Technically, the real news is that Sean Astin and Tom Arnold (of, “He’s still working?” fame) are starring in Dead Ant. But the fun news is literally everything else about this movie.

Dead Ant is the story of a down on their luck hair metal band who has to fight a pack of giant ants while on their way to Coachella. They could have stopped at “down on their luck hair metal band,” I would have been happy. One getting attacked instead of making to Coachella? This movie is manna from heaven.

“But wait,” I hear you asking. “Is there also an appearance from the son of formerly-famous-actor-turned-punchline? Perhaps one who has been on Celebrity Apprentice?” Yes, of course there is. JAKE BUSEY, everyone!

Busey is in the band, Astin is a roadie, and Arnold is the band’s manager. This is going to be hilarious. On purpose, even!

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Photo credit: Ant by Samantha Henneke/flickr/CC BY 2.0

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

The crop of new skyscrapers going up on 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan are very tall, whisper thin, and—yawn—rather boring. This idea for a supertall on the same street is a throbbing EDM antidote to the architectural elevator music that’s taking over New York City.

The proposal that takes design audacity to new heights is not by Ivo Shandor but by Mark Foster Gage, New York architect and assistant dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Instead of a sheer wall of glass, the 102-story tower is adorned with deconstructed gargoyles made from “limestone-tinted concrete panels with sheet-bronze details,” which seem to iterate along the facade like a glitchy 3D printer spewing out random Art Deco references.

And, perhaps best of all, the building is named “The Khaleesi.” Okay, so those are dragon gargoyles.

Look at the video for this thing:

Once you get past the fact that the building is draped in what’s essentially Ed Hardy jewelry, the structure itself contains some great ideas. Instead of cramming the retail on the ground floors (ahem, Nordstrom Tower), shoppers will be treated to views from the 64th floor sky lobby and four outdoor balconies while they fork over their cash to boutiques. That’s pretty awesome!

While Gage doesn’t explicitly mention that this feathered filigree is a nod to the Art Deco architecture found throughout the city (even the Chrysler Building has its own birds), it’s obvious that he’s trying to bring a little bling back to the monotonous towers of our built environment. He’s trying to shake up the skyline, and for that he should be commended.

I am 99 percent certain this structure will never be approved or built but I almost wish it would be just so we could hear all the complaints from local NIMBY groups about how awful and inappropriate it is for New York City.

[6sqft via Untapped Cities]

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

Sixteen-year-old Aramis Knight plays the young warrior with hidden Hulk-like super strength on AMC’s Into the Badlands. He talked to us about being a total badass.

As you can imagine, training to be on a martial arts show is hard as hell—especially when you have zero experience, like Knight and most of the cast did. Knight says he and the other cast members got their butts kicked at a six-week training boot camp before shooting began. It’s like he was a real-life Colt! Except for, y’know, not having to pledge his young life to a murderous near-dictator who treats his minions like the disposable pawns they are.

Instead, the cast was turning into real-life martial arts masters, as we see in the show’s never-ending, hypnotizing fight scenes. (Though Daniel Wu, who plays main character Sunny, has an extensive martial arts background from years of starring in Chinese action films.)

“While we were training, I was burning 1,500 calories a day, working from nine to three,” Knight told me over the phone this week. It was especially tough in the swampy Louisiana heat, which hit triple digit temperatures and 100 percent humidity. “I don’t envy Daniel having to run around in that leather jacket.”

Badlands is a pretty big departure from Knight’s other work, which includes 2013’s Ender’s Game, as well as guest roles on Dexter, Psych, and General Hospital.

“Not only were we getting stronger and becoming more flexible, but we were each developing our fighting styles,” Knight told me. The boot camp was led by expert fight choreographer Huan-Chiu Ku, who’s worked on Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

“Emily [Beecham, who plays the Widow] is very good with daggers, I’m very good at hand-to-hand combat, and Ally [Ioannides, Tilda] is very good all around.”

Speaking of Tilda—she and M.K. gonna hook up, or what? Or at least join forces with Sunny and Veil to overthrow their respective evil “parents,” the Widow and Quinn?

“They are [like] forbidden lovers,” he says of the Badlands’ other teen killing machine. “I think they trust each other. Maybe M.K. trusts her more than he trusts Sunny. It’s also very likely that Tilda is the first girl M.K. has ever met, and that M.K. is the first boy Tilda has ever met.”

While Tilda’s background is cloudier, M.K.’s is a focal point of the show, and the pilot dives right into it. Knight says that a challenge with M.K. is balancing being a cool fighter while showing vulnerability. “There’s a very, very fine line between vulnerability and whininess,” he says, and staying on the right side of that line can be tricky for an actor with this kind of young warrior role.

Finally, Knight praised AMC for casting young people in roles of real power—in this case, power in both the dramatic and physical sense. From Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka to Knight and Ioannides, Knight said it’s a network that doesn’t patronize child actors or minimize their talents.

He also spoke positively of the network for casting two Asian leads: Wu, a Chinese-American, and Knight himself, who’s Pakistani, Eastern Indian, and German.

“They’re breaking down barriers that should have been broken down a long time ago,” he says. “It’s proving that to other networks, who were too scared to cast an Asian man or an Asian 16-year-old boy.”

Well said, Aramis. He also mentioned that this Sunday’s episode of Into the Badlands is his favorite of the season so far. Last week’s was my personal favorite, so I’m hoping his tops it. The new episode airs Sunday at 10 p.m. EST on AMC.

Photo: James Minchin III/AMC

Email the author at bryan@gizmodo.com, or follow him on Twitter.

The Muse I’m Covered In Goosebumps After Watching the Trailer For Netflix’s Making a Murderer | Gizmodo Opulent Air Travel Is Reaching a New Level of Lunacy with Seats On Top of the Plane | Black Bag Did Stanley Kubrick Fake This Video of Stanley Kubrick Admitting to Faking the Moon Landing? | Jalopnik The Ten Most Fucked Up Things You’ve Seen At Stoplights |

As any good Champion of Truth knows, the alleged moon landing was, of course, an elaborate sham constructed by Hollywood and NASA to distract the rest of the world from our newly acquired Nazi UFO technology. And as any reasonable person knows, that is bullshit. Or—according to a fake new video of a BOMBSHELL fake Stanley Kubrick interview—is it?!

