If the gushing rivers of blood in these claymation shorts can make your stomach churn, just imagine how you’ll react while viewing the live-action film that inspired them.

We’re excited to exclusively debut these shorts by animator Lee Hardcastle, whose work appeared in The ABCs of Death. Each features exaggerated versions of The Belko Experiment’s characters, and offers a taste of the level of violence and humor you’ll see when the actual movie—a messed-up horror thriller from the mind of James Gunn—opens in theaters. It’s about what happens when a seemingly average corporate office suddenly shuts down and a mysterious voice begins demanding that the employees start killing each other. It’s a situation that drives people to madness pretty quickly, and as these short films illustrate, it doesn’t take long for things to get totally gruesome.

Check them out. But beware—even though they’re rendered in claymation, they’re very gory, and might be considered NSFW.

The Belko Experiment opens March 17.

The Mass Effect hype train is going faster than light right now, and ThinkGeek is hopping aboard with 20% off apparel and accessories sure to please every Shepard and FemShep in the galaxy. Inside, you’ll find gear to represent both N7 and the Andromeda Initiative (though not Cerberus, hmm).

From 1945 until 1962, the United States conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests—the kind with the big mushroom cloud and all that jazz. Above-ground nuke testing was banned in 1963, but there are thousands of films from those tests that have just been rotting in secret vaults around the country. But starting today you can see many of them on YouTube.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs has made it his mission to preserve these 7,000 known films, many of them literally decomposing while they’re still classified and hidden from the public.

According to LLNL, this 5-year project has been tremendously successful, with roughly 4,200 films already scanned and around 750 of those now declassified. Sixty-four of the declassified films have been uploaded today in what Spriggs is calling an “initial set.”

“You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the byproducts of the decomposition process of these films,” Spriggs said in a statement to Gizmodo.

“We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they’ll become useless,” said Spriggs. “The data that we’re collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose. They’re made out of organic material, and organic material decomposes. So this is it. We got to this project just in time to save the data.”

It’s a race against time, and Spriggs figures it will take at least another two years to scan the remaining films. The declassification of all the remaining 3,480 films, a process that requires military review, will take even longer.

“It’s just unbelievable how much energy’s released,” said Spriggs. “We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them.”

The biggest achievement attained by Disney’s 1991 film Beauty and the Beast is being the first animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Sure, Disney movies from that era like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King. remain classics decades later, but Beauty and the Beast stands alone. But years later and with a live-action remake days away, does it still deserve that spot at the top? Yes. Always.

The opening lyrics of the movie’s iconic title song put it best: “Tale as old as time.” Beauty and the Beast is so good it’s genuinely hard to remember that it’s only 26 years old. Sure, it helps that it’s about a fairy tale centuries old, but the Disney movie goes far beyond that—its timelessness is built into its DNA, its pitch-perfect storytelling, its memorable, iconic characters, and most of all, its music.

Case in point: The very first song, “Belle,” is not only a catchy tune, it’s a storytelling powerhouse. It establishes the setting and world of the film, explains the main character, foreshadows the rest of the movie, and sets up one of the film’s main conflicts, all in mere minutes. It’s not alone. “Gaston” serves a similar purpose, using a toe-tapping melody to set up the movie’s conflict. “Be Our Guest” introduces all the servant characters in the castle, while simultaneously being a showcase for the wonders of the animated art form. “Something There” marks the transition of the relationship between Belle and the Beast and “The Mob Song” acts as a marker of the movie’s tonal shift, from sweet second act to the action-packed finale.

Then there’s Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s title (and Oscar-winning) song, beautifully sung by Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Potts. Watching Belle and the Beast dance in the ballroom to it—it almost seems as the song couldn’t have been written in the ‘90s for this film. Like it must have been around for centuries, always part of our culture. There’s not a song from another animated movie—not even Disney’s—that gives you this feeling.

Everything serves a purpose in Beauty and the Beast. Including credits, the movie comes in under 90 minutes but it doesn’t feel short. That’s because it’s packed with information and a true economy of storytelling. Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise don’t get the credit they deserve for the film’s marvelous structure, tone, and pacing. You rarely see a movie tell a story so well, so quickly.

The very first scene in the film features the Beast’s entire backstory, which set up via voiceover in a prologue that runs less than three minutes. Read this. Seriously.

Every word is carefully and deliberately selected, conveying everything that needs to be conveyed in stunning efficiency. And the entire film shows that same precision and attention to details. There’s never a dull moment in Beauty in the Beast, because the filmmakers worked so hard to keep them out.

While the storytelling may hold up like a swiss watch, more than 25 years later, the film has developed some issues. Gaston’s aggressive advances on Belle are more than a little uncomfortable; Belle willfully sacrificing her entire life for her father feels less like an act of selflessness than an act of stupidity. The Beast actually considering her a lifetime prisoner because her father sat by his fire is difficult to justify. Also, if you do the math, the Beast was transformed by the enchantress at the age of 10 or 11, which seems like a pretty weird thing to do to a child.

But while these things like those haven’t aged as gracefully as everything else, the “everything else” more than makes up for them. Plus, there are multiple, subtle character moments that do their best to correct those awkward setups. The Beast, in his chambers, immediately regretting his tone with Belle, for example.

Watching the film as an adult, you realize how so much of it was also geared toward us, while still remaining thoroughly enjoyable for kids. For instance, a lot of the film’s vocabulary is way over the head of most children; words like “provincial,” “expectorating,” and “baroque” are thrown around liberally. They’re proof that the filmmakers were really trying to make a film that entertained everybody—a true family film in every sense of the term.

