It was worth the wait. After a year-long delay, A Quiet Place Part II is finally in theaters, and like a fine wine, it’s only gotten better with age. If you just finished watching the monster movie sequel (or you’re too scared to watch it but want spoilers) you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to know, from a breakdown of the Quiet Place 2 ending to whether there’s a post-credits scene to what comes next for the franchise.

This should go without saying, but spoilers ahead for Quiet Place 2. Ready? Let’s dive in.

Quiet Place 2 ending explained

The movie’s ending isn’t particularly complicated, but it does feature parallel, intertwined stories that might be a bit confusing to some. The film follows the family from the original A Quiet Place and picks up immediately after (not counting a flashback epilogue). However, about halfway through the movie, the family splits up, with daughter Regan heading out on her own in an attempt to find the source of a mysterious radio signal. She’s joined by Emmet (Cillian Murphy), while her mom (Emily Blunt), brother, and the new baby stay behind.

Throughout Quiet Place 2, both groups face numerous threats ranging from the movie’s unexplained monsters to other survivors. They also regularly use Reagan’s hearing aid as a weapon after discovering in the first film that it temporarily paralyzes the monsters.

This is particularly important at the end of the movie after Reagan and Emmet find the source of the radio signal: a community of people living in safety on an island off the coast of New York (turns out the monsters can’t swim). Of course, things quickly go wrong and most of these new characters die after a monster makes it to the island. Meanwhile, another monster traps Emily Blunt and her family. It looks bad for everyone.

However, Reagan is able to hook her hearing aid up to the radio tower, broadcasting the sound to her brother’s radio just in time. This stops both monsters at once, saving all the main characters just in time for the credits to roll.

It’s unclear if the signal was broadcast anywhere else, though that could be the setup for a third movie. But first...

Does Quiet Place 2 have a post-credits scene?

It does not. Once the movie ends, it’s over. If you’re sitting in the theater right now waiting for one more scene, you’re out of luck. It’s time to get up and leave. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay in this movie theater.

Will there be a Quiet Place 3?

Probably? The original A Quiet Place was a huge hit. Of course, expectations are lower in 2021. Even with theaters reopened, capacity is still lowered in many locations and plenty of people are likely uncomfortable going to a movie theater. However, if Quiet Place 3 does happen, apparently director John Krasinski already has some ideas.

In an interview with Collider, his wife and co-star Emily Blunt says Krasinski already has multiple ideas for the third entry in a Quiet Place trilogy, though it depends on how people react to his sequel:

“He has a whole arc of ideas that could work. I think he just wanted to see how people responded to this one before he fully engaged his brain on the third one. But he has a couple of great ideas.”

Hopefully, if another movie does get made, we don’t have to wait quite as long for A Quiet Place Part 3.

A Quiet Place Part II is in theaters now.

One of PlayStation's biggest games ever is coming to PlayStation 5 in 2021. Horizon Forbidden West, a sequel to Guerilla Games' acclaimed open-world sci-fi game from 2017. Ahead of E3 2021, Sony gave eager fans another look at Aloy’s next adventure during its May 27 State of Play. But we still don’t have a release date for this hotly anticipated PlayStation exclusive.

This is everything that you'd want to know about the game, including its release window, platforms, and story details.

Horizon Zero Dawn was a monumental release for its Dutch developer, which had stuck with the Killzone series since Sony acquired the studio in 2005. Its previous game, Killzone Shadow Fall, was a PS4 launch title that met with ukewarm reviews. Horizon Zero Dawn proved to be the studio’s magnum opus when it was met with critical acclaim and nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2017.

The title’s breath-taking environments, monolithic mechanical animals, and captivating plot came together to form a near-perfect RPG experience that let it easily compete against other big-name franchises. Luckily, Horizon Forbidden West isn't far off.

When is the Horizon Forbidden West release date?

As of May 27, we still don’t have a firm release date for Horizon Forbidden West. While the developers showed off 14 minutes of gameplay footage from an early mission set in the ruins of San Francisco, the reveal did not conclude with a firm date as many observers had expected. That said, it appears that the sequel is still on track for a 2021 release, even if we still don’t know precisely when. At this stage, it’s safe to expect the game will come out toward the tail-end of the year.

In a PlayStation Blog post published just after the May 27 event, Narrative Director Ben McCaw noted, “We don’t have an exact release date yet, but development is on track and we’ll have an update for you very soon.”

Guerrilla Games confirmed that Horizon Forbidden West would come out in 2021 shortly after its announcement. It currently shares a release window with the sequel to God of War, though we still don't know if that game will actually come out this year.

Horizon Forbidden West will be released just over four years after the original, which is a surprisingly quick turnaround for what is expected to be an enormous game. Horizon Zero Dawn took Guerrilla about seven years to develop and it was announced two years before its launch.

Guerrilla built its own engine from scratch, and that is an extremely labor-intensive process. It appears the developer saved a lot of time with the engine under its belt, which could be what made Horizon Forbidden West's 2021 release date window possible.

Is there a Horizon Forbidden West trailer?

The May 27 State of Play presentation contains the most up-to-date footage of the game, and includes details about Forbidden West’s story and gameplay mechanics. You can check it out in full below:

The announcement trailer also teases the game's story and gives some very brief looks at gameplay and the west coast locations that Aloy will explore.

What are some of the new features in Horizon Forbidden West?

During Sony’s May 27 State of Play event, narrative director Ben McCaw highlighted several new tools in Aloy’s arsenal.

• The focus cannon will highlight spots that allow free-climbing.
• The pullcaster functions like a handheld zipline, allowing Aloy to flit away from danger fast.
• The shieldwing (the one that looks like a “laser umbrella”) is a glider that reduces the risk of fall damage and lets you get the drop on your enemies.
• The diving mask allows Aloy to stay underwater indefinitely and navigate past baddies under the sea.
• Certain enemy machines can be “overriden” and used as mounts to help you navigate the open world, or aid in combat.

Aloy will also have new weaponry, like the spear for close-up melee blows and valor charges, attacks that do heavy damage. You’ll get access to even more weapons throughout the game, and all of them can be upgraded with workbenches scattered around the world.

Is Horizon Forbidden West a PS5 exclusive?

While it's one of Sony's major 2021 releases, Horizon Forbidden West is not a PS5 exclusive. Like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Sackboy: A Big Adventure, it's a cross-gen experience that will also be available on PS4.

That said, Horizon Forbidden West will take advantage of some of the new-gen console’s niftiest features.

"Horizon Forbidden West features new weapons that are designed to feel unique and play a specific role in combat with machines and human opponents," Game Director Mathijs de Jonge explained to PlayStation Blog. "The DualSense wireless controller adaptive triggers will help us to make the weapons feel even more unique and satisfying to use."

The game will also take advantage of the system's 3D Audio tech. "Now with the PS5 console’s Tempest 3D AudioTech sound engine we’ll be able to play sounds in such a way that players will be able to locate the machines around them with greater ease, which is great for situations in which you find yourself surrounded or just want to sneak on machines," Mathijs de Jonge explained in another PlayStation Blog post.

Could Horizon Forbidden West support multiplayer?

Guerrilla hasn't confirmed a multiplayer mode for Horizon Forbidden West, but a series of intriguing job listings have hinted that it might be possible.

An opening for a “Game Server Engineer” at Guerrilla suggested that Horizon Forbidden West might also feature a new online mode. The job description states that the developer is in need of someone to work on "systems like matchmaking, tournaments, clans, and leaderboards."

A feature like this could take the form of PvE battles where players can team up and face off against powerful robotic animals for better rewards than they would receive by doing them on their own. The mention of "clans" is even more interesting, as Guerrilla could let players create their own tribes with friends to complete quests in a mode outside of the main story campaign, a lot like Red Dead Redemptions 2 Online.

That said, it's possible that this job listing was unrelated to Horizon Forbidden West, so take it with a grain of salt.

What’s the Horizon Forbidden West story about?

Heavy spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn ahead.

Horizon Zero Dawn is set in a post-apocalyptic world where massive, self-replicating robots are the dominant species, and humans — who have already undergone a mass extinction — are thrust back into the tribalistic society.

Gamers play as Aloy, a member of one of many warring tribes that stumbles upon the origins of the mechanical beasts the rule the world. They were created by a company named Faro Automated Solutions, nearly 1,000 ago as “peacemakers,” but need biomass for fuel. Eventually, they consumed so much of the Earth’s biosphere that it eradicated most humans. But there was a Plan B.

Faro also created an artificial intelligence named GAIA, that could shut down the peacemakers, create its own robots, and make the Earth livable for humans again. But APOLLO, the system designed to teach humans to not repeat the mistakes of the last generation, was sabotaged by Faro and led to the rise of Aloy’s tribal society.

Upon discovering GAIA, Aloy is warned about HADES, another Faro system mysteriously triggered to carry out a controlled extinction if GAIA couldn’t reestablish a stable human society. Aloy faces off against HADES at the end of the game and apparently defeats it, but not for good.

The final scene of Horizon Zero Dawn reveals HADES has not been completely defeated. A dark entity — thought to be HADES — shoots out of a pile of rubble and is captured by Sylens, a secondary character thought to be Aloy’s ally.

He seems hungry for knowledge about the evil system’s “masters” and seems ready to stop at nothing to acquire it. He could be the main villain of Horizon Forbidden West or the catalyst for its events at the very least. The official website for the game gives more insight into its premise. "Life on Earth is hurtling towards another extinction, and no one knows why."

"It's up to Aloy to uncover the secrets behind these threats and restore order and balance to the world. Along the way, she must reunite with old friends, forge alliances with warring new factions and unravel the legacy of the ancient past — all the while trying to stay one step ahead of a seemingly undefeatable new enemy," it concludes.

Horizon Forbidden West will be released exclusively on the PS5 in 2021.

Kraven the Hunter has found its star. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is set to play the iconic Spider-Man villain in Sony’s solo film, which will be directed by J.C. Chandor (Triple Frontier). Sony had reportedly considered actors like Keanu Reeves, Adam Driver, John David Washington, and Brad Pitt for the role, but ended up going with Taylor-Johnson after seeing footage of his performance in the upcoming action film Bullet Train.

To his credit as an actor, Taylor-Johnson has the potential to knock it out of the park as Kraven. But his casting also raises questions about the film’s possible Marvel Cinematic Universe connections.

Kraven in the MCU — As Marvel fans are already well-aware, Kraven will not be the first comic-book character Taylor-Johnson has played in recent years. The actor previously played the titular hero in Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2 and starred as Pietro Maximoff a.k.a. Quicksilver in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. The latter role makes Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven particularly interesting.

Despite his death in Age of Ultron, Taylor-Johnson’s Quicksilver is still remembered by die-hard Marvel fans and casual viewers alike. With that in mind, it’d seem like a safe bet to assume the actor couldn’t play another MCU character. That, in turn, begs the question: will Kraven the Hunter exist in the MCU?

A Tale of Two Cinematic Universes — All of this ties back into the bluntly confusing co-existence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters (yes, that is what it’s called). Most fans assume — given how protective Marvel is of the MCU — that the two universes exist separately. But no one’s sure at this point whether that’s actually the case.

In the Morbius trailer, released early last year, a background clue and a cameo appearance suggested that the film – which is part of the SPUMC – exists in the same reality as Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige also said in 2019 that Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man could cross over between the two cinematic universes — implying that they are at least somewhat connected.

All of this is to say that, until films like Morbius, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Spider-Man: No Way Home are released, it’s difficult to know exactly what the connections are between the MCU and the SPUMC, should substantive ones exist.

It’s also worth noting that Kraven has long been rumored to make an appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home, though no legitimate reports have been released confirming that. Now that Sony has its Kraven actor, it’s possible the studio could set him up with a cameo appearance in the MCU entry — especially since No Way Home already promises to explore Marvel’s Multiverse and alternate realities.

The Inverse Analysis — For whatever it’s worth, it’s very possible that Taylor-Johnson could play both Quicksilver and Kraven within the MCU.

While Marvel typically tries to avoid casting the same actor in multiple roles, the studio has done it a handful of times over the years. Gemma Chan, for instance, is set to star as Sersi in Marvel’s Eternals despite having already appeared as a different character in 2019’s Captain Marvel. Taylor-Johnson’s previous MCU experience doesn’t necessarily disqualify Kraven the Hunter from taking place in the MCU.

But we really don’t know what Sony’s current plans are for Kraven the Hunter. Taylor-Johnson is said to have signed on to play the character in multiple films, which means the studio likely has some franchise and crossover ideas already in mind for the character. Whether he’ll exist in the MCU or cross over into another Marvel Studios title, for now, remains to be seen.

Kraven the Hunter is set to hit theaters on January 13, 2023.

On July 15, 2019, United States Navy personnel filmed something they couldn’t explain — or at least, that is what a new video purports to show.

The video dropped Thursday afternoon on the website of Jeremy Corbell, a filmmaker and UFO enthusiast. In the new footage, we can see what appears to be a radar display with multiple objects moving across the field. At a point in the video, one of the people apparently monitoring the radar exclaims: “holy shit.”

The website describes the new footage thus:

This RADAR data release shows four clips; multiple unknown targets (and one civilian vessel). Some of the unknown targets drop off RADAR in this footage. This happened numerous times throughout the UFO encounter series. At the height of the contacts - there were at least fourteen unknowns observed at one time. The event series reached a crescendo with one of the unknown targets entering the water at 11pm. No wreckage found. None of the unidentified craft were recovered.

This is just the latest escalation in what is fast becoming an all-consuming obsession on the part of the U.S. public. Sarah Scoles, a journalist and author of the UFO culture book They Are Already Here, has been researching UFO incidents for four years but never imagined that things would get as heated as quickly as they have the last few months.

The video was not independently verified by Inverse. You can watch the new footage here:

The video comes weeks ahead of one of the most-anticipated events of 2021. Inverse, like Scoles, is keeping an eye on the Pentagon UFO report, which is set to be released in June.

“It's definitely not what I expected when I first started looking into UFOs around 2017,” Scoles tells Inverse. “This was not what I thought the end result would be, or even that public interest would sustain itself for this long.”

The government report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is due to be delivered by June 25. The report has been preceded by a series of surprising statements by the Department of Defense authenticating grainy footage of UAP caught by Navy pilots. This has lead many who have been following the development of this story to wonder: Why are UFOs suddenly the big talk of the government?

Ahead of the release of the UAP report, Inverse breaks down what to expect from it, how much of it will be available to the public, and how it will likely change the narrative around UFOs.

Why is the Pentagon releasing a UFO report?

The catalyst from the reports come from a series of leaked Pentagon videos purporting to show UFOs:

• The latest video, leaked on May 27, 2021 by Corbell, appears to show U.S. Navy encountering numerous unidentified objects on radar.
• In 2017 Navy videos leaked, stirring up a barrage of rumors online. The footage shows a cluster of odd-looking aircraft executing strange maneuvers. The Navy pilots can be heard saying: “what the f--k is that?”
• In April 2020, the Pentagon formally released the three videos of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — the official term for UFOs — captured by the Navy pilots.
• The Pentagon release suggested the videos were legitimate, but it did not say what the crafts were or were believed to be.
• An amendment in the Intelligence Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2021 followed, which called for a thorough investigation of UAPs.
• In December 2020, the government made the Intelligence Authorization Act law and called for an unclassified report on UAPs to be published in 2021.

The Act was a part of the mammoth appropriations bill that also included financial aid checks for people living with the economic fallout from Covid-19.

The report is due in June. It will be compiled by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense and it should pull together everything the U.S. military knows about the phenomena. It will first be presented to the congressional Intelligence and Armed Services committees.

For people like Corbell, the release of the report is like a dream come true.

“I was always hopeful that if we beat the drum, marched forward and shook things up and kicked down some doors, that we would see a day like this,” Corbell tells Inverse. “I’m an optimist so I had to believe that we would get more confirmation from what our military knows about the UFO presence on planet Earth.”

Corbell has previously shared footage captured by the U.S. Navy off the coast of San Diego in July 2019. The video, which he shared on Twitter, showed a dark, spherical shape disappearing into the water.

A few days later, the Department of Defense confirmed that the video was recorded by military personnel and that it would be reviewed by the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, says that the government was forced to confirm the legitimacy of the Navy videos because they leaked to the public — but notably, they didn’t confirm much else.

“I don’t think they were planning on releasing these videos,” Shostak tells Inverse. “And in releasing them, they said, ‘well, these videos are definitely videos.’”

What is going to be in the UFO report?

As far as what is going to be included in the Pentagon’s report, Corbell is not one step ahead of the government this time.

“I don’t have a crystal ball so I can’t predict what will be in it,” Corbell says. “Anything they put out for me is good because it’s saying that the Senate Intelligence Committee is listening to the American public and that this is important to the American public.”

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in a high-profile interview with Fox News earlier this year that the report would contain information on “difficult to explain” sightings.

“Now, could they be aliens? Sure, that option is definitely firmly sitting on the table.”

“We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for, or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom,” Ratcliffe told Fox News in March.

In addition to the three videos the Pentagon confirmed as real footage in April 2020, the Department of Defense also confirmed the authenticity of several photos and videos of UAPs taken in July 2019.

The footage shows mysterious lights encircling the USS Russell and the USS Omaha at the Naval Base in San Diego — a major point of operations for the U.S. Navy.

A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed to CNN in April 2021 that the footage of triangle-shaped flying objects was indeed recorded by Navy pilots, but that the Department could not explain what they were.

It’s still not clear whether the report will also include footage that the public has already seen, or if it will release new video footage.

“They’re kind of trying to keep all of this under wraps right now, so I don’t really think we have a sense of what it will contain,” Scoles says. “It would be great if we saw more of their cases because I’ve seen all of the videos and photos that we have about a thousand too many times.”

Meanwhile, Shostak believes that parts of the report will be classified and not available to the public.

“It’s going to be a mix, that’s often the case with these reports,” Shostak says. “Some of it is going to be classified simply because the military doesn’t want to tell you too much about the capabilities of their cameras.”

How will the UFO report affect us?

When the Pentagon released the footage of the UAPs, they admitted they cannot explain the maneuvers pulled by the aircraft seen in the videos. So it’s pretty safe to assume that the report will not confirm whether or not the UAPs are in fact alien spaceships or some form of foreign technology.

“I think in the end, it is above all else an unclassified government report and it will read like that,” Scoles says.

But Scoles believes the report may still serve a purpose as it will lay the groundwork for figuring out what to do with the information that has been released and provide a way to systemize information that may be available in the future.

Will the UFO report confirm aliens?

The short answer is, no. The language adopted by the side of the government has emphasized that they themselves are not sure what these flying objects are.

“You have a transparent, honest response from our military that they don't know what these are,” Corbell says. “So they’re telling the truth.”

Corbell himself remains agnostic as to whether they might be aliens.

“I’m not saying that they’re aliens, I’ve never said that once in my life,” Corbell says. “What I’m saying is that these are unidentified and we have a right to know, a need to know, and a duty to find out from a safety standpoint, from a national security standpoint, as well as for understanding our place in the universe as humanity.”

“Now, could they be aliens?” he adds. “Sure, that option is definitely firmly sitting on the table.”

Although alien enthusiasts have been rejoicing over the government finally confirming the footage of UAPs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are admitting these are alien spaceships. Instead, the government’s main concern appears to be whether or not this poses some form of threat.

“It will probably be focused on whether UAP presents a national security threat which is a very terrestrial, very grounded concerning,” Scoles says. “And so that I think will tether a lot of people to Earth.”

But in most cases related to alleged UFO sightings, it only takes an incident of an unidentified aerial phenomenon for people to claim that it is the work of an alien civilization and that will most likely happen with the release of this report.

“UFOs have a very good way of sustaining their own history,” Scoles says.

Picture this: you leave your house and hop onto a crowded bus to head to work or to meet up with a friend.

You touch the turnstile to pay for your fare. The bus sways, and you grab onto a pole for support before sitting down and leaning back on a chair. As your stop approaches, you yank the chain to signal to the driver that you need to get off.

Now zoom in: How many microbes did you encounter on this short ride? It might be hard to count, but two new studies mapped the presence of thousands of microbes across dozens of cities to create a sort of urban biome tracing — and it could make germaphobes squirm a little bit about the subway.

What’s new — The first study, published in the journal Cell, creates the “first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem.”

It presents a map of more than 4,000 samples from 60 cities across six continents, identifying both known and unknown microbes, including:

• 10,928 viruses
• 1,302 bacteria
• 2 archaea (a type of single-cell organism)

In the process, researchers found 4,246 known species — meaning the rest are new to science. A second map looks specifically at the profile of antibiotic-resistant superbugs in cities around the globe (spoiler alert: there are a ton of them).

Individuals can go to these maps and click on the profile for each city to find out, say, the percentage of bacteria in New York or the most prevalent types of antibiotic-resistant (AMR) bacteria in Los Angeles. The researchers concluded that each metropolitan area has its own unique microbe core.

The second related study, published in Microbiome, looks at the microorganisms in the air of public transit, such as subways or buses. Once again, the researchers found differences in the composition of microorganisms based on the geographic location.

But what’s more important — though perhaps not surprising — is that this study confirms that public transit truly is also a mess of human detritus. The researchers write: “human skin, soil, and wastewater were major [...] sources of public transit air.”

The researchers also found that public transit surfaces were also likely sources of microorganisms found in the air.

How they did it — The researchers launched a program known as the International Metagenomics and Metadesign of Subways and Urban Biomes (MetaSUB) Consortium in 2015 to fill the scientific gap in our knowledge on microbes in cities.

Since then, they’ve collected more than 4,000 samples from 60 cities.

Why it matters — These studies aren’t just a fun — or gross, depending on your viewpoint — look at the tiny critters that surround urban dwellers. They could also help us track dangerous pathogens.

As we have learned from the past year dealing with Covid-19, viruses and pathogens can spread very quickly, especially within cities.

If updated regularly, we could use these maps to conduct “real-time monitoring of organisms, AMR genes, and pathogens” which “have the potential to reveal hidden microbial reservoirs and detect microbial transmission routes as they spread around the world,” the researchers write.

Surprisingly, the study found fewer antibiotic-resistant microorganisms in Oceania and the Middle East — though it’s not entirely clear whether that’s due to lower levels of antibiotic use or some other factor.

Plus, now that we know our relationship between public transit and our urban microbiome, researchers suggest these findings can help urban planners better design public buildings and structures to prioritize public health.

What’s next — The Cell study has three pretty important limitations that limit our ability to fully understand the urban microbiome.

These limitations include:

1. Measuring only DNA, not RNA (for example, coronaviruses are RNA viruses, so this current microbe profile would not capture them)
2. The study was unable to identify a significant percentage of the DNA included.
3. The researchers could not always separate out anti-biotic resistant bacteria from similar microbes that might not be resistant.

But the researchers are confident that more data on urban microbes will help clarify some of these limitations. The scientists also state that the “microbial profile of cities can slightly shift year to year” so it’s important to keep updating the data so we can stay up-to-date on our microscopic friends.

