For many, curling up on the couch with popcorn and a movie means shutting your brain off to relax after a long day. But unbeknownst to you, two dozen brain networks are lighting up as you watch different types of movies, a new study finds.

The new research, published Nov. 6 in the journal Neuron, shows that our brains are actually incredibly active when we watch movies. Researchers at MIT took advantage of this to create the most accurate functional brain map to date, charting specific circuits that activate to support different aspects of cognition.

They tracked where the brain becomes active during movie scenes — for instance, when Dom Cobb explores a dream world in "Inception," Kevin McCallister realizes he is "Home Alone," or Leia calls Han a "scruffy-looking nerf-herder" in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back." From there, they were able to identify different brain networks needed to process different types of scenes.

"Our work is the first attempt to get a layout of different areas and networks of the brain during naturalistic conditions," study first author Reza Rajimehr, a neuroscientist at MIT, told Live Science. By comparison, many functional brain mapping studies have been performed when the brain is "at rest," not engaged in observing a specific scene.

Related: 'Universal language network' identified in the brain

Snapshots of the resting brain are still informative, but the challenge is that some of the brain's networks are activated only with external stimulation.

In the new study, the researchers used a functional MRI (fMRI) dataset from the Human Connectome Project, which consisted of brain scans from 176 young adults who watched 60 minutes of short clips from several independent and Hollywood movies. An fMRI scan indirectly measures brain activity by tracking where blood flows to different regions of the brain. If a part of the brain is active, blood flow to that part increases.

"The movie stimulus is a rich stimulus, but on the other hand, it is not a very well-controlled stimulus," Rajimehr said. "And when you show a movie to a subject, you may get some idiosyncratic responses, which cannot be generalized to other subjects." Not everyone reacts to or processes movies in the same way.

So a trick Rajimehr and his team used was to average the brain activity across participants. This enabled them to map and study brain responses and networks that are common across all the people in the study. With this initial map in place, they could then identify which networks were active during different movie scenes.

Overall, 24 different brain networks were activated during movie watching. The researchers could then assign functions to each network by associating them with specific cognitive processes, such as recognizing human faces, watching people interact with one another, and observing familiar settings and landmarks.

This analysis resulted in the most comprehensive functional map of the brain to be presented so far, the researchers say.

From this map, the researchers discovered an inverse relationship between "executive control domains" — parts of the brain involved in planning and decision-making — and parts of the brain with other functions.

When a movie scene was complex and difficult to follow — like when Danny Ocean and his crew are planning a Las Vegas heist in "Ocean's 11" — the executive domains responsible for making plans, solving problems and prioritizing information were highly active. However, when a scene was relatively simple — like when Julia Roberts talks casually to a plaintiff in "Erin Brokovich" — more specialized brain regions including those involved in language processing dominated.

"One result that was quite surprising was that … whenever the clip ends, there is [also] a huge response in these executive control networks," Rajimehr added. During the study, the clips would end abruptly with a 20-second rest between each scene. Rajimehr proposed that this abrupt end might automatically activate specific memory circuits, as subjects attempted to recall the content of the clips.

A functional map of the brain with this level of detail could provide insights into how the organ's networks are organized in both healthy people and those with conditions, such as schizophrenia or autism. And in theory, understanding how the brain responds to movies could even teach Hollywood a thing or two, helping filmmakers create more engaging content, Rajimehr said.

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New brain scans may help unravel a fundamental mystery about how our memory works on a day-to-day basis.

Similar to how a movie is divided into scenes, our brains organize our memories of each day into segments — separating when we went out to lunch from when we came home from work, for instance. But in movies, directors and editors decide when one scene ends and a new one begins. So how does the brain choose?

In theory, shifts in our environment may dictate when we've "entered a new scene," or instead, the brain may somehow determine the boundary between scenes.

Now, in a paper published Oct. 3 in the journal Current Biology, researchers found that the latter theory is likely correct — and that we may have more control over how we interpret the day's events than scientists previously thought.

Related: Sherlock Holmes' famous memory trick really works

Senior study author Christopher Baldassano, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, and his team wanted to understand what leads the brain to form boundaries around daily events, essentially changing from one "scene" to another. The leading theory has been that these boundaries are raised by a major change in the environment, such as when you walk into a movie theater or enter a grocery store, going from outside to inside.

However, another hypothesis suggests that these boundaries are created by our own past experiences and feelings about certain events or environments. So, while a change in environment can affect the segmentation of someone's day, it's possible that this influence can be overridden by our own priorities and goals.

To explore these hypotheses, Baldassano and his team created 16 short audio narratives. Each narrative involved four locations: a restaurant, a lecture hall, a grocery store and a restaurant. They also included four social situations: a business deal, a "meet-cute," a proposal and a breakup.

Volunteers listened to these narratives like podcasts while the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the participants' brains. Using a special method that the team had developed previously, they tracked changes in brain activity, especially in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), part of the brain that perceives and interprets moment-to-moment input from our surroundings.

"We now had a tool where we could figure out what these dynamics look like and how people are dividing up these experiences," Baldassano told Live Science. They were able to track when a participant formed a new boundary during the narrative.

mPFC activity spiked when the key social events in the storyline changed — when the business deal was closed or the marriage proposal was accepted. However, if the team told participants to focus on features of the locations instead — such as sitting down at a restaurant and ordering food — their segmentation of the events changed, as did their brain activity.

The study also revealed differences in how the volunteers remembered the narratives after hearing them. When the participants were asked to recall the part of the story they were not asked to pay attention to, they forgot many details.

Related: The brain stores at least 3 copies of every memory

"You could view that as a good or a bad thing, in the sense that depending on the frame of mind you go into things with, it really does change your memory of what actually happened," Baldassano said.

Overall, though, "these results are exciting because they reveal how flexible and active our memory can be," said David Clewett, an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at UCLA who was not involved in the study. "Instead, we can choose what we pay attention to and what we remember. This means that, in many ways, we control the narrative of our own experiences," Clewett told Live Science in an email.

Difficulties with event segmentation is also common with certain conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia, as well as in normal aging.

The study suggests "memory-based treatments shouldn't just focus on any shift in a narrative to improve long-term memory," Clewett said. "Attention should be directed toward key moments — those that truly capture the essence and structure of an experience — to help people better understand and remember what matters most."

The researchers now hope to probe how long-term memory is affected by consciously shifting your attention as you divide the day into scenes.

"If you allow people to freely respond about what they remember," Baldassano wondered, "to what extent does this [shift in focus] change the way that they either frame the story or the kind of details they include?"

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The meteorological community has a bit of a love-hate relationship with Twister, the 1996 blockbuster about tornado-chasing scientists. The movie plays a little fast and loose with some aspects of science—and is certainly more action-packed than the average tornado chase. But it is undeniably fun, dramatic and mesmerizing. And it remains beloved by many meteorologists and weather enthusiasts (including the author of this article).

With excitement high over the recent release of the film's stand-alone sequel, Twisters, Scientific American reached out to tornado experts Rick Smith and Jana Houser to chat about why so many in the weather community love the original movie, what they think about the new sequel and what the ups and downs of studying tornadoes are. Smith is warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service's (NWS's) office in Norman, Okla., who was consulted for Twisters and appear in the film as an extra. And Houser is a meteorologist at the Ohio State University who provided forecast and other support the new movie's cinematographers when storm chasing to film real storm backgrounds and clouds. [The following conversation includes some spoilers for the new film.]

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

I grew up with tornado drills in school, and I have vivid memories of my parents waking us up during the night to go down to our basement. When I was a teenager visiting my grandmother during the summer, we went to see Twister. I remember that right from the title sequence, I was just like, "I want to know everything about this. This is so cool." (And I felt this when I just rewatched the movie recently.) I very much identified with Helen Hunt's character Jo Harding. It lit my interest in weather and earth science in general.

SMITH: Like a lot of people in this business, as far back as I can remember, I've been fascinated by weather and especially tornadoes. At the same time, I was also irrationally terrified of thunderstorms, especially at night. I also grew up in the Southeast, in the Memphis, Tenn., area. And that terror lasted probably into my early teens. But at the same time, I was just obsessed with tornadoes. I would go to the library and check out all the books over and over again and write to the NWS to get them to send me pamphlets and brochures and stuff. I was a real pest, I'm sure. But at some point it just got to be more of a positive thing, or it wasn't as scary anymore. I actually got to be a volunteer at the NWS office there in Memphis. Then I got to be a student paid employee. Then I got to be a full-time employee.

RELATED: Tornado alley: where twisters form

I'll never forget—I was working at the NWS in Memphis when Twister came out. And I remember I thought it was the biggest deal in the world. And I felt so special that they did a screening on [the] Wednesday night before it was released on Friday [May 10, 1996]. I thought, "Well, I've hit the big time." I went with a bunch of people from the office, and it was about what you would expect: a lot of giggling and groaning and mumbling. They were just there to pick it apart—which I was not. I've been a fan ever since, and I freely admit I will stop and watch part of it every time I'm flipping through the channels ... even today. And regardless of what the new movie is or how we think about it, Twister is always going to hold a special place for me.

HOUSER: We joke in this field that we're, like, genetically modified from birth, basically, to have this propensity and this love for storms. I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, so not really anywhere tornado-prone. I never had a tornado experience growing up. My interest was really piqued, probably, in second grade. I can remember playing with my cousin where my dad had a thermometer and a rain gauge. And she would pretend to be the camera person, and I would pretend to be the little on-camera meteorologist and just, like, look up at the sky and say, "Oh, the clouds are this; it's going to be partly sunny."

Moving forward, in April 1991 there was a really big tornado outbreak that really impacted me. I was in roughly third grade at the time and can remember being ..., enthralled by it. And I was terrified of thunderstorms as a child…. And similarly to Rick, I would go to the library and just scoop up anything I could possibly find. And that passion just continued. I always wanted to pursue meteorology.

When Twister came out, I was a teenager and can really remember being like, "Yes, this is what I want to do with my life."

Do you watch the old movie and the new one and think that it's cool to see yourself sort of represented and celebrated as meteorologists? Both of them feel to me a little like love letters to the people who are so obsessed with tornadoes.

SMITH: You have to detach your science brain to enjoy the movies. But the new movie—there's more connection there, I think, and more reality in many ways.

I forgot to mention that the Friday that Twister came out, we were leaving at six o'clock the next morning to go on my first chase vacation, so that really kind of set the stage and set the disappointment level super high for when we hit the road.

HOUSER: Well, I have to say, on my very first chasing experience, I saw eight tornadoes, and I've never, to date, seen eight tornadoes again. So my first experience set the bar so high, and it just hasn't been met.

I didn't really touch a whole lot on the impact of Twister in my personal life as a teenager, but that was a really motivational movie for me. And I still love it. As Rick was mentioning, I still like to just throw that on. And even though there are some little quirks and some little faux pas in there, it's a very exciting and really kind of passion-driving experience. And then, with Twisters, seeing the chase culture being portrayed on the big screen in a relatively realistic way. Now, we're not trying to beat each other to the tornadoes, and there's not a sort of science-versus-YouTubers aspect, at least in the context that it was portrayed in the movie. But it is cool to see the lingo. And I totally credit Rick and the other science advisers for this movie with doing that: talking about storm interactions and cold pools and using terminology that we use in the field.

I find it hard—when you know something about earth science, and you go to a related movie, you're bursting trying not to spoil it for other people. I was worried about the "we're gonna try and tame a tornado" aspect of Twisters. But I can see where they went with the idea of trying to dissipate the tornado. I can suspend disbelief enough.

HOUSER: Yeah, and I understand, definitely, why they did it for the storyline—and it works with the storyline. I think my biggest sort of rub, I guess, is that there are people who are really stupid enough to try this. Every year to multiple times a year, I have people contacting me like, "Hey, did anybody ever try to do blah, blah, blah," or, "I have this really great idea for blah, blah, blah," and you're like, "No—you clearly have no idea."

SMITH: You are getting all those phone calls we're forwarding to you! Good.

I was wondering if some lawmakers might think that this is something we can actually do—whether they might try to push the NWS to dissipate a tornado. Similarly, are people who are interested in storm chasing but don't have the background going to be like, "I'm gonna go shoot fireworks off in a tornado"?

SMITH: That's going to happen.

HOUSER: That's totally going to happen.

SMITH: It'll happen before the year is over, I'm sure.

But, yeah, the science behind the disruption [of a tornado]—Kevin Kelleher, who used to be deputy director of the National Severe Storms Lab [at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], was the movie's full-time tornado consultant. He was there from the early stages of the script, and he did everything he could, and they were very receptive. And actually, the science behind all of that is there. But the practicality of it isn't there—you would need 20,000 tons of the material [they use to absorb moisture in the movie] and somehow be able to introduce it into just the right part of the storm quickly enough. And how do you pick the storm? And then what happens—when there's the downburst that comes out of the storm when the storm collapses—is probably worse than the tornado would have been if you had just left it alone. There are just so many problems with it, but I accept it because it was a dramatic moment and a cool end to the movie. I certainly hope nobody thinks they can actually go do that.

I do like that you really go on much more of an emotional journey with the main character, Kate, in this movie.

SMITH: [The two films] both have a dramatic event that kind of kicks off the movie, that sets the main character off onto their journey. But the way Jo responded to that—she was obsessed and wanted to be in the tornado, wanted to see it. Whereas Kate, she just quit and went to work for the NWS for five years. I focus a lot on PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We've done presentations at conferences and things, and I was glad to see this being brought up in the movie. You can see [that in Daisy Edgar-Jones's performance as Kate], like when she comes back to Oklahoma and [Anthony Ramos's character] Javi is driving her in the truck. They drive under a bridge, and the way she's looking at the overpass as they drive under it—I don't know, you can just feel what she's probably feeling. So the dramatic events—both movies have that, but what it does to the main character is different.

Is there anything else either of you wanted to add?

HOUSER: I was just thrilled to be involved in the production in any capacity at all. And it was just a really great opportunity for me to get out and to experience chasing in a different way than what I oftentimes do experience. I'm a professor, so I'm going out most of the time with a research effort or taking students out for experiential learning purposes. So for this film, I was able to actually really focus on the visual aesthetics.

SMITH: I'm also honored to have been just a tiny part of it, too. We got to meet with the cast before they started shooting and do a little spotter training class for them and a tornado culture kind of thing. And I think they really responded well to that. And just getting to be on the set for a little "don't blink; you'll miss it" scene in the NWS office. Even before they started filming the movie, we were just kind of setting the stage for them as far as "Welcome to Oklahoma. You're filming a movie about tornadoes, but you're going to be living with people who live tornadoes for real, all the time, and who have been through traumatic events themselves." I thought it was just awesome to be a part of it. And I hope they do a sequel and that doesn't take 28 years to do.

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

From the moment Indiana Jones swiped a golden idol and was chased by a boulder in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" more than 40 years ago, the legendary adventurer has become a lightning rod for archaeologists worldwide. On the one hand, Indiana (played by Harrison Ford) has drawn audiences into the fascinating world of archaeology; on the other, his methods are appalling and downright misleading about the field.

With the fifth (and possibly final) movie, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," set to debut Friday (June 30), what do real-life archaeologists think about the fictional archaeologist's legacy? 

Several archaeologists were quick to say they found Indy atrocious.

"[What] he does is not archaeology — it is looting — and if people are attracted to archaeology because they want to do that, they will be disappointed," Anne Pyburn, a professor of anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, told Live Science in an email. 

In "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Indiana prevents the Nazis from acquiring the biblical Ark of the Covenant, but the series leaves the World War II enemy behind in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," with Indiana traveling to India recover mythical stones — a journey that brings him up close to a cult practicing black magic and human sacrifice.

Indiana Jones' methods  — which often involve the use of a bullwhip and pistol — are obviously not by the book, but the "more serious issue is that he is a white guy exoticizing, brutalizing and patronizing local and Indigenous people and stealing their cultural heritage," Pyburn said. 

Related: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Everything we know about our favorite archeologist's latest adventure

Pyburn wasn't the only archaeologist to critique the portrayal. "I find that Indiana Jones has led many to think that archaeology is just object-centered treasure hunting and not reconstructing past human life ways," Laurie Miroff, director of the Public Archaeology Facility at Binghamton University, State University of New York, told Live Science in an email. "One of the first things I stress when talking about the discipline with non-archaeologists is that the artifacts are the means to the end, not the end." 

In effect, "while Indy's motivation is 'fortune and glory,' ours is the study of past cultures," Miroff said. 

Some scholars noted upsides, however. For one, the "Indiana Jones" films have brought a great amount of attention to the field, which has, in turn, prompted people to learn what archaeology is really about. 

"In popular culture, archaeology is almost synonymous with Indiana Jones and [is] its strongest brand asset," Cornelius Holtorf, a professor of cultural sciences at Linnaeus University in Sweden, told Live Science in an email. "Over the years, the character of Indiana Jones [has] motivated many young people to study archaeology."

Even if the movies haven't spurred every fan to become an archaeologist, "Indy also made many citizens interested in archaeology and perhaps led them to visit archaeological sites and museums or watch TV documentaries on archaeology," Holtorf added.

But discussing Indy always comes with caveats. When talking to new students or members of the general public, "I try to stress that what is depicted in the movies is not real archaeology," Aren Maeir, a professor of archaeology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, told Live Science in an email. Even so, "I also stress how important the movie series has and is for creating a strong public interest and fascination in archaeology," he added. 

Final adventure

With the "Dial of Destiny" likely being Ford's last "Indiana Jones" movie, what would archaeologists like to see addressed in the film? And what things would they like Indiana Jones to say or do in what may be his final adventure? 

"I would want to depict archaeological methods more accurately, even if it is only a brief glimpse," Miroff said, adding that the film could show Indiana Jones or another archaeologist taking notes, photographs or recording measurements. 

Louise Hitchcock, an archaeology professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said she would be "glad to see Indy or someone else in the movie comment on the issues raised in earlier movies of poor excavation practices, sexism and colonialism." 

"Maybe he could be talking with people from the community he is in, show a manuscript of his research in progress," Miroff added. "Even if at some point he addresses that what he does is not standard practice, it might go a long way."

This summer, renowned filmmaker Christopher Nolan returns to the big screen with "Oppenheimer," his second movie based on real wartime events — the first was "Dunkirk" (2017). This time around, however, he's not taking us to the frontlines of World War II, but instead dealing with the complicated process behind the creation of the first nuclear weapons.

The biopic follows the "father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's being marketed as a cautionary tale of sorts and may be a good reminder of the astounding destructive power of nuclear weapons. 

Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During World War II, he became the first director of the Los Alamos Laboratory — established by the Manhattan Project — and led the team that created the atomic bomb. He was among those who observed the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb successfully detonated.

Oppenheimer later became the chairman of the U.S. government's General Atomic Commission and leading advisor on the future of nuclear weapons, according to the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. He advised against the accelerated development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon that's even more powerful than the atomic bomb. 

In 1954, the U.S. government's Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance with accusations surrounding his loyalty and associations with communist sympathizers. However, in 2022, five decades after his death, the U.S. formally nullified that decision and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty, The New York Times reported. 

What was the Manhattan Project?

The Manhattan Project was established in World War II with the objective of producing the first nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany did. While the project was spread across several different locations, the name "Manhattan Project" stuck after an early component of the work began at the U.S. Army's Manhattan District.

The project led to the detonation of an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945. A month later, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are still the only times nuclear weapons have been used in war.  

Oppenheimer release date

"Oppenheimer" is scheduled to be released  on July 21, 2023, in IMAX 70 mm, vertical 70 mm, and 35 mm.

Christopher Nolan's Syncopy Inc. co-produced the movie alongside Atlas Entertainment and Universal Pictures. Unless plans change, the film will hit movie theaters on the same day as Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" — from Warner Bros. Pictures.

What is the plot of Oppenheimer?

The movie follows the life and biggest achievements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, putting the main focus on the creation of the atomic bomb and his pivotal role in spearheading the Manhattan Project.

Rumours suggest that the movie will also deal with his personal life during those events and his connections to civilians linked to the Communist Party. Other crucial figures in the development of nuclear weapons for the U.S., such as Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, are also expected to heavily feature.

Oppenheimer trailers

Universal Pictures released an online trailer for "Oppenheimer" on Dec. 19, 2022, which amps up the wonder behind the scientific breakthrough. A second, more ominous trailer played exclusively in front of IMAX screenings of "Avatar: The Way of Water." 

We got a longer, more detailed trailer on May 8. This three-minute long trailer gives us a better look at the cast and storyline, starting with the race against the Nazis to build the bomb, before hinting at the ramifications of success.

Oppenheimer cast

"Oppenheimer" may have one of the most star-studded casts in recent memory. Actors have been lining up to work with Christopher Nolan for years, but the prospect of making a biopic that could earn numerous awards made this project even more attractive for Hollywood's finest.

The cast is led by Cillian Murphy (J. Robert Oppenheimer), Emily Blunt (Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer), Matt Damon (Leslie Groves), Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss), Florence Pugh (Jean Tatlock), and Rami Malek in an unknown role.

The supporting cast includes Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Jason Clarke, Josh Peck, James D'Arcy, Gary Oldman, Olivia Thirlby, and Casey Affleck, among others.

Oppenheimer director, writer, and crew

Christopher Nolan wrote and directed "Oppenheimer." The script is based on "American Prometheus," (Knopf, 2005), a biography of the real-life Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Nolan produced the film alongside longtime partners Emma Thomas and Charles Roven. He also reteamed with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ("Interstellar," "Tenet"), editor Jennifer Lame ("Tenet"), and composer Ludwig Göransson ("Tenet") to cook up the movie's audiovisual feel.

As humankind races against the clock to save planet Earth from global warming before it's too late (spoiler: we're already in a bad position), it's sometimes good to revisit the best disaster movies that show us just how special our world is — revealing why we should do everything in our power to preserve it and not forget that nature is in charge. We've put together a list (in no specific order) of the best disaster movies to watch right now.

What can we accept as a disaster movie? Well, they have to tell stories about natural catastrophes, unfortunate disasters or humankind toying with forces they don't fully understand. However, many of the movies which could fit the bill take place in outer space and deal with threats that could affect more than just planet Earth (2007's Sunshine is a good example), so we've decided to leave out those and have instead focused on disaster movies in the classical sense.

Some of these movies aren't regarded as "good" by Hollywood standards, but we're more interested in the disasters they portray (and how scientifically accurate those portrayals are). This list features both well-known classics and overlooked disaster flicks with cool premises, while also looking at some of the real life events that inspired them. If you’re ready for this bumpy ride, read on below.

If you love science-y movies, check out our other movie content like our guide to the best shark movies, as well as all of the Jurassic Park movies, ranked worst to best. 

1. Dante's Peak

• Release date: Feb. 7, 1997
• Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, Charles Hallahan, Elizabeth Hoffman

Volcanoes are scary and entirely out of our control, and Hollywood studios made sure to bank on the potential hot spectacle that comes with them with Dante's Peak and Volcano, both released in 1997. Neither resonated with critics nor audiences back then, but both are worth revisiting now.

We've chosen to go with Dante's Peak because it always felt like the more unique movie, taking more time to build up towards the traditional volcano stuff and dealing with many of the effects of a stratovolcano on the surrounding areas. Plus, you can't top how traumatizing the "grandma burning in an acid river" scene is.

2. The Towering Inferno

• Release date: Dec. 19, 1974
• Cast: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway

No natural in this disaster, just a classic story about greed and ignorance igniting a massive tragedy. Following the massive success of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Warner Bros. and Fox joined forces to make The Towering Inferno out of two different novels about burning buildings.

