Month: March 2019

A female astronaut returns to Earth and starts a downward psychological spiral in the first trailer for Lucy in the Sky, a forthcoming film from Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Lucy in the Sky tells the story of married astronaut Lucy Cola (Portman), who has an affair with fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm). When he dumps her for another woman in the program, she begins to lose her grip on reality. Originally titled Pale Blue Dot, the movie is the feature-film debut for director Noah Hawley, whose TV credits include Fargo and Legion. Reese Witherspoon was initially considered for the lead role of Lucy but dropped out to shoot the second season of Big Little Lies. Portman came aboard instead, making this at least her second song-titled film alongside Jane Got a Gun.

The film is loosely based on the real-world case of NASA astronaut and US Naval officer Lisa Nowak, who became involved with fellow astronaut William Oefelein in 2004 after his divorce. The affair lasted a couple of years, until Nowak discovered her lover had taken up with an Air Force engineer named Colleen Shipman. In February 2007, Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando International Airport with a car full of kidnapping gear (including an 8-inch folding knife) and confronted Shipman in her car in the airport parking lot. Nowak copped a guilty plea in 2009 and received two years' probation; she also received an "other than honorable" discharge from the Navy.

SAN FRANCISCO—Shortly after Google announced its upcoming Stadia streaming platform this morning at the Game Developers Conference, the company opened up a few kiosks showing off the technology in a corner of a Moscone Center West hallway. Unfortunately, these extremely limited demos didn't answer most of the burning questions that Google has still left unanswered about it much-hyped platform.

The most popular demo, judging by the crowds gathered around the screen, was an opportunity to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey on a standard Chromebook via Stadia streaming. The game—running at apparently native resolution and 60 frames per second on a 1080p display—was for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a local copy running on a high-end gaming rig. Playing and watching the games for a few minutes, I didn't notice any of the input delay, dropped frames, or stuttering that sometimes characterizes the current state of game streaming.

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  By far the most important part of this image is the Chromebook in the foreground powering the display.

The important caveat here, of course, is that the demo was running on a wired Ethernet connection hooked to the Moscone Center's industrial-strength Internet hookup. The demo team couldn't confirm the location for the Google data center where the game was actually running, but we can't imagine it would be very far from the heart of San Francisco, where the demo was being played.

Enlarge / Wind turbines near Palm Springs, Calif. (credit: nate2b / Flickr)

More and more people are finding themselves with a new neighbor: a commercial electricity-generating system. As electricity grids move from centralized fossil fuel plants to decentralized renewables, the world is switching from fewer, larger plants to more, smaller ones. For some people, this means they're looking out of their windows at wind turbines that weren't there a few years ago.

How do people feel about these turbines? That may seem like a question best answered with "why should we care?" but if we get serious about addressing climate change, lots of people might end up living with generating hardware. To better understand people's preferences, researchers Jeremy Firestone and Hannah Kirk analyzed the results of a large-scale survey on attitudes toward wind turbines. The results, published this week in Nature Energy, show that people in both red and blue states who live near wind turbines would rather keep them than swap them out for either solar or fossil fuel plants.

Wind over coal

The results came from a survey of 1,705 people living less than five miles from at least one commercial-scale wind turbine across the United States. The survey, conducted in 2016 by the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, included a hefty set of questions aiming to get a full understanding of how community members feel about their local turbines. It asked questions like how involved people felt in the planning process for the project, how noticeable the turbines are from people's homes, and whether they notice the impact of things like turbine noise.