The newly released interview by “filmmaker T. Patrick Murray” claims to be 15-year-old footage taken just before Kubrick’s death in which the famed director finally admits to faking the entire moon-landing as we know it.

The “documentary” itself, dubbed Shooting Stanley Kubrick and incessantly spliced with footage from his various films, is an absolute marvel of grating, unwatchable cinema. You can see it below:

But since you probably won’t be able to last more than a few minutes before you start bleeding from your eyes, here’s the “raw,” unaltered fake Kubrick in all his wholly coached glory:

To be clear, there is almost no way this is Stanley Kubrick. But just to be sure, we reached out to his former wife, Christiane Kubrick. A spokesman responded with the following: “The interview is a lie, Stanley Kubrick has never been interviewed by T.Patrick Murray the whole story is made up, fraudulent & untrue.”

Then again, of course Stanley Kubrick’s widow would say that. Made up. Fraudulent. AND untrue?

Either way, whether this video is real (it’s not), the elaborate construction of an unhinged man (probably), or the elaborate construction of Kubrick himself for reasons unknown (why not!), the transcript is—to say the least—incredible.

A small sampling of the revelations that lie within:

Fake Kubrick: I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the moon landings were faked, that the moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it.

Murray: Ok. (laughs) What are you talking...You’re serious. Ok.

FK: I’m serious. Dead serious. Yes, it was fake.

And:

M: Why are you telling the world? Why does the world need to know that the moon landings aren’t real and you faked them?

FK: I consider them to be my masterpiece.

M: And you can’t take credit, or even talk about...

FK: Well, I am now..

M: ... So, you can’t talk to Roger Ebert about it. Does that frustrate you? Why did they have to fake it? Why would they have to do that?

FK: Because it is impossible to get there.

As well as:

FK: Yes, 2001 was very ambitious, but that’s not to say that faking the moon landing was not ambitious. But I learned things from making 2001, and that’s why I got this gig in the first place.

M: That makes sense

FK: Well, it was easy for me, because I didn’t think a whole lot about the morality of it. But I didn’t. And I could see that Neil was, he was bothered by it.

Conspiracy theorists, for their part, are delighted to finally have the proof they’ve been waiting for all these years.

It’s just too bad the mainstream idiots and Illuminati reptilians of the world will always refuse to see.

[h/t Disclose.tv]

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Photo via NASA, composite by Sam Woolley.

We’re at peak pre-new Star Wars hype right now, and I’m not immune. I bought my 5-year old a can of Spaghettios because it had a picture of R2-D2 on it, and I was glad to do it. What’s happening to me? I’m okay with it, but there are no cars in the movies, which is an issue for me. Luckily, there’s landspeeders, which are close enough to get me thinking.

Landspeeders have been an essential part of the Star Wars universe since the first (or fourth, whatever) movie came out back in 1977, when my little kid brain was blown away by Luke Skywalker’s floating, glorious shitbox, his brown, striped Landspeeder.

I’ve been thinking about that vehicle off and on for decades, and, on the cusp of the new movie coming out, I decided it was time to give it a good scrutinizing, via all the questions I had about it. The answers will be a combination of canonical information from the movies, what I can find online, and, if not attributed, stuff I extrapolate and/or make up. So get in.

Who makes Luke’s landspeeder?

Luke owned a SoroSuub X-34. SoroSuub is, according to the Wookiepedia,

... a massive Sullustan corporation that specialized in mineral processing, but contained divisions and subdivisions which handled everything from energy mining to food packaging.

So, based on their considerably diversified products, I’d say they most resembled Hyundai here on earth, since Hyundai makes cars, cargo ships, owns apartment buildings, and probably sells seafood or something.

How much did the X-34 cost?

Again according to Wookiepedia, the X-34 sold new for 10,550 credits, and Luke got his for 2,400 credits, used. He had to take a bath on his when he sold it, getting only 2,000 credits, which he blamed on the newer X-38s coming out.

I think he was fooling himself. No one in the market for a newer X-38 is cross-shopping dented, sun-baked old X-34s, kid. A quick wash and a replacement for that missing engine cowl would probably have got him 2,250, easy.

According to this iO9 post, a Galactic Credit is about $0.50, so half those numbers for the number in our American Human Dollars. I’m not sure what the salaries are like in the Star Wars universe, but I bet they’re lower, since those prices seem low.

What was Luke’s landspeeder really?

Okay, fine. It was built on a Bond Bug, and designed by Ogle Design, the firm that designed the Reliant Scimitar, among other cars. You can still see bits of the Bond Bug in the dash and interior layout.

Why is a landspeeder better than a wheeled vehicle?

That’s a good question, me. I like how you’ve been thinking. At first, I was thinking that a wheeled vehicle would be far more efficient, since it’s not expending precious energy just to stay up or when standing still. Wheels are pretty good ways of getting around.

Then I thought about the hovercraft-like advantages of a repulsorlift-magic vehicle, and realized such vehicles don’t really require any sort of road infrastructure or network. If you live in a massive, multi-planet society, it may make more sense to have vehicles that can handle almost any terrain rather than having to build massive roadway infrastructures on every planet. We just did it to our one planet, and it was a shitload of work, and it’s still nowhere near done, really. So, I get it now.

What are the specs on the X-34 landspeeder?

I don’t know; probably dust, maybe mud? Oh, that joke never gets old!

Sorry, this is important. Here’s what’s known:

Top speed: about 250 KPH/155 MPH

Max altitude: ~1 meter/3 feet

0-60 (est): 4.1 seconds

Seats 2, with a pair of small, flat areas behind the passenger compartment that can be magnetized for stowing two droids, minimal (5 kg) other cargo capacity

Three jet-turbine engines, outer pair possibly used for steering

Repulsorlift (housed under front ‘hood’) used for hovering

How do you drive the landspeeder? What does it drive like?

Neither of these questions have definitive answers (at least in-universe; on Earth, I imagine it’s like driving a very heavy and unbalanced Bond Bug) so I’m going to make some guesses here.

Looking at the cockpit, there’s a number of controls. We have a strangely complex-yet-completely-uninformative center console (HVAC controls? What’s the equivalent of satellite radio for the Empire?), a lever that’s totally not the gearshift of a Bond Bug, a familiar steering wheel, and, according to cutaway drawings, two pedals.

