Noticias

Exclusive: Investor and Tony Award-winning producer Kevin J. Kinsella (Jersey Boys) and actress Paten Hughes (Heirloom) have launched film and TV banner Cowboy + Cougar Entertainment.

Kinsella and Hughes will look to write and produce around 4-6 projects per year in the prestige and commercial spaces and will have the capacity to develop, package and finance. Already on the slate are books Confessions Of An Alien Hunter by astronomer Seth Shostak, which Cowboy + Cougar will adapt as a sci-fi TV series called Fermi’s Paradox, and Julia Oliver’s Goodbye To The Buttermilk Sky, which the company will adapt as a feature film.

The latter is a coming-of-age romantic drama in the vein of Bridges Over Madison County about a young woman, Callie, in Depression-era 1938 rural Alabama whose torrid affair with a handsome stranger jostles her life trajectory. Lily Houghton (Day By Day) is writing the adapted feature film script.

Aliens are calling me, but first I have to buy Lunchables. Soon, I’ll be heading into the Nevada desert. I will not be alone. It is pre-pandemic September, and tens of thousands of seekers are reported to be descending on Hiko and Rachel, two no-stoplight towns 150 miles north of Las Vegas. The two map specks are the closest civilian outposts to Area 51, a highly guarded military installation where, legend says, a hangar holds a gravity-propelled craft that travels between galaxies and through wormholes based on technology acquired from aliens and,...

One of the reasons why I love the sci-fi film Arrival so much is because it told an intellectual sci-fi story involving aliens using an approach that made an attempt to use real science. We all know Hollywood likes to embellish things a bit, especially with sci-fi movies, but according to this new Science Vs. Cinema video, the filmmaking team that created the film actually came very close to real scientific theories and practices.

The science of the Denis Villeneuve-directed film is discussed and evaluated by Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram, Seti astronomer Seth Shostak, and linguist Jessica Coon. The video is almost 30 minutes long, but it's absolutely fascinating, especially if you're into real science and aliens. ...

The first contact drama “Arrival” continues to shake up sci-fi with its rejection of the action-packed alien antics the genre is so often known for. Denis Villeneuve’s brainy feature has been building awards season buzz since its debut at the Venice Film Festival in September, and was recently listed as one of the best films of the year by the National Board of Review (with Adams’ performance landing Best Actress to boot). But did the movie get the science right? Andy Howell of Science vs. Cinema investigates.

Read More: National Board of Review Names ‘Manchester By the Sea’ Best Film of 2016, Other Winners Include ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Arrival’

Interspersed between scenes from the film’s trailer are interviews Howell conducts with the cast and crew, as well as conversations he had with linguists and scientists about the film’s accuracy. Howell covers several different facets of the film, from the...

Washington, D.C. — Fanboy favorites from Star Trek star William Shatner and The X-Files creator Chris Carter to Syfy’s hit series 12 Monkeys and Deadpool director Tim Miller are squarely in the spotlight for Smithsonian magazine’s fourth annual The Future Is Here Festival™, a three-day event highlighting the most advanced thinking in science, technology, space, art and engineering from a dazzling array of experts, visionaries and noted science-lovers.

The Festival kicks off on Friday, April 22nd at the Shakespeare Theatre’s Sidney Harman Hall with an exclusive ticketed evening event featuring Shatner, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Star Trek; a conversation with Carter, fresh off the triumphant return of The X-Files to television; and an exclusive glimpse into the thrilling second season of Syfy’s hit series 12 Monkeys (premieres April 18) with special advance footage presented by stars Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull and executive producer Terry Matalas.

So, yeah. Everyone knows that today the planet Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun. Especially Fox, which has Ridley Scott's Prometheus (review) hitting theatres this weekend. Can you think of a better rare celestial event to capitalize on? Dig it!

Star gazers (and perhaps legions of movie fans) will have their eyes on the sky today to catch a glimpse of The Transit of Venus, a rare celestial event that occurs when the planet passes directly between Earth and the Sun. Such transits help us to identify the capacity for life on other worlds as they move across the face of their home star. It was a transit like this that helped the scientists at Weyland Industries identify life on a distant world, which would ultimately lead to a world-changing, exploratory space mission aboard the ship The Prometheus.

