoo and the superpowers by making…

If you’re wondering what Madame Web AKA Cassandra Webb’s abilities are then you’re not alone, read on to find out what she can do! So the trailer for Madame Web has finally dropped, fans are on the fence about the whole thing, and that’s putting it nicely, but can you blame them? Sony doesn’t exactly have the best track record with these spider-verse spin-offs so far. That being said, Cassandra is a pretty cool character with a unique set of abilities in the comics, so giving her a solo movie sounds like a great idea on…

It’s scientifically impossible to use a tape measure to just measure something. It’s the workshop tool of 1,000 other useless uses, including lightsabers, or seeing how far it can extend before the tape collapses. Researchers at Stanford University have found yet another use for the tape measure: as a way for robots to navigate rough terrain by taking advantage of the terrain itself.ReachBot is actually an ongoing research project between Stanford’s Biomimetics & Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory, Stanford’s…

Hold back, heroes, it’s the villains’ time to shine. The biggest Marvel news of the day this Friday concerns not the MCU, but its less-loved younger brother who resents their older sibling for inheriting all the good looks and charisma — namely, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, which has just added another new movie to its docket. Elsewhere, one of the most effective foes the Avengers ever faced has assured us their character is still alive, even though we never thought they weren’t. Sony orders another Spider-Verse…

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. Some things are SO adorable, we say they’re cute as a bug’s ear. Of course, bugs don’t have ears. But a new study shows that orb-weaving spiders can use their webs to detect sounds. The findings are unfurled in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ron Hoy: Any animal that makes sounds is likely to have an ear. Hopkin: Ron Hoy studies neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University in Ithaca. Hoy: …ranging all the way from…

An illustration depicts the lost animal diversity of central Colombia. Credit: Oscar Sanisidro/University of AlcaláThe scale of the biodiversity crisis is shown by recreating 130,000 years of mammal food webs.A recent study, published in the journal Science, provides the clearest picture yet of the long-term effects of land mammal declines on food webs.It’s not a pretty sight.“While about 6% of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50% of mammal food web links have disappeared,” said…