Based on these, here’s how I think you drive an X-34 landspeeder:

The steering wheel, of course, steers. It’s either vectoring the exhaust of the engines, or varying the thrust of the two outer engines, or, maybe, both. Without any aerodynamic control surfaces, I don’t think these could make really sharp turns, unless you can selectively reverse thrust on one of the side-mounted engines at a time. Maybe you can!

For the pedals, let’s keep this Earth-similar (why not, Galactic Basic Standard sure sounds like English to me) and say the right pedal is the throttle (possibly just to the center engine if the side ones are reserved for steering, but likely all three) and the left one is the brake, which would have to work by reversing engine thrust, which would blast the back of your neck with hot exhaust, I think.

Perhaps if you press the brake pedal to the floor it would activate the emergency/parking brake, which I’m imagining is some sort of physical mechanical drag-arm.

The not-a-Bond-Bug-gearshift I think is where you can select your hover-height, from 10cm to 1 meter. Let’s say there’s, oh, six settings:

10 cm Superlow for fast travel on smooth surfaces

20 cm Low for medium-speed travel on smooth surfaces

40 cm Mid-1 for variable-speed, multi-surface use (slightly smoother)

60 cm Mid-2 for variable-speed, multi-surface use (slightly rougher)

80 cm High for rugged terrain

100 cm Full Height for very rugged terrain or non-solid surfaces, like water or ground-gel

That seems like it’d cover everything. You can shift on the fly without stopping, which is a relatively new feature for landspeeders. I heard on the old X-28s you had to get out and crawl under the damn thing to get to the height slider! Plenty of lifeforms got crushed doing that. Big mess.

Wait, so what does it drive like?

Oh, right. Based on everything we know, I’d say the closest earth-analog to a landspeeder is a Citroën DS. The DS is way slower, sure, but I bet the repulsorlift setup feels pretty close to a DS hydropneumatic suspension, and like a landspeeder, the Citroën has several heights you can pick from.

So, my guess is it feels like a jet-powered Citroën DS.

Why doesn’t it have any lights?

FANTASTIC question. And I have no idea. I don’t even see anything that looks like a mounting point for lights, like it had some, but Luke stripped them off. It makes no sense.

Even if the Empire’s Department Of Surface Transportation (DOST) doesn’t mandate anything like turn indicators or brake lights or related running lights, it still gets dark, right? Those twin suns of Tatooine do set, don’t they? Why doesn’t this thing have a set of headlights?

Hell, based on what I’ve seen of greater Mos Eisely-area infrastructure, there’s hardly any street lighting, so a landspeeder like Luke’s should have a big-ass light bar on the hood.

I have no idea why none of these seem to have lights. It seems a ridiculous omission. If I ever end up in the Star Wars universe, I know what business I’m going into.

What sort of fuel does the X-34 run on?

This is a tricky one to answer; all of the exciting ‘stop for gas, pee, get snacks’ scenes from the movies seem to have been cut. From what I can tell, landspeeders burned some sort of liquid fuel — those jet engines are not electric, they produce exhaust, though the repulsorlift system likely is something like electric and may be powered by a fuel-driven generator, some sort of batteries, or maybe some kind of reactor.

Several kinds of fuel are mentioned: rhydonium, malastarian, and even regular old oil, which apparently, was refined on Kashyyk, where Chewbacca’s from.

Until I see the little sticker inside the fuel filler flap, I have no idea.

How’s the space utilization of the X-34?

Terrible. Like, really awful. Look at this lovely cutaway by Hans Jenssen:

There’s hardly any room in that thing. The entire front end is crammed full of repulsorlift hardware, and the back end must be full of fuel tank, batteries/generators or all of the above. The three engines are externally-mounted, and the only usable passenger volume is a small little space for the two seats in the center. There doesn’t appear to be any real enclosed luggage areas.

Maybe the X-34 was marketed as more of a sports model, like a Miata or an MR-2 or something, and cargo-carrying just wasn’t a priority. Still, that’s a lot of densely-packed hardware in that body. It’s worse than a Fisker.

Is a roof available?

I hope so. No shade under the twin Tatooine suns? That’s got to suck. And that looks like vinyl upholstery. Luke’s thighs must look like a rotisserie chicken.

I bet whatever the Star Wars universe’s version of the JC Whitney catalog is has pages of aftermarket snap-on duraplast roofs for X-34s. I bet some even have integrated roof racks (very handy) and I also bet a lot of people get them, even on cooler planets, to avoid the blast of hot braking exhaust from that center engine.

You can even get them covered in Wampa skin! Classy.

What’s the tow rating?

Not bad, 2,600 lbs.

Were there ever any special edition X-34s?

Briefly, some dealers offered a Sy Snootles Signature Edition X-34, which had special paint colors, interior fabrics, a signed dash plaque, and a hood decal of the singer’s famous lips.

Only 5,000 were sold. These are, of course, highly prized by collectors.

Contact the author at jason@jalopnik.com.

This weekend’s Geminids are going to be the biggest meteor shower of this year, and you absolutely should not miss it. Here’s when, where, and how to watch the Geminid meteor shower—and what you should be looking for when you do.

What are the Geminids?

The Geminids are a mid-December (this year peaking on Sunday, December 13th) meteor shower formed by the debris of comet 3200 Phaeton burning up in our atmosphere. Phaeton is unusual in that it was only recently recognized as a comet at all. For many years, astronomers believed that Phaethon was really a large asteroid, due to its total lack of ice. Eventually, researchers figured out that Phaethon’s lack of ice was simply due to how close its path was to the sun, and they reclassified it as an extinct comet or a “rock comet.” That extinct comet is responsible for the Geminids you’ll see this weekend.

Top image: 2014 Geminids over Nevada / David Kingham; Image of comet: Artist’s concept of rock comet 3200 Phaeton / NASA-JPL

The Geminids are a fairly young shower—people didn’t begin to keep records on the meteor shower until around the American Civil War. Initially, it was a light enough shower that it barely registered for any but the most hardcore of 19th century astronomy geeks. Since then, though, the number of meteoroids simply exploded. Today, the Geminids are almost always the largest meteor shower of the year—and 2015 will be no exception.