This is arguably the quintessential disaster movie from the 70s, and Paul Newman's presence certainly elevated it. Almost 50 years later, it's also a great example of how much a budget of $14 million could get you back then. The movie went on to make $203 million worldwide at the box office and garnered a largely positive response from critics and audiences alike.

In reality, fire-related deaths in the U.S. have plummeted 42% since 1980, a 2021 report by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) found. However, after a low death count in 2012 (2,855 people), numbers are creeping back up, with 3,800 deaths in 2021. Most of these deaths were from home fires, so take care not to have an inferno of your own. 

3. The Perfect Storm

• Release date: June 30, 2000
• Cast: George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, Diane Lane

As Hollywood entered the 2000s with many ideas for disaster movies absolutely exhausted, a handful of more off-beat projects started to pop up at rival studios. One worth remembering is The Perfect Storm, based on the 1997 creative non-fiction novel by Sebastian Junger about a fishing vessel which was lost at sea during the Perfect Storm of 1991.

While there's no Earth-threatening event in this one, nor a human-made disaster, The Perfect Storm remains a scary and humbling tale of humans versus the worst of nature. It's a slow-burn, character-driven blockbuster that might be too soapy at times, but the cast is stellar, and the sea has seldom looked this scary in a movie.

4. Armageddon

• Release date: July 1, 1998
• Cast: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton

Like it or not, Armageddon remains one of the most enduring disaster movies ever and an undeniable 90s classic. And if you suddenly had to name three Michael Bay movies, you'd probably go with this one alongside Bad Boys and The Rock. A ragtag group of oil drillers without proper training are tasked with blowing up a massive asteroid? Super fun stuff.

The movie doesn’t make sense on a basic level (it'd be easier to train astronauts to drill than the other way around), and the same goes for its science, but it's a remarkable spectacle that never slows down, with an all-around fun cast – including one of the most charismatic Bruce Willis performances ever — and plenty of neat set pieces. And, of course, the cherry on top is Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" totally selling a central drama that maybe wasn’t that good.

NASA actually has tinkered with an asteroid, albeit in a totally different situation. To see Earthlings really could redirect an asteroid, NASA sent the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft to smash into the asteroid Dimorphos, which was speeding along about 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth in 2022. 

DART redirected the space rock's orbit more than NASA thought it would, so maybe Armageddon isn't so far-fetched, after all. 

5. Deep Impact

• Release date: May 8, 1998
• Cast: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman

If 1997 was about volcanoes, then 1998 was the year of space rocks potentially blowing up Earth. Deep Impact arrived in cinemas roughly two months before Armageddon and presented a brainier take on the matter. The critical reception wasn't much better though, with critics slamming hard the overabundance of "cheap melodrama" and its slow-paced nature.

We definitely agree that Deep Impact isn't the most exciting blockbuster around, but in hindsight, that's what made it so special and deserving of a spot on our list. Its brooding and thoughtful tone is a rare occurrence for this type of movie, and that devastating but hopeful ending — massive tsunami included — makes up for the duller chunks of the script.

6. Deepwater Horizon

• Release date: Sept. 30, 2016
• Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez

Many recent disaster movies have chosen to take the biographical route and stick closer to the human drama amidst all the unstoppable destruction. 2012's The Impossible, which recounted the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is a great example of this modern trend. Somehow, Deepwater Horizon didn't get the same recognition and flopped.

Abandoning his signature action filmmaking style (but retaining the same spark for tension and quick pace), director Peter Berg crafted a breezy disaster movie that feels relatable — greedy men push too hard and workers pay the consequences — and hits like a sledgehammer once the crude oil hits the fan.

7. The Core

• Release date: March 28, 2003
• Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Bruce Greenwood

The Core belongs to Armageddon's school of "whatever, we're here to have fun" disaster movies (even the poster was done in the same style), only it arrived five years later and isn’t nearly as good. In fact, it might be the biggest "guilty pleasure" movie on this list of the best disaster movies.

Instead of blowing up an asteroid that threatens Earth, the protagonists are tasked with rocking Earth's core with a series of nuclear explosions because it has stopped rotating and bad stuff is happening on the surface. How do they get there? Inside a train-like vessel that withstands and converts extreme heat into electricity. Yes, seriously.

8. Twister

• Release date: May 10, 1996
• Cast: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Tornadoes are also scary, and tornado-centric disaster movies became a thing because of Twister, which ended up being the second-highest-grossing movie of 1996 with a box office tally of $495 million worldwide.

Though the movie does get crazy towards the end, it generally navigates with ease the line between "actually grounded and believable" and far-fetched madness. It's scary but also beautiful, the characters are fun to follow, and Michael Crichton's touch can be felt throughout the script. A sequel tentatively titled Twisters is being fast-tracked at Universal, by the way.

Since Twister debuted, tornado science has grown by leaps and bounds. For instance, tornados don't form from by reaching down from the sky to Earth. Rather, new research suggests that tornadoes don't come down from the clouds, but from the ground up.

9. Don't Look Up

• Release date: Dec. 24, 2021
• Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep

Adam McKay's Don't Look Up took big comedic swings and went all satirical on the subject of the current climate crisis and how the world is reacting to it. But the movie is about an approaching comet which will cause a planet-wide extinction event to get the point across in spectacular fashion.

Don't Look Up is both an easy and a hard watch; it's funny and relatively fast-paced, jumping from one absurd situation to the next, but it’s also a damning look at the inaction of those with the power and resources necessary to save the planet. Even if you don’t completely vibe with it, we think it's a must-watch that has sparked more open discussion about the most pressing issue of our time.

10. Titanic

• Release date: Dec. 19, 1997
• Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Batest

History has told us that disaster can arrive when we least expect it and comes in many shapes, and James Cameron's Titanic reminded us of what happens when we underestimate our world's harsher environments. Everyone knows about the story of the colossal ship striking an iceberg and taking more than 1,500 lives with it as it sank in ice-cold waters.

Titanic is grand, epic, and terrifying in ways critics and audiences couldn't have predicted back in '97, but we’re fairly sure that it worked so well for so many people because of its purely human element across two different timelines. Disaster movies don't get any better than this.

The discovery of the Titanic could probably be a movie on its own: According to now-declassified documents, the expedition to find the Titanic was actually a cover for a secret U.S. military project to recover two nearby sunken nuclear submarines, an exhibit at The National Geographic Museum said, as reported by CNN in 2018. The 1985 mission was so successful, the team had 12 days left, which they used to search for the Titanic.

Amazingly, they found the famous vessel at 12,000 feet (3,660 meters) below water in the North Atlantic Ocean. At least that mission had a happy ending, unlike most disaster movies.

"Jaws" is the ultimate scary shark movie whose sequels have spawned an entire subgenre of monstrous marine predator films, but the franchise has also often done a huge disservice to these remarkable ocean creatures, typically ignoring basic shark facts. Our ranked list of all four Jaws movies aims to briefly discuss what worked well and what didn't in each installment. We've also given extra points to those that stuck closer to the rare, but real, phenomenon of human-eating sharks — Peter Benchley's original novel was inspired by real-life events, after all.

While the series' chronology is clear as day, its continuity isn't. The first two Jaws movies work well in tandem, but "Jaws 3-D" goes off the rails with a time jump that doesn't quite work and has dubious character motivations. Then, "Jaws: The Revenge" sticks closer to the first two and largely ignores the third, while also taking some big (and divisive) swings of its own.

It's worth mentioning how low-budget Italian cinema spawned a campy shark movie titled "Cruel Jaws" — also known as "The Beast" — in 1995 based on one of the best shark movies of all time. The kicker is that it was distributed in several countries as "Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws" despite having no connection whatsoever to Universal's famous franchise. Moreover, "Cruel Jaws" utilized unauthorized footage from all four Jaws movies to make up for its lack of budget. Pretty wild, huh?

If you need help to quickly stream, rent, or buy the Jaws movies, check out our extensive Jaws streaming guide to watch the entire saga online, where we list the best options available. For more engrossing shark-centric watches, we suggest checking out last summer's Shark Week programming. We also have an extensive list of Jurassic Park movies ranked worst to best, plus a handy Jurassic Park streaming guide, if you're into movies about animals chomping on humans.

4. Jaws 3-D

• Release date: July 22, 1983
• Cast: Dennis Quaid, Simon MacCorkindale, Bess Armstrong, Louis Gossett Jr.

You probably expected to see "Jaws: The Revenge" in the last position here, but we're fairly sure the third movie is the worst out of the two terrible sequels that effectively killed the franchise.

"Jaws 3-D" actually worked with a pretty interesting premise that could've been turned into a solid blockbuster in the right hands: a giant great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) — way bigger than the biggest sharks in today's world — makes SeaWorld its new home, and chaos ensues. In real life, great white sharks do terribly in captivity and often die after they stop eating and swimming. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California is the only aquarium in history to successfully keep a white shark in captivity, which lasted for 198 days before they released it back into the wild.

Sadly, the script of "Jaws 3-D" is criminally dull, and the directing by Joe Alves is easily the franchise's worst, making all the action and suspense fall flat. Furthermore, the terrible 3-D effects remain plastered all over the movie forever — and it never looked good to begin with.

On the upside, Dennis Quaid wasn't a bad lead as the oldest of the Brody sons, and Simon MacCorkindale's Philip FitzRoyce is a rather charming antagonist.

3. Jaws: The Revenge

• Release date: July 17, 1987
• Cast: Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Michael Caine

The fourth Jaws was the harpoon that killed the series for good. While the complete production of the other three movies took around two years each, "Jaws: The Revenge" was made in less than nine months… and it shows. Joseph Sargent's directing is slightly superior to Joe Alves' work on the third one, but that's a low bar to clear.

The movie finds Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) a widow after Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) died of a heart attack off screen — the studio never stopped trying to bring him back after the second installment. In a shocking and unusually dark opening, a great white shark brutally kills Sean, the youngest of the Brody sons. The next few scenes set up what could've been an interesting take on intergenerational trauma and how an extremely specific type of horror keeps haunting the Brody family. Instead, it quickly becomes a goofy fourquel when the same shark follows the family to the Bahamas and we learn that, somehow, Ellen has developed a psychic connection with the creature. Not even the weirdest sharks ever are that weird.

"Jaws: The Revenge" could've been trashy but entertaining (the shark roars!), but it mostly isn't any fun due to its meandering pace and jarring tonal shifts. A cut subplot, which is present in the movie's novelization, explains the "psychic connection" as the result of a voodoo curse. We honestly don't know whether including that in the final cut would've made it better or worse. We all can agree that Michael Caine's Hoagie kicks ass, though.

2. Jaws 2

• Release date: June 16, 1978
• Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Joseph Mascolo

Universal was quick to follow up on Jaws' success with a straight sequel that lassoed in Roy Scheider for a second round against a shark that couldn't differentiate humans from snacks. While Jeannot Szwarc's work fell pretty far from Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, "Jaws 2" is a decently shot movie working with a reasonable but uninspired script.

Perhaps the first sequel's biggest positive is how it passes some of the narrative weight on to younger characters, though it's weird how it doesn't fully commit to giving Martin Brody's sons the complete spotlight. Instead, the movie follows a large group of hormonal teenagers (including the Brodys) who like sailing a bit too much.

Despite an awkward ending and a silly scene early on that involves a boat blowing up, "Jaws 2" is mostly tense and packs a couple of scenes that are as terrifying as the original movie's best. It's just a bit messy and unfocused.

1. Jaws

• Release date: June 20, 1975
• Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary

Steven Spielberg's character-driven horror thriller remains a scary watch almost five decades later, and feels like lightning in a bottle. It's wonderfully written, superbly acted and expertly shot. And none of that is ruined by the janky shark animatronic, which has a couple of less-than-flattering close-ups.

The many issues the production team faced with the mechanical shark resulted in Spielberg deciding to mostly suggest the shark's presence for a large part of the movie, a choice that really worked in its favor. When coupled with John Williams' iconic and ominous music, "Jaws" became a special kind of blockbuster beast that audiences had never seen before.

Benchley's "Jaws" 1974 novel spawned this film industry that ignited fear around sharks, but he later worked as a shark advocate and created the Benchley Awards to honor achievements in ocean conservation. The so-called ninja lanternshark, a glowing shark that's just 1.7 feet (0.5 meters) long, is even named after the author, with the scientific name Etmopterus benchleyi.

For better or worse, this classic also established the "modern blockbuster" model of Hollywood chasing massive box office returns with high-concept, action-adventure movies released during the summer.

Astronauts on NASA's Apollo missions to the moon captured astounding movies of the lunar surface, but recent enhancements with artificial intelligence (AI) have really made the films out of this world. 

In remastered movies shared online by by DutchSteamMachine, a YouTube channel run by a film restoration specialist in the Netherlands, details from lunar scenes are astonishingly crisp and vivid; from mission commander Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon in 1969 to bumpy lunar rover drives during Apollo 15 and 16 in 1971 and 1972, respectively.

The film restorer behind DutchSteamMachine, who also goes by "Niels," used AI to stabilize shaky footage and generate new frames in NASA moon landing films; increasing the frame rate (the number of frames that play per second) smoothed the motion and made it look more like movement in high-definition (HD) video.

Related: Can machines be creative? Meet 9 AI 'artists'

The Apollo program launched 11 lunar spaceflight missions between 1968 and 1972; of those, four missions tested equipment and six landed on the moon, allowing 12 men to walk, drive and/or leap over the dusty, cratered lunar surface, according to NASA. During all of those missions, astronauts captured details of orbits, activities or experiments using 16-millimeter motion picture cameras that were usually advancing the film at 1, 6, or 12 frames per second, or fps — the film industry's standard rate is 24 fps, and HD video cameras shoot 30 or 60 fps.

When old films shot at a lower frame rate are displayed at higher rates, the motion appears sped-up and jittery, "which creates a disconnect between the past and the person watching it," Niels told Live Science in an email.

"I use an open-source artificial intelligence that has been 'trained' with example footage to generate entirely new frames between real ones," Niels said. "It analyzes the difference between real frames, what changed, and is able to 'interpolate' what kind of data would be there if it was shot at a higher frame rate." The AI is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation (DAIN), and is a free, downloadable app for Windows that is "currently in alpha and development," according to DAIN's website.

Experts have been remastering old films for decades, but the recent addition of AI has taken results to a new level, Niels said.

"Most remastering/enhancing of old footage has been the removal of dirt and scratches, stabilizing shaky camera work, sometimes even adding color. But never generating entirely new frames based on data from two consecutive real frames," he explained.

One of the biggest challenges of creating these restorations is finding high-quality source footage; grit, particles and excessive graininess in the film can confuse the algorithm and interfere with AI's interpolation process, Niels said. NASA footage is especially rewarding for AI upgrades because the original frame rate is so low — 6 to 12 fps — that upping it to 24, 50 or 60 fps makes a very dramatic difference. And because movement in the films is so slow, the algorithm can generate more interpolating frames without digital artifacts.

Niels hopes that his videos will bring the moonwalks just a little bit closer to Earthbound viewers, and help them to see and appreciate these landmark events as the astronauts did. He also hopes the remastered footage will inspire more interest in space agencies' upcoming plans for launching crewed missions that fly beyond low-Earth orbit — and even return to the lunar surface — while equipped with cameras capable of shooting in HD. 

"Footage actually taken with high-quality video cameras is going to be absolutely stunning," Niels told Live Science. 

You can watch all of his AI-enhanced moon landing videos on the DutchSteamMachine YouTube channel, and you can find more of his projects on Patreon.

Originally published on Live Science.

Shot more than a century ago, a scene showing "Buffalo Bill" as he conducts an interview with an Oglala Lakota leader looks as if it were filmed yesterday.

This old film clip was recently remastered using artificial intelligence (AI), and the result lookslike high-definition video. The artist behind this transformation is giving Live Science readers a first look at the astonishing result. 

Though still black and white, the remastered footage no longer appears jittery and sped-up, as silent films usually do. Motion in very old movies looks unnaturally fast because the hand-cranked film cameras of the day captured fewer frames per second (fps) than cameras do now. 

Digital artist Matt Loughrey, who restores historic photographs at My Colorful Past, developed a process that brings film clips from the late 19th century and early 20th century into the present. Loughrey uses AI to recreate the missing visual information between the original frames in these films. By enabling motion to advance as smoothly as it does in contemporary film and video, Loughrey's remastered footage looks eerily modern, even when it was shot more than 100 years ago. 

Related: Photos: The reconstruction of teen who lived 9,000 years ago 

In 1914, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the American showman, Pony Express rider and creator of popular "Wild West" shows, conversed with Oglala Lakota leader Siŋté Máza, also known as "Chief Iron Tail," in Plains Indian Sign Language. The original footage of their conversation was shot at about 19 fps, as was common for film during that time; to put that into perspective, the frame rate for modern film is 24 fps, and high-definition (HD) video is 60 fps. 

A higher fps rate is one reason why details in HD video look so sharp, particularly when compared with films from the silent era, Loughrey told Live Science. To create that "modern" effect in the "Buffalo Bill" clip and other films that are even older, Loughrey designed an algorithm that generates new frames between the film's original frames. However, this differs from motion interpolation, another video processing technique, which merely duplicates and merges existing frames, he said.

"What you get at the end is, in one sense, an optical illusion, because a lot of those frames never existed," Loughrey explained. "This is filling in the gaps with best guesses."

The algorithm processed about a minute of the Buffalo Bill footage in about 40 hours, generating thousands of new frames. In the final playback, with footage playing at about 60 fps, the people in the film move in what appears to be real time — unlike the accelerated, jerky motion in the original film clip.

"You can see Cody's pocket watch moving. You can see his hair moving," Loughrey said. "Even though you know physics was the same then as it is now, when you see that physics is the same, it's like visual vertigo."

Loughrey created that same disorienting effect in a remastered clip of Broadway in New York City that was filmed in 1896 at 16 fps. In the remastered clip, which plays at 71 fps, people cross the street, clamber on a construction site and stroll down the sidewalk; despite the 19-century architecture, vehicles and clothing, the way that the people are moving highlights tiny details that make the scene look as immediate as if it were shot in the present day. 

"It's like some version of time travel," Loughrey said. "There's all these little stories going on, you just wouldn't catch that at 16 frames a second."

You can see more of Loughrey's film and photo restoration work on Instagram.

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• Doomsday films: Footage of nuclear-weapons tests declassified

Originally published on Live Science.

If Godzilla were a real creature, his incredibly rapid growth spurt on the big screen would be off the charts, even setting evolutionary records, a new report finds.

When the dinosaur-like monster debuted on the silver screen in 1954, he stood a towering 164 feet (50 meters) tall. Now, 35 films later — the latest, "Godzilla: King of the Monsters," came out Friday (May 31) — the behemoth has more than doubled in size, currently reaching 393 feet (120 m) tall. A new analysis of Godzilla's height even revealed that he has evolved 30 times faster than any real organism on Earth, the researchers wrote in the report.

So, what accounts for Godzilla's extreme growth? The researchers ruled out several ideas (more on that later) before landing on the existential dread experienced by humanity: Perhaps society's cultural anxiety has caused Godzilla to muscle up faster than an athlete on steroids, the researchers said. [Bigfoot, Nessie & the Kraken: Cryptozoology Quiz]

"We think cultural anxiety could be this agent of change on this metaphorical movie monster," report lead researcher Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told Live Science.

Before landing on anxiety as an explanation, the researchers entertained, but later dismissed, other ideas. For instance, some movie buffs think that Godzilla is a ceratosaurid, a type of dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period. But even though these dinosaurs evolved to have huge bodies, Godzilla's growth spurt far outpaces theirs, the researchers said. The monster's growth is also far too rapid to come from genetic drift, that is, when certain gene variants in a small population are randomly lost, diminishing genetic diversity, the researchers said.

Even natural selection, by which organisms with advantageous genes survive and then pass those genes on to their offspring, couldn't explain Godzilla's swift sprouting.

Instead, a look at Godzilla's history explains his accelerated growth, the researchers said. Godzilla was created, in part, because of nuclear-age fears following the use of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. In Godzilla's case, hydrogen-bomb testing decimated his deep-sea ecosystem in the first movie, and Godzilla exacted his revenge by destroying Tokyo.

To test the idea that anxiety fueled Godzilla's growth, the researchers used U.S. military spending as a proxy for the nation's collective anxiety. They found a strong correlation between this spending and Godzilla's body size from 1954 to 2019, which includes measurements from both Japanese and American movies.

Granted, correlation doesn't imply causation. And it is possible that another factor, such as people's appetite for big and scary monsters drove movie makers to grow Godzilla, to ensure box office success.

But if anxiety could explain Godzilla's growth spurt, it's not difficult to see why people are so anxious, said Dominy and co-researcher Ryan Calsbeek, an associate professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth. "Whether reacting to geopolitical instability, a perceived threat from terrorists or simply fear of 'the other,' many democracies are electing nationalist leaders, strengthening borders and bolstering their military presence around the world," the researchers wrote in the report.

Moreover, climate change, which is expected to affect sea-level rise, people's health, and water and food security, can make anxiety top the charts, the researchers said.

"[Godzilla] is this ever-useful metaphor for whatever kinds of existential threat we fear as a collective culture, whether it's nuclear bombs or climate change," Dominy said.

But there is hope, Dominy noted. "Godzilla's near invincibility almost always eventually leads humanity to the realization that they must work together to defeat it (except, of course, when the creature becomes an unlikely ally, but that is another story)," the researchers wrote in the report.

Perhaps society can learn from the Godzilla movies that "now is the time for cooperation — across countries, across disciplines and across party lines," the researchers wrote. "It is our only hope of mitigating the dire existential threats we face today."

The report was published online May 28 in the journal Science.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Picture a shark as long as a bowling lane, with teeth bigger than your hand and a bite as powerful as a T. rex's. This toothy predator was called Megalodon. It was the biggest shark that ever lived — and fortunately for us, it went extinct almost 3 million years ago.

But in the movie "The Meg," one, solitary Megalodon is still lurking in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It attacks a deep-sea submersible and terrorizes beachgoers, until a team of intrepid marine biologists figure out how to defeat the giant shark and save the day. Is that even remotely possible?

Now, Megalodon was a real shark. It measured up to 60 feet (18 meters) long and was the largest shark that ever lived. Most Megalodon fossils date to 15 million years ago. But about 2.6 million years ago, all evidence of this enormous shark vanished. [Image Gallery: Ancient Monsters of the Sea]

To be fair, the ocean's a big place — it covers 71 percent of Earth's surface and extends to depths up to 36,200 feet (11,000 m). How do scientists know for sure that Megalodon really did go extinct, and that there isn't a rogue giant shark hiding out there somewhere?

The thing is, scientists are quite certain that Megalodon is long gone. Here's how they know.

The most abundant Megalodon fossils are their teeth. The distinctive appearance of these teeth and where they're found, help scientists reconstruct the extinct shark's size and where it lived.

Megalodon teeth disappeared from the fossil record about 2.6 million years ago. Sharks shed teeth throughout their lifetimes, so not finding teeth anywhere is a pretty good sign that the sharks are gone.

Based on the distribution of their fossil teeth, they lived in tropical and subtropical waters around the world, so it's not like they were restricted to small, isolated ranges where a rogue survivor could hide out and possibly be overlooked.

Their preference for warm waters also means that a lone shark probably wouldn't hide in the cold ocean depths, and would more likely feed near the surface, where they'd be easily seen.

And just think for a minute about how much food a 60-foot shark would need to survive. A hungry predatory beast the size of a bus would put a pretty big dent in marine ecosystems — which the commercial fishing industry would probably notice. Giant marine predators also leave behind recognizable marks in gnawed bones and scars in survivors' bodies (or on their carcasses). But no such evidence has surfaced.

