The New ‘Power Rangers’ Trailer Makes Me Want to Go Back to 1995

I'm less reflexively hateful of cinematic reboots and reinterpretations of old beloved franchises than I used to be. The endless barrage of Transformers movies, the abominable creature design of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the new action-heavy Star Trek have all worn me down to the point that I just accept the inevitability that the popular entertainment of my childhood—no Masterpiece Theater, mind you—will be forever regurgitated into newer, shinier, more frenetic iterations for the children of today. And that's OK! The cycle of art and commerce continues on.

But I feel the need to speak up about the new trailer for Power Rangers, the movie reboot of the popular 1990s Mighty Morphin' TV and toy franchise about spandex-clad color-coded warriors and their animalistic fighting robots (aka Zords). So the quick word on this new movie is that it's darker and angstier than than previous iterations, and stars Bryan Cranston as Zordon and Elizabeth Banks as Rita Repulsa. I'm down for all that. But what I'm NOT down with are the following:

1. Zordon is freed from his bubble tank and appears as some kind of giant pin-face toy now?

2. The Ranger suits look like weird polished alien skeletons?

3. The Zords look like weirdo organic Michael Bay-era Transformers rather than bulky retro mechs?

Compare to the original trailer for the 1995 movie Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and mourn the loss of our cheesy innocence:

Full disclosure, like my colleagues at VICE, I will probably see this movie at some point and enjoy it.

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These Flying Animal Robots Are Real and Magnificent

Just barely making it under the wire of a year full of bizarre and adorable robots, the fancy animal robot-makers at Festo are back with three new flying robots.

An industrial automation company, Festo’s robotic menagerie also includes herring gulls, kangaroos, ants, an elephant's trunk, and a gripper inspired by the tongue of a chameleon. Festo showed off three new animalistic flying drones at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC last summer, and they can seen beautifully gliding through the air in a video captured by IEEE Spectrum.

The eMotionButterfly uses a camera tracking system to fly autonomously, avoiding crashes into the ceiling and walls without human guidance. A kaleidoscope of up to 15 butterflies can work together at once, using the tracking cameras to navigate without crashing into one another.

AirJelly, a giant flying jellyfish, is gently propelled up and down by eight tentacles and directed remotely with a bearing inside the helium body. It only weighs about two pounds, and can fly for two hours on one small battery.

Last but perhaps cutest, the AirPenguin is a chubby silver blimp-bot with flippers that help it glide forward through the air, and moveable tail fins and a beak. Each of these creatures seems plucked from alternate reality, where mechanical zoos and Atomic Age-style penguins reign the skies. We’ll allow it, even though real penguins don’t fly.

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Come Watch 'The Running Man' with Motherboard at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn

The future doesn’t always turn out the way you expect. As our reality star president-elect prepares to assume office, Motherboard and Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn are pleased to co-host a timely 30th-anniversary screening of The Running Man, the 1987 sci-fi action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse “The Body” Ventura, which depicts a dystopian future United States pacified by a deadly reality show in the year 2017. In other words, the film feels a little too familiar as we prepare for the Trump Administration to take office.

Our screening is set for January 18, 2017, at 7:15 pm, just two days before President Trump is inaugurated, and will feature special guests and some surprises from Motherboard staffers. It's open to the public, but tickets are limited, so order yours online here (all proceeds go to Nitehawk Cinema).

For those who can’t make it out, we’ll be hosting a brief Q&A about the film on our Facebook page, and posting a new short Motherboard documentary featuring a new interview with one of the The Running Man’s creators.

And in even better news, The Running Man 30th-anniversary Inauguration Special is the first in a new ongoing screening series we’re co-hosting with Nitehawk Cinema called Future Shock. Throughout 2017 and beyond, we will be screening many more sci-fi films, looking at how they depicted the future that has become our present, what they got right, and what they got wrong. We’ll also seek to explore how art can sometimes unintentionally anticipate life, for better and for worse.

Grab your popcorn and get ready for one hell of a show.

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Aliens and Shower Sex Don’t Mix in the ‘Alien: Covenant’ Trailer

The winter holidays are a special time of year for gathering with friends and family, maybe exchanging a few gifts, and watching an otherworldly creature erupt from a man’s spine. At least if you’re director Ridley Scott and company at 20th Century Fox, the makers of Alien: Covenant, the latest in the long-running Alien movie franchise, which debuted its first trailer online over the holiday weekend. The movie hits theaters May 19, 2017.

