Collider has a nice rundown of the new Wonder Woman. Unfortunately, I'm not buying the new look. I don't know if it's due to the baby fat around her cheeks or the non-functional Halloween quality costume.

Anycase, looks like we're in for a campy Xena the Warrior Princess style treatment. I think they should've gone with the new updated Wonder Woman uniform in the comics.

Gamers have been waiting with baited breath to learn what direction Bungie, the creators of Halo, will be going with their next big title.  They've just released a blurp at the Game Developers Conference that their next project, codenamed Destiny, will be a Sci-Fi MMO. However, they stressed that the new game would not just be "WoW in space."

They got their work cut out for them. In general, massively multi-player online games based on Science Fiction haven't performed well in the marketplace. The upcoming Stars Wars MMO from Bioware hopes to reverse that trend.

The time for a Sci-Fi MMO is now though, because once World of Starcraft begins gearing up, the announcement will probably steal the wind out of the sails of many other Sci-Fi MMO projects.

Just a quick announcement. The movie TRANSCENDENT MAN, showcasing the work of futurist Ray Kurzweil, is now available through iTunes. Please note, Logic-Cool is not an affiliate marketer of the film. We supply the link because we agree with the overall message of radical human optimism.

Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have designed a working tractor beam. Alas, it only works on the nano-scale, so you won't be seeing the USS Enterprise pulling in shuttle crafts anytime soon. Instead, their work has the most immediate application in photonic circuitry where the tractor beam will allow for interesting manipulations within a circuit.

You can see their full research paper here.

I couldn't stop lol'ing at this video. Some mischievous guy with After Effects has a bit too much time on his hands. Alas, too bad we all can't be wandering around with lightsabers.

The Cartoon Network has released its first official trailer for the re-imagined “Thundercats” series.  Looks pretty well-done, at least for anime style. Kids from the 80’s should get a kick out of the video below.

I used to love “Thundercats” but I haven’t been following the remake’s development as closely as I’d like.  So, I’m a tad confused where this other trailer comes into the picture.

While it's too early for 80's geeks to celebrate, movie gossip grapevines are whispering that LORD OF THE RINGS star Viggo Mortensen is a "Person of Interest" to play General Zod in Zack Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN reboot.

We already know the villainess Ursa will play a major role, but what use is she without an infamous evil overlord to command her.  Mortensen currently remains in negotiations for the upcoming SNOW WHITE movie starring Kristen Stewart.  No talks with Mortensen have begun yet to be a part of the SUPERMAN project.

(h/t Collider)

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America have just released their finalists for 2010.  The novel finalists are:

Blackout / All Clear by Connie Willis - Historians travel back in time from 2060 to witness heroic events but discover that one, or all of them, have been changing history.

Echo by Jack McDevitt - Set in a distant future, an antiquities dealer investigates a mysterious tablet only to attract the attention of an assassin who doesn't want the mystery revealed

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin - After being named heir of a space kingdom, a princess finds she must contend with two deadly blood rivals to the throne. 

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson - Built on an alternate history America after the Civil War with steampunk, magic and zombie slave labor, a young witch struggles to lift a curse placed upon her. 

Shades of Milk & Honey by Mary Robinette ...

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Here's an amusing look back in time by Popular Science magazine which summarizes 10 paranoid fears of humanity back in the 20th century.  Among humanity's freakouts include:

1) Destroyed by the dreaded death ray.

2) The Earth will spontaneously explode.

3) A doomsday device will be invented.

4) The Sun will grow too cold causing an ice age.

5) A wandering star will destroy our solar system.

6) The Sun will grow too hot causing us to burn up.

7) A comet could collide with the Earth.

8) Nuclear war armageddon.

9) Man will poison the oceans, causing the world to die.

10) The Moon could collide with the Earth.

This post is for Narv, our resident steampunk fanatic.  Now thanks to eBay, and an anonymous tinkerer, visitors had the opportunity to bid on an authentic steam-powered car for $1,500.  Alas, we're too late covering the topic, for the bidding has ended.

I'm a tad late covering this topic, but I really love the style of this viral video. Created by a company called Deep Silver, the game tells the story of vacationers who get caught on an island during a zombie outbreak.  Despite reports by Deadline.com, Variety and other entertainment news outlets that the movie rights have been sold, the game producers announced in a press release that the movie rights to "Dead Island" have NOT been sold yet.

"Deep Silver has received a massive amount of interest in the film adaptation rights to the Dead Island IP. Contrary to rumors that have been circulating, neither the film rights nor any other licenses have yet been sold by Deep Silver, which is the sole IP holder of the Dead Island brand.”

This trailer truly is a testimony to how much story and drama a director can add even while ...

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This cool image shows Mimas, one of Saturn's moons, which carries an unmistakable resemblance to a certain "fully-armed and operational battle station" which featured in a certain movie that tends to regress grown men into little boys. The picture was shot by the Cassini spacecraft during its flyby of the 246 mile diameter moon. The crater has been dubbed Herschel by astronomers.