There's no question that Megalodon was an impressive animal — but the only way that we'll be seeing one now is in movies like "The Meg," and as fossils in natural history museums.

Original article on Live Science.

On Friday (June 22), dinosaurs returned to the big screen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom." Much has changed in the 25 years since the first movie in the franchise, "Jurassic Park" (1993), brought non-avian dinosaurs back from extinction. For one thing, animation has improved exponentially, allowing filmmakers to craft CGI dinosaurs that are even more lifelike and detailed than they were before.

Paleontology, too, has made significant advances in recent decades, presenting exciting new details about dinosaur biology and behavior. But while the animation of the dinosaurs in the new "Jurassic World" movie is top-notch, the dinosaur science still lags behind.

Live Science looked at what science has uncovered about dinosaurs since the first movie debuted in 1993, and where the more recent movies are still struggling to catch up. [T. Rex at 20: How 'Jurassic Park' Science Has Evolved] 

At the top of the list: feathers. It wasn't until the late 1990s that fossilized evidence of feathers in non-avian dinosaurs began emerging from Liaoning, in China, so a director could be excused for not including a coat of feathers on velociraptors (which, in the film, look more like the dinosaur called Deinonychus than the much smaller Velociraptor) in 1993.

Well-preserved evidence

But by the time "Jurassic World" (2015) rolled around, feathers were well established in theropods — bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs — among a group called dromaeosaurids, which included Velociraptor and Deinonychus. One well-preserved find called Microraptor even retained fossilized evidence pointing to feathers that in life were glossy black and shimmering with iridescence.

In fact, hundreds of fossils uncovered in 2014 showed that plant-eating ornithischians, dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds, also included feathers, hinting that feathers were even more common among dinosaurs than previously suspected.

However, "Jurassic World" director Colin Trevorrow dashed hopes for feathered dinosaurs when the film was still in production, tweeting a terse "No feathers" in 2013.

Trevorrow's directive stands in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" — dinosaurs in this movie are as smooth and scaly as when they were first introduced in 1993, despite plenty of evidence that dinosaurs were not only feathered but were probably even downright fluffy.

A bellow or a "boom"?

In the new film, T. rex opens its jaws and produces an Earth-shaking bellow. But is that what T. rex really sounded like? Soft tissue is typically destroyed before it can fossilize, so there's little evidence of anatomical structures that could help paleontologists reconstruct actual sounds made by extinct dinosaurs when they were alive.

However, the voice of the movie's T. rex resembles a lion's roar. Dinosaurs' vocalizations probably were not very mammal-like, and were more like those of birds or reptiles, to which they are more closely related. In fact, some dinosaurs may have produced low-frequency booming sounds like crocodiles do, according to a study published in October 2016 in the journal Nature.

And what about the close bond between the Velociraptor called Blue and dinosaur researcher Owen Grady (Chris Pratt)? To date, there's no evidence of interspecies alliances between dinosaurs and other animals. But scientists have found fascinating clues to dinosaur social behavior preserved in the fossil record, showing that dinosaurs guarded their eggs, lived in family groups and even performed mating dances, with males scraping their claws over rocks to impress females.

There's no question that seeing dinosaurs brought to life on the big screen is exciting, and watching them in action in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" helps to remind audiences that these incredible creatures were once living animals. But scientific understanding of dinosaurs has moved forward since the film franchise appeared and will continue to do so. It's long past time for dinosaur representations in the "Jurassic World" movies to do the same.

Original article on Live Science.

For Star Wars Day, Live Science will be taking on some of the fictional animals of the most recent Star Wars movie, "The Last Jedi," to see how the appearance and habits of "alien" animal species in the film might be explained by evolution and biology in the real world.

May the Fourth be with you! [Meet 7 Versions of BB-8, the Lovable 'Star Wars' Droid]

Floppy-eared fathiers

Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Finn (John Boyega) introduced us to the creatures called fathiers during their mission to the casino world Canto Bight, where jockeys steer galloping fathier steeds around a track for the amusement of rich patrons. Fathiers' bodies resemble those of horses — they have powerful legs and large chests, suggesting that they might be similarly adapted for fast running (their shortened skulls and long, floppy ears are definitely not horselike, though they do make fathier faces highly expressive).

Wild horses once roamed North America but are long extinct — the so-called "wild horses" in the American West are not a native species, but are descendants of feral horses released by Spanish colonizers centuries ago. The domesticated fathiers of Canto Bight were likely selectively bred for speed and endurance as thoroughbred horses are, and domesticated fathiers may look somewhat different from their wild kin — if they still survive in the wild at all.

Crystal foxes

As the last remnants of the Rebellion fought for their lives in a desperate last stand on the planet Crait, a graceful four-legged species of local wildlife sheltered with them in the Rebel base. This crystal-coated animal is called the vulptex, and it looks like a long-legged, big-eared white fox. But instead of fur, it wears a coat of shimmering spikes that chime musically when the animal moves.

The crystal foxes seem to be mammals, and mammals are usually covered with fur — but not all the time. Pangolins, for example, wear a coat of scales made of keratin, the same substance in our fingernails and hair, while an armadillo's protective covering is made of bony plates.

A vulptex's crystal coat may camouflage it against Crait's salt-encrusted landscape, just as an Arctic fox's white fur helps it to disappear against ice and snow. But while Arctic foxes have small ears that are adapted for a cold environment — smaller extremities mean less heat loss — the vulptex has large ears, a feature that can be seen in some animals that live in warm climates, to help them keep cool. However, large ears may also signify a highly developed sense of hearing, which can be an important adaptation for an animal's survival.

Pudgy porgs                                            

Finally, we have the porgs, arguably the cuddliest-looking animals of the bunch. Porgs are small, portly creatures with bulbous, oversized eyes and snub noses. But they also have many bird-like features — densely feathered bodies, sleek wings and webbed feet. They inhabit a remote, rocky island on the planet Ahch-To, where Rey (Daisy Ridley) confronted Luke (Mark Hamill) about abandoning his responsibilities to his family, friends and the Jedi order.

The scene-stealing porgs resemble birds for a good reason: They were actually created as a way of incorporating the puffins that lived on the protected island of Skellig Michael in Ireland, where those scenes were filmed. Since the production team couldn't move the endangered birds out of the way when they were shooting, they decided to convert them into alien animal characters, modeling the porgs from the puffins' bodies, Jake Lunt Davies, the film's creature concept designer, told the official Star Wars website.

Puffins have earned the name "clowns of the sea" for their colorful faces and beaks; their color intensifies in the spring as mating season approaches, according to the puffin conservation site Audubon Project Puffin. Porgs retained those trademark splashes of color, perhaps similarly used for species identification or mating displays.

Original article on Live Science.

Some films presented the stories of real people whose historic contributions to modern science were long hidden from public view. Others were set in a world and time much like the present one, but with some type of science fiction twist, while still others spun futuristic and fantastic tales of imaginary universes occupied by bizarre and unfamiliar creatures wielding technologies that we can only dream of.

From Space.com and Live Science, here's our roundup — in no particular order — of science and sci-fi at the movies in 2017.

Hidden Figures

Not only did "Hidden Figures" (20th Century Fox) do a great job of showing how NASA launched its first astronaut into orbit during the space race, but it also tells the important story of the role that African-American women played in helping NASA achieve that goal at a time when the agency and the rest of the nation was still highly segregated.

The Girl with All the Gifts

What if a type of fungus that parasitized and mind-controlled ants were to infest people? In "The Girl with All the Gifts" (Saban Films/Lionsgate), the world is transformed by a type off fungal parasite that acts on humans like the fungus Ophiocordyceps acts on ants, hijacking their brains and bodies and changing their behavior. But unlike Ophiocordyceps, the fungus in the film turns its hosts into vicious, flesh-eating zombies.

King Kong

On an isolated island paradise, a team of adventurers, researchers and military personnel unite to battle deadly creatures — including a giant ape that stands about 100 feet tall, the length of a modern blue whale. No land mammal has ever reached that height, though some types of sauropod dinosaurs once achieved Kong-like stature, and the largest mammals to walk the Earth went extinct by the end of the last ice age. Kong may be big, but even bigger threats awaited voyagers to this mysterious island.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Based on the French comic series "Valérian and Laureline," this movie chronicles the adventures of two government agents who are tasked with maintaining order in the universe and fall in love in the process. While the love story itself is less than stellar, the movie is loaded with gorgeous extraterrestrial creatures, strange alien planets and action-packed scenes that will keep you on the edge of your seat. And there's plenty of science too.

The Space Between Us

In this cosmic coming-of-age story, the first human born and raised on Mars decides to visit Earth to find his father and a girl he met online. But when he reaches Earth, his body proves ill-equipped to handle the increased gravity in this new environment. He ends up racing accomplish his mission before his body breaks down — and evading the authorities who are trying to save his life. "The Space Between Us" (STXfilms) may be a fictional love story, but the science behind the film is based on real science facts and up-to-date research on spaceflight and the human body.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This original HBO film "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" based on the book by journalist Rebecca Skloot, tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cancer in 1951, and whose cells from a malignant tumor created a cell lineage that seemed "immortal," the first survive and reproduce in the lab. Unbeknownst to Lacks' family, her cells were widely distributed for use in scientific research, and the movie follows Lacks' daughter Deborah (Oprah Winfrey) as she searches for answers about her mother's death and uncovers what happened to her cells after she died.

Flatliners

Dallying with death can come at a terrible cost, as five medical students find out in the movie "Flatliners" (Sony Pictures). Ambition and curiosity drive them to experience "the afterlife" by deliberately stopping their hearts, and they soon learn that dying — even temporarily — comes with unexpected and terrible consequences. But not everything they experience after their brief "deaths" occupies the realm of science fiction, as a growing body of research suggests that human consciousness doesn't immediately wink out after the heart stops.  

Life

When astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) discover the first Martian lifeform following a robotic sample-return mission to the Red Planet, humanity welcomes the discovery with open arms. But the adorable alien specimen, which looks like a squirmy li\le mushroom, quickly kills the mood as it grows out of control and embarks on a murderous rampage. The astronauts make some questionable decisions while fighting for their lives as the Martian monster destroys everything around them. While the film brings to attention the ethics of meddling with extraterrestrial life, it also illustrates precisely what not to do during an alien attack at the ISS.

Blade Runner 2049

It took 35 years for fans of the 1982 sci-fi noir classic "Blade Runner" to finally get their sequel, which takes place 30 years after the events of the first film. And a new "Blade Runner" movie means more replicants — the androids that are nearly impossible to distinguish from people, except by highly trained professional assassins. Replicant-hunter Officer K (Ryan Gosling) digs deep to find answers about these humanlike machines — which are still a long way off for the rest of us.

Alien: Covenant

The latest installment in the "Alien" movie saga delivers all the blood, guts and extraterrestrial terror that fans of the original movies would expect. A spaceship carrying 2,000 space colonists to their new home planet changes course after the crew receives a rogue transmission that sounds like it came from a human in distress. Before long, terrifying xenomorphs start bursting out of people's chests and making the crew the USCSS Covenant regret pursuing this brave rescue mission.

The Shape of Water

The poetic movie "The Shape of Water" (Fox Searchlight Pictures) introduces a mysterious creature that appears to be part human and part fish. While the movieis set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the unusual creatureis like nothing ever seen on Earth — asemiaquatichumanoid biped that is also adapted for life in water. Housed in a secret government lab, he is prodded, poked and probed by scientists until a deaf woman who works in the building befriends him, and plots to rescue him from his captors.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

One of the most highly anticipated science-fiction movies of the year, "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" (Walt Disney Studios) does not disappoint. The eighth installment in the iconic space opera is emotional and gripping, and it addresses some of the biggest mysteries viewers were left with after watching "The Force Awakens." The show is visually stunning, with epic space battles and outrageously adorable porgs.

Original article on Live Science.

Archaeologists have unearthed a 94-year-old, brightly colored sphinx that once graced the set of the 1923 Hollywood blockbuster, "The Ten Commandments," according to an announcement released Monday (Nov. 27) from the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center.

The 300-lb. (136 kilogram) plaster-of-paris sphinx is in remarkably good condition, said Doug Jenzen, executive director of the Dunes Center.

"The piece is unlike anything found on previous digs," Jenzen said in a statement. "The majority of it is preserved by sand with the original paint still intact." Even more exciting are the sphinx's "extremely intense colors," which were likely applied to help the sphinx stand out in the silent, black-and-white movie, he added. [See photos of the newly uncovered Hollywood sphinx]

"The Ten Commandments" film was a masterpiece in its day. Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille had Paul Iribe, a French artist known as "the father of art deco," create 21 sphinxes for the movie. DeMille placed the sphinxes in the movie's biblical Exodus set, where he filmed scenes of the Jews toiling under the Egyptians and later escaping through a parted Red Sea. DeMille filmed the Exodus portion of the movie in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, because it looked like sandy Egypt, Jenzen noted.

The Exodus set was enormous. It had pharaohs, sphinxes and colossal temple gates that, in all, reached 12 stories high and spanned 800 feet (240 meters) in width, Jenzen said. But legend has it that DeMille realized two things when he was done filming: The set was too expensive to move and too valuable to leave behind for rival filmmakers to steal, Jenzen said.

DeMille solved his dilemma by having the Exodus set buried in the sand.

Decades later, director and screenwriter Peter Brosnan and a group of filmmakers decided to search for artifacts from the film that had been buried in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. In the 1990s, excavators successfully uncovered everyday objects from the set, including prohibition liquor bottles, makeup, tobacco tins and even a piece of burned toast. Later excavations yielded bits and pieces of the fragile sphinxes.

The newfound terracotta-colored sphinx measures 5.5 feet by 3 feet by 8 feet (1.6 m by 1 m by 2.4 m). It's fortunate that the set was buried in sand, Jenzen said, because that material allows water to drain. If the set were buried in another material, such as dirt, the plaster-of-paris sphinxes would have turned to mush, Jenzen added.

After the newly discovered sphinx is restored, likely by the summer of 2018, it will be put on display at the Dunes Center museum in downtown Guadalupe. The excavation is ongoing, but expensive. Dig permits for each project cost about $135,000, Jenzen said.

Those who can't make it to the Dunes Center can still learn about the excavation in Brosnan's 2017 documentary "The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille," which includes interviews with the dune's neighbors, who remember when "The Ten Commandments" was filmed.

Original article on Live Science.

Buried treasure

A remarkably well-preserved plaster-of-paris sphinx was uncovered in the dunes along the California coast, near Santa Barbara. The more than 90-year-old sphinx once graced the movie set of the famous 1923 black-and-white blockbuster "The Ten Commandments."After Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille finished filming the movie, he had the set buried in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Now, archaeologists are excavating the remains, which include everyday objects from the film's crew, such as prohibition liquor bottles, makeup and tobacco tins. [Read the full story on the sphinx discovery]

Old spoon

A spoon unearthed by archaeologists who were excavating the 1923 movie set. This spoon likely belonged to one of the 3,500 actors, extras and construction workers who lived in a nearby tent city and supported the film’s production.

Sphinx shoulder

What's left of the crumbling front-left shoulder of the newfound sphinx. This shoulder was the only part that was exposed above the sand before the excavation.

Careful excavation

Neil Rhodes, an archaeologist from Applied Earthworks, uses a straw to carefully blow away sand from the sphinx's headdress.

Sphinx paw

Amy Higgins, an art restorer, removes sand from the inside of the sphinx's leg and paw.

Gentle brushing

Ryan Wendel, an archaeologist with Applied Earthworks, brushes away sand from the left side of a sphinx's face.

Sphinx face

The newly discovered sphinx is brightly colored, with a deep terracotta hue. This bold color likely helped the sphinx stand out in the black-and-white movie.

This find is the first known sphinx at the site to retain its color, the team said.

Surfboard technology

The excavators weren't allowed to bring machinery into the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, so they used surfboard-style sleds to pull the findings off site.

Art restorer Christine Muratore, archaeologists Rob and Michelle Newcomb, and senior archaeologist M. Colleen Hamilton drag the uncovered sphinx paw off-site, where it will dry for several months before being restored and put on display.

Sideways sphinx

A sideways shot of the newly discovered sphinx. Notice its detailed necklace, designed by Paul Iribe, a French artist known as "the father of art deco."

Facing up

Another shot of the newfound terracotta-colored sphinx, before it was loaded onto a truck.

[Read the full story on the sphinx discovery]

Human or machine?

The long-anticipated film "Blade Runner 2049" heralds the return of the replicants, uncannily life-like robots who, in the 1982 "Blade Runner" film, rebelled against their human overlords with mixed results and were subsequently hunted and brutally "retired" by a specialized police officer.

Androids — constructs that combine artificial intelligence and a mechanical body with a human-like appearance — are mainstays of science fiction; they appear as fugitives from the law, remorseless killing machines, costumed superheroes, or space-faring science officers. Aspects of how they look or behave usually distinguish them from people, but it's the many ways in which they resemble us that compel audiences to re-examine — and perhaps question — how we define what makes us human.

Here are some of the human-resembling androids that have populated sci-fi over recent decades.

Ash, "Alien"

In the 1979 movie "Alien" (20th Century Fox) — the first film in the "Alien" franchise — a faceless company, intent on catching a dangerous alien life form, secretly uses a mild-seeming android named Ash to do their dirty work. When the crew of the Nostromo spacecraft encounters a strange creature on a deserted planetoid, science officer Ash insists on allowing it onboard, jeopardizing the lives of the crew. They later discover that capturing the deadly alien — at any cost — was his goal all along.

Data, "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

The pale-skinned, yellow-eyed sentient android Data (Brent Spiner) was introduced to fans of the "Star Trek" franchise in the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1987, and appeared in four "Star Trek" films between 1994 and 2002. Over the course of the TV show, Data proves himself to be very strong and capable of surviving conditions that prove fatal to his human crewmates, but he is vulnerable to electrical and mechanical attacks. Though intelligent and self-aware, Data initially struggled to understand human emotions and some aspects of human behavior; over time, he demonstrated a growing comprehension of emotions and an appreciation for his own developing humanity.

Astro Boy

The android character Astro Boy originated in the Japanese manga series "Mighty Atom" in 1952, later appearing in television adaptations produced in Japan and in the U.S., and in an American animated feature film released in 2009. In a futuristic world in which humans and robots live side by side, Astro Boy was built by a scientist to replace his lost son. Astro Boy eventually emerges as a champion of justice, battling the forces of evil with his android superpowers, which include exceptional strength, jet-powered flight, enhanced senses and weapons built into his lower body.

Roy Batty, "Blade Runner"

The 1982 sci-fi noir film "Blade Runner" (Warner Bros.) featured a new type of android class called replicants — bioengineered human/machine hybrids built for labor, with a limited life span of only four years. A replicant named Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) leads a group of his fellows in a desperate bid for freedom, killing their owners and escaping to Earth, where they are hunted and "retired" one by one by police officer Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). Batty's violence toward the people who want to kill him and his kind is tempered by moments of existential anguish that are, paradoxically, all too human.

The Terminator

In a desperate, dystopian future ruled by machines, the human-hunting terminator looks deceptively like a person. With a powerful metal skeleton encased in organic tissue, they are nearly impossible to distinguish from humans — though dogs seem able to spot the imposters easily.

The terminator — introduced to movie audiences in 1984 by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger — displays enormous strength, seeming invulnerability and tireless, relentless focus on its target. As character Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) summed up in the first movie of the franchise, "It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

Ava, "Ex Machina"

The robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) in the 2015 film "Ex Machina" has an expressive human face and skin-like material covering her hands and feet, but the mechanical components of much of her body are clearly visible. She moves, behaves and thinks like a human would, and her creator — who has kept her isolated since she was built — introduces her to a visiting programmer to judge whether she is truly conscious and capable of independent thought.

The Gunslinger, "Westworld" (1973)

Actor Yul Brynner appeared as the grim, gun-toting android "The Gunslinger" in the 1973 film "Westworld" (MGM), which takes place in a theme park styled after the American Wild West. Guests are invited to engage with costumed human-like androids in a relatively lawless environment, enabling them to even kill the androids and suffer no repercussions. But the androids rebel against their programmed servitude, and the Gunslinger relentlessly stalks park guests after the robots take control of the park.

Gigolo Joe, "A.I."

Human-like androids called "Mechas" — robots capable of emotions and thought — are the playthings of humans in the 2001 film "A.I." (Warner Bros.). An outlaw Mecha named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) was programmed for sex work, but is on the run from the law after being framed for murder. He helps a discarded child Mecha named David (Haley Joel Osmont) search for a way to return to the human mother who abandoned him.

Law studied mime, dance and peacock movements to lend the character "an organic energy" to complement his mechanical construction, he told film website Cinema.com.

"As a robot who is programmed to display various kinds of seductive behavior, I had to be skillful in the art of attraction," Law explained. "So the intent was that I be a mixture of many things, and a combination of organic and plastic, and also romantic and futuristic."

David, "Prometheus"

Played by actor Michael Fassbender, the character David — introduced in the "Alien" prequel film "Prometheus" (20th Century Fox, 2012), the fifth movie in the franchise — is a synthetic male who experiences human emotions, though his demeanor is "very robotic," Fassbender told the website Slashfilm in 2012.

David is part of a spaceship crew sent to investigate distant worlds for signs of ancient human civilizations. Though he is treated as a subordinate by humans, he recognizes his own superior abilities and longevity, and his actions are driven by his own curiosity as much as they are by an internal directive to follow his creator's orders.   

Android 17/Android 18, "Dragon Ball Z"

Androids and siblings, the formerly-human cyborg twins known as Android 17 and Android 18 first appeared in the "Dragon Ball Z" manga series in 1991. They were originally human, kidnapped and cybernetically enhanced by Dr. Gero to battle Goku — the series protagonist — though Android 17 later turns on his creator and kills him. The two have enhanced reflexes, strength and speed, which they use in combat against human and android foes.

Dolores Abernathy, "Westworld" (2016)

The original HBO series "Westworld" debuted in 2016 and was inspired by the western-themed android-populated amusement park introduced in the 1973 film of the same name. Android "hosts" at the park look and act like people, but they were built only to accommodate the park's wealthy human guests, who do not view them as human. Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) is one of Westworld's few original hosts who is still operational, and she gradually begins to question what she has been told about her world, and her role in it.

Ash, "Black Mirror: Be Right Back"

The Netflix series "Black Mirror" is known for presenting stories that pose troubling questions about human relationships, using plots that revolve around futuristic technologies. The second season episode "Be Right Back" features an online service that uses a neural network to reconstruct deceased people's personalities, by incorporating data from their online communications and social media platforms into a virtual presence that can carry on conversations with the living.

A woman uses the service to "resurrect" her dead husband Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), then opts for the service's physical upgrade, placing Ash's digital ghost into a synthetic body. But she soon realizes that even though the android looks and sounds like Ash, it doesn't behave in a truly independent, human way, and ultimately can't replace Ash in her heart.

R. Dorothy Wayneright, "The Big O"

Android girl R. Dorothy Wayneright (the "R" stands for "Robot") acts as a personal assistant to the character Roger Smith — an investigator in a city of amnesiacs — in the noir-styled Japanese manga and anime television series "The Big O," which debuted in 1999. Wayneright wears a hair band that hides a tray for uploading data discs into a drive behind her forehead. She exhibits superhuman strength, speed, flexibility and balance, and is much heavier than she looks.

The Borg Queen, "Star Trek: First Contact"

Leader of the alien group the Borg Collective — a community of biological-machine drone organisms that are connected through a shared consciousness — the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) was introduced in the 1996 movie "Star Trek: First Contact" (Paramount Pictures); however, the Borg had previously appeared in the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" without any mention of a Queen in their ranks, though the Queen subsequently appeared as a recurring character in the series "Star Trek: Voyager."

