It's funny. Roboapocolypse had a major plot hole as soon as Boston Dynamics was demonstrating BigDog. One of the main plot points is that robots can't move in rural, uneven terrain, at least at first. Sort of ridiculous (even without BigDog demonstrations), as flying drones would get around that pretty easily.…

I would love to see an article about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_v…. He was talking about 22 day missions to Mars with a 2MW reactor at 4.0 N/kW. Granted that's a heavy reactor... but still impressive.

Aaaannd now I might actually buy a Wii U. I have to say looking at this though if only Wii had been as powerful as PS3 and Xbox360 in the first place we could have had a beautiful open world Zelda game almost 10 years ago.

Ahh. Really? Listen, I'm not Russian and I assume you might not be either. But there's a lot of Russia born-Russians who would agree that he's a dictator (and there's a large percentage of Russia's population who love him). I think they would object quite strongly to your insinuation that their hatred of the man is…

I think writers should do whatever they want and their readers will read what they like. Some might enjoy reading science fiction fantasy (The Culture), some might enjoy hard sci-fi such as that seen in Red Mars (as Sofge alluded to). Even though I prefer hard science fiction by a significant margin I still would not…

Some are sick, but some arn't. And I should say right off the bat that you should check into the latest news as there's a mission to Europa in the planning stages now. Ideally we shouldn't have to pick between Europa and Mars as both are compelling targets. http://www.smh.com.au/national/educa…

Extant life doesn't seems so far fetched either. Water on Mars is old news as we've known there is ice for quite a long time now. Recently orbiting spacecraft have observed what appear to be seasonal flows of briney water which offer us a possible location to look for currently living life (or at least, seasonally…

Meh, It was passable. Maybe it was because I never read the books? I have to say though I'm glad they took Mars out of the title. This is 2014, not 1912. We know a little more about the planet now.

Name recognition. It certainly wasn't because it was a better action movie, or even a better film. Other than the last 20 minutes and 10 minutes that Cranston was in the film, Godzilla was quite bad. The main character was one of the most forgettable actors of all time, no charisma and no acting ability. Most of the…

Heavier missions for robotic and eventually human missions. A 2-3 ton capability provided by the inflatable aeroshell is a 1-2 ton improvement on the parachute and skycrane combination used for Curiosity. Think of a rover three times as heavy, or multiple Curiosity sized rovers on one landing. With Curiosity…

Can't agree more. You might be interested in this book:

My two cents. I smoked for nearly 10 years, was up to 50% of a pack per day, 100% if it was a weekend. I quit cold turkey.

Add me to the 'love the Surface' club. I use mine for digital painting and digital sculpting while I'm away from my desktop (at family, friends, watching a film at home), or to work on my personal projects while there's nothing to do at my job. It's surprisingly powerful, it handles Zbrush better than I would have…

As far as I have read this is very old news. Sample return has always been part of the Mars 2020 mission profile, or at least it was assumed by everyone that it would be. From a political standpoint manned landings will not happen until there's sample return. A manned mission to Mars is now NASA's long term directive…

I'd be more surprised if they didn't. The main migration was probably across the land bridge, with some others traveling along the coasts, then Inuit following later. Interspliced with that Polynesians reaching South America in limited numbers or while Amerindian populations were already established, and the…

Ah, in that case Jurassic Park over Babe without question.

Gravity below Babe is a strange choice. Babe has a fraction of it's screen space filled in by VFX, the movie for all intents of purposes could have been made by putting peanut butter in the animal's mouths. Maybe I'm underestimating, I'll have to watch some footage.

I'm curious to see io9's response.

I'm skeptical of people who decree we need to get rid of 8 billion people. Parts of the world are overpopulated and others are most definitely not. Everything I've read suggests humanity produces enough food to feed everyone. The problem is distribution. The mathusians predicted mass starvation decades ago, instead…

One of the oldest references for artists but still one of the best. I'd suggest this and Gottfried Bamme's Complete Guide to Drawing Animals book are perfect one-two pairing, likely Ken Hultgren's book as well.