If you haven’t seen the scary, gory and briefly sexy trailer, you can watch it above. Many bad encounters with scary extraterrestrial creatures await. (It’s a red band trailer, which means the Motion Picture Association of America thinks you should be at least 17 to watch it, so kids and those with delicate constitutions, be warned.)

Alien: Covenant is the sixth film in the Alien franchise (technically the eighth if you count Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, but those aren’t stand-alone Alien films, so most people don’t), and looks to be a direct sequel to Prometheus, the controversial Alien prequel from 2012 that I maintain was a pretty good monster flick. The synopsis for Alien: Covenant from 20th Century Fox reads:

“Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discover what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world, whose sole inhabitant is the synthetic David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.”

Indeed, a few shots in the trailer show the shadowy wreck of the alien starship seen in Prometheus.

Image: 20th Century Fox

We also see a new starship, presumably the Covenant, descending into a lush, mountainous new alien world with fields of some sort of wheat-like grain.

Image: 20th Century Fox

This shot of the new planet totally echoes something out of Ridley Scott’s more earthly hit, Gladiator. What can I say? The man loves his crops.

Image: 20th Century Fox

Are the silly optimistic humans really about to fly headfirst to their doom again? It sure looks that way (the original title for this film was Alien: Paradise Lost, so there’s a clue).

But before all that, the trailer immediately sets a tone of pure bodily horror, as we see a woman in what looks to be a medical ward of a starship frantically banging on a portal window and pleading with another woman (who looks a lot like Ripley from the original Alien) to open the door. Meanwhile, an extremely pale dude spasms and then squirts blood from his back. Never complain about your back problems again.

Image: 20th Century Fox

We also get a very cool shot of some figures standing in a stark room with a full-sized piano.

Image: 20th Century Fox

And check out this creepy close-up of Michael Fassbender (who played the android David in Prometheus) with a painting behind him.

Image: 20th Century Fox

Both of these images evoke the fancy trippiness of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, though this film will undoubtedly be decidedly more violent.

For Alien superfans, there are some great callouts to other moments of the franchise (a patch reading Weyland-Yutani, the ruthless mega-corporation behind many of these-ill fated space missions; eggs—never a good sign in this universe; a facehugger attack; and a very special cloak). The trailer concludes with some skin, as a human duo shower together and become distracted enough to miss a sharp tail creeping around by their feet. An interspecies threesome doesn’t seem to be in the cards, as the scene ends with more bloodshed.

Image: 20th Century Fox

The original 1977 space sci-fi/horror flick Alien and its direct sequel Aliens are among the Motherboard staff’s favorite films, so we have a pretty high bar when it comes to new entries in this universe. But based on everything we’ve seen in the grim and foreboding Alien: Covenant trailer, we’re in good hands (slash claws).

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Remembering Carrie Fisher, the Actor and Writer Who Transcended 'Star Wars'

Carrie Fisher, the actor and writer who rocketed to global fame as Princess Leia Organa in the original Star Wars trilogy, died today following a heart attack, according to a statement provided to People magazine by a spokesperson for Fisher’s family. Fisher was 60 years old. She’s survived by her mother, Hollywood actor Debbie Reynolds, as well as her daughter Billie Lourd, her brother Todd Fisher, and her pet bulldog Gary, who became a famous in his own right after public appearances and interviews where he joined Fisher.

Fisher had been hospitalized on December 23 after going into cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles, causing worldwide outpourings of concern on social media. The announcement of her death on Tuesday prompted even more widespread expressions of grief and mourning around the world.

For many, it was an even more tragic loss coming after a long and difficult year in which other celebrated entertainers passed away, including David Bowie, Prince, and George Michael just days ago.

Although Fisher was best-known for her role as the iconic Star Wars heroine, a role she reprised in The Force Awakens under a new rank, General Leia, following a 32-year-long interval, she appeared in numerous other films including Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, and When Harry Met Sally (she has 90 credits to her name on IMDB).

And Fisher was an acclaimed and sharp-witted writer: Her 1987 novel Postcards from the Edge, based in part on her own experiences with drug and alcohol addiction, became a best-seller, and she later wrote the screenplay of the hit 1990 movie of the same name. She wrote and performed her own autobiographical one-woman stage show, Wishful Drinking, which appeared on Broadway, and later adapted it into a book. Earlier this year, she published The Princess Diarist, her account of her rocky experiences filming Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. She wrote several other novels and worked on other major Hollywood screenplays as well, including Sister Act and Hook.