Image: 2014 Geminds / Scott Butner

This weekend’s Geminids are expected to blaze through the skies at a steady clip of 120 meteors per hour, according to NASA, though some observatories (like Slooh) are suggesting we could see up to 150. The closest we’ve seen to that in 2015 were the Perseids, which at their peak only reached 100 meteors per hour. In short, this will be an amazing show that you absolutely shouldn’t miss.

It’s not just the numbers of meteroids that you’re going to see that makes this weekend’s shower so exceptional; it’s also the meteors themselves—and some unusual behavior you may see up above.

Image: 2012 Geminids over South Dakota / David Kingham

A Strange Show

Because Phaeton is a strange comet, the behavior of its meteoroids is also a little unusual. One of the marks of the Geminids is that—instead of the mix of ice, rock and assorted space debris you usually see in a meteor shower—these are just pieces of the rock comet breaking away. This means the meteoroids are more substantial than you see in most showers which lets them fall deeper into our atmosphere and also create longer arcs.

Image: 2012 Geminids composite / NASA Marshall

The Geminids are also an usually slow shower—averaging at about 22 miles / second. This is excellent news for meteor-watchers because it means that you have a better chance of spotting some of those stunningly long trails as they spread across the sky.

When you do spot those trails, you should also be on the lookout for something else: Color. Like last month’s Leonids, the Geminids are famous for showing up in something other than black-and-white. This is because of the elements that compose the meteoroids. While the Leonids often show up in shades of green and purple, the Geminids are more commonly sport yellows, blues, and greens.

Image: 2013 Geminids / StarryEarth

So, How Do I Watch?

One of the (many) wonderful things about the Geminids is that you have pretty much the entire night to watch them. Although they’re expected to reach their peak in the pre-dawn hours, anytime after 9 p.m. on Sunday should give you an excellent view of the show.

This year should be especially good, though, because the new moon is on December 11th. By the 13th it will still be just barely visible and is expected to set early in the night—excellent news for visibility. Skies should be dark, making clouds the biggest visibility worry. If you’re lucky enough to have a clear night, you won’t be disappointed.

Video: 2012 Geminids timelapse / Kenneth Brandon

What do I need?

There is one big drawback to the Geminids: In addition to being the biggest meteor shower of the year, they are also typically the coldest. In previous editions of Sky Guide, I’ve suggested you bundle up as needed for your own personal level of comfort—the time for such flippancy is past.

This is a real winter meteor shower, friends, and this is not a drill. Hat, gloves, a warm coat, a flask of something warming (whether bourbon or coffee), blankets: these are your weapons in the fight against the cold and only by having them at the ready can you expect to last the night.

Images: Geminds 2013 / Dirk Essel

And you’re going to want some time out there because the meteoroids should be falling fairly thick. To spot them, a good bet is to start by looking at the radiant (the spot where the meteoroids appear to originate) and then cast your gaze outwards over the full sky.

Go ahead and bring a star wheel or a sky-mapping app along with you to help find it. You can also find it simply by locating the constellation Gemini (it’s just slightly to the left of Orion) and looking right above.

Image: Geminids radiant, NASA / JPL

I usually recommend laying a blanket out on the ground or lying back on your car as the best way to get a full, overarching view of the sky. Not this time. Even if you don’t have snow, the ground is likely to be cold enough to send you inside quicker than you want.

If you do get chased back inside, either by sky-blocking clouds or the chill, all is not quite lost. You can still catch up on the action online: Slooh always has a nice feed of the show broadcasting from the Canary Islands.

But really, the joy of meteor showers is in watching them live and in-person. So do a little preparation, and (with a little weather-luck) you’ll see something to remember this weekend.

Image: 2013 Geminids / Teide Observatory (Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute, IAC / StarryEarth

The Last Man on the Moon, the new documentary about astronaut Eugene “Gene” Cernan, will gets a theatrical/digital/VOD release on February 26th. As you might have suspected, Cernan was, uh, the last man the U.S. managed to put on the moon, back in 1972 during the final Apollo lunar landing. Watch the trailer above.

[Via Deadline]

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

Starting tonight, New York’s Film Forum is running a series of crime movies based on source material written by women. This is a great chance to catch Marilyn Monroe as a troubled, shady babysitter. Big city hotels—so sinister!

The slate includes classics like Otto Preminger’s 1944 Laura, adapted from a novel by Vera Caspary, and Hitchcock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train, which is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel. (See the full lineup here.) It’s meant to accompany the release of Women Crime Writers, a new compilation of detective novels from the ‘40s and ‘50s from the Library of America. Five of the movies included are based on books from the collection; “For the six others, I just chose the strongest films I could find in excellent prints—I think it’s a very strong grouping of films,” said Film Forum’s director of repertory programming Bruce Goldstein, who put together the series with an assist from the Library of America’s Geoffrey O’Brien. He explained his choices in an email:

“Well, the field is not that huge and, outside of the films based on novels in the box set - including some big classics like LAURA, IN A LONELY PLACE, DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK, THE RECKLESS MOMENT and BAND OF OUTSIDERS - I wanted to include other great movies based on novels by women, especially Patricia Highsmith (PURPLE NOON, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN) and some true rarities, like BEDELIA (based on a novel by Vera Caspary, who wrote LAURA) and Chabrol’s LA RUPTURE (based on a novel by Charlotte Armstrong), both of which we imported from Europe.”

Laura and Strangers on a Train are probably the most famous movies included, but the rest of the slate is interesting, as well. Don’t Bother to Knock features the aforementioned Monroe performance, and The Reckless Moment in particular is fascinating. In it, a young woman gets involved with a scummy older man and writes some incriminating letters. It wouldn’t be so bad except they quarrel, he falls and dies, and suddenly there’s a blackmailer trying to shake her mother down for $5000. And so a California housewife, Mrs. Harper, is sucked into dealings with the L.A. underworld while trying to cover her daughter’s tracks.