I haven’t even mentioned the hand-drawn animation which is as colorful and vibrant today as any computer animated movie you’ll see in a theater. The life in every single frame is so vivid, it’s still hard not to be awed by the visuals, even in a post-Avatar world. And remember, this is a hand-drawn animated film.

And it remains one the best animated films of all time. Worthy of its place in history not just as a Best Picture nominee, but as the gold standard of what a Disney film should be. However good the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie may be when it opens this Friday, it will be a distant second to its predecessor forever—ever as before and ever just as sure as the sun will rise.

I mean, if you’re gonna try and murder your former allies and steal their powers, you might as well update their looks, right?

Today’s Power Rangers #15 continues the ongoing saga of the alternate world that Lord Drakkon—aka evil Tommy Oliver, who stayed by Rita’s side after her mind control was broken—rules with an iron fist. In previous issues, we’ve seen members of his “Sentries,” soldiers who wear souped-up, futuristic, armored versions of the Black Ranger’s costume:

But this issue briefly introduces us to the rest, confirming that on top of appropriating the fallen rangers’ looks, they also have their powers—powers that can be taken at will by Drakkon and planted into others.

Sadly the issue doesn’t give us that great a look at the designs, but thankfully Comicbook.com revealed Jamal Campbell’s concept art for the Yellow, Pink, and Red Ranger Sentries. There’s no Blue Ranger yet, for story reasons revealed in today’s issue, which also sees Billy confront what happened to his alternate-universe self when Tommy turned bad.

It must be said, these are some really great designs. Recognizably Power Ranger-y, but at the same time, they’re a cool mix between scifi and fantasy that makes them look like a cross between Power Rangers and the heroes of Destiny. Maybe if you lost the capes, these would’ve been credibly modern-yet-faithful designs for a Power Rangers movie, instead of the distinctly alien suits we’re getting.

The Magicians is a show that’s full of contradictions. At times it’s refreshing and brilliant, but then it’s so silly I can’t believe an adult wrote the story. (At one point, there’s an actual forest of dick rocks.) But if there’s one thing it’s good at, it’s having a smart, thoughtful, and thoroughly progressive portrayal of sex... even if the results have been controversial at times.

Seriously! For all its faults and bouts of immaturity, Syfy’s Harry Potter For Adults might be one of the most forward-thinking shows on television right now, because it’s exploring a great many aspects of consenting adult relationships in a remarkably honest—and mature—way.

There’s no judgment on The Magicians, no Chandler-from-Friends-style gay panic. Everything is permitted. Quentin and Eliot have openly explored their bisexuality (from opposing sexual preferences), Margo is straightforward and unapologetic about her desires, and Alice and Quentin took refreshingly open steps to help her orgasm. Group sex and orgies are a repeat occurrence, along with sessions of casual sex. Female bisexuality hasn’t been explored yet, other than Quentin’s sex dream where Margo and Alice alluringly discuss trying to pass the Bechdel Test, but it wouldn’t be out of place. Just about any sexual pairing on the show is possible and plausible.

That’s not to say all of the relationships are healthy or well expressed. The show’s only queer woman of color (so far) was killed off unceremoniously, along with Mike, Eliot’s male love interest. Eliot’s melancholy over having to kill his boyfriend was treated like a problem by our heroes— especially Margo, who cared more about wanting her party boy back than empathizing with his loss. The awfulness of pedophilia, in particular, was rather poorly explored, turning a male sexual assault victim into a sociopath without once trying to rectify his tragedy.

But then there’s Julia. It’s safe to say that Julia’s storyline has been a Herculean task for The Magicians. Rape is one of the most misunderstood and abused experiences in modern storytelling, often used as a cheap plot device to make us hate one person and feel sorry for another. People were (rightfully) concerned when Julia’s brutal rape at the hands of trickster god Reynard the Fox gave her godlike powers at the end of the season one, hinting at the problematic “rape as character motivation” storyline that’s shared with the likes of Game of Thrones. However, I feel Julia’s story this season has negated some of those concerns, and has presented a progressive view toward the victims of rape and issues of consent.

One of the most refreshing things about Julia’s storyline is no one blames her for the attack. In fact, Julia is the only one who assumes guilt for what happened (as victims often do), but she is surrounded by people who assure her that it’s not her fault, because it’s not. This includes hedgewitch Marina, who helped Julia erase the memory of her rape even though they were enemies at that time. Dean Henry Fogg gave her sanctuary at Brakebills without question, even though she’d helped steal magic from the school in the past. In last week’s episode, all our heroes robbed a bank so they could fund Julia’s abortion, without ever once blaming her for the pregnancy. They were upset she betrayed them before they could kill The Beast, the big bad of season one, but when they realized Julia saved him in hopes of using him to get revenge on Reynard, they empathized with her decision, even while feeling betrayed.

The show also takes a very open stance toward abortion, which is always a very risky subject on television. The moment Julia finds out she’s pregnant, she absolutely wants to get rid of the baby. She doesn’t mince words, she doesn’t gracefully touch her belly in the mirror as a silent tear of regret falls down her face. It’s plain and simple: Julia doesn’t want the child, and the show makes it clear that it’s her choice to make. Of course, Reynard the Fox does everything in his power to stop her, but this only serves to increase Julia’s resolve. She doesn’t want anyone else making this decision for her, and she goes to every length to take control of her own body. It’s a powerful statement on a woman’s right to choose.