Although researchers in the first study found no dangerous pathogens, researchers in the second study did identify C. acnes, which they describe as an “opportunistic pathogen” that should be monitored closely to see if it poses any risks to humans using public transit.

Ultimately, this map is just a first step in what will hopefully be a long line of studies on the teeny-tiny critters with whom we share our city streets and subways.

Summary: We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic elements, including 10,928 viruses, 1,302 bacteria, 2 archaea, and 838,532 CRISPR arrays not found in reference databases. We identified 4,246 known species of urban microorganisms and a consistent set of 31 species found in 97% of samples that were distinct from human commensal organisms. Profiles of AMR genes varied widely in type and density across cities. Cities showed distinct microbial taxonomic signatures that were driven by climate and geographic differences. These results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas that enables discovery of organisms and genes, highlights potential public health Q1 Q2 and forensic applications, and provides a culture-independent view of AMR burden in cities.

SpaceX has launched the latest batch of Starlink satellites — but researchers are warning about an all-new threat from these mega-constellations, potentially kickstarting an “uncontrolled” science experiment with the Earth’s atmosphere.

On Wednesday at 2:59 p.m. Eastern time, the firm launched 60 satellites for Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Ars Technica notes that it’s the 100th consecutive successful launch of a Falcon 9 booster after the CRS-7 mission failed to reach the International Space Station in 2015. It’s also the 16th launch of 2021, meaning SpaceX has launched a rocket every nine days so far.

But the feat may come at a cost. In a paper for Nature this month, researchers claim the development of mega-constellations like Starlink “risks multiple tragedies of the commons, including tragedies to ground-based astronomy, Earth orbit, and Earth’s upper atmosphere.”

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Aaron Boley, associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s physics and astronomy department and the lead author, tells Inverse that these emergent mega-constellations will need better governance — and fast.

“Regulations that consider the full environmental effects of systems of satellites, rather than single satellites, will be necessary for maintaining safe and sustainable practices with space use,” he says.

Perhaps the biggest effects could come as the satellites start to deorbit, sparking what could be a major experiment in geoengineering.

This week’s SpaceX launch is the 29th batch of Starlink satellites since the first in May 2019, building out the firm’s internet connectivity constellation. Starlink aims to offer high-speed and low latency internet access almost anywhere with a view of a ground terminal.

SpaceX has now launched 1,737 satellites for Starlink, with 951 operational. Starlink satellites typically take a few months to move into position and start operations. Starlink is already the biggest single constellation in space, but the firm has applied for permission to launch up to 42,000 satellites.

In response to the Falcon 9 feat, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter:

“Cumulative payload to orbit is the really crazy number. Falcon has delivered more than double rest of world combined over trailing 12 months.”

It’s not just SpaceX planning to launch larger-than-ever constellations. Other projects are planned from the likes of OneWeb, Amazon, and GW. The paper explains that these firms aim to mass-produce cheaper satellites on a faster upgrade cycle.

“There is not a simple solution to this, but treating space as a resource and avoiding, when possible, a consumer electronic model for satellites are important steps,” Boley says.

One issue, in particular, could have an inadvertent effect on the planet’s atmosphere. The paper notes a number of facts:

• A Starlink satellite’s dry mass is around 260 kg (573 pounds).
• A total of 12,000 satellites would reach 3,100 tonnes (6.8 million pounds).
• SpaceX aims to deorbit a given satellite in around five years.
• That means around two tonnes returning to Earth per day (4,409 pounds).

It’s not as much as the 54 tonnes (119,050 pounds) of meteoroid mass that falls to Earth every day. However, the researchers note that the satellites are mostly aluminum. Meteoroids, on the other hand, tend to be less than one percent aluminum based on mass. That means it’s possible these mega-constellations will greatly increase the amount of aluminum scattered into the Earth’s atmosphere on a given day.

The paper warns that this will effectively become a giant science experiment in climate change:

“Anthropogenic deposition of aluminum in the atmosphere has long been proposed in the context of geoengineering as a way to alter Earth’s albedo. These proposals have been scientifically controversial and controlled experiments encountered substantial opposition. Mega-constellations will begin this process as an uncontrolled experiment.”

Boley says that the full impact this will have is unclear, in part because it will depend on how companies approach maintenance.

“However, we do know that such material in sufficient quantities can change the albedo of Earth directly, as well as provide nuclei for high-altitude cloud formation,” Boley says.

Indeed, scientists have explored the idea of scattering material into the atmosphere to reduce the Sun’s energy. An October 2015 analysis from Harvard University, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, claimed that pumping aluminum oxide (or alumina) into the atmosphere could have less of an environmental impact than pumping sulfates into the air to achieve the same effect — although the researchers warn that there are unknown risks with doing this.

In effect, pumping particles like these into the atmosphere is about mimicking the effects seen with volcanoes. NASA noted that when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the resultant sulfur dioxide cooled the planet by around half a degree Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit) for 15 months.

Alice Gorman, associate professor in space archaeology at Flinders University, tells Inverse that the space industry has assumed “for too long” that leaving satellites to burn up in the atmosphere is the most desirable endpoint.

Gorman explains that alumina, formed as aluminum spacecraft burn up, can cause the ozone layer to decay. That layer protects the Earth from the full force of the Sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Beyond backing up Boley and his team’s calls for greater oversight, Gorman also argues that the industry needs to start “thinking more creatively” about which materials to use for spacecraft. In a CNN article this month, Gorman highlighted silica-based ceramics used on the space shuttle and a Japanese firm developing satellites encased in wood.

“Deliberately putting huge quantities of alumina dust into the atmosphere seems like a dangerous experiment, like introducing cane toads to Australia — a reasonable idea at the time which has terrible unforeseen consequences,” Gorman says.

SpaceX’s behavior did receive some praise in the paper. The firm was singled out as driving adherence to end-of-life guidelines, as outlined by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee. The paper notes, however, that regulations and international co-operations need to catch up with the new reality.

But similar to how SpaceX didn’t realize its shiny satellites could disrupt astronomers’ work, it may not be until masses of Starlink satellites actually start deorbiting that the true nature of the issue emerges.

Abstract: The rapid development of mega-constellations risks multiple tragedies of the commons, including tragedies to ground-based astronomy, Earth orbit, and Earth’s upper atmosphere. Moreover, the connections between the Earth and space environments are inadequately taken into account by the adoption of a consumer electronic model applied to space assets. For example, we point out that satellite re-entries from the Starlink mega-constellation alone could deposit more aluminum into Earth’s upper atmosphere than what is done through meteoroids; they could thus become the dominant source of high-altitude alumina. Using simple models, we also show that untracked debris will lead to potentially dangerous on-orbit collisions on a regular basis due to the large number of satellites within mega-constellation orbital shells. The total cross-section of satellites in these constellations also greatly increases the risk of impacts due to meteoroids. De facto orbit occupation by single actors, inadequate regulatory frameworks, and the possibility of free-riding exacerbate these risks. International cooperation is urgently needed, along with a regulatory system that takes into account the effects of tens of thousands of satellites.

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Genshin Impact is an update festival. Every six weeks, the game attempts to evolve. It Each update tries to rebuild the game by adding new features, characters, and events. If you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the numerous changes you'll need to watch the Genshin Impact livestream, which often happens two weeks prior to the update.

When is the Genshin Impact Version 1.6 livestream start time?

If you're sitting in the United States hankering for the Genshin Impact 1.6 livestream, don't worry. Players based in the United States can watch livestream for Genshin Impact Version 1.6 on May 28 at 12 a.m. Eastern.

However, if you want your information earlier than that, a Chinese version of the livestream will be available at 8 a.m. Eastern. It will feature all the same information but will obviously be broadcast in Chinese.

How to watch the Genshin Impact Version 1.6 livestream

You can watch the English livestream on the official Genshin Impact YouTube channel.

If you're very eager, the Chinese version of the livestream will be available on miHoYo's official Bilibili channel. There will also be a live fan translation of the Chinese version on Twitch by the Discord group Wangsheng Funeral Parlor.

What's going to be revealed in the Genshin Impact Version 1.6 livestream?

The livestream will rundown what changes will be in the Genshin Impact Version 1.6 update. This will likely include the characters who will be featured on Banners and events that will occur following the update.

Officially, we don’t know the specifics of what will be in the update. However, leaks have claimed a few additions:

• We’ll have an event called Ludi Harpastum.
• There will be changes to the housing system, improving it for players.
• Costumes will be introduced for Jean and Barbara.
• There will be a new series of islands to explore.
• A new boss named the Maguu Kenki will be added.

It’s unknown how exactly these features will be implemented. There should be more details available at the livestream.

What are the Genshin Impact Version 1.5 Banners?

The hottest question on everyone's mind is what characters will be featured on the Genshin Impact Version 1.5 banners?

We don’t currently have confirmation for the banners, but by using in-game trial data, dataminers have determined that the two banners will be Klee then Kazuha.

According to the Twitter user, Lumie, Klee’s banner will arrive first. She’ll come with the four-star characters, Sucrose, Fischl, and a currently unknown character. Following the Klee rerun, there will be a new Anemo character named, Kazuha. He’ll be the first Inazuma character and, according to Lumie, come with the four-star characters: Rosaria, Bennett, and Razor.

Again, it’s unknown if this will come to pass for sure, but this is the information we have thus far.

Dragon Quest fans, rejoice! Square Enix has big plans for the RPG series, with six new games announced in a livestream. Here's everything to look forward to.

View this story on Inverse

E3 2021 hasn't even started yet and I'm already sick of it.

In previous years, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a time of celebration for gamers. it was a massive social event that was essentially the Super Bowl for nerds (though minus the football game, only leaving in the commercials). For one week, fans of the industry got to pal around and enjoy a few exciting days of announcements that would set the stage for the next year of their gaming life.

Things look much different this year. Rather than getting ready for a news-dense three days, E3 has turned into a full-blown season. Digital events are springing up every day, huge announcements are casually getting dropped on Twitter, and Geoff Keighley is trying his darndest to swallow the ESA whole with Summer Game Fest.

It’s a headache for both fans who want to stay informed and the press who have to.

In some way, what’s happening in the gaming world right now makes a lot of sense. For the past few years, E3 has started to feel like an unnecessary gala. With companies like Nintendo ditching live presentations in favor of digital Directs, fans were starting to envision a world where publishers would just drop news whenever they wanted rather than saving their announcements for the summer.

That’s still looking like the logical conclusion of the modern game press cycle as E3’s power slowly fades. The problem is that we’re now living in an awkward in-between space where multiple ideas are fighting for relevancy.

On one hand, you have the traditional E3 format. After missing last year due to the pandemic, the ESA came back in 2021 with a reimagined vision for its expo. While it’s all digital this year, it follows the same format as previous events: a multi-day affair that acts as a who’s who of gaming publishers under one roof.

On top of that, we now have copycats who are trying to capitalize on E3’s fall from relevancy by taking over its niche. This year’s Summer Game Fest begins the same day as E3 and will feature an exclusive world premiere. To make matters even more confusing, both E3 and Summer Game Fest are claiming that Microsoft’s upcoming digital showcase is part of their events. It’s impossible to keep track of what’s happening at which show or where to even watch the events associated with them.

To make matters worse, publishers seem noncommittal about the idea of an ‘all-in-one’ show at all. Today alone saw four digital publisher events, which revealed some E3-sized games. Dragon Quest XII getting announced two weeks before E3 during a late-night live stream leaves us wondering what Square Enix actually plans on saving for the show. The same goes for Ubisoft, who are revealing new details on Far Cry 6 this week outside of its planned Foreword event.

To add to the pile, Nintendo is doing its own thing entirely. It dropped release dates for two of its biggest games, Pokemon Legends Arceus and the upcoming Diamond and Pearl remakes, casually on Twitter. Now there’s speculation that the company plans to announce the Switch Pro before E3 too. It’s hard to imagine Nintendo’s E3 stream being action-packed if giant news like that is going to drop well before it.

The gaming industry is a mess. That’s always been true, but it’s especially accurate in this situation. It’s clear that E3 isn’t working for publishers. Rather than throwing everything at the wall, companies need to come together to either unify or formally wave goodbye to the “expo” format.

The current mix is, frankly, exhausting for players. It’s impossible to keep up with every event. That’s hurting the actual fun part of gaming announcements: the social component. Ultimately, the point of events like E3 is to get gamers talking. It’s a marketing play, but it doubles as a fun water cooler moment for the community. With so many “can’t miss” events scheduled this summer, people will spend every day in the breakroom talking about games instead of actually playing them.

Love, Death & Robots is unlike anything else on Netflix. A dark sci-fi anthology created by Tim Miller (Deadpool) and David Fincher (Mindhunter), it’s established itself in a league of its own, crafting visually diverse animated short films mostly inspired by short stories.

With Season 2 now available for streaming, albeit with fewer segments than Season 1, fans are now clamoring for more. Here’s everything you need to know about Love Death & Robots Season 3, from potential release date to specific episodes to expect.

Is Love, Death & Robots renewed for Season 3?

Yes: the highly anticipated trailer for Love, Death & Robots Season 2 (released in April 2021) came complete with a twist ending. After giving audiences a glimpse of the heart-racing, tear-jerking stories told across Season 1, the teaser confirmed more Love, Death & Robots is on the way. Announcing Season 2’s release date as May 14, 2021, the screen then glitched and displayed text that read: “VOL. 3 2022.”

So, it’s official; there is a third season incoming. Be prepared for another selection of visually gripping, narratively twisted tales to hit Netflix sometime next year.

When is the Love, Death & Robots Season 3 release date?

While we know a third season is coming, no official date has been confirmed beyond 2022. However, that’s actually great news, given the show’s past. Season 1 of Love, Death & Robots premiered in 2019, on March 15, while Season 2 hit the streamer in 2021, on May 14. For those keeping track at home, those seasons arrived 26 months apart. However vague, a 2022 release date means fans will have to wait far less long before plunging into more episodes of the series.

How many episodes will be in Love, Death & Robots Season 3?

There was some concern over the fact Season 2 only had eight episodes, as Season 1 had a whopping 18. That means there’s a substantial range where Season 3 could fall, but don’t expect another batch of 18 next year.

“I'll just say what has become volumes two and three, we planned as volume two,” Love, Death & Robots co-creator Tim Miller told Inverse. “And then Netflix said, 'Hey, is there any way we can get this on the service sooner?' So this was the way we did it, by prioritizing a batch of them.”

Given these clues, the most logical number of episodes would be 10, as Seasons 2 and 3 were developed to be an equivalent to Season 1. But it could be another set of 8, or the extra year may allow for more episodes in Season 3.

Is there a Love, Death & Robots Season 3 trailer?

Not just yet. While this series is distinguished by its inclusion of various shorts developed by different crews with unique animation styles, that approach makes the series’ development a bit more complicated. Each short is developed more-or-less independently, meaning a trailer will likely only be curated once enough of them have been completed and delivered to the series’ creators.

That said, we can expect to see a full trailer for Love, Death & Robots at least one month before the release – if Netflix sticks to the same marketing strategy it employed for Season 2.

What will happen in Love, Death & Robots Season 3 episodes?

The joy (and despair) of the anthology format is that you never know what to expect – not only from one season to another, but any individual episode to the next. However, one huge spoiler has already emerged regarding the third season, bringing a sense of continuity to this fragmented series.

In a recent Reddit AMA, supervising director Jennifer Yuh Nelson let slip that there will be returning characters in Love, Death & Robots Season 3: in particular, the three tourist robots from Season 1 episode “Three Robots.”

Tim Miller confirmed the reappearance to Inverse: “We definitely wanted to make sure that “Three Robots” came back, it was one of our favorites and one of the fan favorites.”

“Three Robots” was based on a short story by author John Scalzi, a common collaborator with Miller. “John Scalzi is my go-to guy. He is a genius and a super nice guy and very into the show. I hang out with him even when we don't have any show business to do,” Miller said. Hopefully this close collaboration means a follow-up fans will love, and even more similar stories that are sure to become new favorites.

Love, Death & Robots is now streaming on Netflix.

Rumors about an upgraded Nintendo Switch are heating up. As more credible rumors and reports about what fans have colloquially deemed the "Switch Pro" come out, its launch seems more plausible than ever. Nintendo's successful hybrid console is already proof that portability, affordability, and classic franchises can go just as far as cutting-edge graphics, but this update could bring the system up to snuff with at least the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Here’s everything we know about Nintendo's rumored Switch Pro console since multiple reports from Bloomberg throughout the first half of 2021 revealed that the console is in development and coming sooner than we thought.

The Switch has sold more than 79 million units since its March 2017 release. Nintendo even released a handheld-only version of the console in 2019. Launching a new version of the system in 2021 would only keep that momentum going.

While Nintendo has yet to say a word about its plans for the gaming system, fans have been calling this rumored upgrade the “Nintendo Switch Pro” ever since initial reports about the alleged console update were first published in 2019.

Months of reporting from places like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, as well as international trade publications like Nikkei and Digitimes, have given gamers an idea of when the Switch Pro might arrive and what improvements it’ll come with.

When is the Nintendo Switch Pro release date?

The Switch Pro hasn't even been officially announced, so there's no release date yet. That said, this could change very soon. On May 27, 2021 Bloomberg reported that assembly of the Switch Pro will begin in July and that Nintendo is aiming for a release in September or October 2021. Eurogamer also backs up this claim.

This information follows through on an earlier Bloomberg report from March 23, 2021, Bloomberg directly confirms that Nintendo is planning this new Switch model for “the year-end shopping season.”

A January 2021 data-mine from @SciresM (shared to ResetEra forums) confirmed that the latest firmware update references some new Switch hardware called "Aura." If this is the Nintendo Switch Pro, then the system itself may not be too far off.

Another Bloomberg report from March 2021 claimed that Nintendo struck a deal with Samsung to use their 7 inches 720p OLED and that production will start in July, which makes a 2021 release seem plausible. A third Bloomberg report from August 2020 also said that Nintendo will release it “along with a lineup of new games.”

With titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 and Bayonetta 3 in the pipeline and multiple reports of a 2021 release now happened, it'd make a lot of sense for the system to launch this year.

When asked about the Nintendo Switch Pro's likelihood of releasing this year, analyst Candice Mudrick of Newzoo tells Inverse that "Nintendo would be able to sell the upgrade to its dedicated audience that wants to enjoy Nintendo first-party titles looking as good as they could be," if it launches this year. "It would allow Nintendo to stay in the wake of Sony and Microsoft's new generation of consoles," she said.

When will we learn more about the Nintendo Switch Pro?

A Nintendo Switch Pro announcement might come ahead of E3 2021. Both Bloomberg and Eurogamer explain that the system will be announced ahead of the showcase so all publishers, including Nintendo, are free to discuss their new games for the Switch Pro during the event. Don’t expect Nintendo to save the reveal for its E3 Direct, but definitely expect some games for the Switch Pro to be shown off during it.

How much will the Nintendo Switch Pro cost?

As the system has not been revealed, no price for it is known just yet. Still, some analysts theorized a price when speaking to Bloomberg for its March 23 report. “$349.99 will increase the value proposition of the device, but I still think Nintendo can drive strong demand even at $399.99,” Bloomberg Intelligence’s Matthew Kanterman guessed.

Then, in the May 27 report, Bloomberg claims that sources told them that the Switch Pro is “likely to be priced higher than the $299 original.” The handheld-only Switch Lite is $100 cheaper than the current $299 model. It’s not clear whether Switch Pro is a replacement for the original or a premium version that will be sold alongside it.

If it replaces the 2017 Switch, this new console could adopt the $300 price tag the console carries now, also leading to a reduction in the cost of the regular Switch. But the upgraded console could be priced anywhere from $50 to $100 more to account for improved specs and features according to other reports.

The lineup could end up looking something like:

• The Switch Lite: $199.99
• The First-Gen Switch: Currently priced at $299.99. This could see a discount, remain the same price, or be discontinued depending on Nintendo’s plan for the Pro.
• The Switch Pro: Premium price of $399.99, or could take the first-gen’s place at $299.99.

Once again, this is pure speculation as we won't know the pricing for sure until Nintendo decides to officially unveil the new console.

Nintendo Switch Pro expected features and specs

There have been plenty of rumors claiming to reveal what Nintendo has in store for the Switch Pro, and Mochizuki's August 24 report has shed light on the two most likely improvements: 4K-docked resolution and juiced-up computing power. Like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X mid-generation upgrades, this upgraded system wouldn't fully replace the Nintendo Switch.

Instead, it would give players an opportunity to experience games at a higher resolution and frame rate. Bloomberg's report is backed up by the aforementioned data-mine by @SciresM that was also reported by Video Games Chronicle. They claim that the Switch Pro will use the same Mariko (Tegra X1+) SoC chip as the Switch Lite, but that it will run at a higher clock speed than it does on that system.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s March 23 report says that Nintendo will use an upgraded Nvidia chip that will have better processing, CPU, and memory. and support Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, to get games to display at 4K quality on a TV.

There are also references and Intel chip that supports 4K UHD multimedia SoC. Bloomberg's report highlights that the console will have a 4K resolution when docked to a TV, but will only display at 720p on Samsung's OLED screens when in handheld mode. This screen will have better contrast and response time and consume less battery than the current screen, according to display consultancy DSCC's Co-Founder Yoshio Tamura.

The Switch Pro will also reportedly have better battery life and cooling capabilities. Combined, these demonstrate an improvement that's more on par with the jump from PS4 to PS4 Pro, rather than PS4 to PS5.

If this information holds any weight, Nintendo could be trying to make up for the power the original Switch would lack compared to the PS5 and Xbox Series X. That means Nintendo fans might soon be playing iconic games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey at crisp 4K resolution, though Bloomberg’s report states that DLSS might only work on games specifically updated to support it.

The Nintendo Switch Pro is reportedly planned to be released in 2021.

There are a lot of notable video game birthdays in 2021. It turns out that 1986 was a baby boon for the gaming industry that produced franchises like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and many more. We’ve already seen celebrations for many of those games but prepare for one more.

The Dragon Quest series turned 35 in May 2021, which means it’s finally old enough to fight a mid-game boss. The series has been a tremendous success in Japan over the past three and a half decades, but it’s only recently started to gain attention stateside. That’s largely thanks to Dragon Quest XI, which was a huge hit among RPG fans.

As fans expected, that’s officially getting a sequel. Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate is official, and it is shaping up to be a slight departure for the series.

Here’s what you need to know.

When is the Dragon Quest 12 release date?

We don’t quite have one yet. The game’s announcement was more of a logo reveal than anything, so we didn’t get so much as a release window. What we do know is that it’ll have a simultaneous worldwide launch, so the west will get it at the same time as Japan. Beyond that, it’s a mystery.

Is there a Dragon Quest 12 trailer?

Sort of, but there’s not much to say about it. It’s basically just a logo reveal that teases a lot of fire and brimstone. That was followed by a brief Q&A session where we got more details on what the game will be like, but we’ve yet to see actual gameplay footage.