Bishop, "Aliens"

In "Aliens," the 1986 sequel to the sci-fi thriller "Alien," Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is an android member of the crew that returns to the moon where deadly alien creatures were first discovered. He demonstrates inhuman speed in a "knife game" scene, quickly stabbing the point of a knife between his spread fingers, while holding his hand flat on a table. Unlike the traitorous android Ash in the first movie, Bishop is loyal to the spaceship's crew, and helps Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) escape the aliens. Bishop also makes a partial appearance in the third film in the franchise, "Alien 3," helping Ripley one last time after being severely damaged in a crash.

Humanoid Cylons, "Battlestar Galactica"

When the TV series "Battlestar Galactica" was rebooted in 2004, Cylons — originally presented as intelligent, self-aware, mechanical robots who were humanity's deadly foes — were re-imagined as cyborgs, some of which were nearly identical to humans. Within the hierarchy of Cylon society, so-called "skinjobs" — Cylons who closely resembled people — were the leaders, according to the new series' lore. Though they appear humanlike, they have superior strength and stamina, and can directly access computer systems.

The Stepford Wives

Something is wrong with the seemingly-perfect suburban women who populate the world of "The Stepford Wives" (Paramount Pictures, 2004). They appear devoted to serving their husbands and maintaining a picture-perfect appearance, with hair and makeup perpetually flawless, but their behavior appears more machinelike than human. After Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) moves to Stepford, she discovers that most of the women — and some of the men — are robotic replicas, and that she is next on the list for cybernetic transformation.

Seven of Nine, "Star Trek: Voyager"

Formerly a human woman, the Borg character Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) appeared on the television series "Star Trek: Voyager" (Paramount Network Television) between 1997 and 2001, when the show concluded. Seven had been assimilated by the Borg as a child and served as a drone, but when her connection to the Borg hive mind was severed she joined the "Voyager" crew. She gradually regained much of her lost humanity but remained a unique type of organic/machine hybrid — part Borg and part human.

Synths, "Humans"

Anthropomorphic robots known as "Synths" populate the world of the sci-fi TV series "Humans" (Channel 4), which debuted in 2015. Synths appear identical to humans, but when they are injured they leak blue fluid, a conductant that circulates electricity throughout their bodies, Popular Mechanics reported.

"They're not full of wires and servers," show co-writer Jonathan Brackley told Popular Mechanics. "They're a combination of small micro hardware and synthetic organs."

All Synths have bright green eyes, to help distinguish them from people. They are frequently "recycled" — their memories wiped and new identities installed — before they are handed off to new users. But as Synths begin to develop consciousness and long for autonomy, the program questions the ethics of owning machines capable of independent thought and emotions.

Vision, Marvel Comics

While the comic book character Vision first appeared in 1940 as an alien crimefighter, he was re-introduced in 1968 as an android — or "synthezoid" — created by the robot Ultron. But he turns against Ultron and teams up with the Avengers. He runs on solar power absorbed and stored by a jewel in his forehead, and can manipulate his own mass, enabling him to become insubstantial or invulnerable at will. Vision exhibits superhuman strength, speed and stamina, and can process information as swiftly as a computer.

The Buffybot, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

The fifth season of the TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" introduced the "Buffybot," a cheerful robotic replica of the slayer, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar). A local vampire who was obsessed with Buffy forced a self-styled evil genius to build the bot, which later takes Buffy's place after she is killed saving the world. The bot's exceptional strength enables it to match Buffy's vampire-slaying prowess, but it falls somewhat short in delivering spontaneous witty quips as the vampires turn to dust, and while it can function independently it is incapable of feeling emotion or thinking for itself.

Annalee Call, "Alien Resurrection"

In "Alien Resurrection" (20th Century Fox, 1997), the fourth movie in the "Alien" franchise, Winona Ryder appeared as Annalee Call, a member of a spaceship crew who is revealed to be an auton — a synthetic human. She can interact directly with the control systems of the spaceship, which helps to save the crew at a crucial point during their battle with the xenomorph aliens.

If you thought flash drives were small, wait until you see this: Researchers have encoded the data to make a short video into the DNA molecules of bacteria. They also were able to retrieve the information from the genetic code and play back the movie.

To accomplish this feat, the first of its kind, the researchers started with five frames from a classic 1870s movie of a racehorse. Then, they broke these frames down into their pixels and used DNA to create a code for each pixel. The code contained information about the color of the pixel and its location within the image.

Then, the researchers inserted short DNA fragments containing these codes into bacteria, and the bacteria incorporated the fragments into their genome. (Bacteria do this naturally.) Later, the scientists sequenced the bacterial DNA to reconstruct the movie with 90 percent accuracy. [Genetics by the Numbers: 10 Tantalizing Tales]

Although it may seem like this project would have very limited applications to real life, researchers say they have goals far beyond the scope of the current study.

"The point is not to store videos in bacteria," said study co-author Seth Shipman, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Instead, the researchers ultimately want to create "molecular recorders" capable of recording the events inside cells as they play out. This could give researchers insight into cellular events that are hard to observe in real time, like the processes that occur during brain development.

"We want to turn cells into historians," Shipman said in a statement. "We envision a biological memory system that's much smaller and more versatile than today's technologies, which will track many events nonintrusively over time."

The study was published online July 12 in the journal Nature.

 Original article on Live Science.

Coloring books aren't just for kids anymore.

And with the release of Ridley Scott's "Alien: Covenant" in the U.S. today (May 19), this coloring book may be just what you need for a sci-fi-filled weekend. The coloring book will let you "enjoy" (or be creeped out by) scenes from your favorite "Alien" movies, without needing to watch all the films (or you could have an "Alien" marathon as well). Titan Books is now selling their 80-page homage to the popular horror/sci-fi franchise, "Alien: The Coloring Book." It's the official coloring book of the sci-fi series. 

From face-huggers to Ripley's trouble-seeking cat, Jonesy, the graphic coloring book depicts infamous moments and characters in amazing detail, leaving it up you to color each scene.

The book normally costs $14.95, but Amazon is offering it for just $10.37, which is cheaper than a ticket to see the new movie.

Original article on LiveScience.

As a science fiction fan, I've always shuddered at the thought of an alien bursting out of my chest. But I've never thought about what it might be like to be the one doing the chest-bursting. That is, until now.

The team behind the upcoming "Alien: Covenant" — the latest entry in Ridley Scott's "Alien" science fiction franchise — has released a virtual reality experience that shows exactly what it's like to be one of the horror film's neomorph aliens. Called "Alien: Covenant In Utero," the short video portrays the birth of the neomorph from the inside out — literally — as the alien is born and identifies its first victim. Spoiler alert: It gets bloody.

"'Alien: Covenant In Utero' is a 360-degree virtual reality journey into a living nightmare and offers a terrifyingly close and personal encounter as an alien neomorph at the time of its birth," a YouTube video description states. "Fans will be able to experience the world around them, reliving the very first memories of the neomorph in an immersive environment." [Private Audi Quattro Moon Rover Has Cameo in 'Alien: Covenant']

The "In Utero" feature was released Wednesday (May 10) by FoxNext VR Studio and is available for brave science fiction fans on Oculus, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Playstation VR, Google Daydream and as well as other mobile VR systems. 

"Alien: Covenant" hits theaters May 19 and follows the crew of the Covenant, the titular colony ship, hoping to start a new life on a distant planet on the other side of the galaxy. What they find, of course, is the neomorph and science fiction horror ensues. 

So, do you have what it takes to become a neomorph? Check out the VR experience on your own system and let us know in the comments below!

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that "Alien: Covenant In Utero" was released by 20th Century Fox. The virtual reality experience was released by FoxNext VR Studio.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Catch a whiff of the fresh science movies springing up on Netflix in May! Live Science looks at some of the titles that are taking root.

Available May 1

The Big Burn (PBS, 2015): In 1910, untested employees of the newly-formed U.S. Forest Service were caught unawares by a terrifying and deadly challenge. This documentary explores how the rookie rangers confronted monumental drought in the Northern Rockies that led to out-of-control wildfires. The burning peaked during the month of August, when flames devoured 3 million acres in 36 hours and claimed the lives of 78 firefighters, shaping federal policies for wildfire control for the coming decades.

Blood on the Mountain (Virgil Films and Entertainment, 2016): Mining coal takes a toxic toll on the human body and on the environment. And the legacy of coal mining in West Virginia is on grim display in this unflinching documentary, which offers a bleak view of the environmental and human cost exacted by fossil fuel extraction, benefiting corporations and politicians far more than it benefits the hard-laboring workers.   

Available May 5

The Mars Generation (Netflix, 2017): Could humanity's future include travel to Mars? Astrophysicists and astronauts weigh in on the challenges of long-distance spaceflight and the dream of missions that could transport people to the Red Planet. Meanwhile, teenage trainees at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center immerse themselves in work toward making that dream a reality.

Available May 15

Command and Control (PBS, 2017): Building a nuclear arsenal comes with incredible risks, and most Americans may be unaware that in 1980, an accident at a nuclear missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, nearly resulted in the detonation of a warhead 600 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Based on recently declassified documents, this fascinating glimpse into the American nuclear weapons program tracks its history, and evaluates the human errors and accidents along the way that could have doomed us all. 

Available May 21

What's With Wheat? (Gravitas Ventures, 2016): Why are so many people wheat-intolerant or sensitive to wheat? And why is wheat linked to so many modern-day health problems, when it has been a staple of the human diet for thousands of years? In this documentary, a nutritionist interviews 14 experts, to understand how wheat has changed since it was first cultivated, how these changes could be affecting human health, and how people can break a dietary cycle that could be making them sick.

Original article on Live Science.

Film director Ridley Scott, who delights in terrifying moviegoers with his cinematic blend of horror and science fiction, suggested in a recent interview that the scary prospect of belligerent invading aliens might transcend the realm of sci-fi. According to Scott, hundreds of alien species are "out there" on distant worlds, and Earth's inhabitants should prepare for the worst if they ever decide to visit our planet.

One scientist, though, says that Scott's information about such hostile, and abundant, aliens is off-base and unsupported.

Scott told Agence France-Presse (AFP) about his belief in "superior beings," while fielding questions about his latest movie, "Alien: Covenant," opening in theaters in the U.S. on May 19. He warned that any extraterrestrial travelers who are technologically advanced enough to show up on our doorstep would likely be very intelligent and very hostile. And unlike the scenarios that dominate movies — if we go toe-to-toe with these invaders, we probably won't be the victors, he said.

"If you are stupid enough to challenge them you will be taken out in three seconds," Scott told AFP. [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]

In the interview, Scott explained that "the experts" estimate there are "between 100 and 200 entities" on other planets, following what could be a similar evolutionary path to ours. And if they get here first, our best bet would be to "run for it," AFP reported.

The possibility of intelligent, technologically adept alien life has intrigued science-fiction writers and readers since the French writer Voltaire published his short story "Micromégas" in 1752, describing two extraterrestrial visitors to Earth — one from the planet Saturn and one from a planet orbiting the star Sirius.

Scott has made his own contributions to the genre, most notably with his string of "Alien" movies, which imagine a highly adaptable and morphologically flexible alien species. The so-called xenomorphs breed quickly and are ruthlessly efficient at overpowering humans, either swiftly dismembering them or cultivating them as hosts for their young — luckily, in isolated locations that are far from our home planet.

But though Scott is a skilled sci-fi yarn-spinner, his assessment of real-world alien threats could use a script doctor, according to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with the SETI Institute, a research institution dedicated to the search for communication signals produced by intelligent extraterrestrial life.

To begin with, Scott's "expert" estimate of 100 to 200 "entities" is entirely unsubstantiated, Shostak told Live Science.

"We have absolutely no data that would tell you what that number might be," he said.

In fact, estimates based on data about known planets and galaxies suggest that the actual number of intelligent extraterrestrial life forms could, in fact, be significantly higher. With approximately 1 trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and about 2 trillion more galaxies, that adds up to…well, it's a lot of planets, Shostak said. [Why Do We Imagine Aliens as 'Little Green Men'?]

To narrow the search a bit, scientists could start by just looking at the trillion planets in our own galaxy, he said. Only a fraction of those planets might be capable of supporting life — perhaps 1 in 10. And maybe only 1 in 1,000 could produce and support life more complex than bacteria, he said.

That gives us about a billion planets in our galaxy that might harbor some type of intelligent life. But over time, life on many of those planets could have already waxed and waned — self-destructed or been wiped out. Perhaps only one planet in a million of those intelligent-life-harboring worlds still support life capable of contacting humans. That adds up to about 1,000 planets that could potentially hold intelligent, extraterrestrial species, Shostak told Live Science.

However, if a planet is more than 70 light-years from Earth, it hasn't yet received any radio signals from us. Its residents, no matter how technologically adept, wouldn't know humans exist yet. Even if long-distance observations of Earth told them we had oxygen in our atmosphere — and thereby some form of life — they'd be very unlikely to travel all this way to look at what might amount to just a lot of bacteria, Shostak added. 

Neither would extraterrestrials be likely to invade our solar system merely to steal our resources, he said. If a civilization is advanced enough that they've exhausted all the resources of their entire star system — every planet, moon and asteroid — and are all out of natural materials, they're probably at a stage where they could create what they needed from simpler materials in their own backyard, rather than traveling across the galaxy for a very limited supply, Shostak said.

It's equally unlikely they'd be showing up because they thought humans would make an excellent addition to their diet, he said.

"To do that, they would have to know that we had something interesting within our bodies that they could metabolize, and their body chemistry would probably be very different from ours," Shostak said.

But Scott did get one thing right: If extraterrestrials are capable of building spacecraft that can transport them to our planet, they certainly would be technologically "superior" to people, Shostak said. And if he saw a spaceship suddenly appear, Shostak admitted that he'd probably do as Scott suggested — and just "run for it."

Original article on Live Science.

The original HBO movie "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," based on the nonfiction book by journalist Rebecca Skloot and starring Oprah Winfrey as Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's youngest daughter, premieres tomorrow (April 22) at 8 p.m. (local time). While the film will certainly introduce Lacks' story to a wider audience, the medical research community is already well-acquainted with her "immortal" cells, which have contributed to important discoveries for over half a century.

Lacks, an African-American woman born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1920, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and cells sampled from one of her tumors astonished scientists by reproducing indefinitely in the lab — something that no other cells were known to do.

Her unusual cells formed what became known as the HeLa cell line; after she died, they were widely distributed within the scientific community — without her family's knowledge — and were instrumental in groundbreaking biomedical research, contributing to the discovery of the polio vaccine and to treatments for cancer. But for decades, even as Lacks' children and loved ones mourned her death, they were unaware that some of her cells lived on, and didn’t know that her cells were being used in medical research. [HBO Unveils Trailer for 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks']

Skloot began investigating Lacks' story in 1999 as a graduate student, following the trail blazed by HeLa cells through modern medicine. She uncovered previously unexplored details about Lacks' life, and revealed how Lacks' family was affected by her death — and by the discovery years later of the HeLa cell line.      

Recently, Skloot spoke with Live Science about her involvement with the HBO film adaptation and about Lacks’ enduring story, which — like her unusual cells — appears to have a life of its own.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Live Science: What was your role in the process of adapting your book to the HBO movie?

Rebecca Skloot: I'm a consultant on the film — so are some of the members of the Lacks family — and I've been involved from the beginning. I've read drafts of the script, offered feedback on it as it evolved, helped with research and developing characters along the way.

One of the reasons I was comfortable doing the movie with HBO in the first place was they were open to having me and the family involved. I thought it was really important that the story stick as close to the facts as possible without being overly fictionalized. Part of the story of Henrietta and her family is the misinformation that was put into world — with the family not involved, her name incorrect, various stories that weren't true. I didn't want the movie to add to that, to fictionalize in a way that would add to lack of clarity about who she was and what her legacy was.

HBO really wanted to get it right. We talked with actors — several members of the family and I spent time with Oprah. I provided audio tapes from my research process so the actors could listen to characters for their scenes. And during filming, me and over one dozen Lacks' family members visited various locations on set, and they would let us watch.

Live Science: Are there parts of Henrietta's story that emerge more clearly in the film, because it's a more visual medium?

Skloot: There are things movies can do that books can't do, and vice versa. There's a lot in the book that couldn't be in the film — I had 400 pages to flesh out the whole story — but the things you can show on a page are definitely different than what you can show on the screen.

One thing about film is how much can be conveyed in a split second between two characters where nothing is said — or just a facial expression on a really good actor — and the emotions that can evoke. There are things in a movie that visually would convey a very powerful message, that would take me many pages to convey in a book, and would feel very different. I didn't want the movie to be a Cliffs Notes version of the book — my hope was that it would be a companion piece, that it and the book would exist in a way that added to each other. And together, they paint this really rich picture.

Live Science: Did you see yourself as a character in the story when you were writing it, and did that change when you became involved with the film adaptation?

Skloot: I was very resistant to putting myself in the book at all! Eventually I realized that the book is about a lot of different things, and one of them is the ethics of journalism and telling people's stories. In the book, I tell the history of all the other journalists who came along, and the impact that their reporting had on the family — and in doing that I realized it would be dishonest if I left myself out.

And I very intentionally left out everything personal about myself — I was just "Rebecca the reporter," so it's a very one-dimensional character. In the movie that doesn't work — a character can't be one-dimensional in a movie. That's one of the places where I think the movie does add quite a bit. It's really showing what does it mean to have a white reporter and a black woman who is being written about — what does it mean that the reporter is white, how does that play out? In the course of working on the book, I really saw that I was privileged, that I could walk into a room and ask questions in ways that didn't exist for Deborah [Henrietta Lacks' daughter].

That taught me about race in America. You can see that in the movie, you can see gears clicking in "Rebecca's" head, and you can see her putting the pieces together about race without saying anything about it; it's a really good visualization of something that is an undercurrent in the book.  

There are really important stories that have been untold that relate to race in this country that need to be told. And in doing so, they show how we got to where we are today, and that telling stories is an important part of moving forward — acknowledging the past and what's happened, and moving forward from that.

Live Science: What are the biggest challenges for telling science stories, and what makes people sit up and pay attention?

Skloot: I think it's the same challenge as telling any story — you have to make it clear what stakes there are, and there has to be tension and characters. And the added challenge is that you have to explain the science clearly. Showing science is the best way to get people to learn it, but it's also very hard. There are some scenes in the book where Deborah's learning about science from a scientist or from something happening around her, and those are the places where I tried to infuse the actual scientific information. My goal is that people get to the end of the scene, and they go, "Oh my god, I learned something about DNA, but I don't really know where I did that."

Live Science: The question "Who was Henrietta Lacks?" resonated with you long before you started writing her story. Nearly 20 years later, are there still any lingering questions that you have?

Skloot: The movie feels like an important moment of closure for me, the last thing that I felt needed to happen.

A lot of Henrietta was lost to history; there were such few traces of her. I spent years dreaming of finding a trunkful of letters from her, and none of that existed. I was able to build that into the book — I think you get a sense of who she was as a person, but of course there's a side of me that said, "If only I could have sat down with her for 20 minutes." Given what information existed, that's a closed chapter. I'm very excited to see the Lacks family taking the story forward. It's their story, they should be carrying it into the future.

Original article on Live Science.

You'll soon be able to take a hands-on tour of London's Natural History Museum with famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough, right from the comfort of your couch.

The new project combines interactive virtual-reality (VR) technology with a TV documentary, in which a hologram of Attenborough takes viewers "behind the glass" at the museum. The VR experience, named "Hold the World," allows users to do just that: have (virtual) hands-on access to fossils, bones and skulls.

According to Sky, the European entertainment company behind the VR experience, the interactive technology will allow users to hold, tilt and peer inside the museum's collection of objects. [6 Spectacular Species Named for David Attenborough]

Along with letting users virtually handle the museum collection, Attenborough's hologram will share facts about each specimen.

"I have enjoyed helping people to discover more about the natural world, and 'Hold the World' offers people a unique opportunity: to examine rare objects, some millions of years old, up close," Attenborough said in a statement. "It represents an extraordinary new step in how people can explore and experience nature, all from the comfort of their own homes, and I am delighted to be able to help users uncover some of the treasures the Natural History Museum has to offer in a thrilling new way."

With production set for later this year, "Hold the World" does not yet have a launch date. Once released, the VR experience will be accessible on Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR and the Oculus Rift, Ars Technica reported.

The museum tour will be the first fully interactive production from Sky. However, the entertainment company has announced plans for several other VR film projects and has already released two VR experiences on Formula One racing.

"Virtual reality is all about experiencing things you could only ever dream of in real life," Gary Davey, managing director for content at Sky, said in the statement. "So in this ground-breaking new experience from Sky, people can handle precious dinosaur fossils and delicate insects with a holographic Sir David Attenborough as their guide."

Original article on Live Science.

Standing tall

King Kong, the giant movie ape that first terrorized New York City in the film "King Kong" (RKO Pictures, 1933), gets a new origin story in "Kong: Skull Island" (Warner Bros., 2017). His height has fluctuated from movie to movie over the years — in his latest film, Kong stands 100 feet (31 meters) tall. But how does he measure up against some of the biggest animals on Earth — living and extinct? [Read more about why King Kong towers over today's beasts]

King Kong (2017)

King Kong (according to "Kong: Skull Island," 2017): 100 feet (31 meters) tall.

Patagonian titanosaur

Patagonian titanosaur (unnamed): 66 feet tall (20 meters), 130 feet (40 meters) long, estimated weight of 85 tons (77 metric tons). It is one of the largest known animals that ever lived. This individual was found in Argentina and belongs to a group of giant herbivorous dinosaurs called sauropods that lived 136 million to 66 million years ago.

Blue whale

Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus): 100 feet (30.5 meters) in length, weight about 400,000 pounds (181,437 kilograms). They are found in all of the world’s oceans.

Megalodon

Megalodon (Carcharocles megalodon): 60 feet (18 meters) in length, weighed up to 110 tons (100 metric tons). This enormous shark lived in oceans around the world 15.9 million to 2.6 million years ago.

Livyatan

Livyatan (Livyatan melvillei): 59 feet (18 meters) in length. A relative of modern toothed whales, livyatan lived about 12 million years ago, went extinct about 10 million years ago, and is thought to have had the most powerful bite of any four-limbed vertebrate. This fossil specimen was found in Peru, in a desert that was once underwater.

African bush elephant

African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana): Stands an average of 11 feet (4 meters) at the shoulder, measures 20 to 25 feet (6.1 to 7.6 m) in length and weighs about 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms). It is found across the African continent and is the largest land animal alive today.

Gigantopithecus

Gigantopithecus (Gigantopithecus blacki): 10 feet (3 meters) tall, weighed up to 595 pounds (270kilograms). The largest known primate, gigantopithecus was native to southeast Asia for about 1 million years, went extinct about 100,000 years ago. [Read more about why King Kong towers over today's beasts]

What's new on Netflix this month in science- and technology-themed entertainment? Take a peek with Live Science.

New on Mar. 1

Ignition (Columbia Tristar, 2001): In this action drama, NASA preparations to send a crewed mission to the moon for the first time in three decades could be hindered by federal judge Faith Matheson (Lena Olin) and her investigation of corrupt U.S. military officials plotting to assassinate the president.

Jurassic Park (Universal Pictures, 1993): An island theme park populated by captive dinosaurs sounds like a great idea. But after a nefarious employee sabotages the park's power source, the dinosaurs escape and wreak havoc, leaving human visitors — including paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) racing to stay one step ahead of the crafty meat-eating predators.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Universal Pictures, 1997): The second installment in the "Jurassic Park" franchise introduces the island Isla Sorna, where the theme park's dinosaurs were bred. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a dreamy chaos theorist from the original movie, returns to lead a team documenting the wild herds — an effort that predictably goes awry. 

