This is fucking marvelous. An entire hemisphere of the sun explodes which then ignites another region. According to io9, this was an event previously thought impossible:

In this ultraviolet light video taken by NASA, you can watch a phenomenon that scientists didn’t believe could exist until a few months ago. An entire hemisphere of the sun explodes, one region igniting another. What does this discovery mean?

It turns out that the sun doesn’t just spurt out gouts of gas in isolated spots. In fact, our star’s magnetic field brings many regions of Sol’s surface into direct relationships with each other, so areas separated by millions of miles can literally spark each other up. The results are called “sympathetic flares.”

G’damn amazing. Hit the jump to watch the explosion in action.

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Max Headroom is one of the most bizarre creations imported to American television in our lifetime. He poked his unholy prosthetic head onto Cinemax in 1986 by way of British TV and quickly began stuttering his way to stardom. Headroom (played by Matt Frewer – who portrayed Moloch in Watchmen) actually has a pretty sweet backstory. I barely remembered what he was all about, but after watching his awesome Christmas special I did some Wiki research. It’s like the best cyberpunk tale never written by William Gibson:

The film introduces Edison Carter (Matt Frewer), a television reporter trying to expose corruption and greed. In the movie, reporter Carter discovers that his employer, Network 23, has created a new form of subliminal advertising (termed “blip-verts”) that can be fatal to certain viewers.

While attempting to flee the network headquarters with proof, Edison suffers a serious head injury, caused by striking a low-clearance sign labeled “Max. Headroom”. Believing him killed, the network’s chief executive orders Bryce Lynch, an adolescent genius working as a scientist for Network 23, to digitally record Carter’s mind. The recording will then be used to create a computer-based replacement for Carter in order to hide his death.

It only gets b-b-better, folks, and I’ll tie this all into Christmas after the break!

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Found this today over at Aesthetically Pleezin, and I gotta be honest with you folks. I couldn’t make it through this entire video. Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m excitable. Like, really. When something gets me pumped up, I begin running around and smiling and acting like a general tardanite. So when I watched this video I began tweaking, and losing my shit.

Uncharted 3. On Jimmy Fallon. This game is going to fucking own my soul.

Hit the jump for the video. Try and not tweak, I got that shit covered for both of us.

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Yesterday, news broke that “doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.”

This story is awesome, and while it may not be true and the science may as usual be unverified and/or prone to later retraction, let’s just be positive for a moment. There’s usual scientist speak throughout the couple of articles I’ve tracked down about it. You know, the “probably” and “strongly” and “may have”, but let’s just be positive.

Word?

The findings came about when “Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient,” received the transplant in 2007 as part of a lengthy treatment course for leukaemia. His doctors recently published a report in the journal Blood affirming that the results of extensive testing “strongly suggest that cure of HIV infection has been achieved.”

Fantastic, no? Even if it’s temporary, or something, or the such? Hope springs eternal. Call me an optimist, I find this awesome.

There’re twelve days until Christmas, the holiday in which we celebrate the birth of a God by telling kids that if they’re assholes all year a fat burglar is going to put coal in their socks. Makes sense. Anyways, there are no doubt fools in our ranks who want the next eleven days to fly by so that they can collect their Christmas goodies. But to that, I say Bah humbug!

We are now in the thick of the best part of the holiday season. We’re close enough to the summit to actually begin enjoying the ascent, but don’t have to start thinking about the dreadful descent. The holidays are making out, baby, and with the shirts being taken off the post-coitus regret isn’t even a consideration.

So put on an ugly sweater, drink some eggnog, and grab the ass of the one who catches your eye.

And while you do that, let me tell you about my upcoming week. After all, Monday Morning Commute is my chance to tell you what I’ve got planned for the next few days. If you’re feeling bold, hit the comments and tell me what you’ll be doing.

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More pictures of the designs behind Tim Burton’s mercifully aborted Superman movie have leaked out. Sometimes you’re like “it’s a shame this project never got off the ground.” But in this case you’re like “Thank god someone took this behind the wood shed, shot it, buried the ashes, and swore to stab anyone who muttered about its existence.”

I will say this, the artwork is cool. I don’t think it fits the Superman mythos I’d like to see executed, but it’s nice. The outfit? Still barf-covered infected fetus.

Hit the jump for more asstacular designs.

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My name is Ian Drinkwater. I am not a remarkable human being. The older I get, the more I accept this. However, being unremarkable, I often think of ways to temporarily boost my self-esteem. A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I needed to complete a Test of Strength (Fat Ass Consumption.)

Being a calorie junkie bent on obesity, combated only by trips to the gym, I decided that I could eat two diner specials from a local joint my band of pederasts, perverts, and horrified girlfriends occasionally visit. What exactly is a diner special? I’m glad you asked. Here’s a video of Pederast Extreme, coder and funder of Omega Level, Senor Poppycock Gravel Dick explaining it. (Sorry dude, this video is going up.)

I decided the only way to justify my continued existence was to eat two of these. The idea was borne from a trip to the diner a couple of weeks ago, when I cleaned up one special, and proceeded to eat half of Poppycock’s. It seemed easy.

It was not.

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Every space junkie knows how fucking sexy Saturn’s rings are. But fuck, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know this. Saturn’s rings are the remnants of an exploded moon. What? Awesome.

io9:

Saturn’s rings are among the most iconic sights in the solar system, but where did they come from? Long ago, an icy moon was ripped apart by Saturn’s gravity, creating rings once a 100 times bigger than they are now.

