Plans are being finalised.
Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I haven’t come across before.
Basically, in The Shaman, it’s 2204, and the world has been at war for 73 years. And the main character isn’t a soldier — he’s a Shaman, one of a group of people who used to be healers. But now, instead, he uses his supernatural powers to “heal” the souls of the enemy, basically helping them cross over into the afterlife. That’s what I get from the trailer, in any case. This is the work of writer/director Marco Kalantari (Ainoa).
Here’s a complete synopsis, via Indiewire’s The Playlist, which also premiered the trailer:
We were really impressed with the trailer for The Shaman when it came out in March. And now, after a successful run at film festivals, you can finally see it for yourself.
At seventeen minutes, The Shaman is a bit longer than many other shorts, but that’s not to its detriment. It just contributes to the overall sense that what you’re actually seeing is a full cinematic feature film—which makes sense, since it was originally conceived as one. Marco Kalantari (Ainoa) uses every second he has to full effect. We have would-building, effective exposition, action scenes, and a confrontation that’s all about willpower.
The premise is that a war is being waged–a war in which shamans are used to visit the afterlife, in order to talk to the souls of the enemy’s war machines. A few minutes of conversation can bring these souls over–a victory for the shamans. But in a battle with one of them, a shaman gets a bit more than he bargained for.
The University of Cambridge is launching a new research centre, thanks to a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to explore the opportunities and challenges to humanity from the development of artificial intelligence.
Cryogenics are an old science fiction dream, but today we still struggle to store large tissues without harming them. Now a breakthrough could lead to a safer, more reliable approach.
” This could be an important step toward the preservation of more complex tissues and structures”
Overcoming past challenges
Cryopreservation of biological material is commonplace, but there are remaining challenges. The initial problem with freezing any cell is crystallization, in which ice crystals form and rupture cells. This was overcome by using molecules like ethylene glycol, which essentially act like anti-freeze and prevent crystallization from happening. These are very effective, but they’re also often toxic; damaging or killing some cells in the process. This has made storage of larger tissues very challenging.
Scientists from the University of Queensland have used photons (single particles of light) to simulate quantum particles travelling through time. The research is cutting edge and the results could be dramatic!
Their research, entitled “Experimental simulation of closed timelike curves “, is published in the latest issue of Nature Communications. The grandfather paradox states that if a time traveler were to go back in time, he could accidentally prevent his grandparents from meeting, and thus prevent his own birth.
However, if he had never been born, he could never have traveled back in time, in the first place. The paradoxes are largely caused by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the solution to it, the Gödel metric.
“[O]nly a carbon tax—not innovation, conservation, or renewable energy—will accelerate the transition from carbon-producing fossil fuels to sustainable energy.”
The risks associated with space debris are rising. An efficient way to clear the skies of junk is desperately needed, and a team of Chinese engineers think they have the answer.
What will happen when machines become smarter than us?
It used to be a question purely for science fiction writers, but with experts predicting human-level AI could become a reality within this century, it’s become a pressing issue for scientists and philosophers, as they try to predict how our world will change.
Keen not to be left behind, Cambridge University has been at the forefront of the issue, and today announced the launch of a brand new centre, dedicated to answering the very real questions once seen solely as the preserve of Doctor Who or Stanley Kubrick’s HAL.
Google says it wants to power 100% of its operations from renewable energy.
Google has announced a slew of renewable energy projects, as it moves to meet its commitment to power 100 percent of its business from green energy sources.
In what it calls the “largest, and most diverse, purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company,” Google said it has added 842 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy to its data centers, which nearly doubles the amount of clean energy it has already bought. Most of the renewable energy has been purchased for locations in the U.S., but Google said it has added more than 150 megawatts from a solar plant in Chile and a wind farm in Sweden.
When Google commits to long-term contracts to buy a certain amount of renewable energy, it effectively gives the giant energy companies, such as EDF, Duke, and RES Americas, the confidence and finances to pursue building new facilities.