Month: April 2021

Actress Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays a key role in the series, revealed the first trailer for the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery, during First Contact Day 2021, a virtual event hosted by Paramount+ featuring panels, livestreams, and news of various forthcoming Star Trek properties.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

Martin-Green plays Michael Burnham, an orphaned human raised on the planet Vulcan by none other than Sarek (James Frain) and his human wife, Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner)—aka, Spock's (Ethan Peck) parents. So she is Spock's adoptive sister. As I've written previously, the S2 season-long arc involved the mysterious appearances of a "Red Angel" and a rogue Starfleet AI called Control that sought to wipe out all sentient life in the universe.

Enlarge / People practice social distancing in white circles in Domino Park in Williamsburg during the coronavirus pandemic on May 17, 2020, in New York City. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)

The B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant is estimated to spread about 50 percent more than previous versions—but it doesn’t seem to manage that higher transmissibility by surviving in the air better than other versions of the virus, according to a new study.

In lab experiments looking at virus survival in artificially produced aerosolized particles, a B.1.1.7 lineage virus had about the same survival rate as a strain of the virus that was circulating in Wuhan, China, in January 2020, according to the study, which published recently in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

For the study, government researchers created aerosolized particles that mimic those spewed from deep in a person’s lungs, then the researchers tested how well the viruses survived in those particles under different temperature, humidity, and light conditions.

Enlarge / Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas arrives for the swearing-in of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the East Room of the White House on October 8, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

The US Supreme Court today vacated a 2019 appeals-court ruling that said then-President Donald Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking people on Twitter. The high court declared the case "moot" because Trump is no longer president.

For legal observers, the ruling itself was less interesting than a 12-page concurring opinion filed by Justice Clarence Thomas, who argued that Twitter and similar companies could face some First Amendment restrictions even though they are not government agencies. That's in contrast to the standard view that the First Amendment's free speech clause does not prohibit private companies from restricting speech on their platforms.

Thomas also criticized the Section 230 legal protections given to online platforms and argued that free-speech law shouldn't necessarily prevent lawmakers from regulating those platforms as common carriers. He wrote that "regulation restricting a digital platform's right to exclude [content] might not appreciably impede the platform from speaking."

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  The Council of Elrond discusses the fate of the One Ring. [credit: 5TV ]

After 30 years, a TV adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings long thought lost has resurfaced. The 1991 Soviet television adaptation has been uploaded to YouTube in two one-hour videos.

The film focuses on the events of the first book in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, and features many elements that were excluded from the popular global theatrical release by director Peter Jackson, including an extended sequence featuring the character Tom Bombadil—one of the biggest omissions by the bigger-budget 2001 film far more of us have seen.

Originally broadcast on TV in 1991 (and then never aired again), the film was thought lost to time by those who had seen it. But as reported in The Guardian, Leningrad Television successor Channel 5 uploaded the film to its YouTube page with little fanfare, surprising fans who had given up on seeing the production again. It is believed to be the only adaptation of these books produced in the Soviet Union.