The same image when filtered for heat temperatures found that Mimas looked like this instead.

A Wonder Woman project has been on and off repeatedly over the last decade. Today (finally) a new Wonder Woman is making her debut. NBC has tapped "Friday Night Lights" actress Adrianne Palicki as Diana. Palicki will also star in the RED DAWN remake. Wonder Woman will be produced by David E. Kelley, the same mind behind "Boston Legal" and "Ally McBeal".

I understand why Wonder Woman is taking so long. Out of all the most iconic superheroes, she's got the most potential to be ultra-cheesy. She runs around in a patriotic swimwear, uses a lasso for a weapon and flies in a jet you can't see. 

This is a guilty-pleasure post for those who used to play the arcade game Mortal Kombat a looong time ago. I got into this game back when you still fed quarters into it. Soon after, it made the leap into the first console games. 

Michael Jai White (BLACK DYNAMITE) and Jeri Ryan (STAR TREK: VOYAGER) will reprise their roles as Jax and Sonya Blade in the upcoming Mortal Kombat web-series.

In the latest trend in movie pitching, ambitious filmmakers now invest several thousands of dollars into creating a short film in order to win higher budgets. In this instance, the Mortal Kombat reboot was sold off the strength of a viral video MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH which had cost around $7,500 to shoot. I've been seeing a lot more of these pitches lately. Aspiring filmmakers take note. Technology is raising the bar.

This new movie Spiderman movie has gotta be one of the most cynical exploitations of a beloved franchise ever. The original movie with Tobey Maguire isn't even 9 years-old yet. And SPIDERMAN 3 isn't even 4 years-old.

I'm looking forward to THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN, partially because movie quality is usually very bad overall anyway. This project will likely be one of the better ones. 

I think of this franchise's exploitation a little like Shakespeare. Does the world need anymore Shakespeare interpretations? No. Are we going to see another dozen of them over the next decade? Yeah, probably. No one criticizes Shakespeare lovers from attending his plays and movies...over and over again. 

Is the Spiderman franchise equal to Shakespeare's plays? Nah, but if people enjoy making the film and continue to enjoy watching it...why have a problem with that?

Time Magazine has published an extensive article about the genius Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity. The Singularity is often referred to as "Rapture for Nerds". The definition that I use for the Singularity is that its the point at which computer intelligence becomes equal to human intelligence. After this point in history, technological progress will become so rapid that most fields of science will converge and bring about all kinds of technological goodies considered blasphemous to many in today's society...such as incredibly-long human life and AI-enhanced human intelligence, to name just two.

The idea doesn't come without controversy. Many fear the Singularity will bring something like Skynet into existence. Mr. Kurzweil has published some corrections to the Time article here.

Ray Kurzweil currently has a little movie on tour called TRANSCENDENT MAN. If interested, look in the link to see if there's a screening near you.

Sweet. I've been waiting for something like this to come around ever since buying a Kinect back in November. As cool as the Kinect truly is, the current game selections leave much to be desired. There's only so much jumping around rivers, flapping your arms, bowling, boxing and dancing to Lady Gaga tunes one can take. Still, I'm a bit disappointed. I was hoping for a sword-swinging Action/RPG game that required combat and blocking motions.

No one seems to know yet how extensive the Kinect controls in the new "Gears of War " will be, but rumors claim that character motion will be set "on-rails".  A game set "on rails" means that players might be able to choose their paths, but ultimately (like a train on rails) they can't deviate from it.  

The image below showcases a player using Kinect motions, but comes from an older ...

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Just awesome, though the hostile alien movie I'm waiting for is Battle: Los Angeles.

(/h/t Deadline)

Geeks from the 80's may rejoice. Movie gossip reports that Zack Snyder will resurrect the popular villainess Ursa, who featured in Richard Donner's SUPERMAN II back in 1980. Ursa found her way to Earth from the planet Krypton after being imprisoned in the Phantom Zone by Superman's father Jor-El.  After gaining freedom due to an errant explosion in space, she served as General Zod's chief henchwoman inflicting pain and suffering upon humanity. 

The 3 actresses rumored to be in the lead for the role are Alice Eve, Diane Kruger and Rosamund Pike. Meanwhile, Olivia Wilde and Mila Kunis are competing for the role of Lois Lane.

Paramount Insurge made its first acquisition, a movie titled THE DEVIL INSIDE from new director William Brent Bell. Inspired by the success of the ongoing PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, franchise, Insurge is a new division of Paramount tasked to locate micro-budget films with multi-million dollar box office potential. Why not, if you can sell $108 million in domestic tickets on a movie that only cost $15,000? Like PARANORMAL, the new movie is also shot in documentary-style about a woman who travels to Italy and films several underground exorcisms.

Regardless whether movie-goers eventually get sick of the fake documentary gimmick, the truth is that studios make money hand-over-fist on movies budgeted under a certain threshold, and that threshold is higher than you might suspect. This is one of the open secrets for why budget conscious directors such as Robert Rodriguez have been able to do whatever they please in the past.

For ...

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