Month: November 2023

For whatever reason—superhero fatigue, disappointing performances by Marvel's last few films, the ongoing Hollywood strikes, or the general depressing state of the world—The Marvels doesn't seem to have generated the same kind of palpable anticipation that preceded the franchise's most successful releases. That's despite a fun, promising trailer back in July. Directed by Nia DaCosta, the movie opens this weekend, and the studio has dropped one last trailer with nods to past Avengers in their battle against Thanos, perhaps to remind us all why we fell in love with the MCU to begin with.

(Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame below.)

As previously reported, Brie Larson and Iman Vellani reprise their respective roles as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel for the film, along with Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, daughter of Carol/Captain Marvel's BFF Maria. Monica grew up to become a SWORD agent, but thanks to the events of WandaVision, she can also absorb and manipulate energy as Spectrum. As for Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, she's a teenage Pakistani American who lives in Jersey City. She's a major comic books fan, worships Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, and fantasized about becoming a superhero someday. Her powers stem from the Terrigen Mists, released globally in a crossover storyline, the "Inhumanity." The mists activated dormant Inhuman cells in several people, Kamala included.

Enlarge / Behold, a collection of apps we love. (credit: Oscar Wong / Getty Images)

Senior Reviews Editor Samuel Axon

Todoist basically runs my life—but that's OK, because it's a very well-designed app. There are a ton of to-do apps on the iPhone, but I went with this one because it's very flexible.

For example, yeah, you can see a top-to-bottom to-do list like with many others, but you can view that same data as a Trello-like Kanban board, too.

I've also found that Todoist is better at understanding natural language settings for projects, times, and so on than a lot of other to-do apps, so, for example, I can type "Edit next article at 2 pm on Tuesday #ArsTechnica" to add a to-do within the Ars Technica project with a due time of 2 pm on the following Tuesday. A lot of to-do apps support that, but I feel Todoist does it best.

Enlarge / A view of the "Headphones" nebula. (credit: Bill McLaughlin)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is November 7, and today's photo brings the "Headphones nebula" into brilliant clarity. The origin of this name seems rather obvious, no?

This is a planetary nebula, and I well remember studying these as an astronomy major decades ago. Why? Because the name is so damn confusing. Planetary nebula are formed when dying stars—including our own Sun one day—expand and form a glowing shell of ionized gas. They were given the name "planetary" nebula because, when first observed by astronomers about 250 years ago through rudimentary telescopes, they looked somewhat like planets.

Enlarge / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)

Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.

Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It has not been entirely smooth sailingdriving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts, aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.