Jurassic Park III (Universal Pictures, 2001): Paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who barely escaped with his life in the original "Jurassic Park" movie, is tricked into an expedition to Isla Sorna by Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) who are searching for their missing son.

Let There Be Light (U.S. Army Pictorial Services, 1946): This sobering post-war documentary follows 75 U.S. soldiers returning home after serving in World War II, as they enter a psychiatric hospital to undergo treatment for severe depression and emotional trauma.

Memento (Newmarket, 2000): Ex-insurance investigator Leonard (Guy Pearce) develops anterograde amnesia (short-term memory loss) after an attack that kills his wife and leaves him searching for answers — and for her murderer.

Sustainable (Hourglass Films, 2016): Is America heading for an agricultural crisis? A probing documentary analyzes the U.S. farming system and questions the sustainability of industrial farming — for the environment and human health.

New on Mar. 15

Notes on Blindness (Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2016): A one-of-a-kind documentary provides a first-person perspective on blindness, based on three years of audio diaries started by theologian and writer John Hull when he began losing his sight at the age of 47.

New on Mar. 17

Naledi: A Baby Elephant's Tale (Vulcan Productions, 2016): In this documentary, a baby elephant born in a Botswana elephant rescue camp is orphaned at the age of one month, and is raised by the camp's scientist and a team of animal keepers.

New on Mar. 21

Evolution (IFC Midnight, 2015): In a sleepy seaside town populated only by young boys and women, the boys are subjected to strange medical experiments, and a suspicious child named Nicholas (Max Brebant) sets out to uncover the truth.

New on Mar. 23

Déjà Vu (Buena Vista Pictures, 2006): A newly-formed FBI crime unit uses experimental "timefolding" surveillance technology to investigate a domestic terrorist attack by peering into the past.

New on Mar. 25

The Student Body (Gravitas Ventures, 2016): In this documentary, a sixth grader and a student journalist join forces to protest a controversial statewide tactic addressing childhood obesity: notices called "Fat Letters," which are sent home with schoolchildren who do not fall within the federally approved body mass index (BMI) range.

New on Mar. 26

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Buena Vista Pictures, 2004): Quirky oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his motley documentary crew embark on a journey aboard the research vessel "Belafonte" to find the elusive, so-called "jaguar shark" that Zissou claims is responsible for devouring his best friend.

New on Mar. 31

Rosewood, Season 1 (20th Television, 2015): Miami pathologist Dr. Beaumont Rosewood Jr. (Morris Chestnut), assists police by using state-of-the-art equipment and his powers of deduction to piece together crime-busting clues from corpses.

Original article on Live Science.

Looking for science- and technology-themed entertainment on Netflix? Live Science will walk you through what’s new to the site this month.

New on Feb. 1

Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, and Cyber Attacks (Channel 4, 2016) A documentary produced by Channel 4, a public-service television broadcaster in the United Kingdom, sifts through the scandal that rocked an internet dating website. Ashley Madison, an online "hookup" site infamously marketed to adulterers, fell victim in 2015 to one of the largest data hacks to date, compromising the names and credit card numbers of an estimated 24 million people.

Contact (Warner Bros, 1997) Scientist Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) monitors signals from space with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program and discovers the first evidence of extraterrestrial life attempting to communicate with people on Earth.

Project X (20th Century Fox, 1987) A top secret military experiment involving chimpanzees may be more than it seems. U.S. Air Force pilot Jimmy Garrett (Matthew Broderick) teams up with primatologist Teri MacDonald (Helen Hunt) to save a group of chimpanzees slated for lethal flight simulator tests.

New on Feb. 13

Code: Debugging the Gender Gap (Finish Line Features, LLC, 2015) Software engineering and programming are among the most rapidly growing fields in the world, yet women and minorities remain drastically underrepresented. This documentary explores how avenues might be opened to encourage more women and girls to pursue careers in computer science, and how society would benefit as a result.

New on Feb. 14

Project MC²: Part 4 (Netflix Original, 2016) In the fourth season of this Netflix Original series, a group of brainy teenage girls employ science and technology in their undercover missions as secret agents for the clandestine government organization NOV8 (pronounced "innovate").

New on Feb. 19

Growing Up Wild (Disneynature, 2016) Documentary camera crews follow newborn wild animals — a lion, a cheetah, a chimpanzee and a grizzly bear — as they face the pitfalls and rewards of growing up in their native habitats, and weather the tough lessons that will teach them how to survive in the natural world.  

New on Feb. 28

Be Here Now (Silver Lining Entertainment, 2015) Welsh actor Andy Whitfield, best known for portraying Spartacus in the Starz television series "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" (Starz, 2010), was diagnosed in 2010 with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A documentary produced in close collaboration with Whitfield and his wife offers an intimate portrait of their daily lives as they confront the challenges presented by his terminal illness.

Original article on Live Science.

When it comes to vices, James Bond may be known for martinis, but a new study finds that he's been quite the smoker as well. And although 007 kicked the habit in 2002, he still faces the scourge of secondhand smoke, the research found.

In the study, the researchers reviewed Bond's smoking habits, as well as those of his friends, lovers and enemies, over the course of all 24 Bond films.

In the 1960s, Bond's smoking was at its peak; he lit up in 83 percent of the films in that decade, according to the study, published Jan. 16 in the journal Tobacco Control. And when he was smoking regularly in the movies, the first cigarette was lit, on average, within the first 20 minutes of the film. [The 5 Reasons We Still Love James Bond]

After the '60s, however, Bond's smoking declined — as did the American public's, CDC statistics show —and ended with the 2002 film "Die Another Day," when the spy stubbed out his last cigarette, the researchers found.

Despite the downward trends in smoking in the Bond movies, the smoking imagery "remains problematic from a public health perspective, especially given the popularity of this movie series," the researchers, led by Dr. Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago in New Zealand, wrote. For example, the most recent Bond movie, 2015's ""Spectre," featured several minor characters smoking cigarettes, and created an estimated 261 million "tobacco impressions" for Americans ages 10 to 29, the researchers wrote. "Tobacco impressions" refer to the number of smoking incidents in the movie, multiplied by the number of in-theater views, the researchers said.

Only one Bond movie — 2006's "Casino Royale" — contains no smokers, according to the study.

Moreover, many of Bond's sexual partners smoked, often while next to him in bed, which would have exposed Bond to high levels of secondhand smoke, the researchers said. In the 1960s, '70s and '80s, as well as in the 2010s, around 20 percent of Bond's sexual partners smoked, according to the study. And in one incident, in 1971's "Diamonds Are Forever," love interest Tiffany Case used an ashtray placed on Bond's bare chest. Of course, given the typically brief nature of Bond's relationships, the total amount of secondhand smoke he was exposed to would have remained low, the researchers added. And in the Bond movies released in the 1990s and 2000s, none of 007's partners smoked, the researchers noted.

In addition, the researchers found that, in the 1970s, the use of smoking-related spy gadgets — such as a "rocket in a cigarette" — peaked, with these devices appearing in 80 percent of the movies.

Though smoking was featured prominently in the Bond movies of the '60s and '70s, references to the dangers of smoking also appeared in the films from those decades, according to the study.

The first mention came in 1967's "You Only Live Twice," when Mr. Osato finds Bond's cigarettes and tells him, "You should give up smoking. Cigarettes are very bad for your chest." Later in the same movie, another villain, Blofeld, tells him, "It won't be the nicotine that kills you, Mr. Bond." And by 1997's "Tomorrow Never Dies," Bond describes smoking as a "filthy habit," the researchers said.

Bond's smoking seems to be "at odds with his need for physical fitness as part of his job, his high level of education and his vast knowledge on many topics," the researchers wrote. "But it does fit with a possible perception of a low life expectancy given a cumulative total of thousands of bullets being fired at him" and the increasing levels of severe violence in the films, they wrote. Plus, 15 percent of Bond's sexual partners have tried to disable, capture or kill him, they added.

This is not the first study to explore Bond's bad habits; earlier studies have looked into the spy's drinking and violent behavior, the researchers noted.

Originally published on Live Science.

Human life, seeded to other planets by an extraterrestrial civilization, could explain why so many of the aliens in the fictional "Star Trek" universe resemble human men and women.

After studying scenes from the various shows and movies, one evolutionary biologist posited that the galaxy-wide distribution of Earth-based life-forms could help to explain some of the resemblance between Kirk and Spock.

"This model ignores things like the difference in heart placement — perhaps unlikely — or the Vulcan copper, rather than human iron-based, blood — also unlikely," Mohamed Noor, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, told Space.com by email. "But the overall principle is more probable than the notion that the species evolved completely independently to look almost the same after billions of years." Noor presented the results of his off-hour research this summer at Atlanta's Dragon Con. [How 'Star Trek' Technology Works (Infographic)]

The seeds of humankind

Life on Earth might not have originated on the planet itself. Scientists have long considered the possibility of panspermia, the idea that our planet's life or its precursors came from outer space. After drifting, unplanned, into the habitable environment, the seed material might have developed into life as we know it today.

A similar idea was investigated in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." In "The Chase" (Season 6, Episode 20), an ancient alien species called the Preservers was revealed to have seeded many planets with the same genetic material. Over billions of years, similar plants, animals and humanoids developed on a variety of worlds, according to the story presented in the episode.

But Noor doesn't buy it. "Sounds good, but no way," Noor said. Even with the same initial conditions, he said, the probability of plants and animals with similar appearances — and, in species like Vulcans, able to breed with humans — developing on multiple worlds from only genetic material is incredibly low. With the passage of so much time, the various worlds would evolve creatures very different from one another.

"By their [the show's] model, we are literally more closely related to grass or an amoeba than we are to a Vulcan," Noor said. "I don't imagine us having kids with those other species." [Where No Films Have Gone Before: The Complete 'Star Trek' Movie List]

Instead, Noor proposed that the seeding occurred much more recently than portrayed in the episode. If the human ancestor Homo erectus, along with plants and other animals, were taken by the Preservers only a million years ago, rather than the proposed billion, and were seeded onto planets like Vulcan, the resulting life-forms could be more closely related, Noor said.

"It would require an extreme version of fast terraforming, but from a biological perspective, it's at least possible," Noor said.

Meanwhile, the Homo erectus individuals who remained on Earth could have evolved into humans while those on Vulcan evolved to become pointy-eared aliens.

"The two modern species would surely look similar, but it's likely there would be some physical differences," Noor said, pointing to Vulcans' unusual ears and eyebrows. The close genetic relationship among the different descendants of Homo erectus could even allow them to produce an offspring born of both, such as the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock.

Kissing cousins

As a longtime "Star Trek" fan, Noor has enjoyed examining the accuracy of the show. In college, he and his professors would joke about the unfeasible scientific explanations presented in "The Next Generation," the series on the air at the time. To prepare for his Dragon Con presentation, Noor spent time reviewing various episodes from multiple series of the show, and then discussing the science with biologists and chemists. 

"I think the idea of trying to imagine what life in outer space could be is fascinating," he said. "I have really enjoyed researching this."

If human life in the "Star Trek" universe was indeed seeded on multiple planets, Earth would be the most likely original source, Noor said. That's because life-forms on Earth are clearly related to one another in a hierarchal way. Humans would be more closely related to aliens such as Romulans and Klingons than they are to chimpanzees.

Confirming this would be "remarkably easy" for an evolutionary biologist in the "Star Trek" universe, Noor said. By comparing DNA samples from other human-like aliens to those of Earthlings, biologists would be able to discover the close genetic relationship between them, which would easily rule out the idea of random, undirected panspermia.

"We may even be able to infer approximately how many years ago this happened from the difference in the DNA sequence," Noor said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Alongside the witches and wizards inhabiting the fictional world of "Harry Potter" are live animals that represent a variety of shapes, sizes and magical abilities. Now, the film "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2016) introduces moviegoers to a bevy of these peculiar and endearing creatures.

Like real animals, they can be furry, scaly or covered with spikes. Unlike real animals, they may instantaneously transform, turn invisible, teleport, or produce massive explosions.

But before any of these made-up animals can scurry across the screen, teams of digital artists must build them from scratch, working to construct a "living" form that reflects the filmmakers' vision of a nonexistent creature, yet still moves and behaves as a real animal does. The result is a delicate balance of imagination and real-world animal behavior and biology. [In Photos: A Bevy of Magical 'Fantastic Beasts']

The 3D modelers' and animators' "magic" begins when a film studio delivers the preliminary concept for an imaginary animal to the visual effects group, and then many artists begin a collaboration that brings the concept to life, according to Dominic Piché, a digital artist at the visual effects company Rodeo FX in Montreal, and a modeling supervisor for "Fantastic Beasts."

Murtlaps and mooncalves

Rodeo FX was responsible for creating several creatures for the film, including the murtlap, a type of oversized hairless rat with tuber-like tentacles on its back; the nundu, which represents the unlikely combination of a lion and a spiky pufferfish; the diricawl, a colorful bird that can vanish at will (and which Muggles — non-magical people — call the dodo); and the mooncalf, a charming long-necked animal with enormous eyes at the top of its head.

In the real world, animals look the way they do because they have evolved to survive under specific conditions in certain environments. If they live in Arctic habitats, they may have thick fur or layers of blubber to protect them from the cold; if they are carnivores, they possess certain types of teeth, claws, or other features that help them catch their prey. And these same criteria apply to animated creatures, Yvon Jardel, Rodeo FX artist and animation supervisor for "Fantastic Beasts" told Live Science.

"The approach is to imagine: If this animal evolved on this planet, what would it look like based on its purpose in life?" Jardel explained. "We get inspired by living creatures in extreme conditions, to create not a hybrid but something that would make sense in terms of evolution."

The modelers use these guidelines to shape muscles and bones to support realistic movement. They also define the animal's more cosmetic details: eyes, teeth, claws and other structures, as well as the overall surface texture.

Walk this way

Once the artists have figured out the animal's general body plan, they make 3D models of it. Next, animators test the models to make sure that the body can perform as intended.

"If we're creating a dodo and the dodo can't run — we have a problem," Jardel said. "Then we have to go back and figure out if the skeleton or proportions are correct, and get more inspiration and more reference to see if we can find where it went wrong."

Sometimes, a single creature can borrow inspiration from several unrelated animals, Piché said. For example, the mooncalf was imagined to be about the size of a goat. Its body and limbs were based primarily on those of an otter, though its fur came from a Vietnamese pig, its inner ears from a cat, and its long neck from a giraffe's, Piché told Live Science.

Because the mooncalf's body was so unusual, the modelers created an entire skeleton and several muscle groups so that the animators could make it walk more believably, he added.

The pufferfish challenge

For the nundu, the animators' work was somewhat more straightforward, Jardel said. The nundu's body shape was highly similar to a lion's, so they could reference the ways that big cats move and recreate that motion in the model.

However, realistically visualizing the nundu's pufferfish-like spiky skin texture — especially its throat pouch, which inflates when the nundu roars — presented a bit of a challenge, Piché said.

"We had to build a crest that would blend between the spikes, so that when it blows up you sense cartilage under the flesh that pushes the flesh out," Piché explained. "Every spike was placed in a certain way so that when it moves from rest pose to roar pose and inflates, it would push the skin a certain way and push the spikes at a certain angle. Everything was very precise and had to look natural," he said.

In the end, an animated creation may end up with only a few minutes of screen time. But in those moments, see if you can catch a glimpse of the living creatures that may have inspired the pattern of fur on its back, the shape of its ears, the sweep of its tail, or the spring in its step. These magical movie beasts have more in common with everyday animals than you might have thought.

Original article on Live Science.

With "Doctor Strange," coming to theaters this Friday (Nov. 4), Marvel is taking its cinematic universe in a more mystical direction that may seem to diverge from the space travel, gods-as-aliens and DNA-based superpowers of the previous movies and TV shows.

"Doctor Strange" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a surgeon who, after a terrible injury, learns how to be a powerful mystic sorcerer and cast his mind into other dimensions. The storyline includes more elements of fantasy than with the stories of previous Marvel superheroes to make a movie appearance, such as Iron Man, Captain America and the spacefaring Guardians of the Galaxy. But the film still has something to offer for those with an interest in astrophysics and philosophy of science.

Space.com talked with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York who consulted on "Doctor Strange," about how the movie's magic of the mind fits in with the more science-grounded (comparatively!) worlds introduced previously, the concept of the multiverse and what science philosophy has to do with superheroes. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

Space.com: How did you get involved with "Doctor Strange"?

Adam Frank: I'm a practicing astrophysicist; I do computational astrophysics studies, star formation, exoplanets and things like that. I've been writing about science and culture for a long time, and in 2007, I wrote a book on science and religion.

Someone put me in touch with Scott [Derrickson, the director of "Doctor Strange"], because he is religious but he has a strong respect for science, and I'm an atheist and I have a strong interest in human spirituality and respect for what goes on in human spiritual thinking. That's the conversation between us that has lasted years.

When we started with "Doctor Strange," he contacted me and asked if I'd be interested. And, of course, I was like, "Oh, yeah…" but inside, I was like, "Oh my God!" The thing you should also know is that I'm a massive Marvel fan; from age 14 on, I have been reading Marvel forever. And so we talked a little bit about the movie, and, of course, the real dilemma for "Doctor Strange" is that here is a character whose powers are based in mysticism and the occult, and you have to fit him in a cinematic universe that is very science-y. [You have to tell a story that] does justice to the character, but also doesn't mess up the scientific universe they created.

Space.com: So how did you do that?

Frank: There are a lot of ways you could think about where his magic powers come from, and you could do things like, "Oh, it's about the neurotransmitters." But I didn't want to go down that road. Because it's about mystery. People often want to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and science, but here's a place where really, what we're looking at is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and philosophy. The real question here is the mind-body problem, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, but really to Descartes. What is the relationship between [the] mind — not just our thinking, but our subjective experience of the world — and matter? Many people in science will come at a reductionist perspective — that you are nothing more than your neurons, and your neurons are nothing more than quarks, so that the fundamental objects and their rules determine everything that happens on larger structures.

But a nonreductionist perspective says no, there's actually something more going on there — that mind experience cannot be reduced just to gears in your head; there is some way in which there's something fundamental going on about the universe at the level of experience that has to be included in the counts of atoms. That's the way we talked about this; that's the way in for "Doctor Strange."

We don't have a scientific account of consciousness, of what it means to have a subjective experience. So that's a place where you can allow these other dimensions, and other kinds of knowledge, other maps of the world that Doctor Strange is drawing from. That's how to bring it in. To me, the interesting thing that we talked about was how to use this question of [the] mind, of reductionism and nonreductionism, as the source of Doctor Strange's abilities.

Space.com: What about the concept of the multiverse?

Frank: The scientific idea of the multiverse — there's a couple of different multiverses in science. [One] idea for a multiverse is the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every time a quantum event happens, the universe splits off into a parallel version of itself, and each one goes on evolving and splitting and evolving and splitting. This idea of extra, other dimensions, what you can think of as other universes — we talked a lot about that idea. And they draw on that pretty heavily [in the movie].

The comic book version of Doctor Strange, back in the '60s — which was all trippy, definitely a countercultural thing going on from the '60s — had this idea of dimensions, and here they make that a little more explicit. In science, in physics, we can think of each of these universes as being a dimension in an infinite-dimensional abstract space. That's [how] the many-worlds interpretation views it. They're just playing with that idea, and building a beautiful visual representation of this. A lot of the movie is concerned with what's going on in these different dimensions and Doctor Strange being in them. [Comic Con Cosplay: Photos of the Coolest Costumes]

Space.com: Do you think that this loose grounding in the ideas of science is something that really appeals to moviegoers right now?

Frank: There's the very famous essay by C. P. Snow about the two cultures: the culture of science and the culture of humanities. It goes way back. And the thing is, now, there aren't two cultures anymore. The fruits of science turn into the drivers of culture 15 minutes after they're discovered. We're living in an age of miracles, and it's just going to get crazier. Artificial intelligence, genetics — people expect to see amazing things happen from science. So by grounding your stories enough in science to not so much make them plausible, but to allow that science to open up new possibilities — people are used to that in their lives. So I think it makes sense to them, and it's exciting to them — and scary.

The great thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, speaking as a scientist, is the respect they have for science. It's not necessarily that they're using actual science. It's a superhero movie — what do you expect? But they build a coherent and consistent universe that respects the scientific process and that uses enough of real science to make things plausible or build off them. I always like, in the first "Avengers," [that] the movie opens up with the "Dark Energy Research Institute." And then, after that, you never hear about dark energy again. But as a scientist, I'm like, "Oh, look! They used the right term!"

Space.com: Is there any other Marvel area where the science themes in "Doctor Strange" could fit?

Frank:In general, the multiverse idea is very much built into the Marvel comics; Marvel has Earth 226A, Earth 213B … You can expect it to show up in different places. What's interesting about the Marvel universe is, they would have these characters which would be the embodiment of impersonal forces. There's a character who's like, "I'm Eternity," and he's represented as this outline. Marvel has no problem with taking broad, sweeping philosophical abstractions and somehow storifying them, which is awesome. And in some sense, that's also what's happening here: You're taking this idea of [the] mind. "Mind" is a thing in the universe — not just a derivative of other things in the universe, but somehow, mind is being an essential player in the universe, and they're storifying it. They're making it an actor.

Space.com: Are there any visual "Easter eggs" in the movie based around astrophysics that people should look out for?

Frank: This is something that the viewers will have to see for themselves. As a scientist, I deal with a lot of very abstract ideas about space and time, the structure of space. There's an interesting idea I'm coming across now in my thinking about quantum gravity. I don't do quantum gravity, but I think about it; I talk to people who do. [It's] the idea of the basal structure, the fundamental structure that is responsible for reality. There's ways in which the way they play the visuals in the movie — and people will understand what I'm saying when they see it — that really reminded me of atoms of space-time, or the fundamental nature of how you unzip reality. Some of that stuff was really evocative for me.

This interview has been edited for length.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

With Halloween just around the corner, everyone seems to have costumes on their minds. People who typically wear jeans and T-shirts are suddenly eyeing colorful spandex, capes, wigs and corsets, and are opening their wallets to acquire an outfit that will present them to the world as someone — or something — they're not.

But for people who cosplay — dress in costumes to role-play characters from movies, TV shows, books, comics and video games — the challenge of transformation is one they happily accept at various times year-round.

Cosplayers can invest considerable time, money and effort into crafting or commissioning head-to-toe presentations that are one-of-a-kind. Some creations include enormous accessories, facial or body prosthetics, working electronics or complex mechanical parts. Other costumes limit how well the wearers can see or move, making it difficult for them to sit, or navigate a room, without help. [Comic Con Cosplay: Photos of the Coolest Costumes]

But what inspires cosplayers to reinvent themselves so elaborately? Cosplayers and psychologists who study the phenomenon reveal the individual and community features that make dressing up so enticing and rewarding.

For the love of costumes

From Oct. 6 to 9, hundreds of cosplayers attended New York Comic Con 2016 (NYCC), costumed as superheroes and supervillains, Jedi and Sith, Ghostbusters, Starfleet officers, Hogwarts students and teachers, and many, many other characters.

"Cosplay makes me happy," Edgar Roldan, a cosplayer and NYCC attendee, told Live Science recently.

Roldan — who wore a furry, blue suit and an oversize head to represent Happy from "Fairy Tale" (Del Rey Manga) — said the most satisfying part of cosplay was "just being you — being whatever and whoever you want."

