-Using only light, Australian researchers say they are able to move small particles almost five feet through the air. It’s more than 100 times the distance achieved by existing optical “tweezers,” the researchers say.
Not quite a simple grabby tractor beam, the new system works by shining a hollow laser beam at an object and taking advantage of air-temperature differences to move it around.
-This is one of those ideas that’s either going to be crazy successful or an epic failure. NBC Universal just made a deal to turn Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga into three films and a TV series, a lot of which will be written by Akiva Goldsman and directed by Ron Howard.
-By using high tech scanners, researchers have mapped the location of thousands of termite mounds in Africa. Their newly-released map of these insect civilizations gives us clues about the future of weather on the savannas. The movement of termite mounds is a distant early warning system of the encroaching dryness of the savannas.
-On Sept. 8, 1966, NBC aired the first episode of what it touted as a science fiction series for adults. Star Trek went on to air for only three seasons, but grew into a towering TV and film franchise and a cultural touchstone that transcends generations. The first episode aired on a Thursday night and was called The Man Trap, and TV viewers were introduced to characters who would become iconic. The episode that aired 44 years ago was actually not the original pilot. The Cage had a substantially different cast – the captain of the Enterprise was Christopher Pike, played by Jeffrey Hunter – and was initially rejected by the network as being “too cerebral”: A second pilot was commissioned, this time with William Shatner playing Captain James T. Kirk, but that installment – Where No Man Has Gone Before – became the third episode of the first season.
-Comic artist Brendan McCarthy has claimed that Disney and Pixar are considering a CGI Doctor Strange movie. Earlier this year, Marvel commissioned McCarthy to create a new take on Doctor Strange. The finished article appeared in Spider-Man: Fever in April.
-Production studio IM Global has revealed further details of the upcoming Judge Dredd adaptation. According to the firm’s website, the movie has been renamed Dredd and will draw heavily from John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s comic books. “Dredd takes us to the wild streets of Mega City One, the lone oasis of quasi-civilisation on Cursed Earth. Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) is the most feared of elite Street Judges, with the power to enforce the law, sentence offenders and execute them on the spot – if necessary,” read a synopsis. Filming on Dredd is expected to commence soon. The movie is slated for release in 2012.
-After launching a four-issue miniseries based on “Darkwing Duck,” a superhero parody spun off from “DuckTales,” Boom! Studios is returning to the Disney Afternoon once again with an ongoing “Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers” comic that launches this December. “Rescue Rangers” will be scripted by Ian Brill, the writer of the “Darkwing Duck” miniseries, and artist Leonel Castellani.
-Using the world’s most powerful particle accelerators and sophisticated detectors, physicists are searching for traces of the Higgs boson, the particle that could help us understand how the universe got its mass. Fermilab’s Tevatron and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are the front-runners for finding this last missing member of the particle family, as described by physicists’ Standard Model of the particle world. In July 2010, the Tevatron found another clue, narrowing the expected range of the hypothetical Higgs boson’s mass. Meanwhile, researchers at the LHC, the younger but more powerful of the accelerator pair, announced that it rediscovered in just months particles that previous detectors had taken decades to find. CERN’s Director-General Rolf Heuer said: “Rediscovering our ‘old friends’ in the particle world shows that the LHC experiments are well prepared to enter new territory…. Now it is down to nature to show us what is new.”
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