What are the Dragon Quest 12 platforms?

For now, that’s a mystery. No platforms were confirmed when the game was announced. Judging from previous games, we can safely assume it’ll come to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. Dragon Quest XI is available on Nintendo Switch as well, so it’s possible it could launch there too. We’ll just have to wait and see.

What’s different about Dragon Quest 12?

While we didn’t get any official footage, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii did tease some changes for the sequel. For one, the game is said to be a little darker than previous entries. It was referred to as a Dragon Quest “for adults” during the live stream. That would explain the particularly dark aesthetic of its gloom and doom logo.

As for gameplay, the combat system is getting some kind of overhaul. Horii didn’t describe what exactly that’ll entail, but it sounds like it’ll be a somewhat major departure. The series is known for being a traditional turn-based JRPG, so a shake-up there would be significant.

Choices are also going to play a role in the game, though it’s unclear what exactly that means. That idea is certainly more in line with a newer style of RPG, indicating that the game might be a little more modern than previous installments.

This article about the streaming service Peacock was originally published on June 26, 2019 and updated on May 27, 2021 following the app's release. Read on for the original article, with some new changes to reflect the latest updates on this topic.

Forget Bop-Its and Beanie Babies. The latest craze taking over the nation is launching your own streaming platform. Back in January 2019, NBCUniversal announced it would be launching its own streaming platform. The media company planned to launch a Netflix competitor to bring together NBC shows, news, live TV, and movies old and new.

The trend towards launching a streaming platform is becoming more and more common these days as the landscape of television shifts. With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO all currently at the top of the heap, NBC joins other huge companies like WarnerMedia and Disney in creating specialized platforms that serve as the hub for all film and television created under their respective umbrellas. NBC CEO Steve Burke told Variety, “we’re going to unite the whole company behind it,” adding, “We want to build a platform that has lots and lots of people using it, so we can start to make money with advertising.”

Here’s everything you can expect from NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, from the release date to how much it costs to what other shows the company offers.

What is the name of NBC’s streaming service?

NBC’s streaming service officially goes by the name “Peacock.” That’s a shoutout to the bird that has served as the network’s mascot since the 1950s

When did Peacock release?

Peacock first underwent a “soft launch” for Xfinity customers on April 15, 2020. It then launched nationwide on July 15, 2020.

How much does it cost to subscribe to Peacock?

Peacock currently has 3 tiers:

• Free - Costs $0, but comes with only a subset of the full library and ads
• Premium - Costs $4.99 per month, featuring the full library but comes with ads
• Premium Plus - Costs $9.99 per month, featuring the full library and no ads

Peacock Premium is also offered for free to subscribers of certain cable providers like Xfinity and Cox.

What shows featured on NBC’s streaming service?

Right now, NBC shows are spread across a ton of streaming platforms and actual channels. If you just consider NBC in TV form, the company is not just its own network but a variety of channels, including Bravo, E!, SYFY, USA Network, Oxygen, Telemundo, and CNBC. Not only can those with a cable subscription log onto any NBC-owned channel’s website and watch episodes for free right now, but NBC has struck deals with streaming platforms Hulu and Netflix to air NBC shows. That includes hit shows like the aforementioned The Office, Frasier, Friends, the newly-acquired comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, This Is Us, every Chicago-based crime, medical, or fire procedural, and on and on it goes.

NBCUniversal reportedly paid big to have The Office leave Netflix early to move to the new streaming platform. It did the same thing with Parks & Recreation on Netflix and Hulu. Though the company doesn’t seem to be doing this with all of its properties, it’s a targeted effort to hold a monopoly over some of its most binged comedies so fans would be forced to the streaming service to get their fix.

Okay, so is NBCUniversal gonna consolidate all the current ways to watch their shows?

It feels like a natural progression to remove the option to watch new episodes of shows from channels like Bravo and E! on their respective individual company sites and push any and all NBCUniversal content to the new platform. However, this is unconfirmed, and it’s hard to get a read on where NBC’s head is at on that note.

Did NBC release any original programming on Peacock?

Yes! In addition to serving as the hub for many previous shows, Peacock also dipped its toes into the waters of original programming. So far, it has launched the reboots of Saved by the Bell and Punky Brewster, as well as the television adaptation of Brave New World.

And there’s plenty more where that came from. Down the pike for Peacock include Bel-Air (a reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from Will Smith), the spinoff Law & Order: Hate Crimes, a reboot of Queer as Folk, and television adaptations of MacGruber and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

Peacock launched nationwide on July 15, 2020.

What’s your biological age? Since having a kid several months ago, I feel like mine has shot up by about a decade. But other factors — like exercise and diet — are also important.

But what if you could somewhat comfortably live to be 150? Getting there may not have much to do with lifestyle choices like exercise and diet but how you react to the stressors of life (whether it be a new baby or following Arsenal FC). It’s the subject of our lead story today. Keep scrolling to read more on this brand-new research that suggests a dramatic scenario for future generations.

I’m Nick Lucchesi, editor-in-chief at Inverse.

If you have any suggestions for how to improve this newsletter — stories you’d like to see, stuff you don’t find valuable, even your own barber stories — drop us a line at newsletter@inverse.com.

Programming note: We are off for the long weekend. Inverse Daily returns Wednesday, June 2, 2021.

A tech tip before we jump in: Gmail users, make sure you never miss an edition by dragging the email version of this daily dispatch to your Primary tab. Here’s a GIF that shows you how:

This is an adapted version of the Inverse Daily newsletter for May 27, 2021. Subscribe for free and earn rewards for reading every day in your inbox.

Scientists identify the key to extending human life — A study in the journal Nature Communications combines data from blood analyses and information about physical exercise to identify a new measure influencing “biological age”. (People on Apple News apparently loved this one.) Here’s a clip from Sophie Putka:

The idea that we could extend our lifespan far beyond a century conjures images of humans stored in cryogenic chambers and decapitated heads preserved in jars, kept alive by whirring machines. In other words, science fiction.

But if a new study published this week in the journal Nature Communications is anything to go by, such a dramatically extended lifetime is not fantasy at all. The study combines data from blood analyses and information about physical exercise to identify a new measure of “biological age”.

The findings suggest there’s one aspect of human longevity that may be crucial if we are ever to meet our maximum potential. Counterintuitively, it has not to do with disease or a lifestyle choice.

Read the full story here.

More health science:

• How quickly do we become unfit? Health experts reveal the number of weeks
• Trees are good for human health in one strange, unexpected way
• 5 scientific reasons why being in nature is good for the brain

The hidden history of summer’s favorite fruit — Scientists reveal that the Sudanese Kordofan melon is the likely ancestor to the modern-day domestic watermelon, reports Tara Yarlagadda.

“Watermelons are just fascinating,” biologist Susanne S. Renner earnestly tells Inverse.

She should know. Currently an honorary professor of biology at the University of Washington, Renner is the lead author of a new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that rewrites the origin story of everyone’s favorite summer fruit.

Renner and her colleagues’ findings reveal how the watermelon got its evolutionary groove and became the sweet, sticky, brilliant superstar of the summer barbecue.

“[Watermelons] have long played a huge role, culturally and biologically,” Renner says. Yet as invested as we may be in these fruits today, their past speaks to another, seedier aspect of America’s culinary history.

Read the full story.

• Scientists are unraveling a fruit bat mystery
• How this company went from a few farms to filling up frozen food aisles
• Scientists are unraveling a fruit bat mystery

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles devastated actual turtles — During the height of “Turtle Mania,” red-eared sliders were shipped all over the world as pets, but a lot of them didn’t stay in their tanks. Brian Vanhooker is the writer of this newest feature:

The turtle-dumping problem was never more pronounced than during the height of popularity for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the animated TV series. During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the dumping of pet turtles around the world got so bad it resulted in millions of homeless turtles and changed turtle ecology all over the planet.

In 1975, the turtles-as-pets trend saw a steep decline after the sale of red-eared sliders smaller than four inches was banned in the United States due to salmonella.

Enter Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird who, in 1984, created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Designed as a parody of Daredevil, the Ninja Turtles were an independent comic that caught the attention of a marketing genius named Mark Freedman who brought the Turtles to a toy company called Playmates. Playmates then helped get a cartoon developed and the rest, as they say, is history.

Read the full story.

• Last Ronin: TMNT returns to its roots for a cyberpunk revenge
• A sea turtle superpower may be the reason they're dying
• Here’s an unprecedented look at how sea turtles make 500-mile journeys

Mars rovers: 5 things you don’t realize until you drive one — Vandi Verma has been working on Mars time since 2008. Here are five critical life lessons she has learned along the road. Passant Rabie has the story.

The moment she finishes her shift on Mars, Vandi Verma takes a second to reorient herself. She gazes out at the Red Planet, locating the faintly twinkling Sun in the night sky. Then, she comes back to Earth. Verma’s work on Mars is the driving force behind the Mars 2020 rover. As the chief engineer for robotic operations for NASA’s Perseverance rover, she spends her days immersed in a world of Martian terrain.

She even operates on “Mars time” here on Earth. With her feet firmly planted on Earth but her brain on Mars, where she has driven rovers for the last 13 years, she’s gained a rather unusual view of our place in the universe: “You’re literally looking from the rover’s perspective,” Verma says.

Read Verma’s list of five lessons she learned from working “on Mars”.

Related stories:

• 5 major differences between Perseverance and China’s Zhurong Mars rover
• The wild story behind one man’s fight to prove there is life on Mars
• A volcanic eruption on Mars could help us find life on the planet

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• Before we go, happy birthday (🎂) to these folks: Jamie Oliver (46), Siouxsie Sioux (64), Chris Colfer (31), Henry Kissinger (98), Andre 3000 (46). (Source: AP.)

Tim Miller has always been a fan of short stories.

“My father read a lot, which is where I got my habit,” he tells Inverse in a recent interview.

Before the Deadpool director reimagined adult animation by co-creating the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots with David Fincher (Season 2 is out now), he was in his father’s library.

It was there where he found a book called Chronopolis and Other Stories by J. G. Ballard. The short story book included “The Drowned Giant,” which tells the story of a dead human giant who washes up on the beach.

“I read it and I loved it. I even did an illustration for a fanzine in high school.”

“The Drowned Giant” is the standout episode from Love, Death & Robots Season 2, but the path to production wasn’t easy.

“Ballard is no longer with us, but his daughters are around. I asked them if I could do it Season 1, and they said no,” Miller says.

“I proceeded to send 50 emails begging them, and in one I said ‘Look, I’ve loved this story for years,’ and I sent them the illustration.”

That’s part of what convinced Ballard’s daughters to allow Miller to adapt the story for the screen, and he took great pains to make sure the celebrated science-fiction writer’s original vision carried over.

“If you read the short story, which I highly encourage, you’ll see it’s incredibly faithful both in tone and in the actual words,” Miller says. “I literally took the prose, converted it into a screenplay, and edited it down.”

The result is one of the most nuanced and haunting chapters of Love, Death & Robots so far. In “The Drowned Giant,” the washed-up carcass, curious locals climb all over the body and cover it with graffiti before it’s ultimately carved up into pieces, quickly becoming a local legend even as some evidence remains. In his episode, the last in Season 2, Miller abstains from flashy sci-fi ultra-violence for a somber meditation on humanity’s inability to respect and recognize the world around us.

Miller has been nominated for an Academy Award for Gopher Broke, a short animated film he co-wrote and executive produced. He also directed Terminator: Dark Fate and produced 2020’s live-action Sonic the Hedgehog.

In an interview with Inverse, he reveals the motivation for the series, what to expect in Season 3 (and beyond), and his predictions for Deadpool 3.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What was the motivation behind Love, Death & Robots as a series?

Well, David Fincher and I had tried to get a Heavy Metal film made for years and years. I mean, hundreds of meetings. The original movie came out in 1982 and it was very inspirational to a lot of animators who wanted to do adult animation.

So when I met David, we wanted to do something together and we said, “What about doing a new Heavy Metal film?” because he was an animation fan, but the world just wasn't ready for it at the time. But in the ten years that we did meetings and tried to get the project going, the world came around to see adult animation as viable, and Netflix was the one that was willing to take a chance. And so here we are.

Did the reception to Season 1 surprise you?

It would be arrogant if I said no. I knew that there were fans of this material, the thing that had held us back was the fact there were no comparisons for it, there were no other shows that had been successful that had a similar structure. That makes people nervous when it comes to spending the kind of money that we needed to do it well. But I knew that people were out there because I was one of them. So I wasn't surprised that they found the show.

Love, Death & Robots Season 2 feels like a shift in style from Season 1. How did the production process change between the two seasons?

Not much really. There's definitely a different perspective. We had different supervisors and directors helping me out on Season 1, but I picked all the stories for both of them. However, Jennifer Yuh Nelson came on board in Season 2, and she's got a strong voice and a clear vision. We had some interesting debates in stories that maybe I wouldn't have included or would have been in for a while and then moved out, she would fight for them. "Ice" is one of them, she was always a big fan of that.

Every time we rearranged the board for what stories were going to be in the actual show she would fight for that and others. That's the biggest thing. And then of course the nature of the show is that we work with different creators and different companies, so they bring a different flavor to it every time.

What benefits and drawbacks come with an anthology series?

There's a budgetary drawback in that you're reinventing the world every time and from a CG animation standpoint, you don't get the standardization of assets. If you model the character, you can use it for a whole season of television versus one show. I think the audience has gone with us, but you don't have the benefit of familiarity with characters from a story standpoint. So each time you're having to explain what everybody wants, what the stakes are, what the rules of the world are.

“On the benefit side, you can do anything.”

On the benefit side, you can do anything. Any story that I thought was interesting, we could do it and could mix and match genres and tones. Also, the audience doesn't know what was coming next — in a good way. Because TV is so often predictable, which can be both good and a bad thing, for me it helps to not get bored. If I do a Terminator movie, it's kind of all I think about for two years: Terminator morning, noon, and night. It's a bit of an intellectual desert, whereas this is like dessert every day.

Every phase of this project is special in its own way. It’s amazing when Robert Valley’s pencils come in for "Ice." It's amazing when I see the character design for "Pop Squad." It's amazing when I hear Stephen Pacey read “The Drowned Giant.” There are all these little jewels that you wouldn't get on a contiguous show.

You’re now executive producing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. How will the sequel differ from the first film?

I can't tell you that. Everybody knows that Tails is in it, and some other secrets have slipped, but if you're a hardcore Sonic fan there's more of the franchise to love. And in this one, the director Jeff Fowler is a pretty hardcore fanboy. And I think he's going to do it justice even more so than the first film.

“Everybody knows that Tails is in it.”

You practically invented a new genre of superhero movie with Deadpool. Do you think the character you helped create can exist in the MCU without being dramatically changed for the worse?

I do. I think Ryan Reynolds' take on the character and the way he embraces the particular kind of insanity — even if you said he's not gonna use four-letter words — would still be there. He still is that character. You can take the R-rated parts out of it if you wanted and it would still be Deadpool if Ryan was doing it.

“You can take the R-rated parts out of it if you wanted and it would still be Deadpool if Ryan was doing it.”

Love, Death & Robots has already been greenlit for a third season set for release next year. It’s already confirmed the famed Three Robots will make a return. Any chance of other follow-up shorts?

I can't tell you, but we definitely wanted to make sure that “Three Robots” came back, it was one of our favorites and one of the fan favorites. I'm sure you noticed that [“Three Robots” author] John Scalzi is my go-to guy. He is a genius and a super nice guy and very into the show. I hang out with him even when we don't have any show business to do. If he's in town, he comes to lunch. He even took me to the Nebula Awards and I got to nerd out with all the sci-fi authors.

How many episodes will there be in Love, Death & Robots Season 3?

I'll just say what has become volumes two and three, we planned as volume two. And then Netflix said, 'Hey, is there any way we can get this on the service sooner?' So this was the way we did it, by prioritizing a batch of them.

“What has become volumes two and three, we planned as volume two.”

I don't want to be criticized for anything, but I guess if the critics have to call us out on something, there not being enough is not a bad thing. To have people wanting more of the show? I'll take it.

Love, Death & Robots is now streaming on Netflix.

As the Epic Games v. Apple trial came to a close this week, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers was forced to explain a joke that didn’t land.

"I made a joke the other day about August 13, which is the date of the hotfix," he told her court. "Not everyone got the joke. I'm not promising to have this by August 13, but I want to get to this while the memory of the testimonies [and] the arguments are fresh. But we do have thousands and thousands of pages to review."

The term “hotfix” typically refers to a small software tweak rolled out without the fanfare of an update, but Epic’s release of the "Fortnite Mega Drop" update on August 13, 2020, was a declaration of war.

This single update could wind up being one of the most consequential in the history of the gaming and tech industries, and it highlights Epic Games' clear motive of bringing Apple to court. Still, whether Epic or Apple emerge victorious in the case, the potential consequences of the ruling for the rest of us are far less clear.

I'm Tomas Franzese, and this is The Hotfix, a column about ideas that could improve video games and the culture around them. Each week or so I'll explore a problem in gaming and how it could be solved. I'll talk to experts, offer my own analysis, and solicit you, the people I'm writing for, to sound off with your ideas. Send any and all feedback to thehotfix@inverse.com. 🎮

What happened? On iOS and Android, the August 2020 hotfix allowed players to circumvent the App Store and Google Play Store and use "Epic direct payment" to get V-Bucks at a 20 percent discount. It was a clear move to entice players away from those storefronts, and Apple subsequently kicked Fortnite off the App Store that day.

"Epic Games took the unfortunate step of violating the App Store guidelines that are applied equally to every developer and designed to keep the store safe for our users," an Apple representative told The Verge that same day. "As a result their Fortnite app has been removed from the store."

"Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments that apply to every developer who sells digital goods or services," the Apple rep explained.

Following this, Epic quickly rolled out a #FreeFortnite campaign across social media and the game itself, claimed the App Store was “anti-competitive,” and took Apple to court. This all led to multiple hearings and the court proceedings of recent weeks.

Why it matters: If Epic Games wins this trial, Apple's ecosystem will change forever. Epic Games will have the power to put its storefront on iPhones. That outcome would likely pave the way for similar lawsuits against platform holders like PlayStation. Additionally, it might cause Apple to take a lower cut of app revenue and mean that not all iPhone apps would need to be approved by Apple.

While it might be a positive change for app developers and publishers in the short term, Apple’s lawyers have argued it could open the door to safety and storefront curation issues. If any app can run on an Apple device, it’s more likely users could get scammed, hacked, or defrauded by sketchy actors. However, it’s important to remember that Apple makes tens of billions of dollars from the App Store each year and would likely prefer to keep it that way.

The precedent this verdict could set for all platforms that sell digital games is daunting. It could spawn competition on all kinds of connected devices and gaming consoles, even if Epic Games only intends to target Apple right now.

Epic stands to profit enormously from a favorable verdict by taking back that 30 percent cut from iOS and cutting out other intermediaries. During the trial, Judge Gonzalez Rogers appeared unmoved by the company’s ongoing attempts to shift the focus to its dedicated young fans.

"Epic is here because if relief is granted, they go from a multibillion-dollar company to a maybe-trillion-dollar company, who knows," Rogers said. "But they won't do it out of the kindness of their heart."

What's next? Epic Games' #FreeFortnite campaign might sound wholesome, but it’s worth remembering the company intentionally instigated this situation — likely because it could make more money if the Epic Games Store app were available on iOS and other platforms. Even though Apple's practices aren't developer-friendly, this hotfix demonstrates how Epic Games was still able to weaponize Fortnite’s massive userbase against Apple in court.

Epic is not the good guy here, and neither is Apple. In this case, Apple maintaining the status quo on the App Store and reforming its revenue split and developer relationship might be the best outcome.

“Mr. Musk doesn’t understand a bit of neuroscience and what is the brain,” Miguel Nicolelis tells Inverse, adding, “he barely knows where it’s located.”

Nicolelis runs the Nicolelis Lab at Duke University. He’s a pioneer in neuroscience, specifically in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), essentially connecting a brain to a machine via some kind of device, such as a brain implant.

He’s got some pretty harsh words for Elon Musk and his emerging brain technology company, Neuralink.

Perhaps the most infamous player in the BCI space right now is Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded by Musk and others. Neuralink recently released a video of a monkey implanted with a Neuralink BCI playing a bootleg version of Pong with its mind. It took the internet by storm.

In a recent interview with Inverse, Nicolelis offers two big critiques of Neuralink. He says it’s...

• Lacking innovation and copying other researchers’ work
• Making promises it can’t keep

For example, Nicolelis says Neuralink’s video game-playing monkey isn’t groundbreaking.

“We had a wireless implant [in monkeys] since 2014,” he says, referring to a 2014 paper published in Nature Methods.

Nicolelis also says Neuralink is taking credit for the work he and other BCI researchers have conducted for decades. “[Musk] sells things that have been invented before and he tries to say that he’s done some amazing thing.”

“I just find it a little offensive.”

Max Hodak — the co-founder of Neuralink who recently left the company — was a former student in Nicolelis’s lab, along with two other unnamed Neuralink employees, he says.

“Neuralink hasn’t done anything that I consider innovative at all,” Nicolelis says. “I just find it a little offensive that these tech guys who behave like gods come out and say, oh we are going to do much better.”

A source with direct knowledge of the situation who wished to remain anonymous confirms to Inverse that Hodak was a researcher in Nicolelis’ lab between 2008 and 2012. The source adds that while Neuralink may not be inventing new neuroscience, they are indeed innovating when it comes to better engineering the science and conveying their technology directly to patients.

But Nicolelis dismisses some of the company’s most-exalted inventions, such as a robot that can implant electrodes, as a “beautiful gizmo” and “just a machine.” He doesn’t believe there is a market for Neuralink’s products, calling it a “boutique market that doesn’t justify a company” with Neuralink’s considerable investments.

Perhaps even worse, he says Neuralink makes consumers promises it can’t keep based on technology that is not currently available.

“The guy is a master of selling things that may never work.”

Although Neuralink aims to use its BCI to improve the condition of people with paralysis, the company has loftier goals of enabling humans “to rewind memories or download them into robots,” according to previous Inverse reporting.

It’s not entirely clear whether Neuralink’s program actually benefits individuals with disabilities, or whether it’s really a covert excuse to explore transhumanism — the merging of robots with humans.

Nicolelis likens the company’s business model to “bad science fiction” that not even “Arthur Clarke could write about.” (Clarke was a popular 20th-century science fiction writer.)

“The guy is a master of selling things that may never work,” Nicolelis says. “They will never make people download their emotions or their deep cognitive functions, and they’ll never make people learn French by uploading French grammar to a brain-machine interface.”

He adds that many aspects of what we consider being human, such as the semantics behind language, cannot be reproduced with a computer algorithm.

“You will never reproduce it,” Nicolelis says, adding “for a science fiction movie, that's fine, but for Elon Musk to come out and say exactly the same thing is bogus — totally bogus.”

“Totally bogus.”

