Workers recover the remains of a female giant squid in Spain's Asturias province in 2003. Photograph by Fernando Camino, Cover/Getty Images
Halo changed forever last month with the release of the Defiant Map Pack, a collection of new battlefields for the latest entry in the sci-fi videogame series. In most respects, the virtual killing fields — which give millions of Halo: Reach players new terrain upon which to splatter each other’s corpses — seem identical to the downloadable expansion packs Microsoft released for previous editions of the landmark Xbox game.
This was far more significant than your average expansion, though: It’s the first set of Halo levels produced without the input of Bungie Studios, the series’ creator.
Defiant was developed by 343 Industries, a new Microsoft unit tasked with continuing the franchise, and the expansion was seen as a litmus test: Can the Xbox maker craft something that feels like Halo without the incredibly talented studio that birthed the series?...
Liang Haiyi aka Tiny: Early victim of the "Jasmine Revolution" crackdown
Status: In detention on suspicion of "subversion of state power"
In her own words: "When the country cannot protect a beggar, it cannot protect the emperor!
Sacred Gallery NYC
424 Broadway 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013
05.05.11 | 8:00 pm
http://www.sacredgallerynyc.com
Group benefit show to lend a helping hand In Japan.
Artists and Photographers from all over the globe come together to help all those affected by the earthquake, tsunami and now radiation damage in Japan. When we first listed this event, we wanted to keep this as a print based show. After receiving so many emails from people wanting to donate original drawings, we've now decided to allow original works on paper.
All artwork will be priced at $200 or less!
This is a rare opportunity where artists lower their standard pricing in order to help those in need.
100% of the sales made from this one-night-only exhibition will be donated to the Red Cross.
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Could Beastie Boys possibly give less of a fuck about trying to sound young? In a word, no. As Ad-Rock proudly declares on their excellent new Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, "Oh, my God, just look at me/Grandpa been rapping since '83!" The Beasties revel in their older-than-old-school references ("Be kind, rewind") and cultural touchstones ("braggadocio" rhymes with "I'll make you sick like a Kenny Rogers Roaster"). Where they used to boast about rocking Adidas instead of Fila, now MCA has different footwear issues: "I don't wear Crocs, and I don't wear sandals/The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles."...
For many alien enthusiasts, Jill Tarter is synonymous with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As the SETI Institute’s research director — and the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in Contact — she’s done more than anyone to raise the search for cosmic company from a fringe effort to serious science.
After receiving a TED prize in 2009, Tarter had grand plans for the Allen Telescope Array, a proposed field of 350 big-nosed radio dishes that would be the world’s only dedicated SETI telescope, as well as its most sensitive. But this week, budget cuts forced the ATA’s existing 42 dishes into hibernation mode. The rest are now just a dream.
Wired.com talked with Jill Tarter about the shutdown and what it means for the future of SETI....
For as long as people have been drinking alcohol, they've been trying to figure out a way to avoid its woozy, nauseated, sensory-amplified aftermath. But is there really any foolproof strategy for preventing a hangover besides, say, not drinking?
Scientifically speaking, no. There is no such thing as a hangover cure. In a review of 15 clinical trials of hangover-intervention methods, a team of researchers publishing in the British Medical Journal found that not a single one worked. They concluded:...
For seventy million users of Sony's PlayStation Network, this is a weird time — one in which they're being simultaneously deprived of the shoot-em-ups they crave and used as pawns in an epic conflagration between Sony and a shadowy, wily opponent. It started on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th, when a post on Sony's PSN blog noted that the PlayStation Network and Qriocity service — which the PlayStation 3 console relies on for multiplayer PlayStation 3 games, movies, and music — were out of commission. A day later, another post estimated that it might be a day or two before they returned. Then one announced that Sony had detected an "external intrusion" and had intentionally taken the services offline to fortify them....
Endocrine disruption, diabetes, obesity—to the list of ills potentially associated with exposure to the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), you can add one more: childhood asthma. In a new study presented over the weekend at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver, researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine found that if pregnant women are exposed to BPA, their children may end up at a higher risk for developing asthma early in life.
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