I know that sounds like the premise for a half-assed Taken knockoff, but the movie is claustrophobic and stressful and very compelling. Made in 1949, you can already see the postwar frustration among American women bubbling up. It’s Christmas and Mr. Harper is off in Germany, building some bridge—on top of years spent away during the war. Mrs. Harper feels obligated to muddle through on her own. She tells her daughter not to worry and doesn’t make a peep to anyone else. Members of her family—her son, the daughter that got her into this mess, her father—are constantly pestering her for something, and by ten minutes in you’re feeling the strain so much their noise seems like fingernails down a chalkboard. The only one who recognizes her situation is the blackmailer, played by a weirdly reassuring James Mason.

It’s noir with noir’s familiar beats, but covered in a woman’s fingerprints. (Which—back me up if you were also forced to read The Maltese Falcon in high school—is not universally the case in this particular genre.) There’s even an incredibly frustrating scene where a desperate Mrs. Harper rounds up her jewelry and attempts to get a loan, only to discover it’s essentially impossible without her husband’s cosign.

If you’re New York-proximate, the series is worth checking out. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth mining their picks for your own watch list. The series runs tonight through December 17.

Contact the author at kelly@jezebel.com.

Photos courtesy Film Forum

In 1985, Steven Avery was charged with raping a woman named Penny Beernsten. In 2003, he was exonerated of the crime and released from prison. Two years later, he was charged with murder. Based on those three sentences, this is something you would like to know more about, correct?

Netflix’s upcoming documentary series, Making a Murderer, will tell Avery’s story across 10 episodes, and—if the trailer is any indication—I’ll be covering my face and breathing heavily through most of them.

Writes Netflix:

“There are an unbelievable number of twists and turns in the story arc of Making a Murderer, it feels like it has to be fictional,” said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix VP of Original Documentary Programming. “Ricciardi and Demos have navigated very complex terrain and skillfully woven together an incredible series that leaves you feeling like you’re right in the middle of the action.”

“It was extraordinarily disturbing,” says a voice in the trailer. That’s very true, because here I am, disturbed.

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

And when they bleed, the resulting blood pool becomes a portal to the underworld. Full art below.

This work is by Matt Relkin, and more of his art can be seen at his website.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

As we send humans deeper into space for longer periods of time, habitat design is going to become a crucial part of mission planning. A clever new technology could help NASA figure out how astronauts use their environments, so that we can build much better ones.

In partnership with NASA, engineers at Draper are currently testing a motion tracking device astronauts can wear as they go about their daily duties on the International Space Station. With space at a premium, NASA is keen to learn which parts of the station are being used most, which aren’t, and if there are any ways the habitat’s design can be improved to make life easier for its crew.

“In the past, spacecraft design studies focused on the square footage needed per person,” Draper’s Kevin Duda, the principal investigator for the project, told Gizmodo in an email. “We want to understand how astronauts are actually using the volume of the spacecraft for their tasks. This can help inform decisions about how much volume may be needed for particular tasks, whether it’s a particular research task, or even exercise equipment.”

Answering these questions could help shape the first human habitats we build on Mars.

The Draper device, which incorporates low-cost optical and inertial sensing technology, collects data on an astronaut’s location and orientation, which is fed into algorithms to produce a continuous motion tracking animation. Last month, Draper engineers carried a prototype of the device through an ISS mockup located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Check out the results in the video below—it kinda reminds me of those old Uncle Worm games you could play on your TI calculator when you were bored in algebra class:

Duda tells Gizmodo that Draper is hoping to get the device up to astronauts on the ISS within the next three to five years. “We’d like for astronauts to have significant time with it so we can get useful data before the space station is retired,” he said. “ We would also like to test this on a parabolic flight to understand how the system performs in a weightless environment.”

In addition to helping NASA hone in on the precise volumes needed for eating, exercising and science-ing in space, motion-tracking technology can reveal how astronauts interact with their environments in subtle ways. “For example, kitchen sinks and cabinets are generally laid out in positions that make it easy to access them together,” Duda said. “Bathrooms are often positioned near kitchens and primary living spaces.” By carefully tracking astronauts’ movements and orientation, we can figure out what aspects of the current layout need improvement.

If these sound like trivial details, rest assured they’re not. Remember, unlike you and me, astronauts can’t exactly leave their built environments. Being stuck in a tin can 24/7 is a pretty stressful situations, but any little things we can do to improve the experience—even things as simple as making sure dishes are within reach of the sink—will go a long way toward ensuring that our brave spacefarers retain their sanity in the cosmic void.

And that, I think we can all agree, is a goal we’d like to shoot for.

[Draper]

Follow the author @themadstone

Top: Interior view from the ISS’s Cupola module. Image Credit: NASA

Fallout 4 is a pretty absurd game, on the whole. One moment you might become a comic book hero, the next you might go on a quest for a long-lost drinking buddy robot. That’s just the stuff on the surface. Things can get even stranger, if you look in the right places.

Fallout 4 seems to have a variety of different random events, special encounters, and unique dialogue—all of which you may never see even if you pour dozens of hours into the game, as they don’t exist as quests or marked locations. Here are some of the more outlandish things that Bethesda has hidden within Fallout 4.

SPOILERS AHOY!

The Preston Garvey Impersonator

This guy isn’t a synth, as you can see when FluffyNinjaLlama loots the impersonator’s body. This, of course, only makes things weirder. And I love how Preston doesn’t even react to it if he’s with you, either!

Synths, Attempting To Murder Their Human Counterpart

I wonder how many “kidnappings” in the Commonwealth were actually brutal showdowns between a human and their clone? A chilling thought, spurred by this clip uploaded by John Souders.

The Clueless Robot

I feel bad for this Mr. Gutsy. He was just doing his job! (Source: Sangrin Dunkaroonie)

The Brahmin Synth

What is wrong with the Institute, honestly? What’s the point of this? What’s the point of any of it!? (Source: funkacola)

The Scam Artist

Well, I will give it to this guy. It’s not a terrible idea.

Deathclaw Dialogue

I was too terrified to get this close to the Deathclaw in this mission. But, according to this footage by FluffyNinjaLlama, there is actually unique Deathclaw dialogue!

The Threesome Offer

Piper just had to be the Ashley Williams of Fallout 4, didn’t she? (Source: FluffyNinjaLlama).