Ultimately, the biggest offense that Nicolelis lays at Musk’s feet: not considering the human ramifications of his decisions and focusing on the technology first and foremost.

“What I see is most of these guys, these techie guys, going there and talking about technology like there is no human being behind what is going to be done.”

“What they did was just marketing, just theater.”

Nicolelis believes there is a benefit in having individuals with experience in the medical field create human-centered neurotechnology.

A medical background would help leaders in the field of neurotechnology to consider ethical questions, such as whether using potentially dangerous and highly invasive brain implants — which break the membrane of the human brain, scarring it — are necessary, or whether non-invasive implants may suffice for emerging BCI approaches.

“As a physician, I think about my patients and needs, and the safety of my patient first, before I think about the beauty or the stiffness of a piece of technology,” Nicolelis says, in a not-so-subtle nod to the tech scions that dominate the BCI headlines.

In the end, Neuralink may be selling a stack of false promises that it cannot keep.

“What they did was just marketing, just theater,” Nicolelis says, “Mr. Musk is an expert on it.”

In a way, Loki is a spinoff of an adaptation of an adaptation. The upcoming Disney+ series branches away from the trickster god’s main appearances in the Avengers and Thor movies. But those films adapt their characters’ Marvel Comics storylines, which were in turn inspired by Norse mythology.

Following all those steps away from ancient myths, much has been lost in translation. But one recent Netflix series brings versions of your favorite MCU characters back to their ancestral roots – with a very Riverdale twist.

Hailing from Norway, Ragnarok is a Netflix Original series created by Danish screenwriter Adam Price.

It follows Magne Seier (David Stakston), a clumsy and near-sighted teenager with dyslexia, as he moves to the historic town of Edda with his family, including warm matriarch Turid (Henriette Steenstrup) and angsty brother Laurits (Jonas Strand Gravli). But as Magne settles into his new life in Edda, he must confront these harsh truths:

1. The most prominent family in town, the Jutuls, are ruining the environment
2. He’s getting a lot stronger and doesn’t need his glasses
3. Also, he can suddenly throw a hammer 500 meters

While learning all this, Magne also meets Isolde (Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin), the annoying environmentalist in class. They bond, and she reveals her discovery that the Jutuls are contaminating Edda’s drinking water. But Magne’s sudden super-strength isn’t something she can help with – at least in the short time before an early, deadly twist forces Magne to question which locals he can trust.

Across its first season, Ragnarok succeeds as a hip, modern retelling of Norse mythology in which existing myths are set to repeat themselves. Magne slowly realizes he’s destined to become the God of Thunder, while the Jutul family’s members are not just powerful figures in local society. They’re also the mythological Norse giants, ancient beings who warred with gods.

But outside of that literal clash of the titans, Ragnarok offers plenty of smaller-scale drama. The first season alone is full of romance, drug use, characters experimenting with gender and sexuality – even a murder mystery. Riverdale wishes it could maintain this series’ brand of realism while reaching toward the dramatic and fantastical.

Season 1 premiered early last year, getting lost amid an early-pandemic streaming boom. Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix, and it contains even more mythology, Marvel-rivaling action, dream sequences, murder, and (of course) teen drama. In the new episodes, Magne’s army slowly grows as others like him emerge from the shadows – each with their own powers and MCU counterpart.

Laurits, Magne’s younger brother, goes on his own journey, confronting less-than-comfortable elements of his gender presentation and sexuality, while figuring out how his arc relates to his brother’s transformation and the Jutul clan’s scheming against Edda as a whole.

If you love Thor and Loki but wish both were depicted on screen more faithfully, then this is the show for you. Without feeling forced to retell Norse myths in exact detail, Ragnarok crafts its characters in a way that acknowledges their rich cultural histories without spoon-feeding it to audiences.

And when Loki rattles off something obscure about his home life in Loki, or Thor soliloquizes about the Midgard Serpent in Thor: Love and Thunder, you’ll know exactly what they’re talking about – thanks to some super-powered, super-angsty Norwegian teens.

Ragnarok Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

Avengers: Endgame transformed the MCU with its “Time Heist.” In order to undo Thanos’ mighty Snap and revive their lost comrades, the surviving Avengers first had to reassemble the Infinity Stones, requiring plenty of Stone Logistics.

Three stones were located in New York (circa 2012), while one was on Vormir and another could be recovered from Asgard. A mission to retrieve all five broke up the decimated (but still capable) Avengers and kept multiple storylines moving. But was there an easier solution?

The Theory – In answer to the prompt “What’s the most unrealistic thing in the Marvel movies, excluding the superpowers?,” TikTokker @mariedmoonlight identified an Endgame plot hole so massive, you’ll wonder why you never thought of it. Try this on for size: as the Avengers struggled to recover all the Infinity Stones, why did they not simply travel back in time to just after the Snap, fighting a weakened Thanos to capture the Infinity Gauntlet?

Seems obvious, right? So, why didn’t this happen? Theories abound.

Perhaps the Avengers didn’t believe they could beat Thanos again (despite Thor later decapitating him with relative ease). But fighting the Mad Titan right after the Snap certainly would have been easier than fighting a younger, stronger Thanos (from 2014) and sacrificing a team member’s life to secure the Soul Stone. Perhaps the rules of time travel wouldn’t have allowed for a fight between Infinity War-era Thanos and Endgame-era Avengers, because it would have created too many branching realities.

But this, too, is easily explained. Just as the Avengers avoided creating new realities by sending Steve Rogers/Captain America back through time to return the Stones, they could have easily done the same with the Infinity Gauntlet. (Plus, timelines break all the time, as we’ll see in Loki.)

The Inverse Analysis – It’s not the most glamorous answer, but the most likely reason Endgame’s writers didn’t go this easier route in resolving the Avengers’ conflict with Thanos is exactly that: it would have been too easy. Endgame was always going to be an epic finale event for the MCU, and an epic story necessitates epic challenges. What could be better-equipped to achieve that goal than a three-destination, five-part tour of the Avengers’ greatest hits?

If Endgame’s decision to take the long way around to victory was purely to benefit the storytelling, then this plot hole remains unresolved. Perhaps a future Marvel project will acknowledge this weird, missed opportunity. Considering the upcoming premiere of Loki – an entire series about characters resolving the MCU’s complicated-at-best, nonsensical-at-worst time travel – in just two weeks, we could get an answer to this lingering question sooner than expected.

Avengers: Endgame is now streaming on Disney+.

Rich in vitamins and antioxidants, these culinary staples can help prevent cognitive decline and keep your memory sharp.

View this story on Inverse

How important is What If…? to Marvel’s future plans?

The upcoming animated series will introduce audiences to a series of alternate realities, reinterpreting versions of familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe moments. In one history, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) was given the super-soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans); in another, heroes like Captain America become zombies. The series is said to be disconnected from stories in the prime MCU reality, and most fans assume nothing in What If…? will impact future MCU titles.

But what if (see what we did there?) that’s not actually the case? What if What If...? will actually help set up a major moment in a future MCU title — even one as major as Avengers 5?

Marvel’s Rod Serling — What If…? will be narrated by Uatu the Watcher (voiced by Jeffrey Wright), a cosmic being committed to watching over the events of Marvel’s Multiverse. Fans have known about Uatu’s role in the series for some time, but recent comments from Wright indicate Uatu may be more than a passive observer.

In an interview featured in the Summer 2021 issue of Disney’s D23 Magazine (via The Direct), Wright teased that Uatu “starts off as an observer” in What If…? Season 1, but “gradually becomes more compelled by what he watches."

The actor also teased possibilities for future What If…? stories in the MCU, saying:

“There are infinite possibilities with this series within the MCU. I'm open to all of it. One thing I think we're realizing with Marvel and Kevin Feige's leadership is that these are broad, broad canvasses they're painting on. I don't even try to anticipate, so I'm just open to all of it - as The Watcher would be."

The Watcher in the MCU — Wright’s comments suggest that The Watcher will take a more active role in controlling the events of What If…? than his title suggests. If that’s the case, it begs the question: Will Uatu ever step in on humanity’s behalf in another future Marvel film or series?

Currently, there’s ample evidence Uatu could do just that. In the comics, the character has a reputation for breaking the Watchers’ pact of non-interference, and certain storylines have seen him leap into action to help humanity defeat powerful cosmic beings like Galactus and Kang the Conqueror. Notably, both of those characters have been rumored to appear as the main villain in Avengers 5, and fans already know that Kang is coming to the MCU soon.

Given his comic-book history with Galactus and Kang, it wouldn’t be all that strange for Uatu to actively hinder the efforts of either villain in Avengers 5 – or another future MCU crossover. Such actions would be in keeping with both his personality and perspective — especially if he’s already going to break his code in What If…?

The Inverse Analysis — One (admittedly sketchy) rumor has been circulating online, claiming that What If…? will set up the use of a Marvel Zombies storyline in Loki Season 2. While that rumor seems pretty suspect, it’s worth noting in relation to Wright’s comments. Maybe What If…? really will be woven more closely into the future of the MCU than Marvel wants us to believe.

What If… ? will premiere on Disney+ in August 2021.

Eternals poses an interesting problem for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Because its heroes are, well, eternal, Marvel needs to explain why they didn’t show up to help out earlier when Ultron tried to destroy the Earth or Thanos successfully wiped out half of the universe.

The trailer and official synopsis for Eternals manages to sidestep that question by describing the Eternals as benevolent aliens/gods who were careful to guide humanity’s evolution over thousands of years without interfering — until now. (Exactly what sort of threat could force them out of hiding when Thanos didn’t remains to be seen, but we’re guessing it's their perennial enemies the Deviants breaking some sort of truce.)

Either way, the careful table setting Marvel needed to pull off just to explain the Eternals' existence in the MCU reveals an even bigger hurdle facing the studio: the X-Men.

Marvel has two main options when it comes to the X-Men. The studio can either:

1. Reveal that mutants have been hiding out in the MCU for years, or
2. Decide that some major event like the Blip recently triggered the latent X-gene in mutants all over the world.

That second option seems a lot easier, but it’s actually almost impossible to pull off. For one thing, one of the most famous mutants in X-Men lore is directly tied to a specific historical event. Magneto is a holocaust survivor, and if Marvel tries to change that by introducing a young new version of the character it would undercut his entire personality. On top of that, rumor has it a Wolverine anthology series is already in the works for Disney+, which would start with a season set in 1980s MCU.

Marvel seemingly has no choice but to announce that mutants have secretly existed in the MCU for decades (or maybe even centuries). Thankfully, that sort of fits with the entire X-Men story. Mutants are an allegory for oppressed minorities, which means they spend a lot of time in hiding. So it’s understandable that if mutants did exist during the first three phases of the MCU, they would have stayed out of sight.

Still, it’s one thing to say that the X-Men were hiding out at Professor X’s mansion in upstate New York, and another to say they sat idly by while the Avengers dealt with multiple world-threatening events. Wouldn’t the X-Men show up to help out at the Battle of New York (practically in their backyard)? Wouldn’t Magneto step in when Ultron (literally a metal man) tried to drop an entire city on Eastern Europe? Wouldn’t Doctor Strange think to call in a few mutants when he was assembling every hero on Earth to fight Thanos in Endgame?

I don’t expect Marvel Studios to answer these questions anytime soon. But when mutants finally do come to the MCU — and it may be sooner than you think — the first thing fans will want to know is why they weren’t there to help out when the world needed them most.

Hopefully, Professor X has a good answer.

He’s (probably) back! After saying goodbye to Star Trek, seemingly forever, one beloved Next Generation cast member may be returning for Star Trek: Picard Season 2.

During a Cameo video message to a fan, actor John de Lancie gave an update on filming Picard Season 2. While discussing his co-stars, de Lancie let slip the name of an actor whose character we’d assumed was gone for good. But could there be another explanation for his admission?

Here’s what de Lancie possibly revealed and why it might support a theory that Q is taking Jean-Luc on a wild time-travel romp. Possible spoilers (and wild speculation) ahead for Star Trek: Picard Season 2.

Recently speaking to a fan via celebrity video-message app Cameo, de Lancie said:

“I am back into the Star Trek Universe. I am doing Picard right now with – of all people – Mr. Picard. So, that’s been great fun. It’s been great fun to see Patrick [Stewart], to see Brent [Spiner], and to see Jonathan [Frakes]. I am going to be working with Jonathan coming up here in a couple of weeks. So, it’s great fun.”

Did you catch it? As TrekMovie and other fan sites have noted, it makes sense that Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes are on set for Picard – but what’s Brent Spiner still doing there? Making matters more complicated, de Lancie mentioned in another Cameo video that:

“I am on the next season of Picard. And Sir Patrick and I have had a whole bunch of scenes, which we thoroughly enjoyed working with each other. I have got one coming up with Data on this coming Tuesday. So yeah, we are moving along.”

Is Commander Data back for Star Trek: Picard Season 2?

Spiner’s Commander Data, of course, died in the Season 1 finale of Star Trek: Picard, paving the way for the actor playing him to exit the series as well. It’s not yet clear if Data is back in Season 2, but it does appear Spiner is confirmed to return in some capacity.

Buried in a Paramount+ press release for First Contact Day back in April, Spiner was listed in the cast for Picard Season 2. Conventional wisdom has it that the actor won’t be playing Data, instead reprising his other role as Altan Soong, Data’s previously unknown human brother (first introduced in Picard’s two-part Season 1 finale). Alternately, could Spiner be playing Lore, Data’s evil twin brother? Or is he really back as Data?

When Inverse spoke to Spiner earlier this month, he said he was “open” to returning for Picard. That’s certainly not a confirmation he’s in Season 2, but it does appear that de Lancie has confirmed he filmed scenes with Spiner recently, suggesting he’s still a part of Picard’s second season.

Picard’s time-travel plot thickens

Now, de Lancie’s comments about reuniting with Spiner and sharing a scene with Data would seem to unambiguously confirm that the character is returning to Star Trek: Picard. (That said, the actor could have simply meant that he had a scene with Spiner, referring to the actor by his previous character’s name.)

But if Q is meeting Data – or some version of Data – that kind of interaction would seem to double down on the idea Picard Season 2 will involve time travel. In the teaser trailer for Season 2, Jean-Luc mentions that “the true final frontier is time.” Elsewhere, the trailer contains all kinds of hints that Season 2 will deal with Picard reliving events from his past.

If Q is wrapped up in a time-travel story, it wouldn't be the character’s first, ahem, time. In the TNG episodes “Tapestry” and “All Good Things...” Q showed Picard alternate ways history could have progressed, bringing Picard back to pivotal points in his own life. Were similar events to unfold in Picard Season 2, Q might certainly meet Data.

The Spiner cameo nobody has considered

There’s another way Spiner could appear in a flashback involving Q, one that wouldn’t require him to play Data. What if Spiner is playing a middle-aged version of Dr. Noonian Soong, Data’s actual creator?

In TNG, we saw a “young” version of Soong via holograms and dream sequences, in the episodes “Birthright Part 1” and “Inheritance.” In both cases, he was played by Spiner. On top of that, in the TNG episode “Brothers,” Spiner played Soong as a dying old man.

But what about all the time in between? Sometime after Data’s activation in 2338, but before his 2367 meeting with his father, Noonian Soong was presmably still running around the galaxy. We don’t know much about this period in his life, but a much younger Picard was in command of the USS Stargazer in the 2340s and 2350s. The Picard teaser trailer makes a big deal out of Jean-Luc’s model of the USS Stargazer, implying some aspect of that backstory could be explored further in Season 2.

Did the Stargazer cross paths with Noonian Soong? We know so little about those years, and it’s possible some aspect of Soong’s exile has been kept secret. Additionally, unanswered questions abound about where Altan Soong came from.

If Q visits Data’s creator at some point during the 2340s, it’s possible that Altan’s almost totally blank backstory could be explained, too. And when de Lancie said he had a scene coming up with Data, he could have meant Data’s dad.

Star Trek: Picard hits Paramount+ in early 2022.

Game of Thrones fans, rejoice! HBO is continuing to invest in the fantasy world of Westeros with a new spinoff series.

According to Deadline, the network has tapped Person of Interest and Helstrom writer Amanda Segel to pen a Game of Thrones spinoff tentatively titled 10,000 Ships. Little is known about the project, but its basic premise has the potential to set up one of the most exciting, refreshing Thrones spinoffs currently in the works at HBO (at least of the ones we know about).

10,000 Ships could also single-handedly rectify one of the biggest mistakes Game of Thrones made across its eight seasons. Here’s how.

A Legendary Warrior Queen — 10,000 Ships will reportedly take place about 1,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones, focusing on the end of the Second Spice War. That conflict saw the forces of the Rhoynar — a race of people who lived along the river Rhoyne in Essos — widely defeated by Valyrian warriors and their dragons. Many of the surviving Rhoynar were ultimately saved from destruction by a legendary warrior queen: Princess Nymeria of Ny Sar.

As described by A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin, Nymeria — upon hearing of Valyria’s victory — gathered all the surviving members of the Rhoynar (mostly women and children) and led them onto 10,000 ships, undertaking a perilous voyage from Essos to Dorne.

Arriving in Dorne, Nymeria later married the head of House Martell and set out on an epic, ultimately successful quest to unite Dorne under one ruler — Nymeria herself. She went on to rule Dorne for nearly 30 years, with Arya Stark later naming a Direwolf in her honor.

Assuming that 10,000 Ships focuses on the initial journey made by Nymeria and the Rhoynar, the series could give fans the epic Dornish storyline they never got to see on Game of Thrones.

A Shot at Redemption — Pedro Pascal’s star-making performance as Oberyn Martell in Season 4 of Game of Thrones gave the HBO series the foundation it needed to make Dorne a force to be reckoned with in the later seasons. Instead, Dorne’s presence across Thrones fizzled out more-or-less immediately after Oberyn met a sudden, brutal end.

Game of Thrones dedicated an entire storyline in its fifth season to Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Bronn (Jerome Flynn) traveling to Dorne, also introducing seemingly important players like Oberyn’s daughters and his older brother. However, the show’s versions of these characters were not nearly as well-realized, memorable, or clever as they’d been in Martin’s books. None proved to be as charismatic, formidable, or impactful to the course of the show as Pascal’s Oberyn.

To make matters worse, Thrones’ version of Dorne was never as detailed or fully realized as its other locations, which made Jamie and Bronn’s journey there feel all the more lackluster. The show’s treatment of Dorne in its fifth season was so universally criticized by both book readers and casual viewers alike, in fact, that the series killed off its prominent Dornish figures early in Season 6, relegating the surviving ones to minor roles in its seventh season.

That’s a shame, considering what a real exploration of Dorne and the Dornish people might have brought to Thrones. How would a region with very different customs from the rest of Westeros look and feel? Fortunately, a show about the warrior queen who first conquered all of Dorne could answer that question.

The Inverse Analysis — News of 10,000 Ships’ development arrives just a few weeks after filming kicked off on HBO’s first Thrones spinoff series: House of the Dragon. That prequel will focus on the history of House Targaryen; it’s set several hundred years before the major events of Thrones. Though House of the Dragon promises to introduce a new cast of characters (especially for those who haven’t read Martin’s books), it will still focus heavily on regions and political dynamics every Thrones viewer knows well.

10,000 Ships, on the other hand, could spotlight a specific time period and setting in Game of Thrones lore that the flagship series left essentially unexplored. That alone should make the series an exciting prospect for any fan of Martin’s world. Now comes the question of whether 10,000 Ships will earn a series order from HBO – or become yet another Game of Thrones spinoff that the network develops and opts not to move forward with.

Amazon's $8 billion MGM acquisition gives it access to James Bond, Rocky, and tons of other movie and TV franchises. Here are the TK biggest sci-fi movies and shows now at Amazon.

View this story on Inverse

Clean energy can help reduce global emissions — but without energy storage systems, it could cause chaos.

During Tesla’s September 2020 “Battery Day” presentation, CEO Elon Musk outlined a plan to massively increase battery production and enable the transition toward renewables. Sources like solar energy and wind power sound good, but they’ll only produce energy at certain times of the day. It’s no good trying to power a house at night if all your energy is from solar, for example.

“That unstable network grid system is supplied with intermittent renewables,” Jonas Eklind, CEO of energy storage firm Azelio, tells Inverse. “This together really is a recipe for chaos.”

Want to know more about what we’ll need to tackle the clean energy transition, why long-duration energy storage is vital, and how Eklind envisions the future energy grid? Read the full interview, only in MUSK READS+.

So what is the solution? Musk’s proposal was to massively increase battery production.

• To fully electrify transportation, battery production for electric vehicles would need to increase 100-fold above current levels, estimated at 0.1 Terawatt-hours, to reach 10 Terawatt-hours.
• To electrify other high energy use industries, battery production for applications other than electric vehicles needs to jump 1,600-fold above current levels, estimated at 0.006 Terawatt-hours, to reach 10 Terawatt-hours.

But there’s a wide variety of energy storage systems out there, all of which can be used to facilitate what the International Energy Agency described as a “complete transformation of the global energy system.”

Here are a few of the energy storage solutions out there, including a few that could beat lithium-ion on key metrics like cost and longer-duration storage.

4. Lithium-ion batteries — Tesla’s favored means of energy storage. The United States Environmental and Energy Study Institute claims that lithium-ion batteries account for 90 percent of battery storage used in the global grid today.

Large-scale installations include Tesla’s South Australia battery, finished in December 2017, offering 100 megawatts of storage capacity. But that battery only offers 129 megawatt-hours, which means that it can only supply its full 100 megawatts of capacity for just over one hour. Great for balancing the grid’s workload — tests show the battery saved the South Australia grid — but not so great for supplying energy for much longer.

3. Pumped hydropower — The current reigning champion. The United States Environmental and Energy Study Institute notes that pumped hydro currently accounts for 95 percent of the United States’ utility-scale energy storage.

Note that pumped hydro is not classed as a battery, which uses chemicals in a power pack to store electricity. Instead, hydro pumps water from a low reservoir into a high reservoir. It’s released when it’s needed, and the energy is used to move a turbine and power a generator.

These can run for a bit longer. The Energy Storage Association claim they can typically supply power for six to 20 hour. In 2017 they supplied around two percent, or 23 gigawatts, of the total electricity supply system.

2. Thermal energy — The less popular one. A phase change material is used to move from solid to liquid as heat is applied, storing the energy. When the energy is needed again, the heat is released and the material returns to a solid.

Azelio has developed the TES.POD with this use in mind. The pod heats up an aluminum alloy to around 600 degrees Celsius, and then the heat energy is transferred as required.

Although Azelio’s pod can supply 13 hours of electricity, it only started construction on its first commercial installation in February 2021, making it one of the less prevalent systems on the list.

Thermal energy storage can also combine with concentrated solar panels, which focus the sun’s rays onto a receiver. This can be used to melt salt, which is then stored ready as it’s needed.

1. Compressed air — Another potential storage system. This idea takes in air, compresses it into tanks or underground caves, then releases it when it’s needed.