Fisher was known for her frankness and hilarity, frequently critiquing and joking about the sci-fi franchise that ignited her early career, and unabashedly slamming her Princess Leia hairstyle and the metal bikini costume she wore in Return of the Jedi. Her Twitter account was delightfully emoji-filled and lively.

While many fans are taking to the internet to offer their tributes and praise of Fisher’s many talents, sardonic humor, and importance in their lives, we also wanted to collect some of Fisher’s own words here. Fisher made an indelible and lasting impact on culture and the arts, and the world is clearly better and richer for it.

Discussing her drug use in 1987 interview with the New York Times about Postcards from the Edge:

"Why drugs? They were there. I wanted to be accepted by people who did drugs. I thought I was too excited. I had this energy. Call it manic. Drugs put me where I perceived everyone else to be. They made me relax.''

She laughed. ''They made me comatose. Eventually, they eroded whatever coping skill I had. I let the drugs do the walking. The scariest thing Belushi ever said to me was, 'You're like me.' And then he died.''

On criticism in the internet era, in a 2016 interview with NPR’s All Things Considered hosted by Kelly McEvers:

FISHER: And I knew that it was a heartbreaking - you know, that show business is a heartbreaking career.

MCEVERS: What do you mean?

FISHER: The rejection - you know, the criticism, especially now with the internet. You know, it used to be that you're your own worst enemy - no longer. The internet is. And they say really, really vicious things about you based in some sort of truth. So it's painful. And eventually it's going to dump you. Eventually it's going to say, you look old. You look fat. It's over. And there's no escaping it. And you pick to go in it. So that's what you get to do. And you can't complain about it, or people will say to you, you wanted to be in show business. And I get to say, did I?

On sexism and relationships with men in Hollywood in a 1994 interview with the LA Times.

Q: You've been so unstinting in condemning Hollywood for making it difficult to achieve an equal relationship--

CF:--and if you're more powerful than they are you're emasculating them. And I'm not revising that, I only hope I'm wrong. But also, I do have this big loud life and so the other person has to crawl in there and find some peace.

On the metal bikini Princess Leia wore in Return of the Jedi, in a 1999 essay for Newsweek.

What do I remember from making the movies? I remember that iron bikini I wore in "Episode VI": what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell. I was lying next to Jabba the Hutt, in the third film—the one I can't remember the name of. (I keep wanting to call it "Rebel Without a Cause.") The actor who played Boba Fett stood behind me while I was wearing the bikini, and he could see all the way to Florida. My mother was always the girl next door. I wasn't quite girl-next-door material; I was the girl-next-dogstar, the one in the titanium thong.

On losing weight to film the Star Wars movies, including The Force Awakens in a November 2016 interview on The Ellen Show:

Well, they like to hire part of me, so I have to get rid of the part they don’t want. So when I’m hired for Star Wars, every time, they have hired about, like three-quarters the size that I am.

An NPR excerpt from Wishful Drinking, her 2008 memoir, discussing the infamous affair that drove apart her parents, actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher:

Alright, so up at the top left of the chart, we have Eddie and Debbie. In the '50s they were known as "America's Sweethearts." Now if you are too young to relate to any of this, try and think of it this way: think of Eddie as Brad Pitt and Debbie as Jennifer Aniston and Elizabeth as Angelina Jolie. Does that help?

All right, so Eddie consoles Elizabeth with his penis, Elizabeth takes a movie in Rome—a big budget film called Cleopatra and she meets her costar Richard Burton, so goodbye, Eddie, hello, Richard.

From the opening lines of Shockaholic, her 2011 book on her experiences with electroshock therapy, excerpted by Today.

To paraphrase The Onion—and when I say paraphrase, I mean basically steal one of their headlines and change one word in an attempt to make it my own—you haven’t lived vicariously until you’ve done it through me.

from Remembering Carrie Fisher, the Actor and Writer Who Transcended 'Star Wars'

The Supermoon Rising Behind a Russian Rocket Is Awe-Inspiring

Did you catch the supermoon earlier this week? The astronomical phenomena—wherein the moon is full and closer to the Earth in its orbital path, making it appear much larger than usual—was actually even more special this time: it was the brightest supermoon since 1948.