The BioShock Nod

A little girl, traveling all alone in the wasteland...well, except for her giant murder robot. Oh, and she’s a shopkeeper, too! (Source: Dastardlydeviant)

The Sandwich Debate

Oh, not this shit again. (Source: Minister Of Hygiene)

Manta Man

Get a load of this guy. I hear you get special dialogue if you encounter Manta Man while dressed as the Silver Shroud, too. (Source: Binocular Goose)

I’m curious: what’s the most absurd thing you’ve encountered in Fallout 4 thus far?

(Top image:OfficialDuckStudios)

Basic physics suggests that electrons are essentially immortal. A fascinating experiment recently failed to overthrow this fundamental assumption. But the effort has produced a revised minimum lifespan for electrons: 60,000 yottayears, which is — get this — about five-quintillion times the current age of the Universe.

That’s a Yotta Years

An electron is the lightest subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has no known components, which is why it’s considered to be a basic building block of the universe, or an elementary particle.

The Borexino facility (Credit: INFN/Gran Sasso)

An international research team working on the Borexino experiment in Italy were looking for signs of electrons decaying into lighter particles, but as expected, they came up short. This is actually a good thing because it affirms what physicists have suspected for a long time. Had they found evidence that electrons decay into photons and neutrinos — even lower-mass elementary particles — it would violate the conservation of electrical charge. Such a discovery would suggest an entirely new physics beyond the Standard Model.

But the research team did manage to come up with the most accurate measurement yet of the “lifetime” of electrons. Their calculations suggest that a particle present today will still be around in 66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 10²⁸ years), which, as Physics World puts it, “is about five-quintillion times the current age of the universe.” The details of this work now appears at the science journal Physical Review Letters.

An article in APS Physics explains how the scientists came up with such an extreme figure:

Borexino consists of a shell of petroleum-based liquid that lights up when a neutrino, a nearly massless neutral particle, knocks an electron loose from one of the liquid’s atoms. The detector’s roughly 2000 photomultipliers then amplify and sense the emitted light. [The] researchers calculated the sensitivity of the detector to photons produced via hypothetical electron decays into a photon and a neutrino...They then looked for photon “events” above this background with energies near 256 kilo-electron-volts, an energy corresponding to half the electron rest mass.

After looking at 408 days’ worth of data, they found....nothing. But they did manage to determine a mean electron lifetime.

A New Lower Bound

Now, this doesn’t imply that electrons will live that long. First, the Universe probably won’t exist by then. And even if it’s still around — say after a Big Rip scenario — the fundamental properties of particles like electrons will likely be entirely different.

Second, and more to the point, the new measurements move up the previously estimated lower bound on electron “longevity.” The new figure is 100 times greater than the previous lower limit, which was determined in a similar experiment back in 1998. Put another way, if such a reaction occurs, it must happen less than once every 6.6 × 10²⁸ years.

No Signs of Decay

The reason for the hideously long lifespan has to do with the fact that scientists cannot be completely certain that electrons are immune to decay. The observations made by the Borexino researchers — or rather the lack of observations — suggests that, because we haven’t seen electrons decay by now, their lifespans must be at least as large as the new calculations suggest.

Sean Carroll, a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, explained it to Gizmodo in an email:

Decay is very natural in particle physics; heavier particles tend to decay into lighter ones. A neutron left all by itself, for example, will decay into a proton, an electron, and an anti-neutrino in just a few minutes. It’s just the elementary-particle version of the decay of a radioactive nucleus like uranium.

But there are some things that seem to never happen, which we describe by conservation laws. For example, the total electric charge doesn’t change. Also the “baryon number” (total number of protons plus neutrons, minus the number of anti-protons plus anti-neutrons), and the “lepton number” (electrons plus neutrinos, minus their antiparticles). Notice this is satisfied by the neutron decay. Before decay we have one neutron, which is charge = 0, baryon number = 1, and lepton number = 0. Afterwards it is also charge = 0 (proton = +1, electron = -1, anti-neutrino = 0), baryon number = 1 (proton = 1, electron and anti-neutrino = 0), and lepton number = 0 (proton = 0, electron = 1, anti-neutrino = -1).

Baryon and lepton number have never been seen to change in any experiment — doing so would be Nobel-Prize-worthy — but on theoretical grounds we think they possibly could change, and probably did in the early universe. (That would help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the current universe.)

But nobody expects charge to change, which is a more robustly conserved quantity.

“It would be one of the most surprising things ever if electric charge was not conserved,” said Carroll. “That’s why everyone thinks electrons don’t decay.”

Carroll said the only particles that are lighter than electrons are electrically neutral: neutrinos, photons, gluons, gravitons. If there were other light charged particles, we should have detected them by now. This suggests there’s nothing for the electron to decay into.

“But we should still look! It’s a lottery ticket — very unlikely that you will find anything, but if you do, you get rich,” said Carroll. “Sadly, they didn’t find anything, but null results are an important part of good science.”

Read the entire study at Physical Review Letters: “Test of Electric Charge Conservation with Borexino.”

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. Top image: Borexino Experiment.

If you want to know exactly what the moon will look like (to those in the northern hemisphere, at least), this video by NASA has got you covered. It tracks all the phases of the moon for 2016, that is you’ll see the moon wax and wane as it corresponds to each day of the year. It’s a really cool look at the movements of the space rock.

Though the moon can look pretty much the same to us down here, there’s a lot of uniqueness to each day.

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, andYouTube.

The weekend is here so, we figured we’d throw up this amazing illustration by artist Carlyle McCullough. It’s of a young boy with a light-up samurai sword riding a flying lion. Sure, why not?

It’s from the cover of the fourth book in Kevin McGill’s series, Nikolas and Company, Fire of the Lionsbran. Here’s the full image:

http://www.amazon.com/Nikolas-Compan...

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Here are the best of today’s deals. Get every great deal every day on Kinja Deals, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to never miss a deal, join us on Kinja Gear to read about great products, and on Kinja Co-Op to help us find the best. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.

The ultimate gift for any anime fan is down to $165 today, or $50 less than its previous low price. The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki includes all 11 of the director’s films, plus a bunch of bonus features, and a collectible art book. [The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki, $165]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0117V8BX8/...