So is the Transit of Venus timing and the...

Star gazers (and perhaps legions of movie fans) will have their eyes on the sky today to catch a glimpse of The Transit of Venus, a rare celestial event that occurs when the planet passes directly between Earth and the sun. Such transits help us to identify the capacity for life on other worlds as they move across the face of their home star. It was a transit like this that helped the scientists at Weyland Industries identify life on a distant world, which would ultimately lead to a world-changing, exploratory space mission aboard the ship The Prometheus.

So is the Transit of Venus timing and the release of the Ridley Scott film a coincidence? The heavens reveal all beginning this afternoon. You won't want to miss it - the last one was in 1874, later inspiring Gustav Holst to write "The Planets." And if you'd like some company, catch it...

Star gazers (and perhaps legions of movie fans) will have their eyes on the sky today to catch a glimpse of The Transit of Venus, a rare celestial event that occurs when the planet passes directly between Earth and the sun. Such transits help us to identify the capacity for life on other worlds as they move across the face of their home star. It was a transit like this that helped the scientists at Weyland Industries identify life on a distant world, which would ultimately lead to a world-changing, exploratory space mission aboard the ship The Prometheus.

So is the Transit of Venus timing and the release of the Ridley Scott film a coincidence? The heavens reveal all beginning this afternoon. You won.t want to miss it . the last one was in 1874, later inspiring Gustav Holst to write .The Planets.. And if you.d like some company, catch...

It goes back to the starfish. That's when the light bulb really popped over my head. We'd found one on the beach and I was struck by what astonishing creatures they are, talking with Dad about how they regenerate. I'd learned in school how severed fragments could grow into new adults and it seemed so utterly removed from the human experience. Lose a limb and it becomes another you? What would that be like? Dad smiled and said, "Nick, you and that starfish come from the same planet. Imagine how different a creature from another planet might be."

Mind blown.

A few years before then, I'd recorded a message for potential extraterrestrial civilizations to discover. Surreal to say, but that sort of thing was normal in my household. Dad was a world-famous astronomer; Mom was the artist who drew the iconic Pioneer plaque. Together with Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Tim Ferris and Jon Lomberg,...

Bad news for lovers of science fiction, science geeks, and those who hope we’re not alone in the universe: Seti -- the official Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- is no more. From the AP via Yahoo! News: San Francisco – In the mountains of Northern California, a field of radio dishes that look like giant dinner plates waited for years for the first call from intelligent life among the stars. But they're not listening anymore. Cash-strapped governments, it seems, can no longer pay the interstellar phone bill. Astronomers at the Seti Institute said a steep drop in state and federal funds has forced the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, a powerful tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, an effort scientists refer to as Seti. "There's plenty of cosmic real estate that looks promising," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute, said Tuesday. "We've lost the instrument that's best...

The Seti Institute has stopped listening for aliens, a casualty of government budget cuts. The business community and private donors should pony up. Here's why it's not as crazy as it sounds.

Nerds everywhere today are in mourning. Funding for the Seti Institute in Mountain View, Calif., has dried up, meaning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence lost one of its champions. In an letter dated April 22nd, reports the San Jose Mercury News, Seti Institute's CEO, Tom Pierson, reported that the array had to be put into "hibernation." The equipment will be maintained, but won't be able to operate--the government funding simply isn't there.

After choking back our tears and shaking our heads in remembrance of Carl Sagan, we began to wonder what the implications were for technology. Would the Seti@home project, which we've covered numerous times in the past, be disrupted, and if so, what of the general project of distributed computing?...

Monday is innovation's Saturday night.

While you were sleeping, innovation was tossing off the world's hardest Sudoku.

1. A United Nations report into the state of the oil fields in the Niger Delta has produced outrage, as it blames locals on the myriad leaks over the past five decades. The paper claims that 90% of the spills have been caused by attempts to steal the oil, and exonerates Shell.

2. Foursquare founder Denis Crowley has taken the fight to Facebook, claiming that Places is "boring." In an interview with the Telegraph, he said, "The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world... but that can only be a good thing for location-based services like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about checkins." Kunur Patel of Advertising Age, however, calls Places a sure-fire way to sabotage a dinner party. And, according to TechCrunch,...