But don’t feel bad if you missed it: NASA just posted an awe-inspiring, timelapse video of the supermoon rising behind a Russian Soyuz rocket sitting on its launch pad in the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The video features suitably spacey, chill post rock music, and it’s hard not to feel pretty small watching Earth’s natural satellite ascend into the heavens, glowing orange at first like the Sun, and then yellow like the big cheese wheel to which we humans have long compared it. It’s also pretty awesome to see the rocket launcher folder into place around the 49.5-meter (about 162-foot-tall) Soyuz rocket, reminding us that humanity has achieved some truly incredible, species-advancing feats through science—including space travel.

This rocket is set to blast off to the International Space Station on Thursday, with a three-person crew consisting of astronaut Peggy Whitson of NASA, cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and euronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency. The moon will have to wait.

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Ryan Phillippe and 'Stranger Things' Kid Star in a Film Shot Entirely on a Drone

Drones have been steadily making their way into moviemaking over the last couple years, but Chinese drone-maker DJI took things a step further with its latest PR stunt: the company made a short film shot entirely with its new Inspire 2, a camera-equipped drone you can buy for just under $3,000 USD. Is this the first movie shot exclusively by a drone? It seems probable.

The 13-minute movie is called The Circle, and it stars 90s heartthrob Ryan Phillippe and Noah Schnapp (Will Byers from Stranger Things) as an estranged father and son (respectively) in "Depression-era America," according to DJI.

It's perhaps a counterintuitive move to use a piece of very-2016 technology to tell a story set in the 1930s, but honestly, the resulting shots look pretty good! And not just the aerial shots—the closeups, too. Still, if you had come up to me a few years ago and told me that the dude from Cruel Intentions would wind up playing the lead in a drone costume drama, I would have been like "wow," followed by "...what was that other movie he was in, the one where he played the tech guy? Antitrust?"

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The Cult 80s Horror Movie That Foretold Our Augmented Future

In 1986, Ronald Reagan was president of the US, the first mobile phone networks were only beginning to take off, and Top Gun was the most popular movie. And on October 24th, exactly 30 years ago today, a sci-fi/horror movie called From Beyond premiered and inadvertently predicted the future, only to be promptly overlooked and mostly forgotten. (It earned $1.2 million at the box office, despite costing about $4.5 million to make).

A gory, goofily sexy portrayal of scientific hubris run amok, From Beyond concerns a brilliant physicist, Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), who assists his older and seedier colleague, Edward Proterius (Ted Sorel), in building a machine called the Resonator. When switched on, the Resonator modifies the brains of any nearby persons, allowing them to perceive alternate dimensions and horrific creatures normally hidden from view. As the main characters later discover, it also excites the human libido in some interesting ways.

The protagonists of 'From Beyond.' Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

Things quickly go horribly wrong. A traumatized Tillinghast is accused of Proterius’s murder, and must rely upon “girl wonder” psychologist Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) and local police officer Beaufort “Bubba” Brown (Ken Foree), for help proving his innocence and sanity.

Despite its relatively brief 86 minute running time, watching From Beyond 30 years after its release may test modern viewers, who aren’t down with silly retro body horror movies and their political incorrectness. For example: our pioneering yet stuffy psychologist sheds her lab coat for bondage gear; the “token” African-American sidekick is the film’s muscular wisecracker; and BDSM—now mainstreamed thanks to the Fifty Shades franchise and a growing tolerance of varied sexual behaviors—is depicted as deviant and morally depraved.

“Our films are about the propensity of human beings to become monsters in and of themselves.”

Notwithstanding, I love From Beyond. Although aggressively set in the 1980s, it was ahead of its time in presenting and dealing with some issues of sex and gender, making a woman scientist the film's ultimate hero. And where it was and remains prescient to this day is in its depictions of augmented reality, i.e., putting imaginary characters in the same physical spaces as us (which we have today in a rudimentary way, through apps like Pokemon Go), and body modification, or biohacking (which some people are already trying by putting chips and magnets into their bodies).

I recently talked about some of these ideas with From Beyond’s screenwriter Dennis Paoli, a writing instructor at Hunter College in New York, who adapted the film from a short story of the same title by celebrated horror author H.P. Lovecraft (he also wrote From Beyond’s much more popular predecessor, Reanimator, based off another Lovecraft story). Here’s what we discussed:

The Resonator, the infernal machine at the center of 'From Beyond.' Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

From Beyond shows the downsides of augmenting reality

The chief horror in From Beyond comes in the form of grotesque beings that appear when the film’s fictional scientific invention, the Resonator, is turned on. These take the form of “creatures that are like eels, creatures that are like giant worms, creatures that are like insects, creatures that are like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Paoli said.

