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Category: entertainment – Page 103

In Brief

  • The game designers for Mass Effect have gone all out for scientifically accurate weapons.
  • From rail guns to “element 0,” this science fiction game mirrors reality.

From the astoundingly stiff weaponry of 1995’s GoldenEye to the alien arsenal of the Halo franchise, video games haven’t always had the most realistic arms. But, in Bioware’s Mass Effect franchise, the game designers opted for scientifically accurate weapons.

Kyle Hill, of Nerdist’s’ series Because Science, explores the scientific plausibility of the weapons in the Mass Effect franchise.

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If I dare show this to my nephews, we will never see them again.

When the Arcade Hotel Amsterdam opened last year, owner Daniel Salmanovich couldn’t help but smile when his hotel had people wanting what is known as the world’s first gaming hotel. It has its doors closed now until it will reopen in May for a much bigger expansion.

Currently, it has nine rooms that, as Travel Daily News puts it, “an exquisite offer of cult consoles, console games and retro gaming facilities in the lobby — traveling gamers could hardly believe their eyes.” To further boost the hotel’s features and offers, the management has decided to renovate the hotel together with creating more rooms which bring it to 43.

Continue reading “World’s First Gaming Hotel in Amsterdam To Reopen In May 2017” | >

Virtual Reality is not a new technology, it’s been around in various forms for decades, but enthusiasts believe it’s now on the cusp of a golden age. Driven by an increase in research money and significant advances in picture resolution and technical functionality, interest in the potential of VR is going well beyond the games and entertainment industry. The pairing of these developments with an exponential growth in certain technology sectors evokes scenarios of the future taken from the pages of sci-fi literature. VR pioneer Cosmo Scharf will paint his vision of our shared future.

More information on http://www.tedxvienna.at

Cosmo Scharf co-founded VRLA, the world’s largest virtual reality expo, the Proto Awards, the first award show for VR, and Visionary VR, a start-up building software for storytelling in VR.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Continue reading “What if we could live in the Matrix?” | >

Paleontologist Jack Horner participates in a “Jurassic World” Q&A at the Natural History Museum.

Here at Popular Science, we can’t wait to see Jurassic World, which opens in theaters nationwide today. I mean, who can resist velociraptor biker gangs:

But we were also curious about the real scientific research that inspired the movie. So we talked with Jack Horner, a noted paleontologist who has consulted on the entire Jurassic Park movie franchise, including Jurassic World.

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In Brief DARPA has created self-steering bullets which use a real-time optical guidance system to hit both moving and accelerating targets with high accuracy.

You may have seen the movie Wanted. Sure, the movie was almost unrecognizable from the Mark Millar comic book series it was very loosely based on. But that didn’t stop anyone from pretending to be a bullet-curving, badass, supervillain-with-a-heart sniper like Angelina Jolie after seeing it.

But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) new self-steering bullet is about to change the pretend part into reality.

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Fans of science fiction movies that depict weird, speculative or dystopian futures have plenty to look forward to in 2017. Here are our picks of the movies you should put on your radar if you enjoy cinematic depictions of future technology, from a couple of space station thrillers to a story that turns our current social media exhibitionist tendencies into an Orwellian take on the importance of privacy in a digital age.

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Inspired by the comic book character Wolverine, scientists have developed a self-healing, highly stretchable, transparent material that can be used to power artificial muscles.

The end product is a soft, rubber-like material that’s easy to produce at low cost. It can stretch to 50 times its original length, and can heal itself from a scissor cut in the space of 24 hours at room temperature.

Just 5 minutes after being cut, the material can stretch to two times its original length again – not a bad power for a comic book superhero to have.

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