Science fiction headlines

#cultmovieworship We've got a seriously amazing collection of indies and shorts in this Sunday's Cult Movie Worship. Check out the latest trailer for Joseph Kahn's frenetic movie equivalent of a turducken, Detention, and see if you can point out every single movie cliché stuffed inside the next. Plus, we've got zombie-killing babies, a beautiful cyborg story and an intriguing 70's-style drama about space exploration. More »

#madscience A new subatomic weight scale can measure masses as tiny as one yoctogram. Less than the mass of a proton, a yoctogram is equivalent to a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a gram. More »

#paleontology Well, "too dumb to live" might be an unfair characterization. But dodos are legendary for their complete lack of a survival instinct when it came to humans. Turns out humans weren't the only threat they just never quite understood. More »

#trailerfrenzy The first full-length trailer for Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake is out, and it shows just how special effects-heavy this movie's going to be. We get a good look at the notorious Total Recall chair, Colin Farrell's supersoldier moves, the CG megacity, and some flying car action — all guest-starring a menacing Bryan Cranston and John Cho's bleach blond hair. More »

#biology Some species share the exact same territories, rely on the exact same resources, and are sufficiently closely related that they can easily interbreed. So why don't these just merge into a single population? Because they simply don't want to interbreed. More »

#holycrapwtf The sentry turrets from the Portal games are pretty adorable, but I wouldn't be caught in its line of sight. After all, I don't feel like getting gunned down with laser, no matter how heart-meltingly pathetic the shooter is. Apparently, a would-be burglar felt much the same way, turning tail at a toy turret. More »

#starwars Yoda's peculiar syntax has become the universal symbol for wise advice, but would the long-eared Jedi sound nearly as profound if you switched around his word order? One Yoda fan (who, appropriately, calls himself "YodaFan") took it upon him or herself to recut Yoda's dialogue with more conventional syntax. More »

#madurbanism Sadly, this is not an April Fool's prank. We've long known that the city of Venice is slowly sinking into its own watery grave. While city officials thought they had halted Venice's descent, it turns out that the city is still sinking — and five times faster than originally believed. More »

#conceptart We've seen gender-swapped superheroes, now the villains are getting in on the gender-bending act. Priscilla Tramontano takes some of the Marvel universe's more fearsome male villains and gives them female form. More »

#mapporn In the 19th century, it was common practice for American school children to learn geography by creating their own maps, painstakingly copying maps from existing atlases. The results are sometimes creative reinterpretations of the world's geography. More »

#goofballery Dungeons & Dragons has pit generations of roleplayers against powerful liches, acid-spewing dragons, and those gelatinous cubes. But no quest is more soul-crushing than the day-to-day horrors of office work. Roll to save against crippling depression. More »

The new Marvel Heroic Basic RPG by Margaret Weis Productions is generating a good degree of buzz in RPG circles. A number of folks I follow on Twitter have been talking about it, and it's been consistently hitting the top spot on RPGNow's Top 100 Sales List.

Since I'm a big Marvel guy, I decided the time was right to start working on a "Summon WebScryer" column for Knights of the Dinner Table on the new game, as well as previous iterations. I plan on doing the column for issue #187. I've found a half-dozen or so sites, but I'm looking for more. If you know of any, please post them in the comments.

• Margaret Weis Productions: Home of the latest iteration of Marvel role-playing.
• Marvel Plot Points: A fan site for the newest Marvel RPG, published by Margaret Weis Productions
• Spider-man's Guide to New York: A fan sourcebook for the Marvel Universe RPG, published by Marvel Comics.
• Classic Marvel Forever: Fan site for the original Marvel Superheroes RPG, published by TSR.
• The Marvel Mansion: Dedicated to TSR's Marvel SAGA RPG.
• BAMF Podcast: A podcast about gaming, comics and donuts.Includes Marvel RPG Actual Play
• Marvel Database: This wiki isn't an RPG site, but its extensive database of heroes, villains and other bits of Marvel history could be handy for a campaign.

#gameofthrones Ever since Lost ended, taking with it our fan theories and a little bit of our naive optimism, we've seen TV show after TV show try to ape Lost's mystery-hurling format. The Event, Alcatraz, and FlashForward all tried — and failed — to fire our brains and send us searching for tiny clues to piece together their season-stretching puzzles. But there's already a show out there that perfectly engages the media detective in us all: Game of Thrones. And it does it far better than Lost ever did. More »

#astronomy When humanity sends spacecraft beyond our solar system, those starships will have to know exactly where they are at all times. A newly proposed cosmic GPS system can track a spacecraft's location to within five kilometers anywhere in the galaxy. More »

#hungergames If you haven't seen The Hunger Games' big-screen adaptation yet, then the Beanie Babies Hunger Games actually isn't a half-bad substitute. See Rocket the Blue Jay take a stirring turn as Katniss Everbean, the District 12 tribute who teams up with Peeta (Quackers the Duck) to knock the stuffing out of the other tributes in the Arena. More »

#psychology It's not unusual for optical illusions to create afterimages, ghostly reflections that show up after staring at something too long. This particular afterimage is a bit different. For one thing, it looks nothing like the original image. Also, it moves. More »

#paleontology Somehow, the Smithsonian Channel has beaten Syfy at its own monster fighting game. They've pit the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex against the gigantic snake Titanoboa in a prehistoric grudge match, animated the possible outcomes for each carnivorous side. More »

#bladerunner The film Blade Runner had Harrison Ford replicant hunting though the dystopian streets of a futuristic Los Angeles. But Philip K. Dick's original novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was set in the San Francisco Bay Area. So how would Blade Runner have looked if Ridley Scott had used San Francisco as his chief urban inspiration? More »

#goofballery Wonder what's going to be on the Internet in the years 2015, 2112, 3000, and beyond? Fortunately, the social bookmarking site reddit's new timeline feature predicts the most popular links on the Internet through the heat death of the universe. More »

#lordoftherings Now that Gandalf is done with his fight against Sauron, he has plenty of time to battle his other foe: the motorist. This longboarding wizard gets his kicks trolling drivers on a narrow road, and, despite all the horns, they seem to be listening to him. More »