“Nothing that exists or is in development can store energy as well, and as cheaply, as compressed air,” Seamus Garvey, professor of dynamics at the University of Nottingham, wrote in October 2018. Garvey noted, however, that the technology is “grossly undervalued.”

Perhaps the biggest issue, Garvey notes, is that it has a similar problem to pumped hydro: it’s better suited for long-term energy storage. For short-term responses, the lithium-ion battery may still reign supreme.

Far from a single solution for every situation, energy storage of the future may require a wide range of ideas — especially if intermittent sources are going to play a big role in the future.

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If a “horny ocean man” named Mr. Nimbus is any indication, Rick and Morty Season 5 looks to be just a touch more sexualized than your average season of the Adult Swim phenomenon.

Surprisingly enough, a lot of that sex-positivity will come from Morty’s parents Beth and Jerry Smith. Their rocky relationship led to a temporary separation at the end of the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere that lasted until that season’s finale. Since then, the couple has been back on track and apparently better than ever.

“It’s a fun season for Beth and Jerry,” Sarah Chalke, who voices Beth, tells Inverse. If the bondage-themed episode teased in the Season 5 trailer is any indication, that might be an understatement.

“Lots of sexual adventures.”

Inverse spoke with Chalke and co-stars Chris Parnell (Jerry) and Spencer Grammer (Summer). But at the tail end of a busy day of interviews, the Rick and Morty stars were more interested in talking about their characters’ sexuality than the finer plot points of the Rick and Morty multiverse.

“Lots of sexual adventures,” Parnell promises. “Season 5 for Jerry and Beth is mostly about their sexual relationship. It’s kind of all the show explores.” While Parnell’s comment is a bit sarcastic, Grammer confirms “there’s more sex in Season 5.” So maybe this one’s legitimate? Thus far, the series seldom explores sexuality — with a few glaring exceptions.

Sure, Morty procreated with a robot, Rick copulated with a stadium full of hive-mind-controlled redheads, and there was an entire episode dedicated to horny dragons, but it’s always in the service of some punchline. Might Rick and Morty Season 5 offer thoughtful commentary on human sexuality like its Netflix contemporary Big Mouth?

“I think my parents’ sex life should be really involved and experimental and open,” Grammer says. “There should be a dungeon, obviously — oh no that’s Rick’s lair. Maybe somewhere else. The attic? Do we have an attic?”

“We have not used the attic if there is an attic,” Chalke says.

The layout of the Smith family house suggests that there might be an attic above the second-floor bedrooms where Morty, Summer, Beth, and Jerry sleep. Curiously enough, the official Rick and Morty artbook has neither an attic nor a bathroom, despite the fact that the Smiths obviously have a bathroom in their human home. The “Pickle Rick” opening scene shows Morty in there combing his hair. So who knows? Maybe they do have some kind of dungeon up there.

The mention of a dungeon is interesting considering the fact that all of the Season 5 trailers so far depict some kind of storyline where Rick, Beth, and Jerry dress up in bondage gear in a hellish landscape. Rick even says, “It’s time we raise a little hell!” (An obvious reference to Hellraiser.) The outfits feel reminiscent of the unnerving sex dream/nightmare from Season 1’s “Lawnmower Dog.” In that one, Morty and Rick wind up in a hypersexualized layer of Mr. Goldenfold’s dreams. This, however, seems far more real.

“Is that sexual in nature?” Parnell wonders aloud when asked about this Hellraiser episode. “I don’t remember…”

Open conversations about human sexuality on Rick and Morty can’t help but lead us to conversations about Jerry’s parents, who appeared in Season 1’s “Anatomy Park.” Jerry’s parents visit during Christmastime, and Jerry freaks out after learning that his parents are in a three-way cuckold relationship with a man named Jacob Philip.

“We need more of Jerry’s life,” Grammer says. “His parents came once. Where are they? Why aren’t they around more? We need more human holiday stuff!”

It’s a good question. Why don’t we see more holiday-focused episodes? If the recently revealed Season 5 episode titles are any indication, then “Rickdependence Spray” could celebrate July 4, and “Rick and Morty’s Thanksploitation Spektactular” sure sounds like a Thanksgiving episode.

And whatever happened to Jerry’s parents? For all we know, maybe they’ll come around again for Thanksgiving to spread some holiday cheer — and sex positivity.

Rick and Morty Season 5 premieres June 20 on Adult Swim.

Dragon Quest is set to host its 35th-anniversary stream on May 26, and we want to make sure you don’t miss a single second of the upcoming event. Curious about what time the stream is expected to start and what the Square Enix festivities might contain?

We’ve got you covered with all the relevant details worth knowing.

When is the Dragon Quest 35th anniversary stream start time?

The Dragon Quest 35th anniversary event stream is set to take place May 26, 2021 at 11:30 p.m. Eastern.

How can you watch the Dragon Quest 35th anniversary event?

The primary place to watch the Dragon Quest 35th anniversary stream is via the official Dragon Quest YouTube channel. There may be other streams on the Square Enix Twitch channel, for example, but all official sources related to the event direct fans to YouTube, so this should probably be your first — and best — option.

What can we expect to see during the Dragon Quest 35th anniversary event?

Given that this stream is meant to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Dragon Quest, most of the festivities will likely center around the franchise’s lineage from its humble beginnings on the Nintendo Entertainment System to current entries on Nintendo Switch. In that vein, we expect to see many montages of the series evolution during the stream.

This is, however, the first time a Dragon Quest event will feature live English translation, suggesting there are likely major announcements that could impact a global audience. Square Enix has teased the stream will highlight “what’s going on - and what’s to come - in the world of Dragon Quest,” which leaves ample room for interpretation.

Here are our best guesses for what the stream might contain.

• Dragon Quest XII first look: The first iteration of Dragon Quest XI released all the way back in 2017, which means a successor should be well into development by now if it’s in the works. Echoes of an Elusive Age is fairly new and on new platforms, but we have to imagine some work is being done behind the scenes on the next major franchise entry. At the very least, the 35th-anniversary stream should end with a tease of the next big game.
• New Collections: Dragon Quest collections have become an infamous fixture of Nintendo Directs and the broader Nintendo Switch library, which makes it seem all the more likely we’ll see more remakes of classic games on Nintendo’s flagship handheld. With the first three Dragon Quest games already playable on Switch, maybe re-releases of Dragon Quests IV through VI are next on Square’s agenda.

• Dragon Quest Builders 3: This one may be a little out there, but it’s no secret the Dragon Quest Builders series has amassed its own loyal fan base over the past few years. Square only took two years to develop and release the sequel, so a third entry may be ready to announce for release in 2022.
• Cool merch and collectibles: New game announcements are one way to celebrate the 35th anniversary of a long-running franchise, but there will likely be physical ways to express your fandom too. Square loves releasing high-quality figurines and collector’s editions for its most passionate fans, so it seems probable we’ll see something on that level tonight to commemorate one of Japan’s most popular franchises.

That’s all we know about the Dragon Quest 35th anniversary stream for now.

Monster Hunter Rise is getting a steady stream of post-launch support.

During a Monster Hunter Digital Event on May 26, 2021, Capcom finally unveiled the Monster Hunter Rise Title Update 3.0 and teased future patches with a roadmap.

Update 3.0 introduces new story content, new monsters, and more alongside a new DLC pack. If you’re interested in the new update and DLC for the Nintendo Switch exclusive Monster Hunter Rise, this is everything you need to know about the game’s Title Update 3.0.

When is the Monster Hunter Rise 3.0 update release time?

Monster Hunter Rise Title Update 3.0 will be released at 8 p.m. Eastern on May 26, 2021. This is just one day after it was revealed, but the short turnaround should be exciting for players. When the update arrives, the update will be about 1.4 GB.

Is there a Monster Hunter Rise 3.0 update trailer?

Yes, there is! A trailer for the update was shown off during May 26’s Monster Hunter Digital Event. It features the new monsters and teases some of the new story additions. You can check it out below:

What are the Monster Hunter 3.0 update patch notes?

This is a hefty update for Monster Hunter Rise as it adds the true ending to the game. Capcom isn’t revealing what exactly will happen but confirms that it will feature a showdown between the Thunder Serpent Narwa and Wind Serpent Ibushi. Additionally, players will have two new monsters to hunt.

Crimson Glow Valstrax is a variation on the flagship monster of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate and can fly and attack players from high up in the air. Apex Zinogre is the other new monster, and it will attack players with lightning-based attacks. On top of those three major additions, players can also expect some new quests, weapons, armor, and skills.

You can check out the full list of patch notes shown off during May 2021’s Monster Hunter Digital Event below:

• New monsters will appear in Hub quests
• New monsters will appear in Rampage
• New quests will be available
• New boss battle arena will be available
• New weapon trees, armor, layered armor, and items will be available
• New skills and Rampage Skills will be available
• You can use materials to change the appearance of Rampage weapons
• New Guild Card medals will be available
• New DLC can be purchased from Nintendo eShop
• Some bugs have been fixed

This update also features lots of bug fixes for issues across, missions, the base, player characters, and monsters. It’s too much to list here, but if there’s a specific issue you hope is addressed, you can see all of the bug fixes on Capcom’s Monster Hunter blog.

What is included in Monster Hunter Rise DLC Pack 3?

This update also brings a new DLC pack to the game. As is the case with most Monster Hunter Rise DLC, this is how players can gain access to new voices, poses, stickers, music, and customization options. You can check out everything included in Monster Hunter Rise DLC Pack 3 below:

• Hunter Voices: Iori and Yomogi
• Pose Sets: Hide Pose Set and Using the Wall Pose Set
• Stickers: Special Stickers 2
• Hairstyles: Noble Short and Delicate Beauty
• Face Paints: Cheek Tusk and Stitches
• BGM: Monster Hunter Series Bases and Monster Music: Dance Version

What is the Monster Hunter Rise 2021 roadmap?

After highlighting May’s new update and DLC, Capcom also hinted at what’s next for Monster Hunter Rise by showing off a roadmap featuring every update coming between May 2021 and August 2021. You can check it out below:

The roadmap kicks off by highlighting May’s 3.0 update. It then confirms that we can expect a Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin collab in mid-June that adds a Palio Layered Armor Tsukino Costume to the game. In late June, more DLC and event quests will come to Monster Hunter Rise through update 3.1.

Moving on to update 3.2 in July, we can expect another Capcom collab with an unspecified franchise as well as new event quests and DLC. Finally, August rounds out the current roadmap with version 3.3 of Monster Hunter Rise. Like in July, players can expect new DLC, new event quests, and yet another Capcom crossover.

Anything coming after that is still unannounced, though Capcom has teased that we can expect the game to come to PC eventually. For now, players can just expect a lot of event quest updates, DLC, and Capcom crossovers over the course of Summer 2021.

Monster Hunter Rise is available now for Nintendo Switch.

Are you stuck on a toilet? There’s a lot to do in Biomutant, including solving one repetitive type of rotation puzzle that occasionally involves ancient toilets. The game is packed with side-quests, loot, and collectibles. Of course, it wouldn’t be an open-world game without some obligatory puzzles like these sprinkled in, would it?

Biomutant doesn’t go particularly heavy on puzzles, but it has one very specific breed of them that reoccur through the game. Players will often bump into a series of rotation puzzles that require a lot of dial turning. These can be tricky to get the hang of, so here’s exactly how to solve them and how you can make them a little easier.

How to solve rotation puzzles in Biomutant

You’ll bump into this puzzle type pretty much anytime you interact with a piece of old-world tech as you traverse the apocalypse as an anthropomorphic critter. If you open a breaker box or find a microwave or toilet, you’ll be doing some variation of this puzzle. They might look slightly different from machine to machine, but they’re functionally the exact same.

What you’ll usually see is a series of knobs that can be turned. When you look at the knobs, you’ll notice that they usually have two nodes with different colors on them (often white and yellow). This is essentially a color matching game. If there are two dials next to one another, you’ll want to line them up so their yellow nodes are pointing at one another. Turn the knobs so all colors are matched up and you’re done.

There are slight variations every now and again, like a record player where you’ll be moving a needle to the right spot rather than spinning nodes. Even in those instances, the same rules apply. If you see white, match it up with white. Yellow colors should point to each other.

How to make rotation puzzles easier in Biomutant

The trickiest thing about these puzzles is that you have a set amount of turns you can make. If you reach the limit, you’ll get booted out of the puzzle and be forced to start again. There’s no real consequence for failing. You might get a little electric shock, but you can always try again right after.

There’s one way to make this a little easier to manage: Intellect. That specific stat determines how many turns you have during a puzzle. If your Intellect is low, you’ll pretty much get the bare minimum number of turns needed to complete the puzzle perfectly. If it’s higher, you’ll get extra turns. So if you’re particularly stuck on these, consider dropping some extra points into it on your next level up.

That goes the other way too. If these puzzles are elementary to you, you can pretty much ignore intellect entirety and focus on stats like Attack instead. Since there’s no penalty for failing, you can keep this stat relatively low throughout the game. Though there are a couple of tricky puzzles out there, so you might want to throw a couple in there to play it safe.

Fortnite’s Foreshadowing Quests have finally begun, with the first two challenges asking players to repair damaged telescopes and investigate a downed black helicopter. In this no-nonsense guide, we’ll show you how to get both challenges done quickly and easily to further fill out your Season 6 Battle Pass.

Where to repair damaged telescopes in Fortnite

There are many damaged telescopes scattered across the Battle Royale map, but this challenge requires finding and repairing five of them. Be aware, however, that you must first accrue at least 100 metal, as each one requires 20 metal to repair. Some have suggested completing this challenge in Team Rumble, as that mode automatically starts players off with a small collection of building materials. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to the locations.

Location 1: Our first damaged telescope to repair is found on this hill east of Craggy Cliffs.

At this location and all telescope locations, your best bet is to look for a small stool, a cooler, and the telescope’s broken husk nearby.

Location 2: The second damaged telescope is on this ledge northwest of Dirty Docks. You may want to use the blue house to the east as a frame of reference.

This is what the location looks like when you land there.

Location 3: There’s another damaged telescope situated on the edge of this snowy peak south of Retail Row.

Given that the mountain is a bit secluded, it should stick out from its surrounding environment.

Location 4: The fourth damaged telescope to repair is nestled on this ledge southeast of Catty Corner.

You’ll find it in a clearing overlooking the ocean.

Location 5: The last damaged telescope is located directly west of Misty Meadows.

Look for this hill overlooking a small building. Just repair these five damaged telescopes, and the easy Battle Pass XP is yours.

Where to find the downed black helicopter in Fortnite

Once you repair the telescopes, you’ll then receive a quest to investigate a downed black helicopter. There’s only one of those on the Battle Royale map, and it’s nestled in the trees here, close to Lazy Lake and its corresponding islands. If you have trouble pinpointing it, just look for the black smoke in the sky.

When you get to the downed black helicopter, you should be able to interact with it to tune its radio. We just messed around with the plus and minus buttons a few times to receive the full message. Apparently, the Imagined Order is messing with corn stalks in the area. That’s likely a mystery we’ll learn more about as additional Foreshadowing Challenges become available.

Fortnite Foreshadowing Challenges

Repairing damaged telescopes and investigating a downed black helicopter amount to two of the five known Foreshadowing Challenges expected to debut in Fortnite in the coming days. Currently, only the first two quests are available to complete, with no in-game indicator for when the rest we’ll release. For now, though, here’s a sneak peek at the challenges to come.

• Repair damaged telescopes (five)
• Investigate downed black helicopter
• Use CB Radio (five)
• Place warning signs at crop circle (five)
• Destroy spooky TV sets (one)

That’s all we know about Fornite’s Foreshadowing quests for now.

Starship, SpaceX’s under-development rocket for sending humans to Mars, is impressive both inside and out.

On Tuesday, freelance 3D artist Caspar Stanley shared on Twitter his render of an internal component of SpaceX’s vehicle. The image shows a dazzling octopus-like array of tubes emanating from the center, connecting down to 28 Raptor engines located below. The render shows the engine setup for the Super Heavy booster, which will work with the Starship itself to lift the ship away from the Earth.

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The image received a response from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who wrote: “Lot of plumbing!”

The image reveals one of the most interesting components of SpaceX’s Starship. Musk first revealed the predecessor to this ship back in 2017 under the name “BFR,” explaining how it’s designed to both replace SpaceX’s existing rockets like Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, while powering more ambitious missions like a visit to Mars.

The ship has three key features that make it ideal for visits to Mars:

1. It’s fully reusable, which means it can land on Mars and fly again.
2. It uses liquid oxygen and methane for fuel, which means astronauts can harvest resources from Mars, like water ice and carbon dioxide, and use them to create more fuel to return home.
3. It can launch over 150 tons or 100 people to space at a time, meaning it can carry the large amount of equipment required to build those early refueling bases.

Stanley, a 21-year-old based in Denmark, hosted a live stream of his creative process on YouTube:

During the stream, he explained how he used a NASASpaceflight video as inspiration. The footage, captured by a website reporter that goes by the name “BocaChicaGal,” shows what is believed to be the propellant manifold for the Super Heavy booster. This feeds methane fuel to the Raptor engines from the downward pipe.

When will Super Heavy fly?

SpaceX has hosted five high-altitude flight tests with the ship portion of the Starship, but it has never flown the Super Heavy booster. That could all change this year, after a document earlier this month detailed plans to host Starship’s first orbital flight.

The flight, expected in the latter half of this year, will launch the Starship with its booster from the firm’s Texas launch site. Just under two minutes after liftoff, the booster will separate and land in the Gulf of Mexico. The ship will come to a stop around 60 miles off the coast of Hawaii, around 90 minutes after liftoff.

The Inverse analysis — Musk’s response to the fan render highlights his support of the SpaceX fan community. Previous renders have focused on the Super Heavy booster stacked high, the Starship carrying Starlink satellites, and its ability to support lunar landings.

SpaceX has also found itself at the heart of two upcoming reality TV shows, set to award lucky contestants a place on a Crew Dragon capsule flight. As the Starship is expected to host a trip around the Moon in 2023, Musk’s current approach to public engagement could be a sign of things to come.

THE STARSHIP’S JOURNEY, SUMMARIZED:

• November 2018 — BFR, first announced in September 2017, gets renamed to Starship.
• December 2018 — Musk confirms the new ship has switched to stainless steel.
• January 2019 — Shortened “Starhopper” prototype unveiled and Musk explains the switch to steel.
• February 2019 — Raptor engine beats a long-standing rocket record.
• April 2019 — Starhopper completes a tethered “hop.”
• July 2019 — Starhopper launches 20 meters (67 feet).
• August 2019 — Starhopper launches 150 meters (500 feet).
• September 2019 — Starship Mk.1 full-size prototype unveiled.
• May 2020 — Starship SN4 full-size prototype completes a static test fire.
• August 2020 — SN5 launches 150 meters (500 feet).
• October 2020 — SN8 completes the first triple-Raptor static fire.
• December 2020 — SN8 launches 12.5 kilometers (41,000 feet) and crashes into the ground.
• February 2021 — SN9 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and crashes into the ground.
• March 2021 — SN10 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet), lands, and explodes eight minutes later. That same month, SN11 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and hits the ground in several pieces.
• May 2021 — SN15 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and lands without a hitch, except for a small fire at the base.

SUBSCRIBE TO MUSK READS+, A PREMIUM NEWSLETTER THAT COVERS THE WORLDS OF ELON MUSK, SPACEX, TESLA, AND EVERYTHING BETWEEN.

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are finally getting remakes. First released on Nintendo DS in North America in 2007, these games introduced millions of players to the series and were the next in line for remakes after Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. While we've had to wait seven years for these remakes, they've finally arrived and have recreated Sinnoh in all of its former glory!

During February 26's Pokémon Presents showcase, The Pokémon Company Chief Operating Officer Takato Utsunomiya unveiled Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl for Nintendo Switch. Then more was revealed about the games in May 2021. This is everything that we know about these Generation 4 Pokémon remakes coming later this year.

When is the Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl release date?

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl will be released on November 19, 2021. Mid-November has become a standard release window for every new Pokémon game, so it’s not a surprise that the game would end up coming out on this date.

On November 19, the games will be released individually and in a double pack. Players will have a couple of months to try out the games before Pokémon Legends: Arceus comes out in January 2022.

It was surprising that this date wasn’t cemented from the start. When it was revealed in February 2021, The Pokémon Company only stated that Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl will be released in late 2021. The release date was then confirmed on May 26, 2021 alongside a box art reveal.

Is there a Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl trailer?

Yes, there is! Check it out below:

The trailer was the first major reveal of the February 26 Pokémon Presents event. The trailer begins by showing the original Diamond and Pearl games booting up and being played on the DS before transitioning to the updated but accurate Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes.

We see brief glimpses of Twinleaf Town, Jubilife City, Floaroma Town, Lake Verity, the Valley Windworks, Oreburgh City, Snowpoint City, several routes, multiplayer, and some normal Pokémon battles. You should get a nice feel for how these remakes compare to the original. Nom more trailers have been released for the game since then, even with the release date announcement.

What are the Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl Legendary Pokémon?

For those that aren't familiar with the original game, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl both have god-like legendaries that were confirmed to reappear by The Pokémon Company. Brilliant Diamond's Legendary Pokémon is Dialga, a Steel and Dragon-Type Pokémon that also has the power to control time.

Meanwhile, Shining Pearl players will encounter Palkia, a Water and Dragon-Type Pokémon with the ability to distort space. Both Pokémon have the ability Pressure, which makes the opposing Pokémon use twice as much PP.

Players will encounter both as they are going on a journey through the Sinnoh region with their rival Barry and ultimately fighting the evil organization Team Galactic, which is led by a philosophical man named Cyrus.

How faithful to the originals are Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl?

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are beloved games thanks to excellent gameplay and region design. That said, those games did have some rough edges, like their extremely slow pace and odd Pokémon distribution that left some of the coolest new Pokémon to the post-game.

Many of these issues were fixed in 2009's Pokémon Platinum, so fans are hoping they'll carry over to the remakes. Ultimately, the reality of these remakes seems to be somewhere in the middle. The press release announcing the game boasts that the remakes are "faithfully reproduced" and will include the same story and features as Diamond and Pearl.

On one hand, it's exciting that we'll be able to explore the Sinnoh region and fight Team Galactic once again in a game that's extremely accurate. On the other hand, the games might possibly retain some of the more negative aspects of the originals. We won't know for sure until we go hands-on with the game.

On the bright side, the press release also promises that "these games are updated with the easy-to-understand, player-friendly conveniences introduced in recent Pokémon core series video games." Hopefully, at least the pace of battles and movement in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is improved compared to the original, even if some other things that should've been changed aren't.

What studio is the Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl developer?

Game Freak is the company that usually handles every single new mainline Pokémon game, but that actually isn't the case with Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. As Game Freak is working on Pokémon Legends: Arceus, this project was handed off to Ilca Inc., an obscure Japanese developer that worked on Pokémon Home and as a support studio on games like Code Vein.

