THe Last Man....

Casting details have yet to emerge on the project, but there’s solid reason to be psyched about the big-screen Y. Trachtenberg’s moody take on Portal milked maximum suspense from a minimalist scenario centered on a tough female prisoner who busts out of captivity with the help of a wormhole-blasting machine gun. Factor in Vaughn’s storytelling chops, which earned him a three-season stint as a writer-producer for Lost and more recently stunned sci-fi fans with thoughtful 2012 graphic novel Saga.

Portal: No Escape Director Snags Y: The Last Man Movie

 

Dan Trachtenberg pulled in 11.5 million views with his moody seven-minute fan film Portal: No Escape (above), based on the popular puzzle platforming game by Valve, a project that has springboarded the new director to much bigger things: He’s now been tapped by New Line Cinema to direct the long-gestating movie adaptation of graphic novel Y: The Last Man for his first feature film

Video: Watch the Entire Dark Knight Movie Trilogy in Three Minutes

Director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which concluded last summer with The Dark Knight Rises, is probably one of the most well-executed comic book hero franchises in recent memory.

An Artisanal Fluffernutter

Bon Appetit recently featured a variety of lowbrow sandwiches that have gone upscale, including a gourmet Fluffernutter by chef de cuisine Gary Fizner of Star Provisions in Atlanta, Georgia. For his version, he skips the classic jar of Marshmallow Fluff and makes his “fluff” from scratch. The sandwich’s soft white bread is baked on-site and even the peanut butter is artisanal, coming from North Carolina nut butter company

New Hiroshima bombing photo shows split mushroom cloud

A photograph that shows the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud split into two sections, one over the other, has been released by the curator of a peace museum in Japan. It was discovered on Monday among a collection of some 1,000 archival items related to the bombing, all of which are now in the possession of Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city.

We (probably) found the Higgs Boson. Now what?

I got to join in on a great conversation this morning on Minnesota Public Radio's "The Daily Circuit", all about the Higgs Boson and what it means for the future of physics.
This is a fascinating issue. Finding the Higgs Boson (if that is, indeed, what scientists have done) means that all the particles predicted by the Standard Model of physics have now been found. But that's not necessarily good news for physicists. For one thing, it would have been a lot more interesting to break the Standard Model than to uphold it. For another, we're now left with a model for the Universe that mostly works but still has some awkward holes — holes that it might be hard to get the funding to fill.
Daily Circuit host Kerry Miller, Harvard physics chair Melissa Franklin, and I spent 45 minutes talking about what is simultaneously a beautiful dream and a waking nightmare for the physics world. And I got to make a "Half Baked" reference in a conversation about particle physics, so you know it's a good time, too.

Cover for new edition of Orwell's 1984 is brilliant

Love this cover art for the new Penguin edition of 1984.

[Designer David] Pearson says that the design went through numerous iterations "to establish just the right amount of print obliteration. Eventually we settled on printing and debossing, as per the Great Ideas series [Why I Write shown, above], with the difference being that the title and author name were then blocked out using matt black foil. This had the effect of partially flattening the debossed letters, leaving just enough of a dent for the title to be determined – though I can't vouch for it's success on Amazon