The creatures also prove dangerous and ultimately lethal for some of the characters. That’s something that isn’t in the cards right now with our “real” augmented reality, thankfully (as the real technology only projects digital beings, not physical ones).

An "air slug" attacks! Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

Horror aside, From Beyond shows the seductive and potentially obsessive nature of augmented reality (or realities). The Resonator enlarges the pineal gland, a real organ in the brain, making the characters able to perceive “beyond” their five senses, a feeling that quickly proves addictive to many of them (“you’re acting like a junkie,” one character tells another in the film). They want to turn it on, even though they know they shouldn’t, with the dangerous creatures lurking on the other side. Still, the pull of a new reality, an expanded vision, proves impossible to resist—to their detriment.

“Our films are about the propensity of human beings to become monsters in and of themselves,” Paoli said.

It’s not hard to imagine our modern, lite version of AR producing a similar desire in some people, especially as our graphics and projection technology improves. After all, some people are already dangerously addicted to 2D games.

“When you look at Pokémon, it’s built to be fun,” Paoli said. “But the fact is those things can be very disorienting, and that’s where the Lovecraft comes in: which world is the world we live in now?”

BDSM: fun for everyone

The ultimately villainous character who sets the film’s events into motion, Edward Pretorius, has a BDSM hobby and his own “Red Room” full of props, toys, and his own homemade porn—which the other characters later cite as evidence of his derangement, abusive tendencies, and general vileness.

Yet one of the film’s most memorable sequences occurs when ambitious psychologist Katherine McMichaels, sexually stimulated by the Resonator along with the other characters, dons a risqué leather outfit used by some of Pretorius’s previous partners. Though unabashedly played for sex appeal, the moment was also meant to show that McMichaels’ character is as self-actualized and transgressive for the time period as the bad guy.

Dr. Katherine McMichaels gets kinky. Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

“What she’s doing when she dresses that way and engages with that material is that she’s taking on the role of Dr. Pretorius,” Paoli said. Paoli added that the point of the McMichaels character arc was to portray a hard-charging heroine who was intellectually equal or superior to the other scientist dudes in the film, a sentiment previously echoed by the actress Barbara Crampton in an interview with horror movie magazine Scream last year:

“I would say Katherine in FROM BEYOND afforded me the greatest opportunity to play a wide range of emotions in the course of 90 minutes. I went from being a repressed Psychiatrist to a yearning, sexually charged and awakened woman to…being a hero! It was quite a journey and one where Jeffrey (Combs) and I almost reversed roles from what we played in RE-ANIMATOR.”

Ultimately, without spoiling too much, the Red Room and some of the bondage gear aren’t there just to titillate in From Beyond—they prove pivotal to the film’s grand finale.

Even though it characterizes BDSM as a morally repugnant activity, From Beyond is one of only a handful of “mainstream” movies that I’ve seen so prominently feature the subject as a main plot thread, at least until recent years. And its appeal to both the men and women characters in the movie shows an unusual “gender equality” for the era.

Body modification is also a hot topic

Of all the subjects that From Beyond touches upon, the most overt is that of body modification. Early on, it’s established that the purpose of the Resonator is to produce a vibration that stimulates the pineal gland—a real-life structure inside the human brain.

Crawford Tillinghast has a headache. Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

The pineal glands of the scientists who create and experiment with the Resonator subsequently grow and mutate, even spilling out of several characters’ heads as a kind of snake-like, literal “third eye.” Although grotesque, the characters who undergo this transformation appear to enjoy it, due to the extrasensory perception it gives them. And a character who is fully absorbed into the alternate dimension is able to shapeshift, or what McMichaels calls “total bodily control at a molecular level.”

“One of the things we wanted to do was go beyond any technology we had at the time,” Paoli said.

In the last decade or so, we’ve seen amateur scientists, artists, and journalists begin to experiment with body modifications designed to do exactly this: expand the sensory capabilities of the human body. So far, these “biohackers” have mainly implanted relatively crude additions into themselves, like NFC (near-field communications) chips and magnets, but they’re essentially trying to do some of the same things the characters in From Beyond are, just on a much smaller scale (so far).