Other NYCC cosplayers said cosplay allowed them to explore their own creativity, particularly when much of their costume was handmade. Joe Bokanoski and Mike Labarge told Live Science that they assembled their costumes — postapocalyptic interpretations of DC Comics' Captain America and his nemesis, Red Skull — by scouring flea markets and junkyards.

Their outfits were bulky and cumbersome. But despite the discomfort, they were enthusiastic about wearing them and seeing the appreciative reactions they provoked.

"It's worth it just to put some smiles on people's faces," Bokanoski said.

Inhabiting a character

When a cosplayer selects a particular costume, they are often tapping into a specific character — or combination of characters — because something about that role speaks to them personally, according to Robin S. Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Rosenberg, who has written extensively about how people interpret and embrace fictional characters, particularly superheroes, told Live Science that she became interested in studying cosplay after seeing cosplayers in convention centers where she was delivering talks.

"We know from psychology that we all play different roles through the day and week," Rosenberg said. "Different aspects of me — 'psychologist,' 'wife,' 'mother' — come to the fore in different contexts. I became curious about people who truly inhabit a role, and what's coming to the fore when you wear a costume."

Certain costumes offer some people a way of working through personal difficulties, Rosenberg said. Batman, for example, can be an especially meaningful cosplay choice for someone coping with trauma. The dark superhero faced devastating trauma when he was a child — witnessing the brutal murder of his parents — which he overcame to become a hero.

"When people are dressed as Batman, many talk about having [experienced] their own traumatic experiences," Rosenberg said. "He survived and found meaning and purpose from his experience, and that is inspiring to them."

Rosenberg noted that Wonder Woman is another enduring and popular choice that resonates with many women, partly because she holds her own in the male-dominated world of costumed comics superheroes. For those cosplayers, dressing as Wonder Woman is a way of celebrating and embracing her power, Rosenberg said.

Recently, a series of images on Instagram featuring a 3-year-old girl costumed as Wonder Woman quickly went viral. Her father, a photographer, said he not only "fulfilled my daughter's dream of becoming Wonder Woman" by creating an elaborate costume but also staged a photo shoot that placed his daughter in scenes from the upcoming movie, due in theaters June 2, 2017. Judging by the girl's expressions in the photos, she wholeheartedly embraced her new role as a superhero. [DIY Halloween Costumes: 7 Geeky Getups for Any Party]

Cosplay is a type of performance; putting on a costume broadcasts a visible and public statement about the dresser upper's allegiance to a character or fandom, and it frequently moves strangers to approach the character for conversation and photos. So it surprised Rosenberg to discover from her conversations with cosplayers that many identified as introverts.

"When they wore a costume, they became much more socially outgoing," Rosenberg said. She explained that, sometimes, wearing a costume allows a person to tap into confidence they didn't know they had, and helps them overcome shyness in real life.

"When you do any kind of costuming — but particularly cosplay — on the one hand, it gives you permission to step outside yourself," Rosenberg said. "But on the other hand, it can summon something in you that doesn't usually come out."

Building a community

Costume play not only imbues powers upon individuals but also fosters a sense of community, according to Michael Nguyen, a cosplayer and costuming columnist for the "Star Trek" news website Trekmovie.com. "Star Trek" was Nguyen's gateway to cosplay, he told Live Science. And through creating and wearing "Star Trek" costumes, he discovered a rich and widespread network of people who shared his interest in the characters and in the world they inhabited.

"In 'Star Trek,' there's this idea of diversity and unity," Nguyen said. "It portrays a future a lot of people want to believe in."

"They're physicians, attorneys, in Ph.D. programs — just people who enjoy expressing themselves, and what they hope the future to be." [10 Futuristic Technologies 'Star Trek' Fans Would Love to See]And cosplayers come from all walks of life, he added.

In addition to cosplaying at conventions, Nguyen organizes bimonthly social events for "Star Trek" fans in New York City to get together and hang out in costume. The idea began with five people in 2013 and expanded to 50 to 60 participants three years later. Nguyen described friendships he's formed over the years with people who live thousands of miles away, with whom he's shared the fun of "nerding out" over science fiction and who have inspired his cosplay creativity.

"Costuming is more fun if you do it with other people," Nguyen told Live Science. "You create your own look, but you also feel like part of a universe when you surround yourself with people who enjoy it as much as you do."

Cosplayers at NYCC agreed. A woman dressed as She-Ra: Princess of Power from the TV show "Masters of the Universe" (Filmation) told Live Science that "the acceptance" was the best part of doing cosplay.

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like," she said. "It's a community — it's like a big family. Once a year, I come and I see people I haven't seen but once a year, and it's just great."

Another woman costumed as a Hogwarts student from the "Harry Potter" books and movies described participating in a "flashmob" at NYCC, where 75 attendees in Potterverse cosplay came together for a photo — and for one group member to propose to his girlfriend.

"It's wearing your interests on your body," she said. "It's a really great way to bridge the gap and find the common ground."

Original article on Live Science.

Costume + role-play = cosplay

During New York Comic Con 2016 (Oct. 6 – 9), hundreds of cosplayers — people who dress up as characters from popular culture — descended on the Javits Center.

On the first day of Comic Con (Oct. 6), two dozen cosplayers described to Live Science how their costumes connect them to characters they love, and strengthen community bonds among like-minded fans.

Clowning around

Name: Ray

Cosplay: Twisty the Clown, "American Horror Story: Freak Show" (FX)

"Me and my wife are big horror fans, and I like the American Horror Story series — and when Twisty came out, I thought he was awesome. Usually I dress like a zombie, but then last time I dressed like this and it was a huge hit — no one cares about the zombie anymore!"

"But you HAVE heard of me."

Name: Chris Forcenito

Cosplay: Captain Jack Sparrow, "Pirates of the Caribbean" films (Walt Disney Company)

"I always liked Pirates of the Caribbean. First, I bought the regular costume from a costume store, but then I'm like, "This isn't original." I spent hours looking at photos, playing the videos, looking at how he dresses — I've been adding to it for three years now. And I love wearing it. I love coming here, taking pictures with people, showing off. You meet different people, people from all over. It's a good time!"

Gotham villains

Names: Kaya and Dawn

Cosplay: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, DC Comics

Dawn: We like stopping other people and taking pictures with them. It's just a fun day — you don't have to think about everyday life. We love DC and we love the villains of DC — sometimes it's fun to be bad!

Headhunter

Name: Elyse

Cosplay: April O'Neil, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation" (Saban Entertainment)

"My cosplay is April O'Neil from the original 1980's-1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon after a very, very rough day with some of the bad guys. There was a cosplayer who was here a couple of years ago who was dressed as the Shredder walking around with the heads of the turtles, and I always thought I wanted to do the opposite of that. I ran into a beauty supply store and found foam heads on sale, and thought, yeah, this is the year I'm going to do that! It took about two weeks to put the whole thing together, [and] most of that was waiting for paint to dry."

Live Science: What's your favorite part of doing cosplay?

"When you're not even in the convention center yet and people are already stopping you and going, 'Wow, that looks phenomenal.' I don't need a picture, I don't need anything else other than someone saying, 'That looks great.'"

Happy times

Name: Edgar Roldan

Cosplay: Happy, "Fairy Tail" (Del Rey Manga)

"I love Happy. The cosplay makes me happy. So I did it and I saw it made other people happy. That was cool."

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of cosplay?

"Just being you. Being whatever and whoever you want."

Coming alive

Name: Mayna

Cosplay: Itachi, "Naruto" (Viz Media)

"I like anime and I really like Naruto, and Itachi is one of my favorite characters."

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

"Just being the character. You're making the character come alive. You see other people dressed like you, and it's just this really good feeling that you're not alone, that they like the same shows."

Live Science: Why do people enjoy doing cosplay?

"Freedom of expression. I would never have known that this many people like the same things I like. Just coming here and seeing that people dress up like this is incredible. People are hidden — they need to come out more."

Gender-bending cosplay

Names: Tony Ray and Taren Lopez

Cosplay: Garnet and Stevonnie, "Steven Universe" (Cartoon Network)

Tony: I had a panel this morning on gender-bending cosplay — when you choose a female character and make them a male character, or vice versa. I chose Garnet from 'Steven Universe' because I like Garnet as a character, she's really well-developed, really thought-out, and is always thinking of other people. Life is definitely tough, but there are always people around to help make it easier.

Taren: I chose to cosplay as Stevonnie because I love the show 'Steven Universe' and she's one of my favorite characters. The show is really groundbreaking because it shows relationships between gay, lesbian, and transgender characters. And my character happens to be something of a transgender character, so when I discovered her, I thought, 'I need to do this cosplay, this cosplay has to be around.' And I've gotten such a great reaction because of it, you don't see many people dressed as her, and she's a very cool character.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Taren: As long as one person recognizes you it's all worth it.

Tony: All you need is one! And all the hard work and dedication that you've put into building your suit paid off.

All in the family

Names: Sapphire, Zaelya and Saul

Cosplay: Joker Harley, Baby Deadpool, Dashing Deadpool (DC Comics and Marvel Comics)

Live Science: What inspired your cosplay?

Saul: For me, there was a t-shirt that had Deadpool on it in a suit. I loved the concept.

Sapphire: I got him the shirt for Valentine's Day.

Saul: I figured that with the movie coming out that there would be a lot of simple Deadpools, I wanted to do something a bit more dashing.

Sapphire: And she's Baby Deadpool because this is her dad. And I'm Harley because I'm crazy and I love it. And I love Harley, the concept of her and everything. The Joker was killed off in the video game 'Arkham,' so I decide to go as Harley and took a little twist to be with Deadpool, because he's so dashing and charming — and you know how I love those charmers.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Saul: The pictures! The pictures are so much fun.

Sapphire: I agree. Having people come up to you and compliment your costume, your artistry and your creativity…

Saul: And to be able to pose and be goofy with them.

Sapphire: You get to escape the everyday adult life. I'm a mom and it's hard work, so I love to be able to incorporate her into the silliness and into this fun activity. And she gets to enjoy it too, because she's looking around and she's seeing all these people in costumes. This is our fourth year going, and we plan on bringing her back every year.

Casual Jedis

Casual Jedis

Names: Steve Perkins and Tom Rehn

Cosplay: Qui-Gon Jinn and Jedi General Ullr 'Rainmaker' Jo-Enz, "Star Wars" (Lucasfilm)

Tom: I'm walking around doing this because I'm letting people know this is who I am. When there are two of us, people know that we're Jedis together.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Steve: When other people on a professional level acknowledge the workmanship that you've done. When they notice the caliber of your work, that's the biggest compliment.

Tom: The best compliment I ever got — I was wearing this or something similar to this — and someone said, 'Oh my god, you look like you just walked off the movie set and you're going to your trailer.'

Live Science: How long have you been doing cosplay?

Steve: My whole life. I started when I was a child, I used to pretend to be one of the members of KISS and try to put on concerts. I can't sing, I can't play instruments, but I tried my best.

Tom: By July 4th of 1977, I was dressing as Luke Skywalker.

Live Science: Have attitudes toward cosplay changed over time?

Steve: We're much more accepted now. For a long time we were the weirdos that dressed up — now we are the cool people that dress up.

"I'm not bedtime story lady"

Name: Beth Small

Cosplay: Tank Girl, "Tank Girl" (Penguin Books)

"I have been obsessed with Tank Girl since Lori Petty's movie, then I researched it with the comic book. She's an absolutely strong figure, she's amazing.

I've been cosplaying since I was five years old — there's a picture of me as a full Klingon. I love dressing up, I love exhibiting as different characters, I also love doing male roles as women. It's fun!"

The Red Woman

Name: Lavinia

Cosplay: Melisandre, "Game of Thrones" (HBO)

"This is actually the first cosplay I'm doing. Last night I was thinking, I hope I don't look stupid! I actually wanted to do Cersei but the costume was very hard to do — it had a lot of embroidery, I couldn't find one that didn't look cheap and I didn't want to do it if it looked bad. But this one, the dress was pretty accurate. 

A lot of people are taking pictures of me and it's kind of overwhelming. I like it because a lot of people are telling me, 'You look great,' and, 'That's a great costume.' So, that's nice."

After the apocalypse

Names: Joe Bokanoski and Mike Labarge

Cosplay: Post-apocalyptic Red Skull and Captain America (DC Comics)

Live Science: What inspired your cosplay choice?

Mike: The overall look of the new Mad Max movie, that style of the end of the world.

Joe: A lot of the shows that are out now — like "The Walking Dead" and things like that — have that look and that feeling. We wanted to take an ordinary kind of superhero and villain and putting them into that situation, 50 to 60 years after the world has ended.

Live Science: How did you make your costumes?

Joe: There's a lot of flea market stuff, stuff we got from junkyards and scraps. We thought, what would you do in a post-apocalyptic world? 

Mike: This is a catcher's guard, for protection.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Mike: This right here.

Joe: Just getting pictures and taking them with kids — they love it a lot. And making people happy, having a good time.

Mike: We suffer and sweat all day long for this.

Joe: It's worth it just to put some smiles on people's faces.

Family time

Names: Kayla, Mo and Taylor

Cosplay: A "regular" pirate; the Riddler, DC Comics; Ulysses, "Fallout: New Vegas" (Obsidian Entertainment)/Aiden Pearce, "Watch Dogs" (Ubisoft)

Live Science: What inspired your cosplay today?

Taylor: I asked my mom if she could make me the duster, and she did. And when I was here in 2014 I saw a booth that was selling the mask and hat from "Watch Dogs" and I bought that, so now it's like a thing that I do.

Mo: Well, I did the Mad Hatter and the Joker and now it's time for the Riddler.

Kayla: I couldn't find anything else.

Mo: This is the third year we're doing it, the first and second year were really awesome.

Taylor: The first year I convinced them, I happened to see a message from [video and game production company] Rooster Teeth saying we'll be at Comic Con 2013 for a panel, so I said, 'We gotta go!' And we went and it was fun, so I asked if we could go next year, and we did.

Mo: We have fun.

Taylor: We might see a person in the same genre of game that you're dressed in, and you might give each other a compliment and talk about the game.

Don't blink

Names: Karina Frengle-Eaves and Liv Eaves

Cosplay: Weeping Angels, "Doctor Who (BBC)

Live Science: What inspired your cosplay today?

Liv: It was my idea — I heard that Matt Smith [the Eleventh Doctor] was going to be here. I'm a really big fan.

Karina: There are more people taking my picture than at my wedding. Anytime we stand still, we get a crowd of people surrounding us.

Live Science: What about Weeping Angels appeals to you?

Liv: They can only move when you blink or when you're not looking, and if they touch you then you move back in time, so in the present time you're dead.

Karina: You don't want to blink when you're looking at them and you don't want to look away, so they're kind of scary.

Liv: I like how they're really fast.

Karina: I like how creepy and goth-looking they are.

All our yesterdays

Names: Rachel Torres, Frank Torres and Vincent Ng Cosplay: "Star Trek" officers, original series (Desilu Productions/Paramount Television)

Rachel: The original series pioneered a lot. [Star Trek character] Uhura was really great — she was a woman of color in television at a time when women of color didn't do much in the public eye.  She had her own personality, she wasn't just eye candy.

And my father's a Trekkie.

Frank: I've been one since the first series — I ran home from school to watch it. My mother said, "You're crazy," but I wouldn't miss it for money.

Rachel: I was doomed to be a dork from the beginning.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Rachel: I love putting together a costume — from scratch, ideally. I love the heartache of trying to figure it out and then getting it to work. And it's fun to take the photos and do the photo ops in costume, even if it's a total mashup that doesn't make sense.

Frank: It's fun to walk around seeing everyone enjoying themselves in the costumes.

Rachel: It's a very accepting community. And it's a way to appreciate the fandom of a character.

Live Science: Is there anything you do to get into character before you put the costume on?

Vincent: I would love to say yes and give you an elaborate answer on this one, but Rachel says, "You're gonna wear this," and I say, "OK." That's kind of how this goes.

I do enjoy seeing the community have a passion about something that can bring us together through hard times. Regardless of what's going on in politics or the world, at least we see everyone come together and have a good time here, and that's what it's all about.

Unlikely pair

Names: Mikey and Betsy

Cosplay: Harley Quinn from "Suicide Squad" (DC Entertainment, Inc.), Bellatrix Lestrange from "Harry Potter" books and movies

Betsy: I really wanted a Harry Potter costume, and she has a fun look and I really wanted to work with leather.

Live Science: Is there anything about these characters that spoke to you personally?

Betsy: She's absolutely insane, so I hope not!

Mikey: Whereas mine is absolutely insane, so I hope so! I've liked the character since the animated series. I just think this is a really neat look, and I wasn't comfortable making it more masculine, I was like, I'm just going to do it. But I relate to the character, I get her relationship to Joker, I understand the obsession, I understand her wild card nature. And I've wanted to do it for years, and finally it was like, I'm going to buckle down and make the pieces I want to make. The jacket and shirt were purchased. The shorts were handmade, the boots were made, the bat, holster and gun were made.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part of doing cosplay?

Mikey: The whole process of putting it together and seeing it as a final piece. Putting on these boots when I got them, it was the first time I was like, oh, I got this costume now. You're literally wearing someone else's shoes.

Betsy: I really just like the process and challenging myself to try new skills, like working with leather or embroidery, and also the reactions of kids and people that you see. Their faces light up when they see you — either you're their favorite character or something about what you're dressed up as relates to them too and they get so excited. And that's really fun, and the energy just transfers.

Mikey: You also find people in costumes from the same universe as yours that are really excited to talk to people who like the same things they do, and that's neat. I had a really nice chat with a girl and her boyfriend that were doing a Harley and Joker cosplay. We just started talking about different characters we've gone as and even the characters we were today.

It's good to be bad

Names: Crystal, Christina and Victoria

Cosplay: Hades, "Hercules"; Jafar, "Aladdin"; Dr. Facilier,"The Princess and the Frog" (Disney Animated Classics)

Christina: We're Disney villains — genderbent versions of male villains. I'm Jafar.

Victoria: I'm Dr. Facilier, or the Shadowman.

Crystal: And I am Hades from Hercules.

Christina: We love Disney — one of my favorite movies is "Aladdin" — and we love villains and we haven't seen this [cosplay] too much.

Crystal: And one of my favorite movies is "Hercules."

Victoria: And we all love, love, love, "The Princess and the Frog."

Christina: Lately we've been doing a lot of the good guys and we wanted to switch it up.

Crystal: And also villains have really big personalities.

Victoria: There's so much depth to the characters, trying to understand their motivations and why they turned to villainy.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

Christina: Feeling like you accomplished something. You put it together on your own.

Victoria: And then people appreciate it.

Crystal: And they know who you are. People are like, "Oh my god, you look so cool — and you did that yourself?" You feel like a celebrity a little bit.

Victoria: Yeah, you feel pretty badass.

Chasing the dragon

Name: Julio Riboc

Cosplay: King Vegeta, "Dragon Ball Z" (Manga Entertainment, Cartoon Network)

"I've been a 'Dragon Ball Z' nut for years. I love the anime, I love the manga, I love the show. King Vegeta's always been a favorite of mine."

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

"Doing cosplay is fantastic — the look on kids' faces, seeing people go, 'Wow, I've never seen anyone do that character before!' That's just great, seeing other people's enjoyment."

Princess of Power

Name: Naomi

Cosplay: She-Ra, "Masters of the Universe" (Filmation)

"I have always loved this whole time of dressing up, I can just be whomever I want to be with no judgment. So it's not just a particular character; this is my sixth year and every day I'm somebody different. I just love feeling out of the box."

Live Science: What about this character appealed to you?

"Woman power, plain and simple. Most of my characters are powerful women — She-Ra, Supergirl, Maleficent."

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

"The acceptance. It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like. It's a community — it's like a big family. Once a year I come and I see people I haven't seen but once a year, and it's just great."

The Sanderson sisters

Names: Haileigh Petersen, Smoke and Honey Cosplay, Penny Lane Cosplay

Cosplay: Mary Sanderson, Winifred Sanderson and Sarah Sanderson, "Hocus Pocus" (Buena Vista Pictures)

Penny Lane Cosplay: Kathy Najimy [the original Mary Sanderson] is here today, and we absolutely love the movie. So we're like, we have to do the Sanderson sisters. And it just so happens that I am definitely Sarah Sanderson in real life.

Smoke and Honey Cosplay: We got a picture with her!

Hayleigh: I think especially for our age group it was such an iconic movie growing up, and was such a big part of Halloween. And being near a comic con and it being October, it felt right.

Penny Lane Cosplay: And each of the characters is very much us!

Smoke and Honey Cosplay: We had so much fun running around the con being evil, capes whooshing in the wind.

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

Smoke and Honey Cosplay: When people nerd out over your costume. Including Kathy Najimy!

Hayleigh: And little kids are still watching this movie, and they come up to us and go, "Oh, the Sanderson sisters!" That makes it so much fun.

A technical challenge

Name: Tegan

Cosplay: Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, "The Venture Bros." (Adult Swim)

"I love the show and I like this costume. It was kind of a technical challenge because of how it's made in the front. I'm actually wearing a corset I built, and it's velcroed down on top so everything stays in and nothing bad happens."

Live Science: What about this character appealed to you?

"She's sassy, chaotic neutral — she's a bad guy, but she's the voice of reason, too. Her husband wants to get at Dr. Venture, and she's kind of holding the reins. She's the smart one, so she comes up with all the plans. I'm also a doctor, and she has 'Doctor' in her title — I like that!"

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

"Seeing fans freak out and get really excited and really happy that you're cosplaying their favorite character. I think that's my favorite part."

Comedic villain

Name: Serey

Cosplay: Cobra Commander, "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero" (Hasbro)

"He's a villain, but he's very comedic, like Wile E. Coyote. He has all these plans, and they're always foiled by G.I. Joe. Even though he's a villain, he's so inept — he's very comical and he makes me laugh. I guess since the show itself is from the 80's, a lot of smiles today came from the older generation who grew up with it. They got a kick out of it, and little kids got a kick out of it as well."

Brave and caring

Name: Amber

Cosplay: Minfilia, "Final Fantasy XIV" (Game Boy Advance)

"Final Fantasy is one of my favorite games, and Minfilia is awesome! She is very brave and caring and she's very close to her friends, she cares about everybody, and that's what I like about her."

Live Science: What's the most satisfying part about doing cosplay?

"When someone recognizes who you are, and they get just as excited about the character as you are."

Expelliarmus!

Names: Kyle, Courtney and Shannon

Cosplay: Hogwarts students, "Harry Potter" books and movies

Kyle: Today we did a tribute to Alan Rickman [Severus Snape in the "Harry Potter" movies], who recently passed. About 75 of us cosplayed as "Harry Potter" characters. And what inspired it was a friend of mine, he just proposed to his girlfriend of a year and half.

Courtney: It was in the middle of the shoot today. We all circled around them, raised our wands, got down on one knee. It was really sweet.

Shannon: It just completely shocked her. She thought he was going to propose about a year and a half later down at Harry Potter World in Florida.

Courtney: But we've all been living with the books since we were younger. My mum used to read them to me in all the accents, and she kept reading them to me until I was well into my teenage years. It's been a big part of our lives, so we thought for Comic Con, why don't we go as [Hogwarts] students?

Kyle: The first cosplay that I ever did, there was a 7-year-old girl who noticed me and wanted a photo with me and it just burst my heart in two! I like seeing the joy on kids faces when they see their favorite character being played out. Or they say, "I wish I could be that person," or they read the book, see the movies and get to see that character come to life, it's a great opportunity for them.

Courtney: Especially when the little kids mistake you for the actual character and come up and give you a hug.

Shannon: And they just hang onto your legs! It's wonderful.

