As convenient as it to ask Siri to skip to the next track or load up songs from your favorite artist without pulling out your phone, there are times when verbally interacting with smart assistants isn’t an option. So researchers at Cornell University developed a wearable smart camera that can detect voice commands…
Don’t expect to watch HBO’s The Last of Us series any time soon. Channel programming president Casey Bloys told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that the adaptation of Naughty Dog’s apocalyptic games won’t air in 2022. Bloys didn’t commit to a release date, but he noted filming was still underway in the western Canadian city of Calgary.
The series stars The Mandalorian and Narcos veteran Pedro Pascal as the grizzled survivor Joel, while Game of Thrones‘ Bella Ramsey plays the teen Ellie. The games’ Merle Dandridge plays the resistance leader Marlene, while Gabriel Luna (True Detective) and Anna Torv (Fringe) respectively play Joel’s brother Tommy and the smuggler Tess. Nick Offerman also has a guest role. The high-level plot largely mimics that of the first game — Joel is tasked with escorting Ellie to an organization searching for a cure to the brain infection that ravaged humanity, but the journey becomes far more complicated.
The timing will have HBO’s The Last of Us debut long after the game’s sequel. Expectations are already riding high, though. On top of the cast, the show is written and executive produced by Chernobyl‘s Craig Mazin and Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann. In theory, the series will both buck the trend of so-so game adaptations and give Sony’s PlayStation Productions studio some extra credibility.
“King Richard,” a film about the father of the tennis greats, has racked up six Oscar nominations.
Orangutans Got Suspiciously Close to Inventing Stone Tools in New Zoo Experiments
Posted in: Today's ChiliCaptive orangutans can use stone tools without minimal direction from humans, researchers reported today. Besides an affirmation of orangutan intelligence, the finding has implications for understanding how and when stone tool use evolved in ancient human ancestors.
More than 84 million acres make up the 423 national parks in the United States. But these forests, grasslands, mountain ranges, hiking trails, and more are at risk because the climate crisis won’t allow us to have nice things.
Terraria 2 has made an appearance years after we last heard about it, but it’s still unclear whether the sequel to the massively popular indie game is real.
California Will Stick Solar Panels Over Canals to Fight Two Disasters at Once
Posted in: Today's ChiliA water and electric utility in central California will install a first-of-its-kind network of solar panels on water canals. Turlock Irrigation District (TID) has secured a $20 million grant from the state to pursue the first-in-the-nation project, which could serve a beneficial double whammy: create renewable energy…
Later this year, the current Star Wars canon is going to lift the lid on how Leia Organa and Han Solo became the Organa-Solos, in The Princess and the Scoundrel, a new novel exploring how the duo tied the knot, and maybe paid a visit to a certain spaceship hotel along the way. But what do we already know about Han and…
Netflix was the first company to announce a project around the alleged Bitcoin money launderers, Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein, but unsurprisingly, it won’t be the last. Deadline reports that Forbes Entertainment and EOne will be teaming up to produce two projects around the scandal: a scripted series, as well as a documentary. Naturally, both projects will lean on Forbes’ reporting, but what’s more interesting is that Morgan was also a Forbes contributor for several years.
Morgan and Lichtenstein, or the “crypto couple” as many call them now, allegedly tried to launder $3.6 billion in bitcoin that was stolen from the 2016 Bitfinex hack. The cryptocurrency was worth around $63.7 million when it was originally stolen, but now it’s valued at over $5 billion. That eye-watering figure mostly comes down to the skyrocketing value of bitcoin over the last several years. Notably, the bitcoin scandal is also the largest financial seizure ever by the Justice Department, beating out the $1 billion recovered from the dark web marketplace Silk Road in 2020.
The shift in rhetoric is an acknowledgment that Democrats’ big economic proposal, the Build Back Better Act, may be stalled for good.