These games have two directors: Ilca's Yuichi Ueda and The Pokémon Company's Junichi Masuda. While it's somewhat disappointing that these remakes were outsourced, it will at least give Game Freak more time to dedicate to Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

Pokémon has been unshackled. After 25 years of primarily sticking to the modern era, the series is turning back the clock to feudal times. Pokémon Legends: Arceus was announced in a February 26 Pokémon presentation, along with the Gen 4 remakes, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. The franchise's first open-world title will bring numerous changes to the series' tried-and-true formula.

Here's everything we know about Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

When is the Pokémon Legends: Arceus release date?

The official Pokémon Twitter account revealed the Pokémon Legends: Arceus release date on May 26, 2021 along with cover art. The game will be released on January 28, 2022. Pre-orders went live with the announcement.

Before then, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company had merely said "Early 2022," so this final announcement definitely lines up with that promise. The series often debuts new titles in February, as they did with the presentation announcing this game and Pokémon Home last year. So the timing right before February makes a lot of sense.

Is there a Pokémon Legends: Arceus trailer?

Yes, you can watch the trailer below.

The trailer reveals quite a bit about the upcoming game's premise. It takes place in a feudal version of the Sinnoh region. This means that catching and battling Pokémon will be a similarly low-tech experience. (Despite that change, the old-timey renditions of the Diamond and Pearl protagonists have kept their dumb little hats.)

The video notes that all native Sinnoh Pokémon, including starter Pokémon like Piplup, can be found in the wild. Presumably, the creatures have yet to be domesticated by humans, causing their ecosystems to be a bit less neatly organized.

Snippets from the game's new features are peppered throughout the trailer. We can see that catching Pokémon is a bit less neat, as you need to move with the Poké ball to aim your shot. It seems that you can also capture Pokémon without entering battle, as seen by the shot where the protagonist is sneaking through the grass while aiming their Poké ball.

We can also see that battles have been given a sleek new UI. The game has seemingly leaned more into the open-world elements found in Sword and Shield, perhaps going full Breath of the Wild with the game.

The video ends with a shot of Arceus, the titular Pokémon who we can expect to chase throughout the game.

What does the Pokémon Legends: Arceus cover art look like?

The same tweet that revealed the game’s release date also showed off the new cover art. It features the male and female protagonist avatars looking out towards what appears to be a volcano. Around them are a handful of Pokémon: Rowlett, Cyndaquil, Lucario, Oshawott, Pikachu, Rhyhorn, and what appears to be a Bidoof obscured by the MSRB rating.

What Legendary Pokémon will be in Pokémon Legends: Arceus?

Well, Arceus will be in the game. He's the title Pokémon and likely the first Legendary Pokémon that you'll catch.

Nintendo has yet to announce other legendary Pokémon, but it seems likely that other Legendary Pokémon native to Sinnoh like Heatran, Giratina, Azelf, Uxie, Mespirit, Darkrai, Shaymin, Cresselia, Dialga, and Palkia will appear. Or perhaps Pokémon Legends: Arceus will show how they came to populate the region.

What are the starter Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus?

The starter Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus are Cyndaquil, Rowlett, and Oshawott. You might notice they all originate from non-Sinnoh regions, presumably because Sinnoh has yet to establish a proper starter Pokémon system.

In the trailer, we see the classic Sinnoh starters Piplup and Chimchar roaming in the wild, implying that we should be able to capture all three by playing the game.

Are there any weird changes due to the time period in Pokémon Legends: Arceus?

Yes! There are a few changes! Firstly, the buildings are old-timey, forged from simpler materials like logs. The second noticeable change can be seen on the Pokéballs. They're now made from wood and close using zippers, a far more archaic mechanism than what's used in modern games.

It also seems other things like the Pokémon League and trainers are non-existent, according to the game's website. Pokémon Legends: Arceus will likely not have an Elite Four. It might even lack random trainers, as they have yet to be normalized.

The moment she finishes her shift on Mars, Vandi Verma takes a second to reorient herself. She gazes out at the Red Planet, locating the faintly twinkling sun in the night sky. Then, she comes back to Earth.

As Verma explains in an exclusive interview with Inverse, going to work on Mars every day can leave you a little... disoriented: “When you’ve become so familiar with Mars, and you go to work on Mars every day, looking at this environment...” she trails off, before picking up the thread once more.

“But when you look at Mars in the sky and see how far away it is, sometimes you just realize the big picture and it’s... it’s interesting.”

“You’re literally looking from the rover’s perspective.”

Verma’s work on Mars is the driving force behind the Mars 2020 rover. As the chief engineer for Robotic Operations for NASA’s Perseverance rover, she spends her days immersed in a world of Martian terrain. She even operates on “Mars time” here on Earth.

With her feet firmly planted on Earth, but her brain on Mars where she has driven rovers for the last 13 years, she’s gained a rather unusual view of our place in the universe:

“You’re literally looking from the rover’s perspective,” Verma says.

Verma understands things most humans will never grasp: How to operate on a literally different world and navigate oneself on a different planet.

This includes how to exist on both Earth and Martian time — circadian rhythms and sleep cycles be damned — and the unexpected perks of spending most of your life with robots.

Ultimately, Verma’s experiences offer some profound life lessons for us here on Earth — and a sketch of how humans might adapt to live on the surface of Mars.

5. How to work on Mars time

Verma spends her days on Earth, but her brain runs on Martian time. This is tricky to manage for a simple reason: A day on Mars is a little longer than a day on Earth.

• Earth operates on a 24-hour day basis
• On Mars, one day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds — a small, but critical, difference
• Verma begins every new workday about 40 minutes later than the day before

“I do find it is taxing to the human body because we have rhythms, and now you're changing it,” Verma says.

Often Verma begins a shift past midnight on Earth, yet it’s the late evening on Mars.

“Suddenly you’re brought back into a world that’s completely different.”

“You’ve been immersed, you’ve been [on Mars] for hours and you walk out and it’s a completely different time of day [on Earth],” Verma says. “Depending on Mars time, sometimes I’ve walked out and it’s dark, sometimes there’s a sunrise or sunset.”

“Suddenly you’re brought back into a world that’s completely different,” she says.

To adjust to this planetary time difference, Verma avoids exposure to the outside world here on Earth while she’s working on Mars time. That includes avoiding any windows, so she doesn’t see the light outside. She also regulates her meals according to Mars time, and even adjusts her clocks accordingly.

4. How to lose yourself on Mars

When Verma drives the Mars 2020 rover, she first writes the commands for the rover to follow and then beams them up to Mars using the Deep Space Network, NASA’s interplanetary communications network. The network is comprised of three deep-space communications facilities in Australia, California, and Madrid.

During a typical workday, Verma is thrust into the Martian environment for about 10 hours. Her team use images captured by the Perseverance rover to create a three-dimensional, simulated version here on Earth. They wear special 3D headsets to transport themselves into that world.

“I don’t know if there are rocks on Earth that I know as well as I know some of the rocks on Mars.”

Looking with clear eyes at some of the selfies captured by the Perseverance rover on Mars, Verma tells me she’s familiar with the Martian terrain around the rover that she recognizes the tire tracks from previous drives. They become landmarks to navigate her way.

“When you’re driving, you’re so immersed in an environment,” Verma says. “I don’t know if there are rocks on Earth that I know as well as I know some of the rocks on Mars.”

3. How to return to Earth

Verma has been driving rovers on Mars since 2008 — that means she has spent more than a decade living between two different worlds. She has also witnessed the Mars rover missions evolve and change over time.

After being immersed in the timezone and environment of another planet for hours, Verma often finds it challenging to come “back” to Earth. Hence her ritual of looking up at the night sky, at the stars and planets, to find her sense of place once more.

“You’ve thought so much about it for hours, so in terms of coming back to reality on Earth,” Verma says. “It can be especially challenging.”

But Verma’s “work-from-Mars” may soon be the reality for some as space agencies and private space conglomerates plan for a highly ambitious future colonization of the Red Planet.

NASA is planning on sending the first human mission to Mars by the 2030s while SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to build a human colony on Mars that involves eventually terraforming the planet to be able to support life. Future astronauts will have to reckon with the new Martian time zones in communications home — as well as the kind of long delays in sending messages back and forth.

2. Why robots make great colleagues

The Perseverance rover is the most advanced robot NASA has sent to Mars and much more autonomous than its predecessors.

For the scientists (and the public), personifying the rover and assigning it human-like qualities can help to make its journey on Mars more real, despite being so far away. But for Verma, Perseverance is much more than human — the robot is an accumulation of knowledge from a group of highly intelligent humans, almost beyond the human.

“It’s a combined intelligence.”

“There are so many people on Earth who worked on it and they all have different expertise so it’s a combined intelligence,” Verma says. “It is a machine but there’s also an aspect of intelligence that we help design, so I feel like you’re interacting with this sophisticated thing that in some ways is more intelligent than any one individual.”

1. How to see the big picture

Verma is aware of the critical importance of her work. She’s keenly aware that she works with a machine that humans designed and delivered to Mars to explore its terrains for essential knowledge about life in the Solar System, and in turn, life on Earth.

The main purpose of the Perseverance mission is to investigate whether or not Mars may have hosted some form of life at a point during its early history. If the rover can answer this question, then scientists can answer another more profound question about our origins, and whether there may be extraterrestrial life elsewhere.

It’s also a final step toward NASA’s goal of human exploration. While there are sample return ideas that the agency has batted around, ultimately, Perseverance’s cache may best be retrieved by human hands, who could confirm quickly with those precious samples if life has ever existed on Mars — or even still exists deep below the surface.

Verma explains how viewing Mars as a speck in the sky from our viewpoint on Earth, she manifests for herself her place in the quest to solve the biggest mysteries of our existence.

“Looking at the sky and seeing Mars in the sky,” Verma says. “You do disconnect.”

I got my first haircut in something like 18 months a few weeks ago. It was glorious.

My friend, a barber based in St. Louis, did a really excellent job, and it was a rare opportunity to catch up IRL with the guy who was the best man at my wedding. We now live 1,000 miles away from each other and I’m happy to report he remains as funny as ever, and a true friend.

But if your barber wasn’t your best man, do you need to talk to him? What if that barber was a robot? That’s the sticky question at the center of the lead story in today’s Inverse Daily, the everyday dispatch of thought-provoking science, tech, and culture journalism. (For those interested in high-quality journalism on Elon Musk, see our Musk Reads+ newsletter.)

Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Our friends at Mic looked back on the impact that moment had on the world from a journalistic point of view. The result is a batch of stories that will unfurl in your brain like a Slinky. They will bring into focus the hazy thoughts you’ve had and help you zoom out to see the bigger picture. Dive in and read the stories here.

I’m glad you’re with us today. If you have any suggestions for how to improve this newsletter — stories you’d like to see, stuff you don’t find valuable, even your own barber stories — drop us a line at newsletter@inverse.com.

A tech tip before we jump in: Gmail users: Make sure you never miss an edition by dragging the email version of this daily dispatch to your Primary tab. Here’s a GIF that shows you how:

This is an adapted version of the Inverse Daily newsletter for May 26, 2021. Subscribe for free and earn rewards for reading every day in your inbox.

Would you trust a robot hairdresser? — If robots take over the service industry, should they do it with a smile? Business technology researchers explore the importance of emotion in working robots. Sarah Wells reports:

There’s a special bond that’s forged by the vulnerability of sitting, dripping wet, as a hairdresser snips and shears your wayward locks. A trusted hairdresser or barber has the power to make or break your day — even month — with a few flourishes, all while deftly discussing everything from politics to family gossip.

Service robots have already come for our grocery stores and construction sites, and now a new hair-brushing robot designed by engineers at MIT could be the first step toward automating hairdressers as well.

Keep reading Sarah’s story about our near-future life.

Related robot reporting:

• Robotic augmentation can transform human bodies — but at a cost
• The emotional reason why you should let robots touch you
• 5 lines of code could change the way we think about A.I.

Wonders under the hood of an electric big rig — Freightliner gave Jordan Golson free rein to drive a bunch of prototype trucks around an LA parking lot. He shares what he learned:

The most surprising thing about driving the giant electric trucks was the noise. Sure, the motors were mostly silent, just giving off the characteristic whirrrrrr-hummmmm that one expects from any EV. And the parking brakes did the standard, noisy truck pssssh blow off when the bright yellow Bendix air brake release was pushed in.

What I didn’t expect was the incessant rattling.

Keep on truckin’...

Go deeper:

• Ford F-150 Lightning price, range, specs, release date for the electric pickup truck
• See the electric pickup trucks that will give Tesla Cybertruck competition
• Freightliner customers have driven electric semis 700,000 miles

Quiet Place 2 is worth seeing in theaters — A Quiet Place Part II isn't just a smart continuation of 2018's surprise hit; it's a better film now after the awful year we've lived through, writes senior staff writer Eric Francisco:

A Quiet Place Part II is full of artistic intention and technical prowess, but what makes it unique is the timing. The sequel was pulled from theaters days before its March 18, 2020, release. It’s a time capsule of sorts, made more potent after a year of our own quiet place.

Though the sequel was written, shot, and completed before the pandemic, its somber tone and apocalyptic setting reverberate even more loudly today, long after the disease that jumped to humans from animals shut down the planet.

A Quiet Place II claims a sturdy enough story about togetherness in the face of danger that offers an extremely satisfying continuation of the first movie’s imaginative concept — a concept that might’ve been one-and-done had it not been so successful.

Read the rest of Eric’s insightful review.

Go deeper:

• The monsters, from an evolutionary point of view (2018)
• A Quiet Place faces the apocalypse with daring realism (2018)
• The A Quiet Place monster looks nothing like the original (2018)

Brood X bon appétit! — After 17 years, Brood X has crawled back to the surface to complete their lifecycle. Enjoy your cicada summer by plucking a love-struck bug to fry up. Sarah Wells has the story:

After a 17-year underground slumber, periodical cicada Brood X is finally making its way out to the light. It is also pretty tasty. These cicadas have suckled on tree root juices for years. Now they’re interested in one thing only: noisily mating and then dying immediately.

These rare cicada summers are not without human benefits, including an unexpected silver lining: the chance to dine on a rare delicacy. It’s easier than you might think...

Learn how to cook a cicada in five easy steps.

More cicada data:

• Brood X: Cicada experts reveal the truth about eating bugs
• Brood IX: Why 2020's cicada visit was different than past arrivals (2020)
• “Zombie cicada” mystery solved by hallucinogenic fungus researchers (2019)

• About the newsletter: Do you think it can be improved? Have a story idea? Want to share a story about the time you met an astronaut? Send those thoughts and more to newsletter@inverse.com.
• Follow me on Twitter at @nicklucchesi, if for no other reason than to get Inverse headlines in your timeline and a few other Inverse-y things.
• Before we go, happy birthday (🎂) to these folks: Helena Bonham Carter (55), Matt Stone (50), Lauryn Hill (46), Pam Grier (72), Stevie Nicks (73). (Source: AP.)

Who’s ready to steal some Materia?

It’s already been a year since Final Fantasy VII Remake stole the hearts of gamers all over again, nearly a quarter-century after the debut of the landmark 1997 original. Now, as we wait for a glimpse of the next installment of Cloud’s story, we’re getting the chance to hang out with one of the heroes we didn’t get to meet in the first installment of FF7 Remake.

The enhanced PS5 version of the game, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, will include a wholly new side-story. Episode Intermission introduces Yuffie Kisaragi, the mischievous Materia hunter from Wutai. While she’s an optional character in the old-school PS1 game, it appears she has a far more consequential role to play in the FF7 Remake saga.

Ahead of Intergrade coming to PS5 on June 10, Inverse got a sneak peek at the early moments of Yuffie’s visit to Midgar. The adorable ninja brings some spiffy changes to Remake’s combat and traversal mechanics. There’s also a new-and-improved version of the Fort Condor minigame, and a new summon that’ll be very familiar to the Final Fantasy faithful. Let’s dive in!

The plot thickens

Yuffie’s adventure in Midgar takes place amid the confusion that follows Avalanche’s destruction of the Sector 5 reactor, so just before the halfway point of FF7 Remake’s 18 chapters. This means it’s unlikely she’ll cross paths with Cloud and his pals, since at this point in the story they’re tied up with the reactor raid and all the shenanigans in Wall Market.

Since we don’t exactly know what Barret’s up to at his point in the story, it’s possible he could appear in Episode Intermission, however briefly. Yuffie and her partner, Sonon, are on a critical mission from the Wutaian government — to steal Shinra Electric Power Company’s most powerful Materia, with the help of Avalanche HQ. It’s worth bearing in mind that this isn’t the same group of rebels as Barret’s crew, but a “more peaceable” organization that prefers to avoid the drastic measures taken by Barret’s “splinter cell.”

The story begins with Yuffie’s arrival in Midgar, as she’s tasked with tracking down Zhijie, the man who acts as a go-between for Wutai and Avalanche HQ.

Getting around

Yuffie soon finds getting around Midgar’s no straightforward task, as anyone who’s played Final Fantasy VII Remake can attest. This is where her ninja skills come in handy. Yuffie can toss her shuriken at distant objects, allowing her to gather items from faraway crates or thwack faraway switches in order to move large crates and platforms.

She can also nimbly dart across hanging grates and fences, kind of like Red XIII in the later chapters of Remake.

If you’ve played the original Final Fantasy VII, you’ll notice a familiar sidequest quest tied to Yuffie’s homeland — collecting an assortment of well-hidden fliers for The Happy Turtle, a riff on the Turtle’s Paradise of yore.

Let the shurikens fly

Unlike the four playable characters in Final Fantasy VII Remake we’ve seen so far, Yuffie can be used as both a long- and short-range fighter. While her shuriken will eventually return to her after a long toss, you can snap it back more rapidly with a tap on the triangle button.

In addition to her own riffs on melee attacks, Limit Breaks, and materia, Yuffie can also use ninjutsu attacks. These initially deal non-elemental damage, but the ability Elemental Ninjutsu can change the attack’s affinity to fire, ice, lightning, or wind, making it easier to exploit an enemy’s weakness — and meaning you won’t have to rejigger Yuffie’s Materia loadout quite so often.

Sonon cannot be controlled in battle, but he can be given orders using the L2 button. This allows him to synergize with Yuffie to pull off powerful combo attacks and staggering moves. Both Sonon and Yuffie will need to have ATB charges available to pull off these attacks, so you’ll need to be mindful of your gauges and timing.

These staggering abilities will come in especially handy during more challenging fights, like this showdown with the massive mechanical Gigantipede. Thankfully, Yuffie has a lightning-powered ace in her deck — the summon Ramuh.

Could Ramuh be the Materia Yuffie’s trying to steal from Shinra at the start? There’s no official confirmation of this in the preview footage, but it's easy enough to connect the dots and assume Shinra Electric Power Company just might have found a nefarious use for the god of thunder. These guys love morally questionable lab experiments, after all.

Fort Condor

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade sees the return of the original’s Fort Condor minigame, a strategy auto-battler where you’re tasked with conquering an opponent’s base while defending your own. While Fort Condor was a prominent part of a late-game subplot in the original FF7 story, here it seems to exist purely as a form of entertainment for the inhabitants of the Sector 7 undercity.

You’ll select from a variety of decks, each of which contain an assortment of vanguard, ranged, and defense units. This time around, it’s a PvP game, which likely means you’ll be able to upgrade your decks and units as you beat progressively more challenging opponents. Rumor has it that those who manage to defeat the Fort Condor grandmaster can obtain a rare orb of Materia.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade comes to PlayStation 5 on June 10.

The first ten minutes of Cruella are going to break the Internet. Even Disney’s classic Sleeping Beauty castle logo is revamped in black-and-white, signaling that this isn’t your regular Disney movie... It’s a little different. That’s confirmed when Cruella narrates her own birth, saying she’s always made a statement. Cut to: an infant with a shock of two-tone black-and-white hair. These first few seconds are a microcosm of the film as a whole: unabashed, on-the-nose, but always hyper-aware of what it wants to be.

Cruella is only partly the story of Cruella, the spiteful, scheming villain seen in 101 Dalmatians.

This movie primarily the story of Estella, first seen as a young girl ripping up and altering her boarding school uniforms. Within a fateful first ten minutes of the movie, Estella suffers a tragic experience that, despite seeming a little ridiculous at first, sets the tone for the rest of her life.

Like any good rags-to-riches story, grown-up Estella – played by Emma Stone with dyed burgundy hair – starts out on the bottom, running small-time scams with her pals and future henchmen Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) and Jasper (Joel Fry).

But Estella wants to be a fashion designer — instead of wasting her talents designing the trio’s disguises. So when she finally gets her big break, she decides to prove her worth without any tricks or grifts.

Enter the real villain of this villain’s origin story — the Baroness, played by Emma Thompson.

She’s Miranda Priestly by way of Maleficent, and she sees something in Estella, taking her under her wing — for better or for worse. (The Devil Wears Prada parallels don’t end there: Cruella credits its story in part to Aline Brosh McKenna, author of the 2006 fashion-industry comedy.)

Cruella is the story of a young woman climbing the industry ladder and setting it on fire.

But Cruella is not another story of a lowly young woman climbing the ladder of the fashion world. It’s the story of that young woman climbing the industry ladder and setting it on fire. Then she blows the ashes in all our faces.

As the Baroness allows her inner evil to slip out, Estella lets more of her “Cruella” alter ego take over.

While the first act may be Devil Wears Prada, the second asks, “What if Banksy was the Joker?”

From afar, Cruella is completely ridiculous. But while watching this movie, it’s very difficult not to buy into its biggest revelations. The exaggerated, comic-book sensibility of its colorful 1974 London setting cushions even the sharpest plot turns. In other words, Cruella has borrowed the Marvel Cinematic Universe handbook and Made It Fashion.

There’s hardly time to question anything, because the stylistic choices of Cruella are so captivatingly decadent. A black, white, and red color scheme permeates nearly every shot, and a fully loaded soundtrack fits Cruella’s ‘70s setting while aligning with the punk-rock attitude it espouses.

The film’s attitude is best personified by Artie (John McCrea), a thrift shop owner and sewist recruited by Estella to create Cruella’s most ferocious looks. McCrea plays Artie with an unmistakable Bowie flair, always done up in graphic eyeliner.

McCrea has previously stated he considers his character to be queer, which is provocative both for a Disney film, and one set in the past.

“He lives his life in a way that makes him happy.”

“He lives his life in a way that makes him happy,” McCrea tells Inverse. “Those people have always been around, since time immemorial.”

He’s proud to play such a unique character in a particularly unique film: “I think it's the most rock and roll Disney movie we've seen,” he says. “It's huge in terms of visuals: hair, makeup, and costume.”

The soundtrack offers non-stop classic rock, with all sorts of loud, boisterous, and extravagant needle-drops that suit the story as well as Cruella’s gowns. “The ‘70s is such an interesting time,” says McCrea. “The music was influencing fashion, and the fashion influenced the music. It was a circle of inspiration.”