Thirty years later…

From Beyond probably isn’t likely to be mentioned in the same breath as other hugely influential sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, The Matrix, or even its contemporaries, The Fly and They Live (the latter which also deals with a kind of “augmented reality”, though it was made two years later).

But when it comes to the incredibly human propensity to overindulge our grandest ambitions and worst impulses through technology, I think From Beyond is up there with any other film you can mention. Augmented reality, body hacking, and BDSM are all features of our modern reality, and in the case of the latter, downright mainstream. Paoli credits this to the source material: H.P. Lovecraft, author of the original story.

“Lovecraft’s understanding of science and the scientific discoveries of his time made him prescient,” Paoli said. “A number of our films, especially our Lovecraft films, are not outdated because of this.”

So this Halloween, if you’re looking to watch a fun, cheesy horror film that’s way smarter than it gets credit for, you could do worse than checking out From Beyond.

The man-turned monster in 'From Beyond.' Image: From Beyond/MGM/Amazon

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Podcast: Traveling to 'Berlin Station' and 'Americatown' with the Creators

What do you do when your dirtiest secrets are revealed to the world? That's one of the questions at the heart of Berlin Station, a new TV series from the cable network EPIX, which explores the fallout of leaks of classified information from several CIA bureaus around the globe, especially the titular one in Germany.

On the latest episode of Radio Motherboard, we spoke with two of the show's writers, Brad Winters and Larry Cohen, about how to craft a riveting, realistic show about spies and spycraft in the era of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks.

Winters and Cohen are also the writers of a new, completely separate sci-fi graphic novel series called Americatown, which explores a very different question: What happens if Americans become a massive immigrant population, illegally entering other countries in search of work?

Americatown is set in the proverbial "five minutes in the future," where technology such as holograms, augmented reality, and ultra-skinny transparent smartphones are commonplace, at least among wealthier parts of society. We spoke to the writing duo about their own use of technology and why immigration remains such a controversial issue in the United States, a country quite literally built by immigrants.

You can stream the premiere of Berlin Station and the second episode for free on EPIX. We've also embedded the free YouTube version of the first episode below.

With permission from Cohen, we've reprinted the first issue of Americatown below. You can purchase the first collected volume of the series online or in your local comic shop.

Americatown Issue #1 by MotherboardTV on Scribd

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CRISPR Co-Creator Isn’t Super Psyched About the J. Lo ‘CRISPR’ Show

One of the pioneers of CRISPR, the powerful gene editing technology, seems curious but guarded about the prospect of a fictionalized bioterror TV show based on her team’s work.

Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter said that NBC was considering developing CRISPR, a serialized sci-fi show from Jennifer Lopez’s production company focused on an FBI agent and scientist duo solving genetic crimes.

Curious to know how CRISPR’s creators felt about the idea, I reached out to Jennifer Doudna, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s widely credited as one of the leading inventors of CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that uses an enzyme called Cas9 as a kind of “scissors” to cut apart DNA strands. The technology, which lets scientists modify living organisms by deleting and adding genes to strings of their DNA, has made headlines in recent years due to the powerful potential it holds for medicine, agriculture, and biotech, as well as the potential risks of creating unforeseen problems that could be passed down through successive generations.

Doudna and her colleagues first developed the CRISPR-Cas9 technique back in 2012 (concurrently with other scientists), and she’s still working on CRISPR research to this day through her namesake lab. Doudna emailed the following statement to Motherboard through a representative:

"CRISPR is powerful and profound technology that can help us positively impact human life," said Dr. Jennifer Doudna, professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and co-inventor of CRISPR-Cas9. "It is important to introduce it to the public and characterize it correctly but we must remember that this show is dramatized science fiction."

That’s a pretty carefully worded statement—neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of the TV show that NBC is said to be considering. Here’s a description of the plot of that show via The Hollywood Reporter:

If the project moves forward, each episode will explore a bio-attack and crime — from a genetic assassination attempt on the president to the framing of an unborn child for murder. The show's central character is a scientist with the CDC who is paired with an FBI agent. In the same vein of Castle, romance will blossom between the scientist and the FBI agent as they team to bring down a diabolical genius with a twisted God complex: her former boss. The drama will see mentor and protégé battle for control over the human genome in a game of cat and mouse in which the future of our species may rest and all disease could one day be eradicated.

I’m no expert on genetics, but based on my understanding of what CRISPR is capable of, it sounds like those plot lines are far-fetched at best. More likely, they’re completely implausible.

