Here are some fairly brutal screenshots from the upcoming Worlds Collide: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe video game. Midway’s Ed Boon has stated that the game will not be as bloody as previous MK titles, but will still push the T-rating. He also said that the DC heroes won’t be performing fatalities, though DC villians and MK characters will.
It’s not often you see Batman and Superman get this pummeled!
I totally had a blast co-hosting the latest episode of Geekscape (ep.78), a weekly video podcast hosted by Jonathon London on his website Geekscape.net.
We talked Wall*E, Wanted, Battlestar Galactica, the Chinese Democracy leak, Final Crisis, Michael Turner, Tarantino, X-Force, Soul Caliber IV, Castlevania, our golden age of video games, and much more. Check it out!
I posted a trailer for Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow awhile back and thought it looked good. Now, I bring you an updated trailer with more of a back story and more animation. Please, enjoy.
I love the way that the kids are taking after their parents. Especially Thor’s daughter.
Domino’s Pizza has a new website called the Dark Knight Vault, in which it is showing exclusive content, including a Joker-centric new trailer.
This makes me want to see the film that much more. Since Achieve Nerdvana has seemingly been your one stop shop for news about The Dark Knight, would it be fair to speculate that The Joker is talking to Two Face at the end of that trailer? Only 9 days until we find out for sure…
Remember the garbage compactor monster in Star Wars? It exists now, except it’s a robot.
ACM-R5 is an amphibious robot snake developed by scientists at the Hirose Fukushima Lab in Japan. When I watched the video (below) of the ACM-R5 swimming, my first thought was, “Wow, it looks so organic and natural.” My second thought was, “Wow, it looks like the killer sentinel robots from The Matrix.”
ACM-R5 is equipped with paddles and passive wheels around the body. To generate propulsive force by undulation, the robot need a resistance property as it glides freely in tangential direction but cannot in normal direction. Due to the paddles and passive wheels, ACM-R5 obtains that character both in water and on ground.
Check out the video demo of ACM-R5 in water below. If you’d like to see how it fares on land, go here.
The trailer for the 22nd James Bond film,Quantum of Solace, was released today.
It looks like director Marc Forster is taking a cue from the Jason Bourne films with the Krav Maga-style fight scenes and the Bond as fugitive plot (M can be heard shouting orders that sound straight out of Bourne: “Freeze his passports! Find Bond!”). This is all a good thing, because the Bourne films are great. This looks like the action flick of the Fall for sure. Let’s hope there will be no boring poker scenes to bring the movie to a dead halt like the last one.
With Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Indy, Wall-E, and Wanted behind us, it seems everyone is starting to count the weekends to The Dark Knight (it has already broken records for ticket pre-sales at 21 days out). Will I see Hancock? Hell no. Hellboy 2? Hell yes.
But Warner Brothers has something special planned for us Batty fanboys to wet our appetite. On July 8th they will release Batman: Gotham Knight on dvd. It’s an animated film with six anime-style shorts, featuring Batman fighting the likes of Scarecrow, Killer croc, Deadshot, and written by Batman begins scribe David S. Goyer and comic book writer Brian Azzarello, among others.
This movie looks so absolutely badass I can hardly believes it exists. The trailer is below, but to really get a feel for what’s in store, you absolutely must check out the five minutes that MTV has posted.
Today I went over to a friend of a friend’s studio to record some music for a new top secret, classified nerd project I’m working on with Chris Laughter and Jonathan London. Our host introduced himself as Skwerl and we sat down and started tuning up our guitars.
That’s when I noticed an article on Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy sitting there. I had heard the tracks when they hit the web last week. So I asked him, ”Have you heard Chinese Democracy yet? It’s great.”
To which he replied, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard it. I’m the one who leaked it.”
With the price of oil now over $140 a barrel, it’s no wonder that the world’s brightest minds are looking to make energy dependency obsolete. Hybrid cars, hydrogen fuel, solar energy — all are candidates to solving the issue, but here’s an idea that you probably didn’t see coming:
Bugs that excrete oil.
Yeah, I know. Weird. The company LS9 in Silicon Valley is at work on the genetic alteration of very small bugs (E. coli) so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips, they excrete crude oil.
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
At this point LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, but it is unclear whether it will be able produce the same results on a mass scale. America consumes 143 million barrels of oil every week. That’s going to take a lot of bugs. And a whole lot of crap…
This may look like a set piece out of Judge Dredd or The Fifth Element, but it could be a regular sight on the highways as early as 2012. The Antro Solo is a prototype gas-electric hybrid with an array of solar panels along the top of the vehicle to power it’s electric motor. The solar energy is stored in it’s batteries and keeps the car juiced — letting it cruise to a jaw-dropping 150 mpg. Here’s another whopper for you: the developers hope to get it on the road by 2012 with a mere $18,000 price tag.
Plenty more photos of the Antro Solo over at dvice.
The G.I. Joe movie has a name: G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra. This poster was spotted at the Cinema EXPO in Amsterdam yesterday.
So, given the new subtitle, it’s safe to assume we’ll be seeing plenty of our favorite inept, power-hungry, super-villian fop Cobra Commander — in addition to the already reported Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow storyline. Channing Tatum is featured on the poster as Duke.
The Stephen Sommers-directed film, co-stars Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller, Ray Park, Rachel Nichols, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Said Taghmaoui, Marlon Wayans, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arnold Vosloo and Christopher Eccleston. It opens in theaters on August 7, 2009.
Dutch designer Jelte van Geest has created the Take a Seat Chair robot device for the Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven Library Design project. The video below shows how they work, but here’s a quick run down: you swipe your library card (which contains an RFID chip) at the base of the chair, and it follows you wherever you go. This is awesome because: libraries are big, and there’s never a chair around when I seem to need one.
Robot devices that follow you around — now there’s a market. Shopping carts, wheel barrows, golf caddies — they can all be replaced. Don’t believe me? Check out the Shadow Caddy.
It costs $4,000, it requires 3D glasses, and “the only programs available so far include just a few minutes of video from the northern island of Hokkaido — shots from the zoo, motorcycle-races and other short scenes.”
Really? Note to Hyundai: Stick to developing fuel efficient cars. The world needs no more tech junk.
The robotic shovel aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander has discovered some white material just below the surface of the Red Planet. NASA scientists aren’t exactly sure what it is — Ice? Salt? A buried spaceship?
It’s been three weeks since Phoenix touched ground on Mars’ north pole with the mission of finding clues as to whether or not the planet could be habitable. I’d say this is a pretty damn big clue.
Phoenix will take images of the trench dubbed “Dodo-Goldilocks” over the next few days to record any changes. If it’s ice, scientists expect it to sublimate when exposed to the sun because of the planet’s frigid temperatures and low atmospheric pressure. “We think it’s ice. But again, until we can see it disappear … we’re not guaranteed yet,” mission scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis said Monday.
The stunning photo below shows the robotic arm and a solar panel looking out over the Martian landscape. For daily updates on the Phoenix mission, check out Mars Daily.
Achieve Nerdvana brings you news from the worlds of science, technology, green tech, robotics, genre entertainment, fanboy rumors, and geek culture. Why? Because the geeks must unite to save mankind.