But Cruella’s maximalism in recreating this time period can’t mask where the film falls short. While it’s a tremendous heist movie, an indulgent fashion movie, and a period piece, the film also has to be a Disney production.

So, in between the rock-’n’-soul needle drops (the soundtrack is on Spotify) and complicated robbery schemes, Estella is forced to transform into a Cruella that the audiences will recognize. (Yes, the original 101 Dalmations is set 20 years before Cruella, but that’s not important!)

As our protagonist engages in huge publicity stunts and blazes her own trail within London’s glitterati, Estella must also embark on an emotional journey, one linked to both her tragic past and how much that Cruella persona is taking over her future.

About 90 minutes in, though, the character finally unpacks her emotional baggage. It feels like the perfect ending to a truly chaotic journey — but Cruella is more than two hours long, and the 40 minutes following that moment of resolution feel like the world’s longest epilogue.

While Cruella is undoubtedly overlong, it’s difficult not to appreciate the film’s efforts to so unapologetically be something for everyone. Every actor gives it their all, from Thompson’s hissing evil as the Baroness to Hauser and Fry’s increasing exasperation as friends grappling with Estella’s new persona.

It plays fast-and-loose with technological anachronisms, like one of Cruella’s stunts involving a digital projector. McCrea considers that all part of the charm. “It’s set in a very specific time period, but still manages just to be completely timeless,” he says.

Perhaps the biggest issue with Cruella is Cruella herself. As the entire Disney empire looms over it, this film gets trapped in the Mouse House’s shadow.

Take away the original animated series, and Cruella is just another movie about a girl whose dreams come true but who throws it all away after discovering the truth to be darker than she had imagined.

Such is the dilemma of the live-action Disney remake. Every film operating under such a mandate can try to do something different; but, in the end, these reimaginings must fit dutifully into the larger picture of the original story, however, shoehorned-in they may feel.

In another universe, one without such obligations to pre-existing IP, Cruella could be marketed as nothing more than the girlboss version of Joker, mixed with a little All About Eve.

It’s difficult to accurately prepare a viewer for the twists taken by Cruella’s plot. Much like Cruella herself, they’re brilliant, bad, and a little bit mad. But if the aesthetic-heavy approach of the film is successful at drawing you into Cruella’s world, you’ll follow its chaotic, frequently rug-pulling narrative.

Those twists range from the use of a rather ingenious device during the heist to a backstory revelation that’s just corny enough to remind you this is a Disney joint.

Ultimately, Cruella is the definition of “style over substance.” It’s the film equivalent of the Met Gala: a flimsy excuse to watch celebrities outdo one another in outlandish costumes, all carried off with a trendy, faux-revolutionary air. While the plot tries to keep up, it often comes off just too much for a film that’s aesthetically more than enough.

But it’s a fabulous time regardless, and well worth the price of admission (be that a movie ticket or Premier Access surcharge). If you see Cruella, buckle up: it’s a nonsensical yet glamorous rollercoaster ride.

Cruella premieres in theaters and on Disney+ with premier access on May 28.

While observing a distant galaxy located 320 million light years away, a team of astronomers from Australia stumbled upon something oddly familiar.

The galaxy, dubbed UGC 10738, had a thick disc containing ancient stars formed billions of years ago and a thin disc of relatively younger stars. The two star-filled discs were strikingly similar to those located in the Milky Way galaxy.

This revelation presented the astronomers with a rare opportunity to compare our own galaxy with its very own galactic twin, a galaxy that may have evolved in a similar fashion to the Milky Way. By doing so, they found that the Milky Way may have evolved gradually over time rather than having formed as a result of a massive collision between galaxies.

The findings suggest that contrary to popular belief, the Milky Way may be a rather common galaxy.

The study was published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

WHAT’S NEW — Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the team behind the new study was able to observe galaxy UGC 10738 in great detail.

Scientists were able to peer into the construction of the galaxy so intimately because UGC 10738 is angled edge-on, making it easy to spot the stars in each of its discs.

“It’s a bit like telling apart short people from tall people,” Nicholas Scott, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney and lead author of the new study, says in a statement. “If you try to do it from overhead it’s impossible, but if you look from the side, it’s relatively easy.”

But instead of telling apart people’s height, the researchers observed the age of the stars that had formed in the galaxy.

• Their observations revealed that galaxy UGC 10738 has a thick disc consisting mostly of ancient stars, which have a low ratio of iron to hydrogen and helium, while its thin disc stars are younger and contain more metal — a sign that they formed from material left over by previous generations of stars.
• Our Sun is a thin disc star, forming around 4.5 billion years ago.
• These discs have been observed in galaxies before, but it was nearly impossible to tell whether they hosted the same kind of star distribution between the two discs.
• By confirming that this galaxy has a similar distribution of young and old stars between its thin and thick discs, the astronomers concluded that it had a similar origin story to that of the Milky Way.

“From these results, we think galaxies with the Milky Way’s particular structures and properties could be described as the ‘normal’ ones,” Scott says.

HERE’S THE BACKGROUND — Nearly 14 billion years ago, enormous clouds of gas and dust collapsed under the weight of their own gravity to form the Milky Way.

These clouds then formed two main structures: a spherical halo, and a dense, bright disk.

Many astronomers believe that a massive collision formed the Milky Way, shaping it into the spiral galaxy it is today. A popular theory suggests that around 11 billion years ago, a small galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus slammed into the primordial Milky Way.

But the new study suggests that instead of a massive collision, the Milky Way came to be by way of natural progression.

“Our observations indicate that the Milky Way’s thin and thick discs didn’t come about because of a gigantic mash-up, but a sort-of ‘default’ path of galaxy formation and evolution,” Scott says. “From these results, we think galaxies with the Milky Way’s particular structures and properties could be described as the ‘normal’ ones.”

Based on previous evidence, scientists suggested that the Milky Way was unique in that it formed as a result of mergers with other, smaller galaxies and therefore its structure was not observable with other spiral galaxies.

But the recent observations of galaxy UGC 10738 suggest otherwise.

WHY IT MATTERS — Although it’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion from the observations of another galaxy that is seemingly similar to the Milky Way, the new study helps scientists understand how galaxies formed and evolved over time.

The new findings also don’t necessarily contradict the theory that the Milky Way collided with other smaller galaxies over time, leading to its structure today.

This is perhaps the closest comparison scientists have observed to our home galaxy and may suggest that the Milky Way is somewhat typical.

“We know a lot about how the Milky Way formed, but there was always the worry that the Milky Way is not a typical spiral galaxy,” Ken Freeman, professor at the Australian National University, and co-author of the study, says in a statement. “Now we can see that the Milky Way’s formation is fairly typical of how other disk galaxies were assembled.”

But more observations of other fairly similar galaxies are needed before re-writing the origin story of the Milky Way.

Abstract: The Milky Way disk consists of two prominent components — a thick, alpha-rich, low-metallicity component and a thin, metal-rich, low-alpha component. External galaxies have been shown to contain thin and thick disk components, but whether distinct components in the [α/Fe]–[Z/H] plane exist in other Milky Way-like galaxies is not yet known. We present VLT-MUSE observations of UGC 10738, a nearby, edge-on Milky Way-like galaxy. We demonstrate through stellar population synthesis model fitting that UGC 10738 contains alpha-rich and alpha-poor stellar populations with similar spatial distributions to the same components in the Milky Way. We discuss how the finding that external galaxies also contain chemically distinct disk components may act as a significant constraint on the formation of the Milky Way’s own thin and thick disk.

Leonardo may lead, Donatello might do machines, Raphael is, indeed, cool-but-rude. Michelangelo is a party dude. But actual turtles don’t really do much.

Real turtles kind of just sit there, swim around a little, and eat. That’s about it. They also live a long time — like, 30 years — and they grow to about the size of a dinner plate. For all of these reasons, turtles can make for rather costly, unexciting pets that require a long-term commitment.

For some pet owners, this may be fine. I have a pet turtle myself — he’s 14 and his name is Grover — and I’m totally okay with our very one-sided relationship. But turtles are often bought as a cheap impulse purchase for a child and, in short order, the kid grows bored with the pet and dumps it in a local pond.

The turtle-dumping problem was never more pronounced than during the height of popularity for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the animated TV series. During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the dumping of pet turtles around the world got so bad it resulted in millions of homeless turtles and changed turtle ecology all over the planet.

While all kinds of turtles have become pets, by far the most popular is the red-eared slider, a green turtle with yellow stripes and red markings where the ears would be. Native to the southern United States and northern Mexico, red-eared sliders started becoming pets in the 1930s and got really popular in the 1950s.

Back then, sliders could be purchased through the mail.

For just $1.69, a kid could order a baby turtle in a “special moss-protected package.” Look:

After growing in popularity in America, red-eared sliders started to be sold overseas. According to Paul Eversfield, a turtle hobbyist in the UK who is involved with an ecological project known as the Turtle Tally, this was part of a bigger trend in pets at the time.

“They began to come to the UK with the goldfish market after the war,” Eversfield tells Inverse.

In 1975, the turtles-as-pets trend saw a steep decline after the sale of red-eared sliders smaller than four inches was banned in the United States due to salmonella. While turtles of all ages can have salmonella, tiny, dime-sized turtle hatchlings were being sold en masse and there was a fear that children would put them in their mouths and get sick (some children have even died from turtle-related salmonella poisoning).

After 1975, the diminished turtle pet trade remained pretty unremarkable and likely would have stayed that way — had the pop culture gods not intervened a decade later.

“Since the movie came out, every kid on the block wants a turtle.”

Enter Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird who, in 1984, created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Designed as a parody of Daredevil, the Ninja Turtles were an independent comic that caught the attention of a marketing genius named Mark Freedman who brought the Turtles to a toy company called Playmates. Playmates then helped get a cartoon developed and the rest, as they say, is history.

As you likely know already, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a cartoon, three theatrical films, hundreds of action figures, and just about every kind of branded merchandise you can think of — including their own breakfast cereal.

“Turtle Mania” didn’t stop with the media blitz. It also saw an explosion in the popularity of pet turtles all across the country: “Since the movie came out, every kid on the block wants a turtle,” Oregon pet store owner Joe Coons told his local paper in May of 1990. Just a week later, in Jackson, Tennessee, a pet store owner lamented a shortage in the availability of pet turtles since the first film’s release six weeks earlier. Similar boosts in pet turtle sales were also reported in York, Pennsylvania, Springfield, Missouri, Wilmington, Delaware, and Escondido, California, just to name a few.

The craze spread well beyond the United States. Because red-eared sliders are plentiful and easy to breed, farms in the United States — particularly in Louisiana — began selling millions more of the terrapins overseas. Prior to 1989, about 3.5 million turtles were exported annually, but from 1989 to 1997, the yearly exports jumped up 257 percent, to almost 9 million.

Ninja Turtles aren't entirely to blame. When the U.S. government shut down the sales of hatchlings in 1975, many turtle farms went out of business, but some began exporting more, as the law didn’t restrict that. There were also significant exports to China as food and for use in medicines, as well as for pets. And in Taiwan, red-eared sliders were used for Buddhist ceremonial purposes.

The worldwide craze over the Ninja Turtles was still a major contributor to the explosion in slider exports. “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series has revived an interest in the animals as pets,” noted Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald in October of 1990. Similar reports from the UK also exist, and since the Ninja Turtles were a worldwide phenomenon, it likely led to increased turtle pet ownership in non-English-speaking countries as well.

But once those kids got bored of their pet turtles — which, trust me, happens pretty quickly — the turtles often got dumped in a nearby body of water. As the UK’s Wingham Wildlife Park explains on its website: “After the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films in the ’80s, the sale of these terrapins rocketed in the pet trade, however when these baby pets outgrew their small fish tanks, many of these turtles were sadly released into the wild all over the world, leading to introduced populations of this species in a huge array of countries.”

This is also confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey, which specifically credits the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle television cartoon craze” with the abundance of wild red-eared sliders worldwide.

Both then and now, when red-eared sliders are released, they inevitably make an impact on their new environments. They often carry diseases and sometimes — because they’re omnivorous — people are introducing a new predator into an ecosystem.

The most widespread issue, though, is that the red-eared slider alters the role of an area’s native turtle species because red-eared sliders are bigger and have far more offspring than most other turtles. As a result, they compete with native turtles for food, basking space, and nesting space. In 2014, they were named as one of the 100 worst alien invasive species by the Global Invasive Species Database

Allen Salzberg, the editor of HerpDigest (tag line: “All the Herp News That's Fit To Print”) tells Inverse that red-eared sliders were already a problem, but it was “made worse” by TMNT.

“I was sounding the alarm back then to news outlets about this issue,” he says, “but it made no difference. In Central Park now, the only turtles in any pond are red-eared sliders, they’ve completely replaced the painted turtle, which was there before.

“Now, you could argue that it doesn’t matter in Central Park because everything there is artificial anyway, but red-eared sliders have also threatened painted turtles outside of the city, which is the native habitat of the painted turtle.”

Across the country in California, Greg Pauly, the curator of herpetology at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, says these turtles could be harming the environment too.

“We did a study that measured the effect that red-eared sliders are having on the Western pond turtle and we found that when you remove a lot of the red-eared sliders, one of the outcomes is that the body conditions of the western pond turtles does improve,” Pauly says. “That says there is definitely competition for resources.”

Pauly’s study is actually one of very few that specifically measures the impact of red-eared sliders in the wild, with good reason. The study involved spending “hundreds of hours” trapping red-eared sliders, making the entire process both difficult and costly.

“It’s also not fun,” he says. “Most of us that get into herpetology do it because we love the animals, so it’s frustrating to do these studies where turtles often have to be euthanized because we can’t find homes for them.”

“There is definitely competition for resources.”

Because studies are so rare, much of the evidence citing red-eared sliders as a problem is anecdotal or it comes from studies done under controlled laboratory conditions. For example, a lab study in Europe illustrated that the red-eared slider is likely impacting the size and mortality of the European pond turtle, which is a native species to southern and western Europe.

In the UK, where there are no native turtles that still exist, The Independent reported in 2010 that, “As committed scavengers without natural predators in Britain, terrapins, and turtles find themselves at the top of the food chain in urban ponds and watercourses, chomping their way through a menu of native species that includes newts, fish, toads, frogspawn.”

In Australia, the red-eared slider has been officially cited as a threat to their native turtles including the eastern long-necked turtle and the Murray River short-necked turtle. In South Africa, they’ve been identified as a threat to the marsh terrapin and the serrated hinged terrapin. And in Japan, red-eared sliders now greatly outnumber all of their native turtle species.

These problems have only been made worse by the introduction of red-eared slider farms in the last two decades. As Dr. Steven Pearson, a research scientist with the New York Department of Conservation, explains, “In China, there are farms for the red-eared slider and now, many of them being spread around the world come from China.”

These farms have also largely supplanted the American turtle farms, says Pauly, simply because the labor costs involved are much lower.

So what can be done about it? Well, like so much of mankind’s impact on the Earth, you can’t unring this bell either, but measures have been taken to at least mitigate the situation. Red-eared sliders were banned by the European Union in 1996 following the Ninja Turtle craze. Another bill in 2015 banned all other kinds of sliders. They’re also banned in South Africa and Australia and Japan may soon ban them as well.

There are also turtle sanctuaries, but they have their own complications: “Many wildlife rehabbers don’t accept red-eared sliders because if they did, there’d be no space for other turtles,” says Salzburg, the HerpDigest editor.

“I got into this because I loved Ninja Turtles as a kid and recognized as an adult that these red-eared sliders need help.”

In the UK, Michael Butcher runs the Kent Turtle Sanctuary. A TMNT fan, Butcher runs one of the few sanctuaries in Britain that can accept red-eared sliders.

“I haven’t been able to get the support from the government to get the property needed to actually care for the animals,” he says. “I also get next to nothing in donations. Without that, I can’t care for these turtles and may have to shut down. I don’t want to do that because I love these animals.

“I got into this because I loved Ninja Turtles as a kid and recognized as an adult that these red-eared sliders need help.”

Awareness and education, to some degree, might help the situation. Susan Tellem, the executive director of the American Tortoise Rescue, tells me the best solution is to simply stop buying pet turtles.

“When the new Ninja Turtle movies were coming out a few years ago, I was telling parents to buy their kids Ninja Turtles toys, not the real thing,” she says, “because these animals so often get dumped.”

Tellem has also worked with Nickelodeon — which purchased the Teenage Mutant Turtles in 2009 — to promote World Turtle Day, which was founded by the American Tortoise Rescue in 2000 and has since become a worldwide celebration.

As individuals, the most important thing we can do is educate ourselves about what we’re getting ourselves into when we get a new pet.

As Pauly explains, “Red-eared sliders really aren’t an ideal pet when you think about it. It’s a six-dollar turtle that, in a couple of years, needs a $500 tank to take care of it.

“The only reason why it’s so popular in the pet trade is because the people who farm them can generate such large numbers of them — that’s it.”

“It’s not a good world to be a red-eared slider.”

“Now they’re all over the world, invading all these waterways and threatening other turtles,” he continues, “but it’s not the red-eared sliders’ fault. It’s not a good world to be a red-eared slider either given that they’re farmed in such large numbers in their non-native country, then shipped all over the world in terrible conditions, only to later be dumped by irresponsible pet owners.”

That being said — and I’m saying this as a Ninja-Turtle-loving, red-eared slider owner myself — perhaps one of the worst ways for someone to express their love of turtles is to support a pet trade that negatively affects both native turtles and red-eared sliders in such devastating ways.

Instead, educate yourself about what it takes to care for a turtle and maybe get yourself one that costs a little more upfront, but that's more suited to actually being a pet.

For those out there who already have a red-eared slider, please don’t dump it in a nearby pond, even if it’s not the most exciting of companions.

There are two main categories of speculative science fiction. You can imagine a future where technology has improved and the world has become a space-age utopia, but where’s the fun in that?

Sci-fi films have the potential to imagine a future far darker and nastier than the present. That’s the direction many of the most memorable sci-fi films in history have taken. Classics of the genre like Blade Runner, Snowpiercer, Children of Men, and even The Lobster all imagine a world made worse by technology and the march of time.

But few sci-fi films are quite as dark as Soylent Green, the 1973 dystopian thriller starring Charlton Heston. It’s available to stream now on HBO Max. Here’s why you need to add it to your watchlist, while you still can.

Directed by Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage), Soylent Green imagines a world where pollution, poverty, overpopulation, and depleted resources have wreaked havoc upon society. Set in the distant future of 2022, the film depicts a time when only the rich live well. Their apartments come with concubines referred to as “furniture,” while depressed citizens have begun seeking out government-assisted suicide to escape the terrors of reality.

It’s a vision of the future that’s hard to forget.

Enter: Charlton Heston’s NYPD detective Frank Thorn. Soylent Green follows Thorn as he investigates the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), one of the wealthy board members of Soylent Industries, a corporation that has amassed huge amounts of power by selling processed wafers called “Soylent Red” and “Soylent Yellow” to the public. When the film begins, the company has begun to roll out its most flavorful wafer yet, a new variation known as — you guessed it — “Soylent Green.”

Soylent Industries claims that the new wafer is made from ocean plankton, but as Thorn begins to uncover the details surrounding Simonson’s death, it becomes clear the company may be withholding more information than it’s letting on. The ultimate resolution of the mystery, while undeniably stomach-churning and appalling, fits perfectly with Soylent Green’s overwhelmingly nihilistic view of the future.

To say much more about the actual plot of Soylent Green would be to lessen the impact of its climactic twists and turns (though there’s a chance Futurama already spoiled the ending for you). But it should be said that all of the beats in the film’s last act essentially work to further drive home its themes, which touch on the dangers of global warming and the tendencies of powerful corporations to turn everyday people into nothing more than livestock for their own nefarious machinations.

The film is elevated by the performances of Heston as Thorn and Edward G. Robinson (in his final film role) as Sol Roth, Thorn’s older roommate who longs to see society return to the world it was before society’s collapse. Heston brings a truly inspiring level of dedication to a role that might otherwise have been forgettable, and it’s difficult to imagine any other actor delivering Thorn’s ridiculously ludicrous final line with quite as much gusto as Heston does.

All of this stands without even getting too far into Soylent Green’s final moments, which are so absurd and horrifying, that they need to be seen to truly be believed.

Soylent Green is available to stream now on HBO Max.

Batman's nemesis is one of the greatest villains in pop culture. Here are five essential Joker comic storylines to get you up to speed with the character.

View this story on Inverse

Marvel’s Eternals doesn’t look like anything that the studio has done before.

For one thing, unlike most films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which typically take place over a few days or weeks, Eternals spans thousands of years, focusing on a group of immortal beings as they form their own unique relationship with Earth. It promises a broader, more grand-scale view of time than any other MCU film before it. And with Nomadland filmmaker Chloé Zhao at the helm, Eternals will showcase the kind of artistic visual style unprecedented in a Marvel Studios project.

But despite visual and narrative elements working to separate Eternals from the rest of the MCU, the film shares a fascinating connection with a recent Marvel entry – one that could push it further into alignment with the studio’s overarching universe.

An Unexpected Connection — The first official poster for Eternals, released this week in conjunction with the film’s first trailer, credits Zhao and Patrick Burleigh as co-writers on the Eternals screenplay. While we’ve known for several months that Zhao worked on the final script for the film, Burleigh’s involvement comes as a surprise.

His credit on Eternals is especially notable given that he’s credited as having worked on 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, as an additional writer/story consultant.

A Home in the MCU — The poster’s credits reveal nothing major about the plot of Eternals, and they don’t confirm details from alleged story leaks that have circulated online in recent months. But the presence of an experienced Marvel hand like Burleigh on Eternals’ creative team does raise interesting questions.

It’s possible Marvel brought Burleigh in on Eternals to ensure the movie feels at home within the broader MCU. The new trailer mostly sells the film on the strengths of a tone and visual style distinct from previous films. It’d be within reason for the studio to want another, Marvel-approved writer involved, making sure the plot doesn’t diverge too much from what audiences have come to expect.

The lighthearted dinner-table banter shown at the end of the Eternals trailer, for instance, feels far more reminiscent of other MCU films than any other moment in the preview. Could that scene be a product of Burleigh’s involvement?

The Inverse Analysis — To Marvel’s credit, the studio appears very supportive of Eternals and in particular of Zhao’s artistic vision for the film. But Marvel has also established a cohesive tone for the MCU across the past 13 years, so it’s plausible the studio could have brought Burleigh onboard to ensure Eternals still feels of a piece with its overarching franchise.

Given rampant speculation that the Eternals and other characters introduced in Zhao’s film will play a major role in Phase 3 of the MCU and beyond, Marvel is surely keen to ensure Eternals feels unique without interfering with its long-term strategy. In other words, while Zhao could have simply partnered with Burleigh because the two resonated creatively, his involvement also points to Eternals having more in common with Marvel’s previous films than its first trailer would otherwise suggest.

Eternals will be released in theaters on November 5, 2021.

A virus spreads across the Earth at unimaginable speed, flooding hospitals and killing millions as civilization grinds to a halt. The survivors are forced to wear masks as their fear transforms into violence wielded against an easy scapegoat. A cruel and incapable government does little to help the situation or extinguish the flame of that violence.

If your eyes glazed over at that last paragraph, I don’t blame you. We’ve all spent the last 14 months dealing with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. As vaccinations begin to beat back the disease, the last thing anyone needs is a shot-for-shot retelling of the worst year of many of our lives. Which is why I cannot for the life of me figure out why Netflix thought it was a good idea to release Sweet Tooth.

The new series, created by Jim Mickle and based on a comic from DC’s mature offshoot Vertigo, tells the story of a pandemic-ridden post-apocalyptic America. As the virus spreads, new children are born with animal features. It’s unclear which came first, “the sick” or these “Hybrids,” but their clear connection drives many to fear Hybrids and some to even try to kill them.

It’s in this world that we meet Gus (aka, Sweet Tooth), a young boy with antlers and deer ears that give him ultra-sensitive hearing and smell (even though he has a human nose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Gus sets out on a cross-country adventure with Tommy Jepperd, a hulking former athlete and reformed Hybrid “poacher” who becomes Sweet Tooth’s begrudging guardian.

The trials of Gus and Tommy are entertaining enough, even if Sweet Tooth has the same flattened digital look of every other second-rate Netflix original series. But what sets the show apart — and also makes it nearly unwatchable — is its insistence on chronicling the spread of the virus through a series of increasingly painful flashbacks.

The show opens as the virus first emerges and we see it through the eyes of Dr. Aditya Singh as his hospital becomes overwhelmed by coughing patients. In the third episode, set years after the outbreak, Singh and his remaining friends gather for a party. When it’s revealed that the host is sick too, the guests quickly turn on him, matter-of-factly pulling face masks out of their pockets before doing something truly horrific to stop the disease from spreading.

Sweet Tooth should come with a trigger warning. Instead, it’s presented in trailers and promotional material as a heart-warming adventure. It’s no surprise that out of 50 press images provided by Netflix, I couldn’t find a single one showing any of these flashback scenes in detail.

The original comic is also significantly darker in its portrayal of the post-apocalypse, but executive producer Robert Downey Jr. and his team decided to “make it a more enjoyable place.” So why couldn’t they change the virus plotline? Even Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seemingly swapped out a pandemic subplot at the last minute. Apparently, Netflix didn’t get that message.

“We were two months into our writers’ room when suddenly, we found ourselves on zoom, writing a show that felt more like reality than fiction,” co-creators Mickle and Beth Schwartz write in a statement.

Maybe there was a moment when someone in that writer's room suggested not turning the real-life pain of billions into a bingeable sci-fi show. Maybe not. Either way, that’s exactly what we got.

Sweet Tooth has eight episodes (at least in Season 1), but I couldn’t make it past Episode 4. I’m just not ready to watch the minute details of life during a pandemic become fodder for a post-apocalypse story. Especially such a mediocre one.

It would be one thing if the core tale of Gus and Tommy was good enough to merit its backstory. It’s not. Christian Convery (Gus) is decent as far as child actors go, and Nonso Anozie (Tommy) is entertaining to watch as a one-man killing machine. But from what I’ve seen, there’s nothing unique or thoughtful enough in Sweet Tooth to balance out the show’s sheer unpleasantness.

Maybe in a few years I’ll feel different. For now, there are better things to do than watch a dramatized version of the Covid-19 pandemic tossed thoughtlessly in front of our eyeballs like one more forgettable Netflix original.

Sweet Tooth releases June 4 on Netflix.

Loki will be unlike any Marvel series we’ve seen. The first of Disney+’s MCU series to focus on a villain, it will find the rogue Asgardian reluctantly rallying to a good cause: helping the Time Variance Authority to repair broken timelines. Don’t expect this redemption arc to stick. It’s likely Loki will be up to his usual tricks soon enough, and one recent fan theory suggests the series will set in motion the MCU’s biggest villain team-up to date.

What if the events of Loki led into a fifth Avengers film, inspired by Marvel Comics’ Siege event? That’s the theory recently advanced by Redditor u/comicclub1089. For those unfamiliar with this particular multi-series event, it follows Norman Osborn’s efforts to create his own line of Dark Avengers, who seek to invade Asgard – with Loki’s help.

It’s already obvious an anti-Avengers squad of some kind is being assembled in the MCU. After Contessa Valentina’s appearance in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it appears John Walker is the first of many to be recruited into this elite group. Could this squad be inspired by the Dark Avengers or The Thunderbolts? This theory makes a convincing case for the former.

In the comics, Loki enlists Osborn’s help by convincing him Earth is no place for a new Asgard. To quote Loki in Siege: “This isn’t mischief. This is mayhem.” The pair launch a joint invasion, with Osborn leading the charge. However, they’re poorly prepared and do not succeed in this effort, with Loki experiencing a change of heart and praying to his father Odin for help. Meanwhile, Osborn and the Dark Avengers are arrested. If the MCU were to adapt this story, it would be the final nail in Loki’s redemption-arc coffin, with the siege serving as his last evil scheme.

While Norman Osborn led the Dark Avengers in the comics, it’s likely Contessa Valentina will fulfill that role in the MCU. Where does Loki come in? After the trickster god is through freelancing with the TVA in Loki, he’ll likely return to Earth – only to find the Avengers scattered, with Iron Man and Captain America gone for good. Odin’s dead, and the world’s in disarray after The Blip. In other words, it’s the perfect time to hatch an evil plot.

After six episodes of do-gooding, Loki will likely return to his villainous roots, and perhaps invading New Asgard will be at the top of his to-do list. The Avengers beat Loki once before. But what if Loki were to partner with John Walker and Valentina’s other new recruits? That would be a fight not only worth reassembling Earth’s mightiest heroes but also seismic enough to support another super-sized Avengers outing in the MCU.

Loki premieres on Disney+ on June 9.

Shaking hands is an important social behavior in chimps, hinting at our shared evolutionary history with primates.

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The end of this pandemic may be in sight, but the Covid-19 will ripple into pop culture for years — especially when it comes to horror movies. However, one of the most frightening looks into a pandemic was released nearly a decade ago, and it’s available to watch now on HBO Max.

No, I’m not talking about Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak or Steven Soderberg’s Contagion, both of which received new surges of interest over the past year. I’m talking about a film that mostly slid under the radar, despite being the work of an Academy Award-winning director. I’m talking about a film that got under my skin so deep I still shudder to think about it. I’m talking about a film that not only explores a devastating, deadly virus but also reveals how government inaction and the greed of a big business allowed such a thing to happen. I’m talking about Barry Levinson’s The Bay.

The Bay is presented as a collection of footage confiscated by the U.S. government. It begins on July 4, 2009 in Claridge, a small tourist town in Chesapeake Bay kept alive by beachgoers and the local chicken industry. The town and its mayor make news when citizens learn that the chicken farm has been dumping excrement and toxins into the bay, contaminating the town’s water supply. Some locals are dismayed, while others look the other way as long as the town’s cash flow keeps coming in. But cash isn’t the only thing flowing from the bay into the town. Parasites abound, and they are quite nasty.

Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), a young reporter assigned to cover Claridge’s Independence Day celebrations, takes it on herself to investigate the chicken farm’s illegal dumping practices. She doesn’t have to look very far to find the story. A number of the town’s inhabitants have developed strange bulges and rashes on their skin. Soon, a crab-eating competition ends in deadly mass vomiting. To top things off, there’s something swimming in the bay that’s killing teenagers who venture out into the water.

The town quickly descends into chaos as Donna, the cops, the CDC, and a family heading by boat to what they don’t know is a disaster site, all struggle to survive a town that’s literally dying.

Found-footage horror isn’t for everyone, and the film came at a time when the format was on its way out. But The Bay is different. While still being based in the horror you can’t see (as so many found footage films start out), what you can’t see here isn’t supernatural. It’s the plausibility that really gives The Bay its edge. Despite a budget of only $2 million dollars, these parasites look disturbingly real.

The Bay isn’t an expansive film. Levinson originally intended to make an actual documentary before he decided to use the budget to turn his research into a horror film. As a result, The Bay’s parasites are based on 80% factual evidence.

There are lots of neat tricks down with camera footage, sound, and obscured images to heighten the tension, but as far as sci-fi-horror-found-footage goes, this is no Cloverfield.

It all works in the film's favor, creating an anxiety-inducing level of intimacy. Levinson operates like a man on a mission. In 85 minutes he’ll not only scare you and make your flesh crawl, he’ll also make you question where your food and water is coming, and at what cost.

The Bay has a point to make: This could happen. In fact, it is happening. Not with the suddenness that we see in The Bay, but a mix of government negligence, bad business practices, and humanity's inability and lack of desire to sacrifice our comfort is a perfect storm for a pandemic.

So as we head into summer, we have every right to question whether or not it’s safe to go back in the water. It’s entirely possible to enjoy The Bay as just a horror film. But for the more ecologically conscious, The Bay is best taken as a warning. One we should all heed.

THE BAY IS CURRENTLY STREAMING ON HBO MAX IN THE U.S.

By the time it finally graces our eyeholes, the wait between Rick and Morty Season 4 and Season 5 will be only slightly longer than a year. That’s a huge improvement compared to the two-plus years that followed Season 3.

Series co-creator Dan Harmon promised in a July 2019 interview that the wait between seasons "will never be this long again." His fellow co-creator Justin Roiland also said that the production team was "rolling right into the next batch," meaning that work on Season 5 began before Season 4 even began airing. So it makes sense that we’re now looking at the shortest amount of time between two Rick and Morty seasons ... ever.

Here's everything we know about Rick and Morty Season 5, from air dates to plot theories — and enough calculated speculation that Rick Sanchez himself would be impressed.

Is there a Rick and Morty Season 5 trailer?

Yes! Adult Swim released the first official trailer for Rick and Morty Season 5 on March 30, 2021 and then followed up with another one on May 1.

The first trailer’s timing was noteworthy considering Season 3’s surprise debut on April 1, 2017 — April Fools’ Day — with “The Rickshank Rickdemption.” The end of March and/or the beginning of April is officially a major week for the show, especially when we remember that the trailer for the back-half of Season 4 debuted on April 1, 2020.

The trailer opens on the entire Smith family — Jerry, Summer, Rick, Morty, and Beth — running through an eerie, foggy wood. Summer and Rick bicker about it being too quiet before things kick into high gear.

We see fully colorized and animated scenes from the “First Look" animatic released during July 2020’s Adult Swim Con. In that trailer, Rick almost dies, Morty crash-lands on Earth when he realizes that Jessica might hang out with him, and we meet Mr. Nimbus, Rick's "once and eternal foe." Mr. Nimbus reappears in several scenes from the trailer, including one where Jerry calls him a “strange, horny ocean man.”

There’s also some kind of Voltron-themed episode where each member of the family gets a super-suit and (presumably) a mecha to pilot. (Is this the same episode where they’re all in the woods?) Morty, Rick, and Jessica also later appear in some kind of arena where the spectators are robot people and giant mecha dogs, so there may be some overlap there.

One nightmarish series of images shows Rick and Beth in bondage gear. Beth looks like Hellraiser. Rick has a swordfish through his abdomen, which he uses to bludgeon an alien. Jerry is strung up in some kind of dungeon in this storyline, so it’s up to Rick and Beth to save him.

One of the more peculiar things about this trailer: There are a series of shots from a very specific angle in the Smith kitchen we don’t see that often. A hologram Rick stops Summer from going into the garage. A bruised and battered Morty is grabbed by the arm to leave with Rick. Some kind of alien in a spacesuit marches through a portal in the garage to attack Rick. Do all of these events take place in a single scene? Or could there be almost an entire episode from a single angle?

In yet another scene, Rick puts the house’s blast shields down, locking Jerry outside while a kaiju-sized praying mantis ravages the surrounding area. Rick’s spaceship is also seen pulling an entire solar system behind it, as piloted by Morty, Summer, and an unknown teenager that looks like it could be a young Jerry. Some small alien wants to be humped, and then there are other scenes of Rick fighting with versions of himself (a tried and true staple of the series).

The second trailer features many similar sequences from the first with tons of new scenes:

There are plenty of clips from the Voltron-themed episode with the whole Smith family which also includes a kaiju-sized praying mantis monster. There’s also some kind of family vacation and some kind of formal event where everyone is wearing formal clothing. The cyberpunk-themed episode with Jessica also seems to be the same episode with Mr. Nimbus. We also see a couple of clips of something that looks like acid rain, where Morty is shown flirting with an alien-looking girl.

It’s unclear exactly which episodes overlap here, but Season 5 already looks as bonkers as any before it — if not, more.

The third official trailer offers new scenes from many of the same episodes we’ve seen from the previous two trailers.

When is the Rick and Morty Season 5 release date?

This one’s easy: The trailer released March 30, 2021 confirms that Season 5 premieres June 20, 2021 at 11 p.m. Eastern on Adult Swim. That’s right: Rick and Morty is sticking to late-night Sundays.

Mid-summer remains the most popular time for Rick and Morty season premieres.

Season 3 technically began on April 1 with the surprise-airing of “The Rickshank Rickdemption” and then continued with “Rickmancing the Stone” on July 30, 2017. Almost exactly two years prior, the Season 2 premiere, “A Rickle in Time,” aired on July 26, 2015. Season 4 did premiere in November, however. But most of the time, it’s been the summer.

Most long-time Rick and Morty fans out there have come to expect long waits between seasons. Whereas many TV shows operate on an annual production and release cycle with more consistency, that’s not the case here. Roughly 18 months or longer have passed between the end of a season and the start of a new one.

When Season 4 was greenlit back in May 2018, it was part of a 70-episode order that likely includes even Season 10. Previously, the production team would be waiting on Adult Swim and Time Warner to greenlight a new season. Since that’s not the case anymore, new seasons should keep coming with regular frequency. The timeline for Season 5 is proof of that.

How does the Rick and Morty Season 4 finale set up Season 5?

Just like Justin Roiland teased in an interview with Variety, the Season 4 finale got "canonical" and "serialized” in the finale. The Gromflomite Galactic Federation, Tammy, Birdperson, and Dr. Wong all returned, but there was also the introduction of a second Beth commonly referred to as "Space Beth."

A Season 3 episode hinted that Rick may have cloned Beth. The Season 4 finale confirms that he did. But now we have no way to know which one is a clone. "Space Beth was not a one-off character," Harmon confirmed during Adult Swim Fest 2020. "That's a thing that could have been the case." In a December 2020 interview with Inverse, Beth voice actor Sarah Chalke implied the obvious but did not say it outright: Space Beth will return in Season 5.

The Galactic Federation has also been defeated yet again, though some Gromflomites will always live on to rebuild. Tammy is dead beyond a measure of a doubt, and Rick has reclaimed the Terminator-esque pieces of Phoenixperson to keep them in his garage in a way that feels like a homage to the ending of Shaun of the Dead.

Much like the Season 3 finale, the ending to Season 4 also alienates Rick from the rest of the family. These characters, along with the viewer, have had to reckon with just how terrible a person Rick is yet again. Rick fancies himself a god in this universe, and so does the average viewer, but the show continues to challenge our expectations in interesting ways. Rick is, quite simply, a jerk. Why do we love him so much?

When the dust settles on Season 4, both versions of Beth decide to stick around, and as far as lingering plot threads, the only major thing left hanging is Evil Morty who had a non-canon cameo in Episode 6 and little else to do this season.

There's a lot that could happen in Season 5: Aside from Evil Morty, we could see the team-up between the Talking Cat and Balthromaw the dragon, Supernova from the Vindicators, Morty's soul mate from "The Vat of Acid Episode," and plenty more.

How many episodes will be in Rick and Morty Season 5?

The going assumption was that Season 5 would be 10 episodes long like most previous seasons, but the official Rick and Morty Twitter account confirmed it on May 24, 2021 with a Tweet revealing “all ten episode titles.”

What are the Rick and Morty Season 5 episode titles?

As revealed in a May 2021 video posted to Twitter, we now know what the title of every episode is.

• Episode 1: “Mort Dinner Rick Andre”
• Episode 2: “Mortyplicity”
• Episode 3: “Rickdependence Spray”
• Episode 4: “A Rickinconvenient Mort”
• Episode 5: “Amortycan Grickfitti”
• Episode 6: “Rick & Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular”
• Episode 7: “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion”
• Episode 8: “Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort”
• Episode 9: “Forgetting Sarick Mortshall”
• Episode 10: “Rickmurai Jack”

Now, for a rough translation of the movie or television series that each episode title references. In many cases, these will be clues about episode plots to some extent, but more often than not, they only vaguely reference a random thing from the storyline.

• Episode 1: My Dinner with Andre — A 1981 dramedy film in which two old friends reconnect and reminisce about their lives.
• Episode 2: Multiplicity — A wacky sci-fi movie where Michael Keaton winds up being cloned several times over and chaos ensues.
• Episode 3: Independence Day — An iconic action blockbuster where aliens invade Earth, leaving Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to save the day.
• Episode 4: An Inconvenient Truth — The 2006 documentary about former US Vice President Al Gore’s crusade to educate the world about climate change.
• Episode 5: American Graffiti — A 1973 coming-of-age comedy directed by Star Wars visionary George Lucas that chronicles the adventures a group of teenagers embarks on in a single night in Modesto, California.
• Episode 6: “Rick & Morty’s Thanksgiving Spectacular” — Sounds like a pretty straightforward Thanksgiving episode, broh.
• Episode 7: Neon Genesis Evangelion — An iconic post-apocalyptic mecha anime series riddled with religious symbolism that follows a group of young pilots struggling to avert total annihilation.
• Episode 8: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — Michel Gondry’s beloved sci-fi romance film from 2004 tells the dramatic love story between Kate Winslet’s Clementine and Jim Carrey’s Joel as they fall in and out of love ... and then delete all memories of one another.
• Episode 9: Forgetting Sarah Marshall — A hilariously irreverent romantic comedy in which Jason Segel’s hapless but lovable musician gets dumped by famous actress Sarah Marshall (played by Kristen Bell), and then bumps into her with her new lover in Hawaii by happenstance. Shenanigans ensue.
• Episode 10: Samurai Jack — This beloved animated series from visionary Genndy Tartakovsky follows the titular hero, a warrior lost in time who seeks to return to the past and undo the destruction wrought by the evil wizard Aku.

But if we consider what the trailers have revealed previously, “A Rickinconvenient Mort” may reference the female Captain Planet-looking character we’ve seen.

What could all of the other references mean? We’ll have to wait and see when these episodes air. But we can safely bet that “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion” is the Voltron episode where the whole family fights a kaiju. The “Thanksgiving Spectacular” sounds like a relatively straightforward holiday episode. “Mortyplicity” will inevitably involve plenty of Morty clones, right? “Amortycan Grickfitti” might follow a vignette structure similar to “Tales from the Citadel,” but that’s pure speculation. And “Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort” could involve memory wipes of some kind, assuming the episode borrows the sci-fi concept from the movie it references?

All Genshin Impact characters are bad. They’re also all universally good. Unless you have the right gear equipped, Genshin Impact characters can easily turn to hot mush. Eula, the brand new five-star Cryo Claymore-wielder can emerge from her hot mush status as perhaps the best physical DPS in the game. All you need is the right build.

Here’s what you need to make the perfect Eula build in Genshin Impact.

What's the best Eula build in Genshin Impact?

Eula is two things – a Cryo character and a physical damage dealer. Despite having the frosty element, her greatest builds rely far more on her physical damage abilities. If built correctly, certain attacks in Eula’s kit can deal literal millions of damage points. Her skillset is absolutely bonkers.

What you want to do is focus on increasing Eula’s physical damage, which enhances all her non-elemental-based attacks. Eula has an innate Critical Rate boost that increases with each level. If you can max out her physical damage and get lucky with your criticals, you’ll be more than ready to deal hundreds of thousands of damage in a single blow.

Here’s what you’ll need to make Eula unstoppable:

1. Song of Broken Pines, or Serpent Spine
2. (2) Pale Flame artifacts
3. (2) Bloodstained Chivalry artifacts

By combining these three things, you’ll get at least a 50 percent physical attack bonus from the Pale Flame and Bloodstained Chivalry artifact pairs and drastically increase either your critical damage or physical damage with the weapon. Together, they make a darn good argument for trying to recruit Eula during her banner.

This setup works for any Eula, even ones without constellations. If you just got the Spindrift Knight, this will be great for your team.

How to get the Song of Broken Pines or Serpent Spine in Genshin Impact

In version 1.5, miHoYo added the Song of Broken Pines, which is basically custom-made for Eula. Like any ideal weapon, it’s a five-star that you can only obtain through the Gacha system. You’ll have to spend wads of cash if you want to obtain this blade.

If you can get it, the Song of Broken Pines has a wide swath of effects. For example, it has Millennial Movement: Banner-Hymn, which increases your normal attack speed by 12 percent and raises your attack by 20 percent for 12 seconds. The possible crown jewel is the physical damage sub stat that bolsters your physical damage by 20.7 percent. Song of Broken Pines also touts a high attack damage, dealing 741 attack damage once you’ve maxed it out.

The weapon will make your Eula incredibly strong, but it’s also a lot of money. It's highly unlikely that you'll have enough money to pull both Eula and Song of Broken Pines.

If you’re scraping by and trying to enjoy Eula, two more affordable options are Serpent Spine or Snow-Tombed Starsilver.

Serpent Spine is the Claymore available by purchasing the in-game battle pass, Gnostic Hymn. At max level, it deals modest 510 damages and will boost your critical hit rate. Serpent Spine increases your character's attack by six percent every four seconds they’re on the battlefield. It’s not as powerful as Song of Broken Pines, but gets the job done.

Alternatively, if can’t afford the battle pass, Eula can thrive on using the Snow-Tombed Starsilver. You can unlock it as a forgeable weapon after completing the puzzle found on Dragonspine.

Snow-Tombed Starsilver doesn’t boast nearly as impressive stats, but it has a fantastic physical damage boost substat. As a forgeable weapon, you can very easily increase its refinement, making it far more suited for Eula.

How to get Pale Flame artifacts in Genshin Impact

Pale Flame is a new artifact set that was added in version 1.5. You can farm it by using the Ridge Watch domain, which can be found in Bishui Plain, Liyue.

With two Pale Flame artifacts equipped, Eula’s physical damage will increase by 25 percent. This will go a long way in making her a powerful damage dealer for your team.

How to get Bloodstained Chivalry artifacts in Genshin Impact

By equipping two Bloodstained Chivalry artifacts, you can further increase Eula’s Physical Damage by 25 percent. If you’re using her as a physical attacker, this is a fantastic boon.

You can obtain Bloodstained Chivalry artifacts by completing the Clear Pool and Mountain Cavern domain, found in Liyue's Jueyun Karst.

Nintendo Switch Online offers a library of classic NES and SNES games, but some of the best are missing. Here are 9 games we'd love to see on Switch Online.

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