That said, a sci-fi show that’s based (loosely) on a real life genetic tool, and not about vampires or zombies, could be fascinating if done well. It might even make people more interested in actual science.

It sounds like Doudna is waiting along with the rest of us to see what the end product is like.

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from CRISPR Co-Creator Isn’t Super Psyched About the J. Lo ‘CRISPR’ Show

Forget You’re Chained to Your Desk and Enter the Forest in Virtual Reality

When was the last time you took a walk in the woods? If you’re anything like me, it was long enough ago that you can’t remember. A sad reality of modern urban living and the corporate grind is that many of us are starved of nature in our daily lives, despite the fact that the United States alone contains around 750 million acres of forests.

But now you can simulate escaping to a real forest and basking in the tranquility of the trees, right from your desk. The Virtual Forest is a projected launched earlier this month by Koen Hufkens, an ecologist at Harvard University’s Richardson Lab, which broadcasts a live feed of continuously refreshing, 360-degree still images (one every 15 minutes) from a spot deep in the middle of the Harvard Forest, a plot of land in Western Massachusetts that is owned by the university and open to researchers and the public.

The feed is year-round, allowing you to check back in at anytime (well—anytime the sun is up, there is no night vision mode at present) to see what the trees are up to.

Using a desktop web browser, you can click and drag around the feed to see different angles of the woods from a height of about 5 feet (1.5 meters), the height of the consumer-grade Ricoh Theta S 360-degree camera that Hufkens installed on a post out there.

“I hope it can show people how the forest changes throughout the seasons...and the beauty of the forest.”

But the real magic comes if you view the Virtual Forest through a recent-model smartphone (iPhone or Android, just one that has a built-in gyroscope) and Google Cardboard, the company’s cheap, smartphone-powered VR headset design. Then you can actually feel like you’re standing right there in the forest, which is one of Hufkens’ goals with the project.

“I hope it can show people how the forest changes throughout the seasons...and the beauty of the forest,” Hufkens told Motherboard over the phone. “For people who are geographically isolated from the forest, I hope it provides a way for [them] to experience it up close and personal, compared to a standard photo.”

As a kind of demo reel, Hufkens created a timelapse of 360-degree imagery captured over just one day in Harvard Forest and uploaded it to YouTube.

In fact, for those who are looking for an even more immersive experience, the Virtual Forest is also supported by the more premium VR headsets including the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (through the open source VR coding framework A-Frame).

Hufkens said he got the idea to create the Virtual Forest when consumer 360-degree cameras first started becoming available in the past couple years. He started conceiving the project in earnest this summer, and began assembly of his camera station in September.

The Virtual Forest 360-degree camera setup created by Koen Hufkens. Image: Koen Hufkens

Besides the Ricoh Theta S camera, which provides the imagery, the rest of the setup is also almost entirely built from commercially available components and supplies, including: a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that serves as the camera’s controller, a wooden post, PVC plumbing pipe, pieces of silicone cut to form a holster, a “lampshade”-like glass enclosure to protect the camera lens from the elements and insects, a standard USB cable, a power-over-ethernet cable for power and internet connectivity, and a grounding cable to protect against electrical fluctuations caused by potential nearby lightning strikes.

In total, Hufkens estimates the Virtual Forest setup cost around $500, and he said he plans to make the plans open source on the maker website Hackaday at some point in the near future, which would allow anyone to build one of these in their own backyards. He’s also planning an improved, higher-resolution camera setup using one of the new Nikon KeyMission 360 cameras, which shoot in 4K resolution.

Aside from being a “fun” side project for Hufkens, he said it also may help his research, which is concentrated on phenology, which, in Hufken’s words, amounts to “the feedback between the climate and the biosphere, and consequently, climate change.”

“Putting a camera in the understory, it summarizes the whole forest in a single image, which is kind of neat,” Hufkens said.

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The TSA Found a Gun Hidden in a Ball of Clay Inside a Computer

The US Transportation Security Administration is in charge of safeguarding America's airports and air travelers (among other things), which frequently involves confiscating guns, weapons, and various other restricted items. The agency also operates what is regarded (by me) as one of the best Instagram accounts, posting the items it seizes under the hashtag #TSAGoodCatch.

Those two facts recently collided to bring us this arresting image of a loaded handgun covered in clay and stashed inside a computer, which the TSA says was recently uncovered inside the checked luggage of someone at Houston's George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH).