There are still plenty of steps The Magicians can take to be more progressive and inclusive in the future, as all televisions shows can. These include exploration of the gender spectrum, as well as what male victims of sexual assault actually go through. However, I do feel like it’s important to acknowledge the risks The Magicians has taken, positioning itself as a fantasy show that openly explores sex, consent, and abortion in a way that reflects the growth and changes in our own society. Sexuality encompasses far more than just sex, and The Magicians is poised to explore all of it—and do it well.

What makes a monster? It’s the central question at the heart of the disturbing indie flick The Transfiguration, which managed to horrify me in ways that I wasn’t expecting—even from a horror movie.

The Transfiguration is a meta-deconstruction built on the bones of other movies that have tried to render the vampire myth down to its barest elements. In the film’s very first scene, you learn exactly what teenage protagonist Milo is. He’s in a bathroom stall, leaning over and sucking blood from a hole in a dead man’s neck. It’s not clear that Milo needs to be doing this to live. But he certainly thinks he does.

Written and directed by Michael O’Shea, the movie rides the tension of whether or not Milo is really a vampire. Is he a teenage boy who just kills people and drinks their blood or does he have the curse of the ages upon him? Milo lives with his older brother in a New York City housing project and walks around with a blank face and minimal affect. Despite his neutral demeanor—or maybe because of it—Milo gets bullied and teased by local thugs. He watches vampire movies religiously, along with videos that show how predators stalk their prey, and hides a stash of money behind a stack of VHS copies of genre classics like Nadja and Near Dark. Scenes with a school counselor reveal a past where he’s harmed animals and he’s shown meticulously working out his own bespoke head-canon about how vampires might work.

Milo’s life changes when a teenaged girl named Sophie moves into the building where he lives. Right after we first see her, she’s shown having sex with one young man while a group of his friends watch. The encounter ends with the boys laughing at her and she cuts herself on purpose “just to feel something.” She shares a bottle of cheap liquor with Milo when he walks over but he’s far more interested in the blood running down her arm. After asking to see the wound, he pulls her arm toward his mouth as if in a trance. Grossed out, Sophie yanks her arm back.

Weird meet-cute aside, the two outsiders quickly start spending time together, sharing grim details from their young lives. Sophie’s parents are dead and the grandfather she’s moved in with is physically abusive. Milo’s mother ended her own life by slitting her wrist—a chilling flashback scene shows him sliding a finger in the congealing blood and bringing it to his lips (seen up top)—and he’s never directly dealt with how that’s affected him. Sophie asks Milo if he’s ever thought about suicide, He replies “I can’t kill myself… it’s against the rules,” and the mystery about what he is deepens even more.

Stellar performances from Eric Ruffin as Milo and Chloe Levine as Sophie make the two kids seem uncomfortable in their own skins. While Milo gets a gruff sort of caretaking from his older brother, the teens’ truest emotional tether is to each other. Things blossom into an awkward first love, complete with Faces of Death and Nosferatu movie dates. Sophie tries to bond with Milo by saying he should read the Twilight books but he says he prefers more “realistic” takes on bloodsuckers like Let the Right One In. But their relationship stalls when Sophie discovers the notebooks where Milo encodes the guidelines of vampire existence and the calendar where he’s been tracking his kills.

There’s an unholy stillness all throughout The Transfiguration. It’s filled with uncomfortable stares that are held too long, silences that scream with tension waiting to be broken and terrifyingly intimate violence. Arguably, only one of Milo’s victims deserves to be killed and one definitely doesn’t. Milo sometimes throws up after drinking blood but we’re never sure if that’s because he is or isn’t a vampire. Ruffin portrays Milo with a creepy patience that makes his inner concerns inscrutable and we don’t learn how he feels about his own existence until the very end of the movie, which gives the answer that the audience has been waiting for.

The ice-cold approach O’Shea takes toward Milo gave my stomach knots every time the main character killed someone. The Transfiguration feels like a throwback to 1970s grindhouse horror but feels retrograde in another, more disturbing way. The character construction of Milo, a poor kid who lives on the fringes of society and ends lives with remorse, rubs up uncomfortably against John J. Dilulo’s specious ideas about inner-city superpredators that became part of political discourse in the 1990s, as discussed by The Root:

On the horizon, therefore, are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile superpredators. They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being in their path). They fear neither the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They live by the meanest code of the meanest streets, a code that reinforces rather than restrains their violent, hair-trigger mentality. In prison or out, the things that superpredators get by their criminal behavior—sex, drugs, money—are their own immediate rewards. Nothing else matters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes “naturally”: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs and get high.

Milo does terrible things that are meant to be interpreted as the workings of a supernaturally traumatized mind. O’Shea’s film is texturally flat on purpose, so as to make its happenings all the more chilling. But that flatness makes it difficult to read. Is the marriage of the vampire and superpredator myths a purposeful one? If it’s intentional, the film’s ending makes harder to pull out a larger meaning from that fusion. I know that this reading is something I’m bringing to the film; I just wish the movie itself didn’t make it so easy to do so. It’s the kind of problem that would be solved by more inclusivity in the entertainment industry.

The Transfiguration is a great movie that explores what it means to lose oneself in the ideas that power the horror genre, but it’s impossible, for me, to see The Transfiguration and not think about racial stereotypes and their onscreen history. My discomfort isn’t enough to wave anybody off from seeing the movie but I would’ve enjoyed it more without having to wonder about this uncomfortable echo.

The Transfiguration opens in New York City on April 7 and in Los Angeles on April 21.

Capcom is giving six NES games based on some of Disney’s finest television animation work HD makeovers in The Disney Afternoon Collection for Xbox One, PC and PlayStation 4, featuring Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, DuckTales and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

Some of the finest licensed 2D platformers in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s came of Capcom’s deal with Disney, and now a bunch of them are coming back. Each of the six games (including sequels for DuckTales and Rescue Rangers) in the $19.99 collection are remastered for full 1080p support, with various filters available to tweak that retro feel.

