Новости за 03.12.2017

For the past few years, governments have been gradually remaking the airport, transforming the single security check into a system of tiered clearances and background checks. You can see this logic at work in programs like CBP’s Global Entry and TSA’s Pre-Check, which let you pass through security lines faster if you’ve gone through the pre-clearance system in advance.

Canadian directors Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard started their filmmaking career together in 2008 with Lost Cause, a tiny comedy they wrote and starred in themselves. The rough edges are clear, but the concept is fascinating: a man’s ghost comes from the future to haunt him by guiding him to better choices. (And at one point, by telekinetically turning a sock into a puppet to interact with him.) Labrèche and Léonard’s latest film, Radius, also has some visible rough edges, but it’s equally high-concept and compelling... Читать дальше...

If you’re a movie fan on the internet, there’s a good chance that you’ve come across a video series called Every Frame a Painting. Created by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos, it’s a series of video essays, narrated by Zhou, that explore everything from Marvel’s film scores, framing in the movie Drive, David Fincher’s use of CGI, and the spectacle of Michael Bay’s films. The duo’s last video dropped over a year ago, and in a post on Medium, they announced that the series has come to an end.

There aren’t any fully self-driving cars available to buy today, but there are plenty of vehicles with autonomous features. One of them is the 2018 Cadillac CT6 with Super Cruise, an advanced driver-assist system that GM claims rivals Tesla’s Autopilot. When driving on divided highways, Super Cruise allows Cadillac owners to take their hands off the steering wheel and their feet off the pedals. It’s about as close to self-driving as it gets with a production vehicle today.

In April, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young announced that he was shifting gears on his high-fidelity audio project, Pono. What began as a music player and online music store would become a high-quality streaming service, Xstream. This week, Young not only released his thirty-ninth studio album, The Visitor, he also launched the Neil Young Archive, a site that contains almost his entire back catalog using the service, which visitors can listen to in a high quality format.

When science fiction jumped from pulp magazines to full books during the mass-market paperback revolution of the 1950s, publisher Ace Books used an innovative new format known as Tête-bêche. It packaged two novels back to back, so readers could finish one, flip the book over, and start the next. A number of prominent science fiction novelists launched their careers on the backs of these little books, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and Philip K. Dick.

If you’ve ever dreamt of turning your kayak into a musical-cum-scientific instrument, now you can — thanks to a how-to-manual published this week. For the low cost of $1133 (boat not included), your Sonic Kayak can record underwater goings-on with submerged sensors, and broadcast a soothing tune from speakers attached to its prow. The only problem? There’s no headphone jack.

In the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands, around seven and a half acres of forest are lit up at night by more than a thousand pulsating red lights. The lights can communicate with each other, and are meant to behave like a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a single “digital organism.”

Niantic may be best-known for the massive hit Pokémon Go, but for its next major release the studio is going back to the beginning. Today the developer revealed that it’s working on a significant update to its debut augmented reality game, Ingress. Called Ingress Prime, the overhauled version of the game will be launching next year, and will change virtually every aspect of the experience — from the art, design, and narrative, to the underlying technology that powers it. “This game was the place... Читать дальше...

In November, word broke that Disney and 21st Century Fox had begun to discuss the possibility of Disney acquiring most of Fox’s film and television assets, but just as quickly, it became clear that those discussions had since ended. Now, it seems as though those talks are back on, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.