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Bringing characters like Spider-Man and Captain Marvel to life on screen requires some real-life superheroes off-screen. Specialized teams and experts carefully plan and carry out the stunts, costumes, and special effects that make iconic films like the Avengers the impressive spectacle audiences love. From actual bus crashes in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (2021) to detailed makeup and training in "Black Panther" (2018), here's what Marvel movies look like behind the scenes.

There's the technology we use and see every day, and then there's the technology being developed behind the scenes. This is the next-level stuff. In this series, The Verge's Senior Tech Editor Lauren Goode takes you into the labs and research institutions where some of the most innovative and bizarre prototypes are being developed.

Horror films are filled with jump scares, moments that shock and startle viewers as monsters, serial killers, ghosts and even cats pop out of the darkness. But while jump scares are a very common element to include in a scary movie, they don't always work as intended, and often, you might just end up laughing instead of screaming. To find out what goes into creating an effective jump scare we spoke with Rebekah McKendry. a film professor at USC who specializes in horror. What makes certain scenes in "The Conjuring," "Insidious," and "The Exorcist 3" so terrifying while others like in "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan" fall flat?

Every Pixar movie has introduced its own technical problems, from creating the first fully computer-animated feature film with "Toy Story" to developing a stronger virtual camera for "WALL-E." Insider takes a look at how the unique worlds, characters, and practical challenges brought up by each Pixar movie pushed the studio to expand animation technology and breaks down the progress the studio has made over the years in different areas of computer technology, including shading, ray tracing, subdivision surfaces, subsurface scattering, translucency effects, cloth and fur simulation, and muscle movement on human characters. Here's how Pixar improved CG animation with every one of its films from 1995's "Toy Story" to 2011's "Cars 2."

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. This is the story of the Treo.