100 times bigger? Good lord. how big are they now? I looked that shit up for us, and they’re 275,000 kilometers which is “is a little less than the distance between the Earth and Moon.” Fantastic.  

4.5 billion years ago, as the solar system was still in its primordial stages, Saturn was likely home to a number of large moons. These days, Titan is its only really big moon, as its lost siblings were likely pulled into Saturn by its gravity and destroyed. Most of the moons would have exploded within Saturn’s giant gaseous atmosphere, leaving no trace of their former existence. But the last moon to be pulled apart would have left a remarkable memorial behind: Saturn’s ring system.

[cont.]

But as huge and remarkable as Saturn’s rings are, an explosion of that size would create much, much bigger rings. A Titan-sized moon would probably create a ring system anywhere between 10 and 100 times bigger than what we see today. It’s hard to imagine just how awe-inspiring it would be to look upon Saturn all those billions of years ago with a sight like that waiting for us.

Over the eons, the rings would have steadily shrank, as parts of the ice fell back into Saturn and others drifted out into further orbits, where they would have clumped together and began to form new moons. Saturn’s inner moons all have masses and compositions that fit in with such an explanation very nicely, which is a good boost for the veracity of this new theory.

Goddamn fantastic.

When all is said and done, I enjoyed this season of Dexter. It started off weak as fuck, rallied for a good four or five episodes, and then last night, it ended. However, the more I think about the season, the more I’m not really sure what the fucking point of it was. You can disagree, and tell me there really doesn’t have to be a point, and maybe you’re right. But after twelve episodes, did we really actually go anywhere with Dexter? Take a ride on my disco stick and we’ll talk this one through.

Debbie Deb and the Grand Vigilantism
Last night’s episode asshole-clenching climaxed when Deb stumbled upon Dexter and Lumen as they cleaned up Camp Stab and Rape. I was certain at that moment that one of two things was going to happen. Either Deb was going to have Lumen and Dexter arrested, or she was going to realize it was Lumen and Dexter and let them go. You know, Huey Lewis and the News shit! The power of love! What actually happened? A cop-out that let her appreciate Dexter’s vengeful spirit without actually forcing her to confront him.

The cop copped out! Rimshot!

Also, maybe I’m making mountains out of mole hills, but I didn’t get what Deb at the very end of the episode when she said to Dexter “Yeah man, aren’t you totally relieved now that it’s all over?” Is she hinting that she knows about him? Or is it just a general comment on the whole situation? Or the rudderless season? Maybe Deb finding out about Dexter is the Jim and Pam moment of the show. Once they cross that threshold, it’s all downhill from there. The sociopathic equivalent of the Impossible Couple finally canoodling.

I made the mistake of actually reading criticism of the show before writing this (I usually blather first, read second), and some people are perturbed by how quickly Deb found Camp Rape and Stab. Really? The entire show has been running on magical IMPLAUSIBILITY DUST that powers everything. All the narrative mechanics and storyline happenings have been sprinkled by it for this season. That’s what happens when the showrunner of this Dexter comes from 24. Those screen writers actually pioneered implausibility dust.

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There have been a few unique monster movies in recent years. The Host, Cloverfield, and Gooby come to mind. Now Monsters, an “indie,” comes out of left field. Shot on a meager budget (less than $500,000) on location in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Monsters is a testament to what can be accomplished with limited resources by a determined and creative filmmaker. Dashing Brit Gareth Edwards not only wrote and directed Monsters, he also storyboarded and filmed the entire thing. And when he was done with that, he created all of the impressive special effects using Adobe. The result is a fresh approach to the genre — one light on exploitation and that focuses more on relationships and politics.

In the not too distant future, a NASA probe lands near the U.S.-Mexico border. This spreads alien life throughout the region, forcing a quarantine of half of Mexico, now known as the Infected Zone. The U.S. throws up an enormous wall on the border to keep the aliens inside Mexico and out of America. The U.S. military conducts expensive bombing of areas in hopes of destroying these aliens that may or may not be a threat. Sound familiar, nudge, nudge? A brash, young photojournalist named Andrew is assigned by his wealthy boss to bring his daughter, Samantha, back into the U.S. Their journey back to the States takes them through the Infected Zone by foot, boat, and, finally, by U.S. military transport. It’s a treacherous road the whole way but that does nothing to thwart the blossoming romance between our travelers. Miraculously, the romantic plot manages to avoid cliche in the hands of Edwards.

During their journey, we see glimpses of the monsters and hear them moaning woefully in the night. Yeah, they sound sad. You’d be bummed too if you just wanted to coexist but people where flinging missiles at you all the time. There is, in fact, a strong vibe of melancholy throughout the entire film. From the beautiful shots of the landscape to the dialogue between Andrew and Samantha. Even when they get to spend a night partying in Mexico it’s like being in the doldrums. No one is happy with their situation: not Andrew, not Samantha, and certainly not the monsters.

One thing to be happy about is the design of the monsters. They’re pulled right out of the pages of Lovecraft with squid-like attributes nodding towards Cthulhu. They disperse a toxic gas when killed, hence the popular use of gas masks. Godzilla, Mothra, and that Coverfield thingy may be bigger and more ferocious than the beasts in Monsters, but these guys have more personality. They’re like jaded hipster monsters.

It’s Edward’s low-key approach to the genre that holds your attention throughout the film. It’s not necessarily suspense that grips us — we know there are monsters in the jungle, but we never really feel threatened by them — it’s the film’s unconventional way at looking at the human condition and relationships. Did that sound corny and cliche? My bad. But if you’re looking for something different and seriously original, check out Monsters.