Month: December 2019

Disney has released the full trailer for Mulan, the studio's live-action remake of its own 1998 animated film. When the first teaser dropped in July, I noted that, while I'm not a huge fan of Disney's live-action remakes, "this is an effective, sumptuously eye-catching teaser for Mulan." This latest trailer cements that assessment. It looks gorgeous, very much in the style of a period war drama, and its rumored $300 million production budget shows in every breathtaking shot.

Both films are based on the Chinese legend "The Ballad of Hua Mulan," which tells the story of a young woman in the Northern Wei era (spanning 386-536 CE) who takes her father's place when each family is required to provide one male to serve in the emperor's army. In this version, Hua Mulan is already a well-trained fighter, and she serves for 12 years, with none of her fellow soldiers ever suspecting her true gender.

Disney's animated film broadly followed the traditional storyline, except Mulan is not well-trained when she first runs away. The film also added a love interest, a goofy dragon representative of the family ancestors named Mushu (hilariously voiced by Eddie Murphy), and a catchy original soundtrack. Mulan was released to critical acclaim, grossing $304 million worldwide and earning Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. In other words, while it didn't exactly set the box office on fire, it was popular enough to merit a spot on the roster of Disney's ongoing live-action remakes.

Robert Krulwich, left, is departing Radiolab after co-hosting the radio series for 15 years with Jad Abumrad, right. (credit: Jad Abumrad / WNYC)

Radiolab, the WNYC radio show that became the pop-science cornerstone of most podcast directories throughout the 2010s, announced a major shakeup on Thursday to fans via its official newsletter. Longtime cohost Robert Krulwich will soon leave the show, with his announcement hinting to only a pair of episodes left before he moves on to other independent projects.

In his not-quite-goodbye to fans, Krulwich appears to declare that the series' producers and staff have succeeded in the mission he'd begun with the series years ago: to create a pipeline (a self-perpetuating one, arguably) for compelling science-based radio accessible to new audiences. After the show caught on with radio listeners nationwide, "the next question we asked ourselves is what’s Radiolab to become, other than the two of us delighting each other?" Krulwich writes. "The answer came literally through the door as one wonderfully talented person after another came and joined us until we now have pretty much the strongest bench in the business, a gang of people who, in their very different ways, have learned to tell stories that grab audiences, sort of like we did but more and more in their own voices with their own musics and their own styles."

Krulwich then describes a moment from roughly a year ago where it dawned upon him that his time at Radiolab was drawing to a close:

Enlarge / Huawei's logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Huawei has sued the Federal Communications Commission over the agency's order that bans Huawei equipment in certain government-funded telecom projects.

"Huawei asks the court to hold the FCC's order unlawful on the grounds that it fails to offer Huawei required due process protections in labelling Huawei as a national security threat," the Chinese company said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "Huawei believes that the FCC also fails to substantiate its arbitrary findings with evidence or sound reasoning or analysis, in violation of the US Constitution, the Administrative Procedure Act, and other laws."

Huawei said it filed the complaint in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. We haven't been able to get a copy of the lawsuit yet.

Released on December 6, 2004, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (KOTOR2) was the first game from the then newly formed Obsidian Entertainment. At that time, the new studio was a shoestring operation with just seven veteran developers who had made the move from the recently shuttered Black Isle Studios, all holed up in CEO Feargus Urquhart’s attic. But publisher LucasArts, wanting to capitalize on the success of the original KOTOR from the year before, reportedly gave that threadbare new team just 14 to 16 months to create a sequel.

It’s no surprise that the finished product had some issues.

The most noticeable of these issues at launch might have been the conclusion to the HK-50 factory side quest. Specifically, that conclusion is just nowhere to be found in the final game.

Enlarge (credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger)

White dwarfs are the cores of stars that were once similar to the Sun. At some point, these stars have exhausted the lighter elements that fueled their earlier existence, flared up into a bloated red giant, and burned down into carbon and oxygen rich cores not much larger than the Earth (but far more massive). With fusion shut down, they gradually radiate away the remaining temperature, fading out of our ability to detect them.

We now know that a large number of stars have planets around them. So what happens to a planet orbiting a star that puffs up on its way to becoming a white dwarf? Some hints of that have come from a number of these stars that have material similar to that of a rocky planet embedded in their surface. But a new example has been found with gas that has been drawn off from a Neptune-like planet.

One weird dwarf

The white dwarf in question, WD J091405.30+191412.25 (the authors refer to it affectionately as WD J0914+1914) was initially identified as having hydrogen on its surface. This, on its own, is not unusual. While it would have burned much of its hydrogen during its past life, many white dwarfs pull material off nearby stars. But in this case there was no sign of a nearby star. And, even more oddly, there was sulfur on the surface of the white dwarf as well. Sulfur is generally a very rare element on stars, which suggested that the material did not have a stellar origin.