On top of the upscaling, the games have also been enhanced with Boss Rush and Time Attack modes, as well as a rewind feature to help players unused to the more challenging platformers of the past a chance to survive. All of this, plus an in-game museum featuring facts and images from the original releases.

The Disney Afternoon Collection is coming to Xbox One, PC and PlayStation 4 on April 18. These were once my jam, and they shall be my jam anew.

The Expanse was io9's favorite TV show of 2016, and the book that inspired the first season is just $3 on Kindle right now.

The “Of Course” file is pretty big thick days, but here’s another entry for it. In a new interview, director James Gunn says that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is definitely going to happen. He’s just not sure if he’s the one to do it.

“There will be a Guardians 3, that’s for sure,” Gunn tells Complex. “We’re trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do really, that’s all it is. I got to figure out where I want to be, what I want to spend the next three years of my life doing. You know, I’m going to make another big movie; is it the Guardians or something else? I’m just going to figure it out over the next couple of weeks.”

Gunn has long said he would have difficulty letting anyone else take control of the characters, to a point where he’s even advising the Russo Brothers, who are currently directing the Guardians in Avengers: Infinity War, about how to handle his characters.

“I’ve been heavily involved in what the Guardians do in Avengers: Infinity War,” Gunn told io9 last week. “I gave [the Russo brothers] tons of advice on how to direct the actors, talked to them a lot during the shooting, and talked to the actors a lot during the shooting to make sure that the Guardians are staying authentic.”

Maybe that’s a sign that he’s beginning to let go. We won’t know for some time.

What we do know is that both Phase Two and Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Part Threes: Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War, respectively. With that in mind, last year we asked Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige if Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 would be the logical place to kick off Phase 4 after the untitled fourth Avengers movie.

“We’re only working on what’s been announced through the end of 2019,” Feige said in April 2016. “And it is still a big chess board for 2020 and beyond, but certainly I would say Guardians 3 is [one film that’s] up there. I don’t know what exactly the order will be.”

There’s no doubt we’ll find out much, much more in the coming weeks as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 approaches its May 5 release.

[Complex via SHH]

The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just making people nervous about the upcoming dystopian apocalypse, it’s also amping up interest in female-authored science fiction and fantasy. Humble Bundle’s giving people a chance to check out a ton of titles.

The latest collection from Humble Bundle is focused on “Women of Scifi and Fantasy,” featuring books from Octavia E. Butler, Robin McKinley, and several other prominent female authors from Open Road Media. For anyone eager to discover more female authors after diving into The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been adapted into an upcoming Hulu series, this is an excellent place to start. You can check out free previews and chapters on all of them beforehand— except for one, which hasn’t been revealed yet.

As is true Humble Bundle fashion, the collections start at $1 donations, and the full $15+ package includes about $125 worth of digital books. Money goes to help First Book, which provides books for kids in low-income areas. Donors can also choose for some of the money to go a second charity of their choice, using the PayPal Giving Fund. This Humble Monday package continues through March 28.

[Humble Bundle]

Cult movie fans, give praise. Starting today, Shudder is streaming the long-elusive unrated version of Ken Russell’s legendary 1971 The Devils, starring Oliver Reed as a priest who’s accused of witchcraft, and Vanessa Redgrave as the hunchbacked nun who’s dangerously obsessed with him.

This clip, presented exclusively by io9, doesn’t contain any of the graphic violence or sexually explicit moments that have made The Devils such a target for censorship and outright banning over the years. It does, however, focus on another aspect of the film that drew ire: the unflattering portrayal of the Catholic church.

Say it with me: “Satan is ever-ready to seduce us with sent-sual delights!”

According to Shudder, this 109-minute version of The Devils—which runs six minutes longer than the R-rated cut—is the longest unrated version of the film in existence. The British-made film has never been released on DVD in the U.S., only VHS, so unless you live someplace with a horror film festival or an adventurous rep house, this may be your first chance to catch it in any form. Thank the movie gods it’s the form that contains all the nudity and blasphemy your dark heart could ever desire.

There’s a gravitational anomaly that permeates our entire universe: The way most galaxies and clusters of galaxies behave implies that there’s around six times more matter than we actually observe. Scientists called the missing stuff that should create the unaccounted-for gravity we measure “dark matter.”

Scientist Vera Rubin noticed one of the strangest anomalies back in 1976. Stars move faster further away from the center of galaxies, but Isaac Newton’s laws say that once you get to the galaxy’s edges, where there’s a lot less observable stuff, the remaining stars and gas should move more slowly. Instead, Rubin observed the matter at the visible edges of galaxies spun at similar speeds to, or faster than, the stuff closer to the middle. This implied there was more matter (and more gravity) beyond what she saw, caused by something none of our experiments can observe.

But a new set of observations show that some incredibly distant, and therefore very young (but ancient, like a fossil) galaxies seem to behave differently than the ones Rubin and others have observed. This doesn’t disprove the so-called “dark matter” gravitational anomaly we see today. It does imply that certain early galaxies are way different from the ones we observe nearby. This could clue us in to how young galaxies transformed into ones like ours, and the role dark matter played in this transformation.

“There are some issues we need to think about,” Reinhard Genzel, astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics told Gizmodo. “We feel that this shows pretty convincingly that dark matter is not as high a fraction of mass in the outer parts of these [galaxy’s] disks as they are in the local universe,” which includes galaxies close enough that the expansion of space hasn’t stretched out their light waves to cause a notable shift in their color. A measly ten thousand light years away, our own Milky Way’s borders seem to be completely dominated by dark matter’s effects. “That’s not what we see in these galaxies.”