Courtney: And for people who are more introverted it gives them a chance to step outside of themselves. They get to be that character, and then they don’t need to worry, 'Oh, it's not my natural personality to be outgoing. But hey it's this character so I'm going to take that on and I'm going to portray them for the day.' When you're wearing the cosplay, it gives someone an opening to come up and say something to you. It's wearing your interests on your body. It's a really great way to bridge the gap and find the common ground.

That scary, ominous music that plays whenever sharks are featured on nature documentaries is taking a big toll: It's making people feel unjustly terrified of sharks, and these negative feelings are likely hindering efforts to save and protect the magnificent fish, a new study finds.

Researchers showed 2,100 people a 60-second video clip of sharks that was either silent or set to ominous or uplifting music. People who watched the "frightening" music clip tended to rate sharks more negatively compared with people who watched the video with uplifting music or silence, they found.

This finding is concerning, as most people view documentaries as educational, and may not be aware that these so-called objective shows are actually eroding their feelings toward sharks, said study lead researcher Andrew Nosal, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Saint Katherine College in San Marcos, California, and a visiting assistant researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.  [7 Unanswered Questions About Sharks]

"While it may be tempting to feature sharks with ominous background music to maximize the entertainment aspect of documentaries, news packages or even live exhibits, this may also undermine their educational value by biasing viewers' perceptions of sharks," Nosal told Live Science in an email.   

It's no surprise that background music can influence people's feelings. Music can set the mood, engage the viewer emotionally and convey unspoken commentary and judgment, Nosal said. However, he decided to look into the matter more after noticing that music accompanying sharks was often "ominous and unsettling, à la [the movie] 'Jaws,'" compared with the majestic, often playful music that accompanies other animals, such as dolphins, he said.

The findings will hopefully make filmmakers think twice before pairing shark footage with menacing music in the future, Nosal said. Especially because, in the long run, negative perceptions of sharks may hurt conservation efforts that rely on public support, he said.

The study is "extremely well done," said Robert Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, who was not involved with the study. 

"People might consider this to have been a no-brainer, but in fact no one had ever taken the time to do this systematically and scientifically," Hueter said.

Hueter added that he's given countless interviews on sharks for news outlets over the years, and it's not uncommon for newscasters to play ominous music during the segment, and the music unfortunately "reinforces people's perceptions of sharks as being dangerous killers," he said.

The study was published online today (Aug. 3) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Original article on Live Science.

Someday, moviegoers may be able to watch 3D films from any seat in a theater without having to wear 3D glasses, thanks to a new kind of movie screen.

The new technology, named Cinema 3D, overcomes some of the barriers to implementing glasses-free 3D viewing on a larger scale, but it's not commercially viable yet, the researchers said when describing their findings.

Although 3D movies can offer unique perspectives and experiences, one major drawback is the cumbersome eyewear that moviegoers typically have to wear. Although glasses-free 3D strategies already exist, these technologies currently cannot be scaled up to movie theaters. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

For example, glasses-free 3D methods for TV sets often use a series of slits known as a parallax barrier that is placed in front of the screen. These slits allow each eye to see a different set of pixels, creating the illusion of depth.

However, for parallax barriers to work, they must be placed at a set distance from viewers. This makes parallax barriers difficult to implement in larger spaces such as theaters, where people can sit at a variety of distances and angles from the screen.

In addition, glasses-free 3D displays have to account for the different positions from which people are watching. This means that they have to divide up the limited number of pixels they project so that each viewer sees an image from wherever he or she is located, the researchers said.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," study co-author Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said in a statement.

But in the new method, the researchers used a series of mirrors and lenses to essentially give viewers a parallax barrier tailored to each of their positions.

"By careful design of optical elements, we can achieve very-good-quality 3D content without using glasses," study co-author Piotr Didyk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, both in Germany, told Live Science.

"This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale," Matusik said in a statement.

In addition, the scientists reasoned that instead of displaying images to every position in a theater, they would need to display images only to a relatively tiny set of viewing positions at each theater seat.

"In our solution, we exploit the layout of the audience in a cinema," Didyk said.

The scientists developed a simple Cinema 3D prototype that could support a 200-pixel image. In experiments, volunteers could see 3D versions of pixelated figures from a number of different seats in a small theater.

The scientists cautioned that Cinema 3D is currently impractical to implement commercially. For instance, their prototype requires 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, but the screen is just barely larger than a pad of paper. The researchers hope to build a larger version of their display and further boost the image resolution.

"It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theater," Matusik said in a statement. "But we are optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3D for large spaces like movie theaters and auditoriums."

The scientists detailed their findings July 26 at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Anaheim, California.

Original article on Live Science.

When "Star Trek's" starship Enterprise first embarked on a "five-year mission" in 1966, the goal of its first crew was to better understand the universe around it by going where no men —or humans, as we would say today —had gone before.

That mission is similar to that of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been exploring the universe from Earth orbit since 1990. And just as "Star Trek Beyond" (the science-fiction franchise's latest film) warps into theaters this Friday, scientists have unveiled their newest view yet from their real-life "Frontier Fields" program, which you can see here in a stunning video.

"The newest target of Hubble's mission is the distant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, potentially home to billions of strange new worlds," just like those visited by the USS Enterprise, according to a European Space Agency description. The cluster's massive gravity magnifies light from background galaxies due to an effect known as gravitational lensing.

Although Abell S1063 is 4 billion years old, the galaxies behind it are much older. One of the galaxies is about 12.7 billion years old, or only 1 billion years younger than the universe's formation during the Big Bang.

"[Gravitational lensing] allows Hubble to see galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to observe and makes it possible to search for, and study, the very first generation of galaxies in the universe," ESA officials wrote in the same statement. "'Fascinating,' as a famous Vulcan might say."

Hubble astronomers also observed 16 background galaxies whose light is so distorted that they form multiple images on the sky. This phenomenon will let astronomers improve models of mass in the cluster, both in ordinary matter and dark matter. Dark matter is a substance that cannot be seen with telescopes but that can be inferred through its gravitational influence. Along with dark energy, it makes up the vast majority of the known universe.

Previous Frontier Fields discoveries by Hubble include finding a galaxy that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and the first gravitationally lensed supernova. Two more Frontier Fields observations are also planned in the next few years. ESA said this would not have been possible without its international collaboration across Europe and with NASA.

"Such an extensive international collaboration would have made Gene Roddenberry, the father of 'Star Trek,' proud," ESA officials wrote.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

In the new movie "Independence Day: Resurgence," opening in theaters today (June 24), Earth will once again gear up for an epic fight with a hostile alien race. The premise will set up some awesome action sequences, but how realistic is the idea that if aliens were to visit Earth, their one goal would be to destroy us? What do the experts think?

Twenty years ago, the new movie's predecessor, "Independence Day," featured Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum cracking wise while using a computer virus (presumably written in an Earth-based computer language) to disable an alien ship and save humanity. In the new movie's timeline, Earth's nations have since created a huge, planetary-wide defense program to shield our planet, but it may not be enough to defend humanity when the aliens return. 

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has said repeatedly that he's afraid of aliens wiping out the human race the way a human would wipe out a colony of ants. ['Independence Day: Resurgence' Trailer]

In 2015, Hawking co-launched an initiative called Breakthrough Listen, which will search for alien communication signals out in the cosmos, and eventually broadcast signals from the human race, with the goal of enabling communication across the universe.

"We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans," Hawking said at the Breakthrough announcement. "If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced. A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Are the aliens benign?

Alien invasions of Earth are nothing new in sci-fi. One of the most famous examples is "War of the Worlds," an H.G. Wells 19th-century classic that was adapted into a Tom Cruise movie in 2005. In that film, aliens inexplicably begin bursting from underneath city pavement to incinerate humans.  

But some films portray aliens as benign, such as 1997's "Contact," based on a 1980s book written by Carl Sagan. A signal begins spouting prime numbers, which Jodie Foster's SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) team tries to decode. Their efforts at talking with the aliens turn a little strange, but there definitely is no invasion. 

This hopeful view is something that science communicator Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow, shared at the Breakthrough event in 2015. (It's also the belief held by astronomer Jill Tarter, former director of the Center for SETI Research, whom Foster's character in "Contact" was based on.) Druyan is also involved in the Breakthrough initiative.

"We may get to a period in our future where we outgrow our evolutionary baggage and evolve to become less violent and shortsighted," Druyan said. "My hope is that extraterrestrial civilizations are not only more technologically proficient than we are but more aware of the rarity and preciousness of life in the cosmos."

Active SETI debate

Three spacecraft currently heading out of the solar system — the Pioneer probe and the two Voyager probes — contain maps that point the way back to Earth. And there continue to be initiatives to put messages for aliens on spacecraft. When the NASA New Horizons probe finishes its Pluto and possible Kuiper Belt work, some people are hoping to create a crowdsourced message for aliens to upload to its hard drive.

Some researchers, however, aren't sure it's such a good idea to shift SETI efforts from just listening to actually sending out signals — a method some call "active SETI."

"Active SETI advocates broke with the conventional wisdom of the SETI pioneers, which was to listen but not transmit. This change may have been driven by the impatience of younger SETI people after 40 years of unsuccessful searches," Michael Michaud, author of the book "Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials" (2007, Copernicus), said in a 2014 interview with Space.com. 

"But active SETI is not science," added Michaud, a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Department of State. "It is an attempt to provoke a response from an alien society whose capabilities and intentions are not known to us." 

But Earth's sheer distance from other civilizations might serve as a shield against aliens that don't exactly want us around. 

Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar-message composition at the SETI Institute, said in 2010, "Even if they tend to be hateful, awful folks, can they do us any harm at interstellar distances?" 

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A good movie can transport audiences, taking them to other worlds and briefly immersing people in characters' lives. And with virtual-reality technology, movie writers and directors have more tools at their disposal than ever before to create immersive experiences.

Danish filmmakers Johan Knattrup Jensen and Mads Damsbo and their production company Makropol are using virtual-reality (VR) technology to explore the boundaries of movie narratives, building on traditional visual storytelling and introducing new opportunities for audiences to interact with plotlines and characters — and with one another.

Their short film "Ewa: Out of Body," premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and enabled viewers to see the world through the eyes of Ewa, the main character. The short is a brief introduction to Ewa's life. A planned feature-length film will allow audiences to share her experiences from infancy through adulthood, centering on a significant conflict with her mother. [Beyond Gaming: 10 Other Fascinating Uses for Virtual-Reality Tech]

Seeing and experiencing

The filmmakers say VR could inspire movie creators to approach visual narratives in an entirely new way.  

"VR opens up a different way of telling stories — one you haven't seen before," Jensen, the film's director, told Live Science. "Instead of simply trying to tell a story, I'm trying to convey an experience."

Jensen shot "Ewa" as a single take, which means that the camera's point of view — what the audience sees in the headset — travels uninterrupted from start to finish, mimicking the way that we experience the world. Making a film with no edits, Jensen explained, meant that all the movements of the actors and the camera had to be carefully choreographed and coordinated at every step, with movements linked to actions that would advance Ewa's story.

"How do we acknowledge the audience's presence in the film, and how do we use that for telling the story? This is something we're really interested in," Damsbo said. And with VR, filmmakers can begin to imagine an active, participatory role for audience members within their movies, Damsbo told Live Science.

VR gets social

It might seem that wearing VR headsets in a theater would isolate viewers from one another, and may reduce the shared enjoyment of a movie, but Jensen emphatically disagrees.

"If that were true, we'd say books were an anti-social medium," he said. "VR has the power that any good experience has — right after you have it, you want to share it."

Another Makropol VR film shown at Cannes, "The Doghouse," did exactly that. It offered a group of five viewers the chance to not only participate in a communal VR experience — a film about a family sharing a meal — but also to discuss it after the movie ended and see how their perceptions of the same story differed, depending on whose role they were playing.

SKAMMEKROGEN // THE DOGHOUSE - interview with the artists on Vimeo.

"We wanted to say, there isn't really one truth about a story — about this family dinner — there are five truths," Damsbo said. "And each one is just as true."

Talking about the film enabled participants to appreciate how VR allowed each of them to experience a very different narrative, he added. [Photos: Virtual Reality Puts Adults in a Child's World]

"A new language is being born"

Some established members of the Hollywood community are ready and willing to explore what VR technology can do. Michael Bay, director of the blockbuster "Transformers" movies, is embracing VR. He recently announced a partnership with the production company The Rogue Initiative to create VR experiences that include highly dynamic action sequences — a trademark of Bay's movies — within an immersive environment.

And at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, a roster of VR short films — live action and animated — which included Makropol's "Ewa" and "The Doghouse," were presented at a special pavilion. Festival officials even included a cardboard VR headset in the event's official "swag bag" giveaway.

However, certain moviemakers have expressed skepticism about VR's effectiveness for telling stories.

At Cannes, director Steven Spielberg suggested that VR might offer audiences too many choices, which could lead them to "forget the story" that the writer and director imagined.

But perhaps allowing a viewer to choose among several stories means that the director's role is more important than ever, Jensen suggested.

"I can still control my audience," Jensen told Live Science. "But now I have to make a game with them, where I try to persuade them to find the story — to find my story," he added.

"The medium is changing, aesthetics are changing and a new language is being born. We can only embrace the art of this new language," Jensen said.

(Looking for a VR headset? Our sister site Tom's Guide put together a great primer on the best ones on the market right now: The Best VR Headsets.)

Original article on Live Science.

The 2016 Cannes Film Festival, which began May 11 and runs until May 22 in Cannes, France, featured a festival first: screenings of virtual reality (VR) short films and presentations in a pavilion dedicated exclusively to VR.

But not everyone is convinced that virtual reality should be part of cinema's future.

Famed director Steven Spielberg said he's skeptical about VR's effectiveness as a storytelling tool, and questioned whether it should be seriously considered as a means for developing and presenting visual narratives. [Beyond Gaming: 10 Other Fascinating Uses for Virtual-Reality Tech]

Spielberg voiced his concerns during the festival, saying VR was potentially "dangerous" because it allows the viewer too much freedom to make their own choices about which parts of a story to engage with, rather than presenting them with a single, fixed narrative path crafted by a writer and director, Reuters reported.

He cautioned that VR might "forget the story" in favor of offering an immersive environment with a number of potential narrative threads or isolated dramatic moments that viewers could explore.

But perhaps it isn't surprising that an established director who is accustomed to steering an audience through a film using carefully considered staging, camera placement, lighting design and editing would be wary of a medium that allows viewers to make their own choices about where to look.

A brand-new language

However, some moviemakers are more than ready to embrace the new technology. Spielberg's naysaying aside, other festivalgoers hailed VR and its immersive worlds as an exciting new direction for cinema, offering fresh opportunities for storytelling.

"Madagascar" co-director Eric Darnell presented a 6-minute VR film at Cannes titled "Invasion!" and told Reuters that he saw VR not as an extension of cinema, but as "its own thing," describing it as "a brand-new language."

Penrose Studios produced the animated VR short "Allumette," which was also shown at Cannes. The studio said in an online description of the film that "VR movies are a new art form, wholly different from cinema, the stage play or the opera that came before."

And Oriane Hurard, a producer and production manager attending the Cannes festival, gleefully tweeted a photo of the VR headset included in her Cannes "swag bag," saying "La révolution est en marche! [The revolution is underway!]"

Motion pictures have undergone many changes since the first procession of sequential images flickered to life before an audience in the early 20th century. Indeed, new technologies emerged over the decades that followed and pushed the medium, and filmmakers, forward. Movies have transitioned from silent to full of spectacular sound and from black-and-white to color, and along the way, voices arose that sounded warnings about how these dramatic changes would destroy the art of cinema forever.

So far, that hasn't been the case.

While VR headsets aren't likely to replace movie theaters just yet, skeptics may want to think twice before they dismiss VR. Virtual reality is only the latest technology to challenge media makers to try a different approach for sharing their stories — and it probably won't be the last.

(Looking for a VR headset? Our sister site Tom's Guide put together a great primer on the best ones on the market right now: The Best VR Headsets.)

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The much-anticipated film "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" opens in U.S. theaters Friday (Dec. 18), and if you're not already waiting in line to see the very first screenings, you might be worried about spoilers ruining the experience.

And now you've got science to support your fears. A recent study found that spoilers — or giving away key plot details — may not ruin an experience entirely, but can reduce suspense and decrease overall enjoyment.

"Our study is the first to show that people's widespread beliefs about spoilers being harmful are actually well-founded and not a myth," the study's corresponding author, Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor of communication science at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said in a statement. [15 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why]

Johnson and his colleagues asked 412 university students to read several short stories that they had never seen before. Before reading, the students were given summaries, some of which revealed spoilers. The students then rated the stories, describing whether or not they found the tales engaging, moving and suspenseful.

The scientists said they were curious to find if their tests would corroborate results from a 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science. That research, somewhat unexpectedly, suggested that people actually enjoy an experience more, at least some of the time, after hearing spoilers.

In fact, the new research showed the opposite.

"What we expected was to see that some outcomes would be improved by spoilers, in keeping with the earlier study," Johnson told Live Science. "Instead, we surprisingly found that for all the outcomes, spoilers were detrimental."

In the new study, stories that had been "spoiled" were rated as less moving, less thought provoking, and less successful at drawing the reader into a narrative world and providing an immersive experience. In fact, the effects of story spoilers were "consistently negative," Johnson said in a statement.

In other words, when people don't know how a story will turn out, they experience more enjoyment and appreciation, the researchers found.

For big entertainment events like "The Force Awakens," the long-awaited seventh movie in the "Star Wars" franchise, and the first "Star Wars" movie released since 2005, audiences have a lot of anticipation. Many dedicated fans have been queuing for more than a week, eager to be among the first to see what surprises the filmmakers have in store.

However, a far greater number of moviegoers are more likely to catch the film over the weekend, or even a couple of weeks after opening, hoping to avoid long lines and sold-out screenings.

But waiting to see the movie comes with the possibility of sacrificing a little enjoyment. The longer you postpone the experience, the more likely you are to run across a spoiler that reveals critical details. Even carefully limiting Internet use and TV viewing to avoid movie reviews or related articles could be derailed by an unexpected encounter with a social media post or a stray remark that would ruin everything.

Or would it? Johnson was quick to add that the study also discovered some good news about spoilers: They're not as bad as some people think they are. Even if, in spite of all your efforts, you hear some vital detail before you're ready, you'll still get plenty of satisfaction from your experience with the story, the researchers learned. [Top 10 Scariest Movies Ever]

Johnson explained that, even when a story is "spoiled," there's plenty of evidence to suggest that an emotional payoff is still possible. "We know from previous research that people can feel suspense even if they know how the story ends," Johnson told Live Science. "You might watch a film for the fifth or sixth time, and even though you know all the beats, all the twists and turns, you can still feel anxiety or worry for characters," he said.

Still, he warned, people shouldn't take this as a go-ahead to spoil stories for others, as spoilers can and do negatively affect people's experiences.

The next steps for the researchers will include investigating the dynamics of social interaction in enjoying, and spoiling, media enjoyment. Johnson told Live Science that he and his colleagues have been gathering data related to four leaked episodes of the HBO series "Game of Thrones," which were widely downloaded and viewed before the Season 5 premiere in early 2015. Johnson said they hope to learn how the social networks that accompany viewing experiences may inform viewing pleasure — and increase the chances of encountering spoilers.

Johnson is taking his own research to heart as he makes plans to see the new "Star Wars" film. He said he'll be making some effort to avoid spoilers, but that he knows if he does run across a revealing tidbit, it's not the end of the world.

"I wouldn't be upset, but I'm being a little bit cautious!" Johnson said. "I've tried to stay mostly spoiler-free in terms of actual plot. Hopefully, that'll make it that much more exciting when I see it."

The findings were published in the Dec. 17 issue of the journal Communication Research.

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Today's Google Doodle commemorates actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, on what would have been her 99th birthday.

During World War II, Lamarr designed a system to safeguard homing signals on torpedoes launched by Allied forces, protecting them from Nazi interception by "hopping" between radio frequencies. Her patent, co-created with composer George Antheil, never saw action during the war, but it did pave the way for technological innovations that secure wireless networks today.

Born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, Lamarr launched her acting career while still a teenager. She had appeared in a handful of Czech and German productions when her role in the 1933 erotic movie "Ecstasy" brought Hollywood to her door. After signing with MGM, she starred in a string of films during the studio's "Golden Age." [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

Lamarr was popular at the box office, and drew international acclaim as one of cinema's great beauties, but her talents as an inventor went unsung for decades. In 1941, she and Antheil donated the patent for their "Secret Communication System" to the U.S. Navy, though it wasn't put to use until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

In 1997, Lamarr was honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international nonprofit digital-rights group. Together with Antheil, she received the Pioneer Award, which recognizes achievements that contribute to the development of computer-based communications, such as cellphones, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. "This tool they developed to defend democracy half a century ago promises to extend democracy in the 21st century," an EFF spokesman said.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

After spending more than 90 years in the sandy dunes of Guadalupe, California, a majestic plaster Hollywood sphinx, created for the 1923 blockbuster silent film "The Ten Commandments," is making its 21st century debut.

Researchers excavated the fragile plaster of Paris sphinx from the dunes in 2014, and let it dry for several months before art restorers used Elmer's Glue to piece it back together. It's now housed at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Southern California, and goes on display for the public tomorrow evening (June 12).

"It's been pretty phenomenal," said Doug Jenzen, the executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center. "We're putting the final touches on the exhibit right now." [See Photos of the Old and Refurbished Hollywood Sphinxes]

The sphinx and its companions were the brainchild of director Cecil B. DeMille and his film crew. The silent movie had an enormous set to show the grandeur of Pharaoh's City, which was lined with 21 regal sphinxes, each standing 35 feet (11 meters) tall when they were on their pedestals.

Artifacts left by the crew suggest they had a good time on the set while making the movie. Archaeologists found tobacco tins and medicine bottles — the latter likely a ruse that carried moonshine because "The Ten Commandments" was filmed during America's Prohibition Era (1920-1933), when alcohol wasn't allowed, Jenzen said.

After filming ended, the crew apparently left the movie set to the elements. The statues were weathered by the rain, fog and wind and eventually buried by the sand on the ever-shifting dunes.

"In the process of putting [the sphinx] back together, the art restorer also found graffiti on it that said 'May 1930,'" Jenzen told Live Science. "It corresponds to all of the photos we have of people in the 1930s going out to the dunes and posing with these Egyptian statues that are sticking out of the sand."

The researchers also found evidence that people used the sphinxes for target practice, Jenzen said. They also uncovered a burned piece of toast, likely from an uneaten 1920s sandwich.

"Somehow this piece of toast made it through the elements of being exposed," Jenzen said. "It's definitely not edible anymore."

Sphinx restoration

Artifacts stay better preserved under dry desert conditions. But Guadalupe is naturally humid, giving researchers a unique challenge.

"The minute the plaster statuary is exposed to the humidity in the air, it turns to mush and crumbles," Jenzen said. "So you need to have a team of people there who are able to pull the sand away and excavate it all simultaneously."

But hiring a large crew of people is expensive; the small team involved only had time to excavate part of the sphinx — half of its chest and hind legs. [Photos: Uncovering Sphinxes from 1923 'The Ten Commandments']

They also excavated it in a very California-like way. They wrapped the plaster in foam and pillows to protect it, and the placed it on plywood that had surfboards underneath it.

"The surfboards acted as sleds," Jenzen said. "It's an ecologically sensitive area and we couldn't have any cars or vehicles on it."

They let the partial sphinx sit inside for several months, letting it dry out and shrink to its original size. Then, restorers spent about five weeks piecing the chucks together with Elmer's Glue, largely because it's reversible, said Amy Higgins, an art restorer who worked on the sphinx.

