Month: January 2019

Netlfix bestowed a New Year's gift to all Stranger Things fans last night: the release date of the show's third season. Stranger Things 3 will debut on July 4, 2019.

Just before 2018 ended, Netflix tweeted out another trailer for Stranger Things 3 (the above video is a shortened version from Netflix's YouTube channel). The nearly four-minute-long clip takes viewers back to New Years' Eve 1985, specifically Dick Clark's iconic New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast. Mysterious interferences interrupt the broadcast, sending static onto the screen along with strange messages like "when blue and yellow meet in the west."

We also learn that the Starcourt Mall advertisement from a previous teaser trailer is a commercial that ran during Dick Clark's broadcast—at least in the Hawkins, Indiana area.

Netlfix bestowed a New Year's gift to all Stranger Things fans last night: the release date of the show's third season. Stranger Things 3 will debut on July 4, 2019.

Just before 2018 ended, Netflix tweeted out another trailer for Stranger Things 3 (the above video is a shortened version from Netflix's YouTube channel). The nearly four-minute-long clip takes viewers back to New Years' Eve 1985, specifically Dick Clark's iconic New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast. Mysterious interferences interrupt the broadcast, sending static onto the screen along with strange messages like "when blue and yellow meet in the west."

We also learn that the Starcourt Mall advertisement from a previous teaser trailer is a commercial that ran during Dick Clark's broadcast—at least in the Hawkins, Indiana area.

Enlarge / Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees speaks at Stephen Hawking's memorial service at Westminster Abbey on June 15, 2018 in London, England. (credit: Ben Stansall/WPA Pool /Getty Images)

Human kind has long harnessed the fruits of scientific research into revolutionary technologies, with a few tradeoffs along the way. The benefits have generally outweighed the risks. But we are now in an era when the choices we make over the next two decades really could determine the fate of our life here on Earth—a critical tipping point for the human race, if you will. That's the message from Britain's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, in his recent book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, published by Princeton University Press.

While the primary focus of his life has been science, Rees has long been engaged in politics, starting with anti-nuclear weapons campaigns when he was still a student. But over the last 20 years that engagement has widened, and his influence has grown. He served as president of the Royal Society, and wields real political influence these days in the British Parliament's House of Lords. (Technically, he is Lord Martin Rees, Baron of Ludlow. But he'll probably ask you to call him Martin, because he's chill like that.) "That made me not just a scientist, but an anxious member of the human race," he said.

It's a thoughtful anxiety that informs every page of On the Future, as self-proclaimed "techno-optimist" Rees explores the many ways in which humanity's fate is tightly linked to continued progress in science and technology—and how we choose to wield that knowledge (or not). Ars sat down with Rees in September in London to learn more about his thoughts on our future.

Enlarge / Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees speaks at Stephen Hawking's memorial service at Westminster Abbey on June 15, 2018 in London, England. (credit: Ben Stansall/WPA Pool /Getty Images)

Human kind has long harnessed the fruits of scientific research into revolutionary technologies, with a few tradeoffs along the way. The benefits have generally outweighed the risks. But we are now in an era when the choices we make over the next two decades really could determine the fate of our life here on Earth—a critical tipping point for the human race, if you will. That's the message from Britain's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, in his recent book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, published by Princeton University Press.

While the primary focus of his life has been science, Rees has long been engaged in politics, starting with anti-nuclear weapons campaigns when he was still a student. But over the last 20 years that engagement has widened, and his influence has grown. He served as president of the Royal Society, and wields real political influence these days in the British Parliament's House of Lords. (Technically, he is Lord Martin Rees, Baron of Ludlow. But he'll probably ask you to call him Martin, because he's chill like that.) "That made me not just a scientist, but an anxious member of the human race," he said.

It's a thoughtful anxiety that informs every page of On the Future, as self-proclaimed "techno-optimist" Rees explores the many ways in which humanity's fate is tightly linked to continued progress in science and technology—and how we choose to wield that knowledge (or not). Ars sat down with Rees in September in London to learn more about his thoughts on our future.

Enlarge / Antarctica today. (credit: Eli Duke)

Believe it or not, the geology at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is extraordinarily common. There, layers of sedimentary rock lie flat atop angled layers of significantly more ancient metamorphic rock. The gap there is enormous—if Earth’s rocks constitute a book of the planet’s history, there are about a billion pages missing. The story only picks up again around 540 million years ago in the Cambrian period, with an evolutionary explosion of complex life just as remarkable as the sudden change in the rock.

This gap can be found all around the world, and has picked up the name the Great Unconformity. Cambrian sedimentary rocks rarely rest on anything other than much older metamorphic or igneous rock, implying that whatever rock formed in the intervening time was scrubbed away by something. This erasure of a chunk of geologic history has long been an enticing mystery for geologists.

Have you seen this rock?

A period of intensive global erosion doesn’t seem sufficient to fully explain the pattern of change in the rock. An alternative, that the formation of new rock suddenly accelerated beginning in the Cambrian, doesn’t quite fit the evidence, either. So what gives?

TOKYO—I'm not sure how much of my life has included dreams of traveling to Japan, but I know it's a majority. I'm a child of the '80s who grew up pledging allegiance to Japanese video game makers while drooling over the arcade and console games that that nation not only produced, but often had early or exclusive dibs on. Some day, I told myself, I'd go to that magical place.

That dream came true in October, and my two-week vacation included no shortage of time spent playing and checking out video games. As this was a vacation, however, I also made room for a lot of other fun diversions: temple and castle visits, prestigious tea-tastings, gorgeous museums, and om-nom-nomming on unbelievable food. (I've already chronicled one food-related discovery I made in Osaka.)

True crime has taken over entertainment. Regardless of what that says about our society, observe the fruits of this trend has been fascinating. It's a pick-your-poison landscape now, filled with riveting podcasts, multi-part streaming series, and other mediums exploring (or exploiting, depending on your view) our interest in the horrible things that happen to others. Amidst the plethora of experiments, one stands out as a refreshing take on the trend: turning the true-crime podcast format into a fictional book.

At its core, podcasting is just another way to tell stories, and British author Matt Wesolowski took that idea and translated it into book form. Changeling, the latest installment in Wesolowski's Six Stories series, successfully implants the tale of a boy's disappearance into your head vividly enough that you can almost hear it being told to you.

For those unaware, the Six Stories book series uses a podcast format to "rake over old graves" of fictional crimes. Journalist Scott King hosts the fictitious Six Stories podcast, in which he explores past crimes by interviewing those associated with them—witnesses, bystanders, and perpetrators alike. Each book in Weslowski's series features six stories and six different accounts of the same crime, written as podcast transcripts. Reading each book mimics "listening" to one season of the Six Stories podcast, with King as your narrator and guide to dissecting the events that led to and made up the horrible (and typically mysterious) crime at hand.