These galaxies are on the order of billions to tens of billions of light years away.

Genzel’s team’s observations come from looking at specific kind of infrared light coming off of hydrogen atoms whose electrons lose a little bit of energy, using instruments on the Very Large Telescope in the Northern Chilean desert. They had to look at a selection of galaxies for several months to collect all of the very faint light needed to do their analyses, much of which was published in the journal Nature today.

Even taking into account any potentially confounding factors, like gas between Earth and the stuff they were observing interfering with the data, the scientists concluded these distant galaxies didn’t behave like the galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. They illustrated this with maybe the easiest-to-understand physics graph you will ever see, below: As you get to larger distances from the center of a galaxy, from left to right in the graph, the velocity of matter increases, then drops off in all six of the galaxies on the lefthand graph—these are the distant galaxies. The data on these galaxies’ velocity curves are averaged into the grey area on the righthand graph, different from the our own Milky Way, our neighbor Andromeda (also known as M31) or average nearby galaxies, where the speed of matter either doesn’t drop off or increases further from the center.

This doesn’t mean we’ve disproved dark matter, by any means. Instead, we might be looking at the way baby galaxies make their stars. “This paper is not about dark matter,” Anže Slosar, who leads his futile existence as a scientist and a bureaucrat at Brookhaven National Labs, told Gizmodo. Instead, the scientists have observed that this set of distant galaxies are mostly dominated by ordinary gas instead of dark matter, with more turbulence causing the gas to slow down and possibly fall into the galaxy’s center. “This is consistent with early universe where you have lots of molecular gas, fuel for stars lying around and it can... produce violent star formation.” He said we still need a halo-shaped skeleton made from dark matter to begin with, but that there’s so much gas in these early galaxies that the behavior of the gas dominates our observations.

Reinhard agreed. “In our Milky Way, interstellar gas is eight to ten percent. At high redshift,” meaning incredibly far away, “some of these galaxies have 70 percent gas. With that much gas you can form stars very quickly.”

But Genzel also noted that theories of dark matter as we’d like to think it exists, in the form of particles, aren’t having a good time right now. Searches for some sort of particle that could explain the dark matter gravitational anomaly have mostly turned up empty handed, and scientists will soon look for more exotic dark matter options. “There are a number of people speculating that perhaps we are on the wrong track as far as the nature of dark matter is concerned,” he said. “Maybe it’s not a particle.” Genzel is personally less interested in what his findings may or may not say about dark matter and more excited about new insights into galaxy formation. But “in any case these more speculative possibilities should be explored.”

Scientists need to be cautious before making statements about the nature of these distant galaxies, though. “An important caveat is that this is not true for all galaxies at that redshift, but for this particular subset of galaxies. They chose [to study] these, because they are comparably easy to observe,” said Slosar.

Genzel agreed—he’s quite familiar with the way science works. “I should say it will take a while until other people will be able to check this,” he said. “As you know it’s essential in science: Just becauase we say it doesn’t mean its true.”

[Nature]

This new Injustice 2 trailer is all about Firestorm, which, y’know, great. Big fan of the Nuclear Man here. But one of the moments in the new teaser has me asking questions about one of Batman’s arch-foes.

So, let’s talk about Firestorm first. I dig this twist on his costume but really hope that he has some attacks that use his best-known powers, which largely involve matter transmutation. Yeah, he usually wields energy in the comics but he’s largely known as a character who’d turn one inorganic thing into another. It looked like one distance attack encased his opponent in stone, so there’s a bit of hope.

However, it’s the environmental interaction in this clip that has me scratching my head. Like a lot of latter-day fighting games, Injustice 2 will have special attacks that trigger when you knock an opponent into a certain part of the background. It looks like the one in the Batcave sends the unlucky player in the arms of Killer Croc. Yes, there’s a few seconds where the Catwoman player is swept down a stream of water but it sure seems like Waylon Jones is just a few block away from Batman’s secret headquarters.

Is Croc just constantly swimming through Gotham City’s sewers, hoping he lucks into finding the Batcave? Or random people getting flushed down the drain? Is he a Bat-ally now? Did the Dark Knight tell him to hang out and wait to smash anybody who gets washed out into that area? Why, Croc? Why are you there, all the time every time?

The life-sized statue of the Gundam RX-78-2 in Odaiba, Tokyo, was dismantled this week, after years safeguarding Tokyo Bay since it first appeared in 2012. However, before it went for good, its deconstruction crew gave it one last referential huzzah.

RX-78-2 isn’t the first giant Gundam statute that’s called Tokyo home—earlier versions of it were temporary attractions in Odaiba and Shizuoka in 2009 and 2010. This version, however, has been much longer lasting, until it was announced late last year that the statue would be coming down after five years of drawing tourists.

When teams came to dismantle the Gundam this week, the first thing they did was remove its left arm and head:

To those unfamiliar with the original Mobile Suit Gundam, that probably just looks like a giant robot with bits of it missing. But it’s actually an homage to the RX-78-2's final moments in the series, referred to as the ‘Last Shooting’ pose—where it defiantly fires its beam cannon into the air after sustaining heavy damage before being destroyed.

The statue wasn’t holding a weapon and wasn’t articulated to move its remaining arm upwards, but the intent was clear: the beloved statue went out just as its fictional counterpart did.

Fear not though. Even though RX-78-2' days are over, a new life-sized statue is being designed to replace it later this year: a nearly 79-foot-tall replica of the Unicorn Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn. Whether its tenure will outlast that of the classic RX-78-2 remains to be seen.