Image: TSA/Instagram

I'm no gun expert, so I won't hazard a guess on the make and model of the weapon here. But I did play a lot with Play-Doh as a kid, and to me, that "clay," as the TSA calls it, sure looks an awful lot like the good stuff. Look to the side and you'll even see our namesake piece of electronics sitting there, apparently in an attempt to make the whole configuration look more convincingly like a computer and less like a gun holster.

Who did this? Why? And did they really think covering a gun in clay and sticking it inside a computer was the best way to hide it from the TSA? None of these questions have easy answers, and the TSA isn't saying much. Here's a statement a TSA spokesperson provided to Motherboard via email, shortly after this article was published.

It was a loaded 9mm.
When TSA officers find a firearm at the checkpoint or improperly packed in a checked bag, they alert law enforcement. Law enforcement interviews the passenger and determines if there will be criminal charges.
TSA has the ability to impose a civil penalty (a fine). See range at link below. Civil penalties can be higher than this range if it’s determined there was an attempt to conceal an item. Passengers are notified about a civil penalty several weeks after an incident.
Passengers cannot take firearms to security checkpoints. They can be transported in checked bags only if declared to the airline at the ticket counter. Firearms also must be unloaded and packed in a locked, hard-sided case. More information on traveling with firearms here.

The TSA also posted about the incident on its blog, saying the substance used to cover the gun was "modeling clay." So there goes my Play-Doh theory.

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A List of Free Terrible Google Pixel Headlines

Google's new smartphone, the Google Pixel, was unveiled yesterday. It's pretty much what you would expect from a smartphone in 2016 (a camera, apps, a talking assistant, a sleek, curved rectangular shape). Honestly, I'd argue the biggest change from previous Google phones is in the name.

Instead of going with its usual "Nexus" branding as in years past, Google this year decided to use the same name as its discontinued laptop line and its weird clunky tablet from last year.

Anyway, with the new Pixel phone out now, here are my suggested terrible, punny headlines for all those people out there reviewing and writing about it:

1. Pixel Perfect
2. Pixel Imperfect
3. Pixel Not-So Perfect
4. 2 Pixel 2 Perfect
5. Pixel Sticks
6. The Pixel Of The Litter
7. Pixel, Please
8. Pixel Dust
9. Pixel Elated
10. The Pixelated Life
11. The Pixel Effect
12. You Know Dasher And Dancer And Prancer And Pixel

Sorry for this.

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This Little Jumping Cube Is Probably How The Robot Apocalypse Starts

Have you ever looked at a Rubik's Cube and thought to yourself "this thing would be better if it could jump"? That's basically the resulting design of a new robot from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Programmable Viscoelastic Materials. Video: MITCSAIL/YouTube

We're using the term "robot" pretty loosely here: made of a common 3D-printed plastic called ABS, with a spring for movement and a simple, commercially available Arduino microcontroller for its brain, this thing isn't exactly The Terminator or a gunslinger out of Westworld (at least not yet). But it can jump on its own, and it has some powerful potential for the future of robotics.

The researchers built this cubebot specifically to test a new shock-absorbing "skin" that goes on its outer shell. The skin was made out of a material that's part solid rubber and part liquid. This material was also 3D-printed, but the big innovation here is that the researchers were able to precisely engineer where the liquid and solid portions of it went, a type of technology known as "programmable viscoelastic materials" (PVM).

The scientists then held a jumping contest, taking cubebots wrapped in various combinations of this new material and comparing how many times they bounced after landing, to cubebots wrapped in foam. The cubebots covered in the new material all bounced fewer times after landing than the one wrapped in foam. They also landed more precisely, and suffered fewer vibrations from impact.

What does this mean for robots moving forward? The researchers try to paint a rosy picture for humanity, writing in a paper to be presented at an upcoming robotics conference: "In the future this material and process may find applications in a wide range of fields, including custom sporting gear, personal protective equipment, and vibration isolation in cameras or industrial equipment."

But they don't shy away from the bottom line, either, saying this material will make for stronger, more flexible, and more indestructible robots (or in their words, it "could allow robots to be more resilient to impacts, to be more accurate when landing, and to reduce controller complexity and effort.")

So enjoy this little jumping cube while it's still cute and nice and peaceful. And pray that any thick-skinned descendants designed in its image don't rise up against us.

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