For a limited time, Best Buy is taking 50% off your order when you purchase two or more select smartphone accessories, including cases, running bands, and selfie sticks. The stars of the show here though are Apple’s first party silicone and leather cases, which are basically never discounted. Now, you can get two for the price of one. [50% off Two or More Smartphone Accessories]

The massive Anker Astro E7 25,600mAh 3-Port External Battery Pack is down to its lowest price ever, if you hurry. Not everyone needs this much power, but it’s enough juice to keep the average smartphone running for a week or more. [Anker Astro E7 Ultra-High Capacity 26800mAh 3-Port 4A Compact Portable Charger, $40 with code XVPW37Z6]

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Today only, Amazon’s offering solid discounts on a variety of comforters, robes, towels, pillows, and more from eLuxury Supply. Just note that it’s a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out. [eLuxury Supply Sale]

The ultimate gift for any anime fan is down to $165 today, or $50 less than its previous low price. The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki includes all 11 of the director’s films, plus a bunch of bonus features, and a collectible art book. [The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki, $165]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0117V8BX8/...

No matter how good Apple makes the battery life in their laptops, you’re always going to want a few more hours. And though it’s a little bit janky, ChugPlug’s external Mac battery is the best option you have right now.

Today on eBay, you can get a ChugPlug for any MacBook Air or 13” MacBook Pro for just $25, the best price we’ve ever seen. The ChugPlug attaches directly to your Mac’s power brick, and contains a 4,000mAh battery to give you 3-4 extra hours of battery life, on average. It might be a little bulky to keep attached to your power cord all the time, but it’s a perfect safety net for long days away from any power outlets. [ChugPlug External Battery Pack for MacBook Air 11” and 13” and MacBook Pro 13” Portable Charger, $25]

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If you own an Android device and like free money, all you have to do is install one of these free apps from Amazon’s Underground app market, and you’ll get a $5 Amazon credit added to your account. [Get a $5 Amazon Credit for Downloading a FREE App or Game]

If you still haven’t decorated your home for the holidays, we’ve found great deals on two different lights strands today.

The $9 copper string lights feature 100 LEDs spread out over 33’, while the $23 light strip packs 300 lights into 16’, plus the ability to change the strip’s color with an included remote.

Copper Wire LED String Lights, 100 Leds 33ft/10M ($9) | Amazon

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Inateck Strip Led Lights Waterproof Flexible with 300 LEDs for Christmas Decorations ($23) | Amazon | Use code 445BGYCE

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By now, most of you probably have a USB battery pack or two to keep your phones charged, and that’s great! But I’m willing to bet most of them won’t start your car if its battery dies.

The $50 RAVPower compact car jump starter has your standard pair of USB ports and a 12,000mAh built-in battery, but it also ships with a set of removable jumper cables to jolt your car’s engine to life in a pinch. Once you’re up and running, it’ll even recharge itself via an included 15V car (or wall) charger, so it never even has to leave your glove box.

Hopefully you don’t need to use this often, but it’s one of those things you’ll be really glad you bought when the time comes. It would also make a great gift! [RAVPower 500A Peak Current Portable Car Jump Starter, $50 with code 77RMA9WA]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018HR6ZBA

If you missed out on Black Friday, Microsoft is once again knocking $50 off every Xbox One bundle they sell, and tossing in a free copy of Assassin’s Creed Unity and a second game of your choice for good measure. [$50 off Xbox One + 2 Games]

Amazon’s sitewide book deal is back, and this time around, you can save 25% on any physical book they sell, with a maximum discount of $10.

This is virtually identical to the Black Friday 30% discount we mentioned earlier, and the same one-time use rule applies, so choose your book carefully. If you need some inspiration, check out our earlier list for some great book ideas. [25% off any physical book sold by Amazo, with promo code 25OFFBOOK]

http://deals.kinja.com/amazons-taking...

Best Buy just kicked off a huge sale on basically every major Apple product you can buy. Most of the discounts are pretty standard fare throughout the year (though $125 off the iPad Air 2 is really solid), but it’s rare to see so many discounts available at the same time. [Best Buy’s Apple Sale]

More Deals

Tech

• 50% off Two or More Smartphone Accessories | Best Buy | Discount shown at checkout. Includes official Apple leather and silicone cases. Use the sidebar tools to sort.
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• ChugPlug External Battery Pack for MacBook Air 11” and 13” and MacBook Pro 13” ($25) | Amazon
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Gaming

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Media

• The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki ($165) | Amazon

Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more. We want your feedback.Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker and all other inquiries to Shane@Gawker

Noted killer robot-fearer Elon Musk has a plan to save humanity from the looming robopocalypse: developing advanced artificial intelligence systems. You know, the exact technologies that could lead to the robopocalypse.

Let’s unpack that one a little bit.

Yesterday, Tesla’s boss, along with a band of prominent tech executives including Linked in co-founder Reid Hoffman and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, announced the creation of OpenAI, a nonprofit devoted to “[advancing] digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

The company’s founders are already backing the initiative with $1 billion in research funding over the years to come. Musk will co-chair OpenAI with venture capitalist Sam Altman.

As Altman explained in an interview, the premise of OpenAI is essentially that artificial intelligence systems are coming, and we’d like to share the development of that technology amongst everyone, not just Google’s shareholders. This sounds fine—great, even.

The weird part is this justification for doing so: essentially, Musk and Altman seem to think kickstarting the open-AI revolution is the only way to save us from SkyNet. Here’s Altman’s response to a question about whether accelerating AI technology might empower people seeking to gain power or oppress others:

“Just like humans protect against Dr. Evil by the fact that most humans are good, and the collective force of humanity can contain the bad elements, we think its far more likely that many, many AIs, will work to stop the occasional bad actors than the idea that there is a single AI a billion times more powerful than anything else,” Altman said. “If that one thing goes off the rails or if Dr. Evil gets that one thing and there is nothing to counteract it, then we’re really in a bad place.”

So, when the killer robots come—and make no mistake, they ARE COMING—Musk, Altman and their band of Avengers will all be able to fight back....with their own killer robots? If this sounds eerily reminiscent of the “a good guy with a gun would’ve stopped that bad guy with a gun” argument, that’s because it’s the same exact logic. Except, applied to a world where guns don’t even exist yet.

Another idea? We could stop trying to build superintelligent AI. That would probably be the safest course of action if we really, truly thought the machines were going to try and wipe us out.