[Anime News Network]

Say hello to Transformers: The Last Knight’s newest combiner. Helen Mirren is starring in a new supernatural thriller... about a weapons manufacturer. There’s good news for Legion fans. Plus, new clips from Power Rangers and The Originals, and a new trailer for the Flash/Supergirl crossover. Behold, Spoilers!

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Making Star Wars has a small but intriguing detail about Phasma’s presence in the film—not about what she’s up to, but what she’s going to be carrying. Apparently, the character has seemingly ditched her chrome stormtrooper rifle for something a little more up close and personal: a spear-like weapon.

The site further hints that some equivalent of the Royal Guards from Return of the Jedi will be in the movie, standing around Snoke—so maybe the weapon Phasma has is akin to that, and a bit more ornamental than practical. Hopefully she gets to do something with it this time around!

A Quiet Place

John Krasinksi and Emily Blunt are set to star in a supernatural thriller from Platinum Dunes & Paramount, directed by Krasinski himself. [Variety]

Suicide Squad 2

Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) is currently negotiating to write the script. [THR]

Winchester

CBS Films announced their supernatural thriller, Winchester, is now in production. Based on a true-ish story, Helen Mirren plays Sarah Winchester, the heiress of the Winchester rifle fortune, who believes she’s being haunted by the spirits of those killed by the titular firearm manufacturer’s weapons. Shooting for the film will commence at the former residence of the real Sarah Winchester, the Winchester Mystery House. [Coming Soon]

Transformers: The Last Knight

Transformers News has a leaked image of the film’s new combiner robot, Infernocus— described on the packaging as the “guardian of Quintessa.” Infernocus is comprised of smaller Transformers Rupture, Skulk, Thrash, Glug, and Gorge. You’ll have to hit the link to see the pictures.

Power Rangers

Zack takes the Mastodon Zord for a joyride in a new clip from the film.

Ghost in the Shell

A new featurette introduces the men and women of Section 9.

The Belko Experiment

James Gunn hired Huxley Berg Studios to remake the trailer with Lego.

Legend of the Ancient Sword

THR has a first look at Renny Harlin’s adaptation of the popular Chinese fantasy RPG.

Van Helsing

Missy Peregrym has joined the cast as Scarlett Harker, “ a woman with a mysterious past who might help turn the tide against the vampires.” [Spoiler TV]

Legion

Good news! The adventures of David Haller have officially been renewed for a second season at FX. [TV Line]

The Originals

The CW has released the opening scene of the season four premiere for your viewing pleasure.

The Flash

Finally, more pictures and an extended trailer for the musical crossover episode, “Duet,” have surfaced. See the rest at the link. [Buddy TV]

_{Additional reporting by Gordon Jackson. Banner art by Jim Cooke.}

Black holes may be one of the universe’s most bizarre phenomena. They’re literally divide-by-zeros in the sky, places where the mathematics of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity falls apart. These dense behemoths have such strong gravitational fields that time stops, and all futures point directly at the center, and light crossing the boundary, or event horizon, can’t escape. But no one’s ever taken a picture of a black hole, and scientists want to change that.

The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, is a network of around ten radio telescope observatories across the planet, synchronized via the most precise atomic clocks, and pointed directly at the center of our galaxy. There, scientists are pretty sure a supermassive black hole around four million times the mass of our sun, called Sagittarius A*, powers the orbit of the Milky Way’s rotation, tears matter to shreds and flings balls of it across space. The telescope network will also look at the much larger black hole inside the giant galaxy M87. The EHT is around a decade old, but the addition of the world’s most powerful radio telescope, ALMA or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in the Chilean desert, along with a telescope at the South Pole, may allow scientists to finally get the wild black hole image previously offered only by artist drawings or computer simulations.

This souped-up Event Horizon Telescope will start observing in early April.

“This is going to be a seminal observation in the history of mankind,” Grant Tremblay, observational astrophysicist from Yale University, told Gizmodo. “This image [of Sagittarius A*], whatever it shows, will be in the top ten images ever taken.”

The EHT made its first failed black hole observations in 2006. But then, scientists confirmed it could resolve black hole-sized structures with data from the 2007 observing run, Shep Doeleman, the astronomer directing the effort, explained to Gizmodo. The method used to link all of its telescopes into one, called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, isn’t new either—scientists published a paper on the “first global radio telescope” back in the mid 1970s when people started connecting radio telescopes across ten to hundreds of kilometers. Despite that, we don’t have a crisp image of a black hole or the shadows they cast, because the telescopes’ combined resolutions haven’t been high enough. We just have a lot of tantalizing hints—we’re fairly certain Sagittarius A* is a black hole, and we know that it has a disk of matter orbiting it.

ALMA and the South Pole Telescope haven’t been hooked up to the network until this upcoming 2017 observing run, which will now include nine scopes after a few swaps. The new telescopes will allow us to capture an image of the black hole at the center of M87 and Sagittarius A* with higher resolution than any image prior, test Einstein’s theory of relativity which says that black holes should look like a dark shadows, and understand how and why the matter orbiting black holes behaves the way it does.

Regular telescopes can’t see a supermassive black hole—not because it’s too dark, but because it’s way too light. The gravity of black holes causes orbiting matter to travel at rip-roaring speeds, approaching the speed of light. The immense friction between particles in the hot gas generates a bright glow, which prevents us from seeing the shadow of the light-eating Unicron itself. The interstellar matter between us and the black holes, as well as the Earth’s own atmosphere, can also blur or dim incoming light waves, depending on their properties, said Doeleman. That means there’s a goldilocks frequency of light that black hole hunters allow into their telescopes. Rather than using visible, ultraviolet or infrared light, the EHT filters out everything except radio waves, longer light rays whose wave peaks have around a milimeter of space between them. For comparison, visible lights waves have about a thousandth to a ten thousandth that distance between their peaks.

But individual radio telescopes can only get a limited amount of information. That’s where VLBI comes in. This technique combines information from the pairs of telescopes, called baselines, clocking the infinitesimal difference in the amount of time it took the light to arrive at either, and correlating the radio wave signals with the time as measured by the atomic clocks. All those baselines essentially create one enormous telescope with a giant light-collection area—but rather than light waves meeting in one place as they do in a regular telescope, their data meets at a supercomputer later. Software lines up the shapes of the light waves as if they were all collected at the same time, a bit like how DJs use sound editing software to sync up music through a process called interferometry—the garbage cancels out, and the important stuff adds up, boosting its signal. That allows scientists to get hyper-fine resolutions. The updated EHT will be able to resolve a volume of space around Sagittarius A* with a radius equal to the distance between Mercury and the Sun, Tremblay said. That’s pretty good for something more than 25,000 light years away.

Despite years of VLBI efforts, the Chilean radio observatory called ALMA couldn’t simply plug into the network as soon as it went online—these telescopes need all the appropriate data analysis hardware and software, including quarter-petabyte disks, and a precise atomic clock, Dan Marrone, experimental astrophysicist in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona told Gizmodo. ALMA, whose inauguration was only four years ago, couldn’t rush into action, despite badgering from the EHT community. “There was a lot of pressure on ALMA to get set up in time. The rest of the Event Horizon Telescopes were relying on the Chilean array’s sixty-plus dishes to get up and running,” Violette Impellizzeri, Operations Astronomer at ALMA, told Gizmodo. “The timing was not ideal,” of getting ALMA online and trying to plug it into the EHT simultaneously.

And the EHT is just one of ALMA’s many goals. “If you wanted to look at a galaxy you need a large angular telescope” like ALMA, said Impellizzeri. Compared with the larger and further objects ALMA is capable of imaging, the EHT is like a microscope, working best for relatively small, specific sources of light.

Sometimes, the collaborative EHT science didn’t feel like a priority at ALMA. “I was very scared it wasn’t going to happen. Sometimes I wouldn’t get answered and had to wait,” said Impellizzeri. She had to be ALMA’s EHT’s advocate. “I would jump up and down. We’d go for beers with the management and I’d say ‘guys, this is super cool! We have to do this!’” Folks eventually got the picture. “It’s very different now, it’s the highest priority.”

ALMA is now one of the most important telescopes to the EHT’s upcoming two-week observing period. Should snow or rain fall in the Chilean desert during those two weeks, none of the EHT telescopes will run, said Impellizzeri. ALMA is a no/no-go facility.

There are other crucial telescopes lending their disks to the mission in April, like the South Pole Telescope. “We can always see the galactic center from the South Pole,” said Marrone. Plus, pictures imaged from North-South pairs tend to be the crispest, he said. Scientists theorize this effect comes from magnetic fields between us and the black holes.

Ultimately, all of the telescopes are important. Should one telescope fail to make observations due to bad weather, that’s less information to build the image. “If you start losing one of your dishes, you’re essentially ripping off a piece of the Earth-sized telescope,” said Doeleman.

During the upcoming EHT run, scientists will mainly monitor the telescopes and perform maintenance. The run will start by collecting 3 millimeter light waves during its first few days, and then it’ll move on to 1 or so millimeter waves for the remaining period, gathering different kinds of light for different kinds of images. After that, researchers ship all the disks—petabytes worth of data—to a central supercomputer at the Haystack Radio Observatory in Massachusetts and another in Bonn, Germany. There, the light signals’ times can be correlated and researchers can run mathematical models based on the data to actually produce the image. That requires intense pattern-matching and data machine learning algorithms—there are an infinite number of pictures that could potentially fit the data. The algorithms, written in part by MIT graduate student Katie Bouman, try to pick the image that best matches what makes the most sense from a physical perspective.

That means we won’t see the EHT’s black hole picture until much later this year at the earliest, maybe not until next year. All of those telescopes might even need to clear their schedules for another observing run next year before we see anything meaningful. “I’m not 100 percent sure that this year they’ll get the result they expect,” said Impellizzeri, meaning a full-blown black hole picture. “Within the next couple of cycles they will. But this is the first result.”

No one really knows what we’ll be seeing yet, but people have some ideas. “If you had a hell of a pair of sunglasses and SPF a trillion sunscreen and a magical spacecraft,” said Tremblay, then black holes might look similar to (but not the same as) the black hole from the movie Interstellar—a black disc with light rays bent by gravity creating a solar eclipse-like glow behind it, marked with a cloud of bright, orbiting matter. Doeleman’s simulations show a crescent moon of light with the black hole’s shadow in the foreground. Maybe the black hole will have bright jets of light emanating from the top and bottom. “Regardless of what we find,” said Tremblay, “the answer will be equally astounding.”

Plus, said Doeleman, we might be able to collect information on how quickly matter orbits Sagittarius A*, and the black hole inside M87, which, despite being much further away from us, is also much larger.

After that, we can only get bigger and better. For instance, Doeleman plans on adding a telescope in Greenland to better image M87. We can even begin taking more detailed measurements on other sources in the sky. “Certainly other quasars,” bright distant light sources, “will be of interest, different active galactic nuclei jets,” beams of matter flying out of galaxies’ bright centers, “and accretion disks,” disks of matter orbiting sources of gravity, said Lynn Matthews, Research Scientist at the MIT Haystack Observatory. “We also expect to look at other types of sources, pulsars, dying stars... I think those are some of the main targets in the coming years.” And why not create a telescope even bigger than our planet? “I think people are already talking about a space based satellite,” said Avery Broderick, Associate Faculty at the University of Waterloo and researcher at the Perimeter Institute. “It would be wonderful because it is in fact [effectively] making the Earth bigger. You’ll also add zeros the price tag.”

Now, scientists are just crossing their fingers hoping the April run goes well. “It’s super exiting,” said Impellizzeri. “Even being live with other telescopes, [this run] is super exciting. I’m a bit scared. I’m not worried, but I’m nervous.”

Well, adorable by prehistoric standards, that is.

Early Man, the next movie from Nick Park and Aardman Animation—the guys behind Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, and much more—follows the adventures of Dug the Caveman (Eddie Redmayne), as he, his best friend Hognob (an actual hog), and the rest of his tribe adapt to a perilous transition into the Bronze Age.

This already looks like it’s just packed with the earnest goofy humor and charm that’s made Park’s past films such a delight. We can’t wait to see more. Early Man is set to hit theaters sometime in 2018.

Normally you should never send a producer to do a voice actor’s job... except when it comes to Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky.

At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Tartakovsky brought some footage from the latest season of Samurai Jack, which is currently airing on Adult Swim. He couldn’t actually show any of it, so instead he described the footage like he would during a “pitch session” to a network. While he watched it on his computer, he relayed the scene’s dialogue (“AAAAAAAAAAAA!”), sound effects (“CHIH-CHIH-CHIH-CHIH-CHIH”), and action (“SQUEEEEEEENG, spikes”) to the increasingly elated audience.

YouTuber Alex Bennington has since taken the commentary from last year’s SDCC panel and added it to its matching scene, giving an altogether amazing scene an otherworldly quality of god-like perfection. This whole five-minute video needs to be watched in its entirety, on repeat, for all time. Plus, it basically proves that Tartakovsky now needs to narrate the whole damn show.

[Polygon]

Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast isn’t bad. How could it be? It’s basically a remake of one of the greatest animated movies of all time. It’s when it tries to be different that it stumbles, and those problems drag down the good parts where it gets hard to overlook its flaws, making you wonder if you should just watch the animated version again.

The film’s music acts as a microcosm of this problem. In almost every song from the original movie, they’ve added an orchestral dance break. Those breaks keep the songs from reaching a natural climax and, for anyone who knows the original movie—it is extremely distracting. Yes, the musical numbers look great, but just as you’re getting into them—bam, a sudden drop in energy for a completely unneeded dance number.

This happens in the plot as well. When the movie’s remaking the animated version, it’s great—especially thanks to the gorgeous visual flair director Bill Condon manages to fill every frame with. But then, when the plot detours into one of its new, extra scenes, it inevitably clutters up the tighter, better story of the original, and all that visual wonder does nothing to mask it.

More irritatingly, the movie doesn’t trust its own storytelling. Whenever it’s added something new, it feels the need to also have a character spell out what the “message” of the new scene is. For example, there’s a flashback to the Beast’s (Dan Stevens) childhood, which meant to explain why he was so mean before—short version: daddy issues—and it gets the point across fine, making it one of the movie’s best additions. But then Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) still has to explain that the Beast has daddy issues, hammering it home on multiple occasions,

Belle (Emma Watson), already one of the more fleshed out of the Disney princesses, is also saddled with a completely unnecessary extra back story involving her mother, which actually has less to do with who Belle is and more to do with her father’s actions. The movie could have easily had Belle and the Beast to have bonded over this semi-similar part of their lives. They both learn about each other’s respective parental trauma, but they only seem sympathetic to the other one rather than seeing a kindred spirit.

Belle and the Beast “bond” over books—a relationship which begins with the Beast belittling her taste and then mansplaining her favorite story to her. I half-expected him to tell her she should be reading The Catcher in the Rye instead because it just, like, gets it.

All of these dramatic character bits don’t land anything like they’re supposed to. And they’re even more jarring because they’re right up against comedic bits that work really well. Stevens’ Beast, when he’s acting all awkward with Belle, is approximately a hundred times more endearing than he is when grumping about and singing depressing ballads. Ian McKellen’s Cogsworth has a running gag about his cowardice that gets laughs every time. Kevin Kline, as Belle’s father, has a moment where he realizes exactly what’s going on in the castle that has expert timing.

But it’s Luke Evans who is the true joy. He doesn’t just steal the show as Gaston, he cons the movie out from under Watson and Stevens and is halfway across the globe, Josh Gad’s LeFou in tow, before anyone realizes what’s happened. His and Gad do the exchange that comes from the original’s “Gaston (Reprise),” and I swear it’s twice as funny as it was back then. I think Evans might be a real-life cartoon and the fact that he isn’t doing more musical comedies is a crime.

There is a lot of talent in the ensemble of this movie: McKellen, McGregor, Thompson, Audra McDonald (Madame Garderobe), Stanley Tucci (Maestro Cadenza), and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Plumette) are all servants of the Beast. When they get their moments, they’re all great. But they don’t get nearly enough of them. The whole movie is simply less than the sum of its parts.

Look, no one’s going to leave the theater demanding their money back. There’s enough going right here that anyone looking for a nostalgia bomb, a date movie, or something to take the kids to will get pretty much what they need. But while Beauty and the Beast is beautiful to look at and absolutely has its moments, you’ll most likely leave wishing you’d seen the animated version again instead.