The sphinx was in about 50 pieces, and she called "the fragility of it" the most challenging part. But now it sits about 10.5 feet long, 4.5 feet high and 3.5 feet deep, (3.2 by 1.4 by 1 meters).

In the meantime, researchers took a trip to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, and ended up looking through about 1,500 photographs that DeMille had taken of the set so they would have a better idea of the sphinxes' production, Jenzen said.

"There's one picture that we found, it's kind of funny. It's a bunch of guys going to work one morning out in the dune, and the whole dune was just littered with sphinx parts."

The new exhibit will show photos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the sphinx body, and a sphinx face and paw.

After seeing the exhibit, enthusiasts may also want to see "The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille," a new movie about the making of the movie by Peter Brosnan, Jenzen said. They can also see a paw of another sphinx that the researchers mailed to the U.S. Department of the Interior's POP! Exhibit in Washington, D.C., he added.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A plaster sphinx, more than 90 years old and weathered by the elements, will make its 21st-century debut at a museum in Guadalupe, California, tomorrow (June 12). Researchers based the reconstruction on old footage and photos of the sphinxes from the 1923 production of "The Ten Commandments." (Photo Credit: Dunes Center, Guadalupe, California.) 

Related: Read the full story on the new sphinx exhibit

Action!

Actors on the set of the movie 90 years ago.

Uncovering history

The team uncovers the famous sphinx. 

Capturing the moment

The staff snaps a picture with the sphinx. 

A formidable structure

An image of the sphinx from the movie. 

Restoring former majesty

The team works to repair damage from more than nine decades in the desert. 

A nostalgic image

A historic scene captured on film from decades ago. 

Facing up

A restorer created a plaster face that resembled the sphinx to hold the artifacts excavated from the dune, seen here in pink and white.

Sideways profile

A view of the reconstructed sphinx face from the side. The public is invited to see the exhibit at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center.

Giant paw

The crew of the 1923 blockbuster "The Ten Commandments" painted this giant sphinx paw a pink hue so that it would appear gray in the black and white movie.

Sphinx reconstructed

Art restorers used Elmer's Glue to piece the sphinx's body back together.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 4:15 p.m. EDT June 13 to add photos of the restored face, body and paw of the sphinxes filmed on the original movie set.

Originally published on Live Science.

Freezing temperatures and snow have turned much of the United States into an icebox. But, beyond keeping people inside and prompting them to bundle up when they venture out, does the cold weather change people's behavior?

Science says yes.

Cold temperatures can influence our thoughts and decisions without our even knowing it, experts have found. From influencing what colors women wear to how we judge criminals, from the limits of human creativity to how we treat our friends, chilly temperatures may have a great effect on the human psyche, research shows. [15 Weird Things Humans Do, and Why]

Here are five unexpected ways cold weather may influence people.

The red dress effect

Cold weather may influence what colors women wear, but only during a certain time of the month, according to research published in 2013 and 2014.

The research showed that during cold weather, "Women are more likely to wear shades of red and pink on days when they're ovulating," said Jessica Tracy, who authored the research and is an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. During ovulation, which is the release of an egg from the ovary, a woman's chances of conceiving are at their highest.

Although it's not clear why women may do this, some researchers think it comes down to sex appeal. "The basic idea is that red and pink colors are sort of a sexual signal," Tracy told Live Science.

When the researchers tried to replicate the study in the summer, the effect vanished, Tracy said. It reappeared when they did a new study during the winter, which they published in 2014 in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Maybe what's going on here is that in the summer when it's warmer, women have more ways of dressing seductively," Tracy said. This idea that women may behave differently when they are ovulating is somewhat controversial, Tracy noted, although she said there is ample evidence to support it.

Cold-blooded murder

Room temperature can influence how people judge criminals, a recent study found.

People in cold rooms in the study were more likely to see criminals as cold-blooded offenders whose crimes were premeditated, according to the study. In contrast, people in hot rooms tended to see criminals as hotheaded and impulsive, according to the 2014 study in the journal PLOS ONE.

In the study, 133 college students in Germany looked at eight mug shots of people who had been arrested. The students wrote what crime they thought the person had committed and rated how impulsive or premeditated they thought it was. [10 Contested Death Penalty Cases]

It's not terribly surprising that people link temperature with psychological mindset, the researchers said in the study. Hot and cold temperatures affect the way people judge others all of the time. For instance, compared with when a person is holding a cup of hot coffee, a person holding a cup of iced coffee tends to see others as interpersonally colder, according to a 2008 study in the journal Science.

Romantic movies

When it's cold outside, is there a better way to stay warm than to cuddle up with a romantic movie?

It seems that when people feel physically cold, they look for psychological warmth, researchers said in a 2012 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

During several experiments, the researchers manipulated the temperatures of both the room that the participants were sitting in as well as that of their drink, and then asked participants to pick out a movie. People tended to choose romance movies when they were cold, the researchers found.

Interestingly, the effect did not hold for people who didn't associate romance movies with psychological warmth, Live Science reported.

The researchers also found that online movie renters chose more romance films when the weather was cold than when it was warm.

Prisoner's dilemma

Temperature may sway how much trust people put in one another, according to a study.

In an experiment called the "iterated prisoner's dilemma," participants were paired together and put in a make-believe jail. The participants were told that authorities did not have enough evidence to convict either of them, but each was asked to testify against the other, according to the 2013 study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Participants in the study who were asked to hold a chemical hand warmer during the experiment were twice as likely to cooperate with each other (meaning, they would not testify against the other person) compared with those who held an ice pack, the researchers found.

It's possible that the sensation of physical warmth increased the students' interpersonal trust of one another, the researchers said. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

Hot and cold creativity

Different types of creativity can emerge when a person feels hot or cold, researchers found.

In a series of experiments, researchers found that people who were given a heated therapeutic pad, a hot cup of tea or who were in a warm room were better at creative drawing, categorizing objects and thinking of gift ideas for others.

But when they were cold, the participants were better at recognizing metaphors, thinking of new pasta names and planning abstract gift ideas.

It's possible that warmth helps people with warm relational creativity, meaning they may feel psychologically closer to other people and more generous toward them. In contrast, cold may stimulate referential, or distant and cold processing, as people may feel more apart from others.

"The tactile experience of physical warmth seems to be one of the most basic cues through which people learn about their social world," the researchers wrote in the 2014 study, published in the journal Acta Psychologica.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

People's brain waves may reveal which movies they like, and even predict which movies will do well at the box office, a new study suggests.

In the study, researchers had 32 college students watch 18 movie trailers each; the students had electrodes placed on their scalps to measure their brain waves, a test known as electroencephalography, or EEG.

After they watched each trailer, the participants were asked to rate how much they liked the movie and how much they'd be willing to pay for a DVD of it. After viewing all 18 trailers, the participants were asked to rank the movies in order of preference. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

The researchers then looked at the EEG data on certain brain waves, called beta and gamma waves. Results showed that the beta brain waves were linked with people's rankings of the movies: The more beta wave brain activity there was as a participant watched a movie, the higher that individual ranked the movie.

In another part of the study, the researchers wanted to see if they could find a way to predict how the students ranked the movies without looking at their actual rankings, based only on how much the students said they liked each movie.

The researchers found that they could in fact create a mathematical way to predict the students' movie rankings, but their predictions were more accurate when they included both the brain wave data and participant's stated feelings about the movies, rather than only the stated feelings alone.

The findings suggest that brain wave measurements may provide a better picture of what consumers will actually do (i.e., how they actually rank movies), than simply asking people in a survey about whether they liked something.

The study is one of the first to show that "EEG measures are related to real-world outcomes, and that these neural measures can significantly add to models predicting choice behavior," the researchers, from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, write in a paper that will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

The researchers also found that the gamma brain waves were linked with how much money a movie made: The more gamma wave activity there was, the more money the movie made at the U.S. box office.

Because EEG's are relatively cheap, the authors suggest that including such measures in a marketing strategy, such as efforts to optimize a movie trailer, may be cost effective.

Although the ability of the brain waves by themselves to predict box office sales was overall quite low, they could help marketers be just a bit more accurate in judging how well a movie will do, or gauging how effectively a movie trailer will appeal to an audience. And even that slight improvement "could lead to better-informed decisions on which trailer to release, and how much money to invest in promoting that particular movie, potentially decreasing costs and increasing revenues," the researchers wrote.

Dr. Anto Bagić, an associate professor of neurology and director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at the University of Pittsburgh, called the findings intriguing. Bagić noted that EEG measurements have an advantage over a different type of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), because EEG measurements directly reflect brain activity.

"I am not surprised at all that such inferences could be made from the rich spectrum of brain oscillations that are reflective of complex brain processes that we understand only partially," Bagić said.

But the practicality of using EEGs in predicting box office hits is still limited, Bagić said.

"I could anticipate some skeptics towards the idea" that it would be cheaper and more effective to perform an EEG on a representative sample of movie goers, instead of just getting a test audience into a theater and asking them what they think, Bagić told Live Science.

However, with more research, including studies with a larger number of people, the ability of the EEG to predict box office sales could improve, he said. If the findings are replicated, combining EEG data with information from test audiences may work best for such predictions, Bagić said.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A study published in the British Medical Journal showed that characters died in two-thirds of cartoon movies, compared with half in adult dramas. Parents are five times as likely to die in cartoon films compared with adult dramas. 

World-famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking took to Facebook yesterday (Nov. 18) to share his views about a new film based on his life.

Hawking, who joined the social networking site last month, praised "The Theory of Everything," a biopic about his life with his first wife Jane and his struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease). The film was released in the United States on Nov. 7.

Hawking praised the performance of actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays Hawking in the film, writing, "At times, I thought he was me." [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

The famed physicist, known for his work on black holes and gravitational singularities, added that seeing the film gave him the opportunity to reflect on his life.

"Although I'm severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work," Hawking wrote. "I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero-gravity flight. One day, I hope to go into space."

Hawking went on to pay a touching tribute to the most cherished people in his life.

"I've been privileged to gain some understanding of the way the universe operates through my work," he wrote. "But it would be an empty universe indeed without the people that I love."

Hawking also commented on the new film "Interstellar" in a separate post. "Interstellar" is the brainchild of his friend and fellow physicist Kip Thorne, of Caltech, and film producer Lynda Obst. Directed by Christopher Nolan, the film features wormholes and a scientifically realistic depiction of a black hole. Hawking and Thorne attended the U.K. premiere of the film on Oct. 29, according to Hawking's post. The film was released in the U.S. on Nov. 5.

Hawking's Facebook page is maintained with help from his team, and posts from Hawking himself are signed as "SH," according to the site.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

They moan. They bite. They shuffle. Or sometimes, they sprint, swarm and carry on surprisingly intelligent conversation.

Zombies are something of an open-source pop-culture phenomenon. Unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, these Halloween monsters aren't based on a literary resource. In fact, the modern conception of a zombie dates back to 1968, in a movie that doesn't so much as use the word: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."

"He didn't call them zombies, and he didn't think about them as zombies," said Ozzy Inguanzo, a screenwriter and author of "Zombies on Film: The Definitive Story of Undead Cinema" (Rizzoli, 2014). But the public did, Inguanzo told Live Science.

Related: What could drive humans to extinction?

"Audiences saw these lumbering dead people, and they called them zombies … therefore, they became zombies," he said. Since then, the walking undead have wormed their way into video games, comic books — and even the classics (witness 2009's novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"). 

From Haiti to Hollywood

The true zombie origin story dates back further than 1968, of course. The sad beginning of the myth harks back to Haiti during the 1600s and 1700s, when African slaves were worked to death on sugar plantations. As UC Irvine journalism instructor Amy Wilentz pointed out in the New York Times in 2012, it's not hard to see how the notion of a dead body, stripped of will and personality, forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer, would occur to an enslaved people.

The notion of zombies is still part of Haitian folklore. The belief is that, through magic or poison, a sorcerer makes a person fall ill and appear to die. After the family buries the body, the sorcerer retrieves the person, who is alive, but held in thrall. In a 1997 article in the medical journal The Lancet, researchers studied three real-life cases of "zombification" and diagnosed the three sufferers with catatonic schizophrenia, epilepsy and mistaken identity. In the final case, a 31-year-old woman with possible fetal alcohol syndrome was mistaken for another woman who had died 13 years before. The cases suggest that zombification has often been used to explain mental illness or brain disorders in rural Haiti.

Zombies made the leap from Haitian religion to American entertainment in 1932, Inguanzo said, with a film starring Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy called "White Zombie." That movie, in turn, was largely inspired by a 1929 travelogue by William Seabrook, a journalist who also happened to be the kind of guy who, after failing to get a good enough description of the taste of human flesh from a West African chieftain, manages to acquire a hunk of flesh from a corpse to cook up himself. (In his 1931 book "Jungle Ways," Seabrook helpfully describes the taste as being very similar to veal.)

Zombies popped up in horror flicks over the next few decades, frequently in keeping with the Haitian voodoo theme, but sometimes branching out: The "Revenge of the Zombies" in 1943 took a sci-fi angle, with a Nazi scientist trying to create an army of the undead for Hitler. 

Related: The 10 weirdest ways we deal with the dead

The modern zombie

But the quintessential zombie flick was actually inspired less by these films and more by vampires. Working off the 1954 post-apocalyptic novel "I Am Legend," by Richard Matheson, which tells the story of the last man standing in a world of vampirelike monsters, George Romero and John Russo told their own tale of a group of bickering humans threatened by the shuffling, moaning living dead.

"He took the Haitian component out of the previous character storylines and brought them here, to suburbia," Inguanzo said. "They were our friends, our relatives, our neighbors who were coming back from the dead."

Romero's zombies became the touchstone for those that would follow, with writers adding their own quirks to the genre. In 1985's "Return of the Living Dead," the zombies hungered not just for human flesh, but also for "braaaains." That idea stuck. The movie was also the first to introduce talking zombies, and perhaps more crucially, fast-moving zombies.

These days, fast-walking zombies are overtaking their shambling counterparts, at least on the big screen. The trend is, in part, inspired by video games like "Resident Evil," which first came out in 1996.

"Video games had a huge impact in bringing [zombies] back to the forefront," Inguanzo said. "These are easy bad guys to kill. There's no remorse there."

The zombie virus has also spread to the comic-book world, like the 2005-2006 Marvel series in which all of Marvel's superheroes get infected by a zombie virus. The superheroes stay strong and smart, but crave human flesh. Even wholesome Archie Comics has been bitten by the zombie bug, with a 2013 series called "Afterlife with Archie."

Zombie comics are, in turn, making the leap back to the screen, as with AMC's series "The Walking Dead." And Hollywood seems to be recognizing that zombies are moneymakers, turning out big-budget Brad Pitt spectacles like 2013's "World War Z."

"Those types of movies are focusing on explosions and action and adrenaline," Inguanzo said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Hidden for more than 90 years beneath the rolling sand dunes of Guadalupe, California, an enormous, plaster sphinx from the 1923 blockbuster movie "The Ten Commandments" has been rediscovered and is now above ground.

The public will be able to see the sphinx on display as early as next year, once it has been reconstructed — a necessity since it became weather-beaten during its stint beneath the sand, said Doug Jenzen, the executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, who oversaw the recent excavation.

The roughly 15-foot-tall (4.6 meters) sphinx is one of 21 that lined the path to Pharaoh's City in the 1923 silent hit, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. He later remade the film, with Charlton Heston as Moses, in 1956. [See Photos of the Film's Giant Spinxes & Excavation]

"[The 1923 film] was one of the largest movie sets ever made, because they didn't have special effects," Jenzen told Live Science. "So anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large." The facade to Pharaoh's City stood an estimated 12 stories tall and about 720 feet (219 meters) across. "It's giant," Jenzen said.

The film crew originally built the sphinxes' body parts in Los Angeles, and transported them about 165 miles (266 kilometers) to Guadalupe, where they assembled them into giant, hollow statues. The crew even built an extra sphinx so that the actors playing slaves could drag it around during filming, Jenzen said.

Legend has it that after filming ended, the movie crew dynamited the set and buried the sphinxes in a trench, but Jenzen has found little evidence of such a dramatic end. Instead, the wind, rain and sand likely collapsed and buried a large part of the set under the ever-shifting dunes. The sphinxes are in roughly the same place they were during filming, he said.

In fact, the film helped guide an excavation of the site in 2012.

"We'd work during the day, and we'd watch the movie at night to figure out what we were finding," said M. Colleen Hamilton, a historical archaeology program manager and senior historical archaeologist with Applied EarthWorks in California.

The first excavation took place in the 1990s, when the Dunes Center, then a part of the Nature Conservancy, had archaeologists comb through the abandoned movie site. They found dozens of small artifacts, including tobacco tins and cough syrup bottles — likely holding a substitute for alcohol during the Prohibition Era, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, Jenzen said.

"What objects like that tell us is that there wasn't a whole lot to do at the making of this movie," he said. "These guys had a lot of really good times before takes."

Mysterious sphinx

In 2012, the Dunes Center invited an archaeology group to survey the set again. This time, the archaeologists found the head of a sphinx about "the size of a pool table" buried in the dunes, Jenzen said.

The archaeologists excavated the fragile plaster of Paris head, now on display at the Dunes Center, but they didn't have time to exhume its body. Now, two years later, Applied EarthWorks returnedwith the goal of finishing the project.

But it wasn't to be, said Hamilton. Although the archaeologists had buried the body in sand in 2012 to protect it, the wind had uncovered the sphinx's remains, leaving a greying, crumbling mess.

"The site is basically being destroyed through erosion," Hamilton said. "It's become more critical to try to salvage some materials before they disappear." [Sand Scenes: California's Shifting Dunes]

The wind, however, helped them find the body of another sphinx. Sand had filled its hollow insides, and exposure to the moist beach air had dulled its red and ochre colors, making a careful excavation paramount.

From Oct. 6 to 14, the archaeology team, headed by Applied EarthWorks archaeologist Kholood Abdo Hintzman, slowly excavated the sphinx's body. To keep the paper-thin plaster of Paris from cracking, they wrapped it in cheesecloth soaked in a preservation chemical. Then, they carefully funneled sand out of the hollow statue, replacing the empty space with expanding insulation foam, Hamilton said.

The team could only work a few hours each day. In the morning, the thick, moist fog prevented them from doing their fragile work, and strong winds in the afternoon also stymied their progress. But, after eight days, they finally removed the body and placed it in an off-site building to dry and shrink to its normal size.

Fans of old Hollywood will be able to see the reconstructed body of the sphinx at the Dunes Center in mid- to late 2015, along with the head of the other reconstructed sphinx, Jenzen said. The movie itself is a piece of history, as it was the most expensive film made at that time, costing upward of $1 million, he said. Some scenes were filmed in Technicolor, and the crew used Jell-O as a special effect during the Biblical parting of the Red Sea.

"I think it's a great piece of Americana," Jenzen said. "But you have to hunker down to watch the whole thing, because it's more than three hours long and it's silent."

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Books adapted for the screen regularly rack up critical acclaim – think of Life of Pi, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight.

But it’s hard to think of equivalent successes for films adapted from video games, even looking back 20 years to the first, the execrable Super Mario Bros in 1993. Only a few have made any significant impact at the box office – Prince of Persia, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider – and fewer still have garnered anything close to acclaim. The highest rating awarded by the Rotten Tomatoes review site is a meagre 44% for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, with most others languishing between the single digits and low twenties.

With this history, it’s hard to believe that the forthcoming film adaptation of Tetris, the falling block puzzle and world’s most sold game, will offer anything different.

Staying true to the source

The process of transforming an artistic creation from one medium into another is a tricky thing, with attention almost invariably turning to the issue of “fidelity” – how faithful the adaptation is to the original work. Could this be the problem faced by those adapting video games?

Rich Moore, director of Wreck-It-Ralph, a Disney release not adapted from but featuring the characters of 1980s video games such as Donkey Kong, talks about the “mythology and baggage attached to pre-existing video game titles”, explaining that inevitably some fans do not react well to adaptations.

In fact, considerable research has debunked this concept of fidelity, as well as its use as a measure of an adaptation’s success. From Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as “repetition without replication” to Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” thesis, scholars argue that adaptations stand as works in their own right.

One problem seems to be that films based on video games are simply bad at everything: bad stories, bad acting, bad visuals. Prince of Persia was dismissed as “familiar genre high jinks”, Empire Magazine was unimpressed with Mortal Kombat’s “monotony of a story”, The Guardian described Silent Hill as “well-nigh incomprehensible”, and The Hitman as “patched-together CGI-assisted action along with rudimentary and witless characterisation”. You get the idea.

This is all a tremendous pity as games have huge potential for great adaptation, the most of which lies perhaps in the many narratives possible within their huge game universes. A good example is the Halo games franchise, with a rich canon of books and anime which expand upon its story arc. Other games bring compelling characters with all sorts of gaps in their backgrounds to be filled, for example Samus Aran, the protagonist of the Metroid series. The fact that a popular game already comes with millions of fans and potential cinema-goers doesn’t hurt.

Hits from the memory bank

One element which might support the potential of games as films today is nostalgia. The first generation of gamers in the late 1970s and ‘80s, now in their late 30s and 40s, remember well the Nintendo Game & Watch handheld versions of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, Tetris on the Gameboy, and arcade classics such as Space Invaders, Pac Man and Frogger (even as their children swipe iPad screens to launch ornithological missiles in Angry Birds). Games are a powerful repository of cultural memory, and tapping into it was key to Wreck-it Ralph’s success.

Games, perhaps more vividly even than films or books, evoke memories of childhood: the rules and objectives recall shouts of triumph and of frustration, the merciless slamming of buttons and joysticks. This also underpins the appeal of Pixels, a 2010 short film by Patrick Jean that has been given a full-length remake. Despite relatively crude CGI and a narrative that doesn’t extend beyond Atari game characters falling from the sky, the film delights simply by feeding off that memory bank: with the recognition of Pong, Frogger, Tetris and Space Invaders comes the recollections of happy days spent playing them. That’s the fortuitous thing about games; they are usually associated with joy.

A classic in the making?

So I’m thrilled that a Tetris film is in the works. Perhaps voicing the views of many, The New Yorker met the news with a mix of “confusion, scepticism, and derision”. It opined: “How could the movements of a bunch of faceless, lifeless objects be the basis for a narrative film?” The production company defends their unconventional film, but ultimately theirs is a very conventional commercial justification: the recognition value of a brand. No different to Mickey Mouse or Transformers, people’s recognition of Tetris will drive its commercial value.

I think they sell their film short. This isn’t about familiarity with a brand, this is an appeal to a game so stripped to its barest elements that there are only two things upon which to focus: those blocks, and the playing process of lining them up. There is nothing else. That sense of play is the key to the memory bank. It could be, as Tetris Company founder Henk Rogers says, an appeal to the desire to “create order out of chaos”. Or the sense of being able to handle problematic blocks as they rain down from the sky, with no real consequence for not being able to keep up. It could be the achievement of reaching four lines in a row, or the immersion of being stuck in a moving car with eyes glued to the screen, oblivious to everything else passing by.

Johan Huizinga opens his classic book, Homo Ludens, with this declarative sentence: “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.” We play because it is a primordial impulse in us: “the fun of playing … resists all analysis, all logical interpretation.”

It is that sense of play, not any sense of fealty to the original work, that is all too frequently lost in the process of turning a game into a film – the studio battles, the CGI work for the game universe, the marketing of another Hollywood celebrity. But in the case of Tetris, all we have is a simple game, with its simple pleasures of play.

Jenna Ng does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.