Hasta La Gadget!

After many successful years with label Virgin/EMI, the electronic music duo known as Daft Punk will be headed to Columbia records with the promise of a brand new full-length album set for this Spring. Though the details surrounding the new album are scant, we do know that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have indeed left Virgin records – this is a monster happening due to their extended period rocking and rolling under the label – nearly 17 years!

The it’s apparent that the team will not be doing any extensive touring inside the first half of the year, the rumor mill remains strong with notes of a possible support push for late in the year. This same mill of rumors did tip the team to be hitting up Coachella in April, and we know that to not be true in the least, so we’ll be eating a full bag of salty chips with the tour business. As far as the team moving forward with an album, however, we’re ready for that action all day long.

The original note of this change-over for the music team comes from NME where they also suggest that the group Chic’s Nile Rodgers will be joining them for one or more songs. They also suggest that Paul Williams, Giorgio Moroder, Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, and Chilly Gonzales will be collaborating with Daft Punk in this new release. Let’s just call it Animal Sounds and be done with it – if you know what I mean.

This album will be the fourth full original album release from Daft Punk, but fifth if you count their work on Tron: Legacy. The covers of these albums are included in the gallery below, with the Tron: Legacy soundtrack (all made by Daft Punk alone and in a severely original manner) coming in at 2010 and “Human After All” coming before it in 2007. The first album they created and released with enough tracks to be considered an LP was 1997′s “Homework” while the 2001 album “Discovery” was also accompanied by a film release by the name of Interstella 5555, a full animated realization of the album, track by track.

Daft Punk is now a multi-national super-hits group that’s taken the world by storm, being well known not only for their music, but for their elaborate live concerts and appearances in media from high-budget Hollywood films (Tron) down to syndicated television (The Simpsons). We’ll be watching this explosive next release with great interest!

[via Dancing Astronaut]

Daft Punk album 4 tipped as duo hits Columbia Records is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Because you’ve more than likely never heard of the story behind “Oblivion”, you’re going to have to start with a viewing of the trailer and an understanding that this movie was first a graphic novel – aka a comic book. This story is about the future, it’s got a lot of rather confusing elements made to excite your pants off, and you’re going to freak out over the massive amounts of action in the trailer alone. You’ll not know more until the third paragraph of this post after the trailer is viewed.

This movie has Tom Cruise as its head, Morgan Freeman and Olga Kurylenko as well as Andrea Riseborough working to support the lead, and a massive amount of effects. This movie is directed by the same fellow who directed TRON: Legacy, that being Joseph Kosinski, and it’s coming to you via Universal Pictures. Have a peek at the trailer here right this minute!

The original story from Joseph Kosinski (yes, director and original writer) follows the drone repairman here played by Cruise through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Drones exists throughout this future Earth where the wasteland effect has been made a reality due to a massive war that, as Cruise mentions, we’ve “won”.

This movie will be released in the most massive theaters on the planet sometime in April in the year 2013. You can expect IMAX action from your local massive screens as well as a global release similar to what we saw back when TRON: Legacy was first sent out unto the world. While the film version of this story was originally purchased by Disney back in 2010, a failure to create a product that’d be able to be released with a PG rating resulted in the sale of the movie rights to Universal Pictures.

This movie has a $100 million dollar budget and started filming all the way back in October of 2011. Kosinski was also responsible for the short film “TR2N” which you’ll get to take a peek at below (this being the film that caught the comic book lover’s universe in 2008, two years before the eventual release of TRON: Legacy), and he’ll be directing Tron 3 (whatever it’ll end up being called) as well as The Black Hole (a remake of the 1979 sci-fi classic). Just you wait and see!

Oblivion 1080p Movie Trailer revealed with Joseph Kosinski attached is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re looking for a lovely video to watch today while you eat lunch, journalist Christoph Malin has just what you’re seeking – a “Star Trails” video showing time-lapse imagery captured by the International Space Station. The video you’re about to see captures a collection of photos snapped by the ISS and places one image on top of another and another on another, making “Tron trails” through space. Accompanying this lovely set of images is music from a set of rather talented artists as well, starting with “Eileen” by Lee Rosevere and moving on to “Window #3″ by Two Bicycles.

The video shows photos taken by none other than your favorite astronaut Don Pettit, a celebrity in his own right, as well as several other space-bound photographers aboard the space station. Thanks to these ISS residents photographing space in their spare time, we’re able to see several artifacts in this video including the comet “Lovejoy” rising in at about 1:42. See if you can see any other fabulous moments of light convergence now!

This video was edited using Apple Motion as well as Final Cut Pro X. Malin also notes that he used the app StarStax to make the lights line up, one on top of another. In addition to stars making lines, the video includes Iridium Flashes – aka satellite tracks, meteors of several sizes, and lightning corridors within clouds. If all that isn’t enough, heed this: the concept for this video comes from Malin’s love of Tron, of course, as he notes here:

“Do you remember 1982′s “TRON”? The Plot: A computer programmer (epic: Jeff Bridges) is digitized inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various programs in his attempt to get back out. I always loved the Light Cycle races and the Solar Ships…

In a way, the ISS is a solar ship, constantly rotating around us. A tiny white spot, as it can be seen racing over the sky from time to time, when illuminated by the sunset (and sunrise ;).” – Malin

Keep your eyes to the skies and hit up our science tag portal as well as our space tag portal for all the ISS news you can handle – and our ever-growing science archive, too!

[via Christoph Malin]

Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

It’s not like we’re trying to out-weird ourselves, it just, somehow, keeps happening. At least one of this week’s offerings (we’ll leave it to you to figure out which) will possibly be the creepiest thing we post all year. As for the rest, well it’s slightly more palatable. We’ll get uncharacteristically pumped about cycling, meet some extra-terrestrial quasicrystals and enjoy some art with X-men credentials. This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 8.11.12: Robo-billies, quasicrystals and radioactive art

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Science

Alt-week 8.11.12: Robo-billies, quasicrystals and radioactive art originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I saw Tron in the movie theater when it came out, 30 years ago today—July 9, 1982. I was almost ten years old and it blew me away. Like with many kids of my age, this movie—along with War Games—changed the course of my life. I’m not exaggerating. More »