Our favorite physicist Andrea Wahl is back with his wild experiments where he blends real life physics with Jackass-style self torture. This time he uses a swinging wrecking ball to prove how conservation of energy can neither be created or destroyed, it transforms into other forms. Basically, as dangerous as being in the line of fire of the swinging wrecking ball, it won’t touch the mad physicist.
Why do stories need to be linear and repeatable? What if instead of finishing a movie, you could keep exploring it? What if your favorite side-character could become central to the plot? Why can’t we harness technology to explore our creativity in a new hybrid of full-interactive, immersive animation? A new startup is determined to do just that.
MashUp Machine seeks to bring the creativity and open-ended nature of traditional storytelling to the era of mass media. The idea is deceptively simple. The startup provides their users with a suite of tools to make it easy to create interactive stories, and a bit of machine learning code to help them explore ideas. In return, anyone can contribute to the infinite iterations of a constantly branching, evolving story.
MashUp Machine is backed by industry veterans Ben Cole and Christopher Sjöholm. Cole is an Academy Award-winning developer, former North American Head of Software for one of the world’s largest visual effects studios, MPC. Sjöholm complements that with nearly 20 years as Creative Director for major video game franchises like FIFA, Prototype 2, and skate.
The way we deal with stories now is “almost Darwinian,” Cole told Gizmodo. Creators make something, then throw it out into the world and hope it finds an audience. But the current way of producing stories doesn’t fit with how we consume stories.
This one’s a doozy in that there is a lot going on. The goal is simple, you need to escape a collapsing tunnel with a group of nine people (including yourself). It’s all the other variables that confuse things.
In 2010 a group of scientists announced that they’d found evidence of multi-cellular life in hyper-salty, oxygen-free pools at the bottom of the ocean. A new study indicates that what they thought were living animals were actually corpses taken over by bacterial “body-snatchers.”
Both global warming and the popularity of downhill skiing are on the rise, a trend that probably seems a little counterintuitive. Hiding behind the scenes are snowmaking machines, which every year convert millions of gallons of water into money-making snow.