[BackChannel h/t The Guardian]

Follow the author @themadstone

Top image: Francois Mori/AP

Man, building an aircraft carrier is just like playing with Lego bricks! At a much, much larger scale, of course. Here is footage showing how the final section of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier the HMS Prince of Wales was slapped on top of the ship. The piece, known as Aft Island, weighs 750 tonnes and will control aircraft operations on the carrier.

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, andYouTube.

I’ve been increasingly interested in translated science fiction novels, and one of the best ones that I picked up this year was Taiyo Fujii’s debut Gene Mapper.

Gene Mapper takes place in a future where augmented reality and genetic engineering is commonplace. When a freelance gene mapper named Hayashida finds that a project that he had worked on is collapsing, he believes that it’s being sabotaged. Determined to fix it, he travels to Vietnam where he finds that there’s more behind the problem than he initially thought.

You can read a tie-in story over on Lightspeed Magazine, ‘Violation of the TrueNet Security Act’.

http://www.amazon.com/Gene-Mapper-Ta...

While reading it, I was a little surprised to find that while it’s somewhat similar to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (in region, content and style), it feels like it’s a far more optimistic novel. I recently spoke to Fujii, who spoke about what was behind the novel, and his outlook on the future.

Your first novel, Gene Mapper, explores a future where food is heavily modified in order to meet global demands and to ward off diseases. What helped inspire this future?

I saw a piece on the news about an agriculture lab that released their organic crop development method. First they seek target DNA code with using genetic engineering, then they start crossing seeds on a legacy test farm field with target DNA.

Still organic? Some say so, but in fact it’s a danger. How do they deal with gene mutation outside the targeted genetic locus? Are the target DNA codes safe? The risk of unexpected mutation seems high

GMOs are a better way to grow food if target DNA codes are known, and focusing on suitable genes is the most important part of developing crops with genetic engineering, I think.

One of the things I was most impressed with in the book was that in a publishing environment where dark, dystopian worlds are popular, yours seems a bit more optimistic about where we’re headed. Do you think technology can deliver a better future for us?

Yes!

Is it too short an answer? Okay. When I was in junior high school, my teacher showed us an illustration of a baby in test tube, and it terrified us. Thirty years later, my wife and I used in vitro fertilization to have a child. During birth, our son was in breech, but we knew thanks to a sonogram and elected to have a Cesarean section. Our son was born fine, but my wife’s womb began bleeding. The surgeon decided to stop the leak with a magnetic stent, and so.

Five days later we were home, technology having saved both my wife and child. Were I an adult in the early 1970s, I’d be childless; in the 1980s I’d be a widower too. I know the downsides to technology: it can kill, eliminate jobs, or just make as sad. But overall, tomorrow will be better than today because of technology. Let’s live in a world where we can all experience the bounty of technology

Gene Mapper came about in an unconventional way - can you tell us how you first published the book and how you were able to get it translated?

I got an idea to write a novel after the 2011 earthquake and subsequent nuclear accident. I downloaded a dozen novel-writing apps on my iPhone and got to work

This was my first attempt at writing a story. At that time, I didn’t know anything about point of view, showing versus telling, or anything else about the craft of writing. I designed Gene Mapper like it was an FPS game. When I finished three chapters, I showed it to a friend. He told me that Gene Mapper was a hard-boiled techno-thriller, because it was told via purely in the first person. He reminded me that I wasn’t writing in a vacuum; there was a tradition I was a part of. I started to re-read my favorite novels with author’s eye and kept writing on my commute.

After six months, the first draft was finished, then I started to make e-book in early EPUB 3.0 format in order to support Japanese legacy typesetting. At that time, EPUB 3.0 reading system had not yet been released, so I built an environment with using WebKit and an on-the-fly packaging system with Ruby, and kept polishing Gene Mapper for release.

By the time I finished the second draft, fortunately, the Japanese e-book platform Rakuten Kobo had launched. I submitted Gene Mapper and it became a bestseller alongside work by Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark, and the work of other Japanese writers.

I was lucky. All the other books were backlist titles; only Gene Mapper was new.

Three months later, Kindle launched in Japan. I submitted Gene Mapper to the Best Kindle Book of the Year and it won in the fiction category.

The prominent Japanese genre publisher Hayakawa contacted me, and I contracted to rewrite Gene Mapper. And that’s how I became a professional writer. The revised Gene Mapper was nominated for both the Japan SF Grand Prize and the Seiun Award.

The next year, Haikasoru contacted to Hayakawa and arranged to translate and publish Gene Mapper in English.

How would you describe the state of Japanese genre fiction? What can we expect to see in the years to come from your country?

The field is strong. There are two dedicated genre publishers, Hayakawa and Tokyo Sogen-Sha, in Japan. Both find new writers primarily through contests for both short fiction and novel-length work. And an editor/translator, Nozomi Omori, launched an original short fiction anthology series called Nova, published by Kawade-Shobo in 2009. Dozens of authors have debuted in Nova, which has become a vital venue for publishing short fiction

If you’ve already read Toh EnJoe (Self-Reference ENGINE) and Project Itoh (Harmony and Genocidal Organ) and liked them, you’ll be fascinated by Yusuke Miyauchi in near future. Miyauchi’s serial short story book Banjo-no-yoru (Board Game Stories) uses board games such as Go, checkers, Japanese chess and so-on to explore science fictional themes I love his stuff works. You can read his short story “Sky-Spider” in Haikasoru’s new anthology Hanzai Japan

Other proimisingg authors include Kazuki Muto, Katsuie Shibata, Dempow Torishima (who has a story in 2014’s Phantasm Japan), Satoshi Hase and Hiroe Suga.

What are you working on now, and what should we keep our eyes out for?

I’m writing a near-future thriller, One More Nuke, as a serial. It has to do with an A-bomb terror attack during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. And started to write Man Kind, a military SF novel of a firearm trigger operator in a near future ruled by Just War theory.

English-language readers should keep an eye out for news about my second novel Orbital Cloud. In Japan it won both the Seiun and SF Japan awards. It’s near-future SF about orbital debris and Kessler Syndrome. I hope it’ll be available to you all soon.

Gene Mapper is now available in stores.