Giant Freakin Robot

As production ramps up for the sequel to The Hunger Games – Catching Fire — the cast and crew have left their North Carolina location to shoot the final arena scene of the Third Quarter Quell in Hawaii. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire isn’t due in theaters until November 2013 but location photos of the Hawaiian production have leaked. We now have a good look at the underwater excitement, plus tributes Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, and Sam Claflin wearing black-and-grey wetsuits. Check them out…

The first phase of the Star Wars and Angry Birds partnership has been completed with the release of the highly addicting Angry Birds Star Wars mobile game. Lucasfilm and Finnish mobile game publisher Rovio aren’t finished trying to dominate the holiday season for children and Star Wars fans, however. Angry Birds Star Wars has crossed over into the non-digital world with the release of Angry Birds Star Wars Jenga and Angry Birds Star Wars: AT-AT Attack Battle Game.

Angry Birds Star Wars Jenga takes traditional Jenga pieces and arranges them in a plastic Evil Pig Death Star. The game comes with five Evil Pig pieces, four Stormtroopers, and one Darth Vader, and three Angry Birds, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca — which is an exclusive piece to Angry Birds Star Wars Jenga – and an X-Wing slingshot launcher. The gameplay is exactly like the mobile game only in a physical form.

Much was made of Ridley Scott’s return to big-screen science fiction with this past summer’s Prometheus, and while that film disappointed many, I still believe Ridley has another truly epic SF movie in him, if given the right script. Many of Prometheus’ problems originated in the script, both the Lindelof version and the earlier Alien: Engineers draft by Jon Spaihts. Another promising project on the horizon for Scott is an adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning The Forever War, and now the project has hired writer D.W. Harper to pen another draft of the script.

It makes me feel old and guilty not being able to remember when bottled water first saturated the marketplace. I can’t even say with conviction whether city water was as terrible beforehand, or if it got markedly worse after people turned away from the tap. But even with a proliferation of different kinds of filters, and various studies showing privatized bottled water to be less regulated than public, government-controlled water, these portable wastes of plastic aren’t going away anytime soon. Realize I don’t think they’re wastes for every reason, just for American reasons.

The key, then, becomes adapting the product for global use — you know, for those places where houses with eight indoor water faucets aren’t available. Enter NBD Nano, a start-up company comprised of four fresh-faced recent college grads eager to adapt the Namib desert beetle’s (pictured below) natural technology to change the world.