Giant Freakin Robot

Say, wasn’t there supposed to be some big Star Trek news today? ‘cause I haven’t heard anything about it…

I kid, of course. The only thing anyone is talking about today on sites like ours is the newly released Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer. It’s being watched and rewatched and dissected and considered by zillions of geeks just like us. But let’s not forget, as many tidbits as there are in the Into Darkness teaser, we’re about to get an even bigger glimpse at the film a mere week from now, on December 14th. That’s the day that a nine-minute preview of J.J. Abrams’ new Trek film will be showing in front of selected IMAX screenings of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

If today’s teaser has you fiending for another potent dose of boldly going, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. Or possibly an angry shriek to the heavens. Either way, you can now click over to Star Trek Into Darkness’ official website to find out if the nine-minute Trek preview will be playing in your neck of the woods.

After 35 years of space exploration, NASA’s Voyager 1 satellite has reached the edges of our solar system. Voyager 1 has encountered a region that scientists are calling a “magnetic highway,” where charged particles take an “exit ramp” into deep space. This is the last point before Voyager 1 enters interstellar space.

This so-called “magnetic highway” is the region that connects the Sun’s magnetic field lines to interstellar magnetic field lines. This allows inner heliosphere lower-energy charged particles to zoom in and outer heliosphere higher-energy particles to stream into our solar system, which is why NASA is going for the highway metaphor. The heliposphere is the “immense magnetic bubble containing our solar system, solar wind, and the entire solar magnetic field,” according to NASA partner Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

Apparently, the magnetic field orientation travels East to West and was once thought to travel North to South according to a few NASA astrophysicist. This is due to the Sun and winds from explosions of supernovae influence to interstellar space.

After the rise, there will be a new dawn. As Dawn of the Planet of the Apes starts to come together, the ostensible lead of the film, Andy Serkis, talks about the new role Caesar has to play as the bridge between humans and apes and his new role as leader of the Planet of the Apes.

While promoting The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Serkis explained how the ape revolution starts with Caesar. After Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the ape population in San Francisco starts to obtain the same cognitive abilities as Caesar after he infects with the experimental serum. Here’s Serkis:

The interesting thing now will be how Caesar operates in this world—because of the virus that hits at the end of the first movie — and how Caesar brings an accord between the apes and the surviving humans and that’s going to be interesting where we take that.

Given the story of the original films, we’re betting the diplomacy between man and ape won’t last long.

Hollywood’s current aversion to risk and love of reboots hits no genre harder than that of science fiction. Wrapping brainless spectacle around a tiny kernel of science fictional speculation often results movies like Battleship…or even worse, the Total Recall remake. For all its camp and Verhoeven goofiness, the original Recall actually played with some very interesting ideas, such as how we know what is real. After all, science fiction is supposed to be the literature of ideas, and most modern blockbusters aren’t interested in saying anything more complex than “I bet you’d really like a bucket of popcorn, am I right?” Thankfully, technology has advanced to the point that the gap between budding filmmakers and their audience is narrower than ever, and as a result we’re getting a slew of ambitious and memorable science fiction short films. Case in point: a Swedish short called Memorize. Check it out: