If a history professor or museum is at their very best when they help people deeply connect with the ghosts of the past, then these 1,000-year-old game pieces found in a German castle are the perfect tool for the job. Consisting of four, flower-shaped gaming pieces, a six-sided die, and a knight chess piece—all carved […] The post Exquisitely Preserved, These 1,000-yo Gaming Pieces Found in German Castle Offer Snapshot of Medieval Pastimes appeared first on Good News Network.

Column Alphaville: Hard-Boiled Noir Meets New Wave Techno-Dystopia A tough-guy detective battles conformity and a soul-crushing computer in a futuristic city. It’s very French. By Kali Wallace | Published on June 12, 2024 Credit: Athos Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Athos Films Alphaville (1965) (French: Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, and Howard Vernon. It’s probably not true, but the story goes like this: Sometime in the 1930s, a down-on-his-luck London writer (who was sometimes a reporter, a private investigator, or a police constable) claimed that anybody could write a crime thriller in the American literary style. A skeptical friend bet £5 that he couldn’t do it, but the writer set out to prove him wrong. That’s how author Peter Cheyney wrote This Man Is Dangerous, the first in a series of several books and stories featuring the American FBI agent Lemmy Caution. Whether or not Cheyney mimicked the style made famous by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler well enough to earn that £5, his books were incredibly successful. They are classic pulpy crime fiction in every way: gruff men with very loose codes of ethics, beautiful women in abundance, thugs always ready to offer a beatdown, everything soaked in whiskey and smelling of cigarettes. After World War II, when everything American in style was enjoying a period of esteem in France, Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution books were adapted into a series of movies released between 1953 and 1962, all starring American actor Eddie Constantine in the lead role. I don’t know about you, but upon learning this I had an immediate and obvious question: How the heck does that lead to Alphaville? To a film with the same actor playing the same lead character, not based on any Cheyney novel but instead presenting a grim science fictional scenario about a supercomputer that has subjugated an entire city under totalitarian rule, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time and a pioneer of an iconoclastic, experimental film style that sought to deliberately transform movies into high art? It’s a good question that has an interesting and layered answer, which we’ll get to in a moment. First let’s talk about French New Wave cinema. (You may insert your own joke about how many college dates begin with those exact words.) French New Wave cinema, much like last week’s German Expressionism, was a deliberate artistic response to the world around it. Specifically, in this case, the political, social, and financial instability of France in the aftermath of World War II, during which lot of French films tended toward the old-fashioned and nostalgic. That did include the aforementioned film adaptations of pulp novels about American tough guys, but it also included more high-brow fare such as period films and adaptations of classic literature. At the same time, many French film critics were growing dissatisfied with how staid it all felt; they were particularly tired of how films played it safe by never trying to be more than visual versions of familiar stories. They wanted film to try something new. In 1948, Alexandre Astruc published an essay called “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo,” in which he wrote, “…cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” A few years later in 1954, François Truffaut (then a notoriously scathing critic, not yet a filmmaker himself) expanded on these same ideas in a piece innocently titled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in which he basically went scorched-earth on the entire French film industry, deriding its output as insipid, formulaic, and even embarrassed to be films rather than novels. These manifesto-like pieces exemplify the frustration that drove the New Wave filmmakers. They believed, and set out to prove, that film as an artform can and should do more than tell the same kind of stories in the exact same ways over and over again. Their approach was generally low in budget but high in existential philosophy, with a fondness for improvised dialogue and a disregard for the accepted rules of cinematic direction. In the long run, all of this also contributed to the idea of film directors as auteurs, that is, as the “authors” most profoundly responsible for a movie’s artistic style and focus—an idea so ingrained in how we view film directors today that it requires a bit of a mental adjustment to consider a time when it had to be defined. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) was the first real success of the French New Wave, followed very shortly by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), his first feature-length film. Those two movies together convinced filmmakers and critics around the world to pay attention. Godard’s fame, in particular, was instantaneous, and even at the time people were talking about how its unique style was going to change movies forever. And it did! They were completely right about that. Godard is universally regarded—especially by other filmmakers, but also by critics, scholars, historians, film buffs, everybody—as one of the most influential directors of all time. In the early ’60s, that legacy was all in the future. Godard was an exciting young filmmaker making a whole lot of movies in a storm of productivity. And there was one particular kind of movie he wanted to make: He wanted to put a detective on a spaceship. He really, really wanted to put a detective on a spaceship. Godard specifically referenced Brian Aldiss’ 1958 generation ship novel Non-Stop and the works of A.E. von Vogt as inspiration for making a sci fi movie. He was also an admirer of American crime and detective films, so much so that at some point he apparently lived in a Paris apartment decorated with nothing but a poster of Humphrey Bogart. And what he wanted to do was put a noir story in a science fiction setting. I love this because it’s the most relatable moment of inspiration I’ve read in all my research for this film club series. I have never before in my life suspected I could have anything in common with Jean-Luc Godard, but I understand this desire completely. After all, who wouldn’t want to send a noir detective to space? I always want to send noir detectives into space. I wish more sci fi writers shared this desire. Alas, Godard was a relatively new director making low-budget films. His success and renown were growing, but he didn’t have access to the kind of money needed for spaceship special effects. (This was also a few years before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, after which it became a lot more common for people to accept the possibility that artsy film style + spaceship sci fi = success.) (Also, yes, we are going to watch 2001 at some point for this film club, and not just reference it in every other article. I just haven’t decided when.) So Godard had to change his plan. Lucky for him, he had also become interested in the way computers were being used in both commerce and government, so that’s where he focused. He even thought about calling his film IBM vs Tarzan which, let’s face it, would have been awesome, but maybe not for the reasons he was considering at the time. We’re almost to the answer to the question of how Alphaville came about, but there’s one more necessary component: In 1958, French anthropologist Jean Rouch presented a film called Moi, un noir, a fictional ethnography of a group of Nigerian immigrants to Ivory Coast. During the day, the characters struggle with the challenges of ordinary life, but during the night they escape into elaborate fantasies in which they cast themselves as actors and characters from movies, including Tarzan, Edward G. Robinson, and Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution. Godard loved Moi, un noir so much that he wrote about it at least twice and spoke about how fascinated he was by the idea of one story co-opting and interpreting a character from another story. (Because it must be said: Yes. That’s fanfiction. That’s transformative art. Others have made this observation.) And when he had the chance to work with Eddie Constantine, who he met via producer André Michelin, he was able to invent his own version of Lemmy Caution. So that’s the answer to the question of how this very odd movie came into existence from a lot of disparate pieces. I mean “odd” in a good way; I think Alphaville is great, even with its jarring soundtrack and surrealist pretensions and utterly dire female characters. But I can also understand why audiences at the time did not have the same reaction, to put it mildly. Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris reported that he felt “waves of hatred washing up on the screen” at the film’s premiere. The film begins, as all detective noir films begin, with a voiceover. But it’s not Lemmy Caution’s voice, not yet. The first voiceover we hear is a gravelly, distorted, inhuman voice speaking as we follow Caution along his journey into the city. He has traveled across the galaxy from another planet but arrives by car and checks into a hotel with an old-fashioned glass elevator. He isn’t in his hotel in Alphaville for more than a few minutes before a beautiful woman tries to seduce him, a pair of thugs try to kill him, and he fires his gun several times but nobody seems to notice. We learn that he’s come to Alphaville under a fake name—posing as a reporter for the newspaper Figaro–Pravda—looking for Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist. Von Braun’s daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina), arrives at the hotel to meet with Caution. We are deep in familiar noir territory here: a mysterious powerful man, his beautiful daughter, even a trench coat that could have come directly from Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. In addition, the entire film is in black and white and filmed at night on very fast film stock. The visual effect is remarkable: the parts of each scene shown in available light stand out, whereas those left in darkness are completely obscured. Yet amidst these familiar trappings, the film very quickly veers into the weird. We’re across the galaxy in the future, but Caution is a veteran of Guadalcanal. The Bible in the hotel room is a dictionary. Arrows, signs, and the equations E=mc2 and E=hf (the latter being the Planck-Einstein relation fundamental to quantum mechanics) flash randomly across the screen at times. Casual conversation often seems to make no sense; characters say “I’m fine, don’t mention it” in place of greetings and farewells that never occur. When Caution meets up with another secret agent (played by Akim Tamiroff), they reference Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon as colleagues. Caution quotes surrealist poet Paul Éluard. We learn that Alphaville is under the control of a supercomputer called Alpha 60, which rules the city in a totalitarian dystopia that’s a mashup of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The word “why” is forbidden, as is any art or literature or anything else that might elicit emotion; transactional sex is commonplace but love is verboten; Alpha 60 is constantly removing words from the language to suppress the ideas around them. Lemmy Caution has come to Alphaville not merely to meet Professor von Braun, inventor of Alpha 60, but to kill him. Alphaville features no special effects, no matte paintings, no science fictional backgrounds or items—in fact, the film specifically goes out of its way to avoid any such scenes or gadgets. Caution has to go to a phone booth to make a call, where he is asked whether he wants a local or galactic connection. The Alpha 60 is represented visually as a light shining through a turning fan, speaking in that distorted voice we hear in the voiceover. The core of the machine, when we finally see it, is a Bull Gamma 60, a real computer that went on sale in 1960. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort to visualize the future. Godard might not have had the resources to build a cinematic spaceship, but he did have Paris in the 1960s, and the city was building a futuristic setting for him. The French government was trying to modernize the capital in the ’50s and ’60s, which meant constructing a lot of office blocks, apartment complexes, and skyscrapers. The Electricity Board Building, Maison de la Radio, and CNIT (Centre des Nouvelles Industries et Technologies), all of these make an appearance as the Alphaville of the distant future, a selection of looming, modernist buildings, alternately showing a gridwork of lit windows from the outside and sleek glass and curving staircases on the inside. The setting serves to emphasize that the hostile, alienating nature of Alphaville comes not from its futurism, but from the sense of rigid disconnect and isolation imposed on the people. Caution is told that anybody who can’t adapt to the city goes insane and dies by suicide, but as the audience we can see how the precise opposite must be true: this is a city that will kill anybody who resists conforming. This theme is drawn out to its absurd extreme in the most bizarrely disturbing—and therefore my very favorite—scene in the film. Caution tags along when Natacha goes to witness a public execution of those who have violated the city’s laws. One by one the men step onto a diving board above a swimming pool. It could be any school or community pool, so bland is its appearance. The men shout out their last words—proclamations of emotion, rebellion, desire—before they are shot and drop into the water. A group of women dive into the pool, as elegant as a synchronized swim team, to finish them off in a violent frenzy. All the while, people from the city watch dispassionately from above. Natacha tells Caution that one man’s crime was loving his wife. It’s brutal. It’s outrageous. And it’s a rare moment when Caution’s tough-guy façade gets a little rattled. This might be a city ruled by a machine that decides every aspect of human lives by replacing emotion with probability, but the gory spectacle of publicly executing people who dare think or say the wrong things is all too human. In the end it’s poetry that defeats Alpha 60, and it’s love that frees Natacha from its effects as she and Caution flee the city and leave its citizens to an unknown fate. What else could it be? When a science fictional dystopia is created by imagining a world without passion and creativity, the only way to escape that dystopia is to reclaim them. That’s as true now as it was in the 1960s. There is some debate among critics and scholars about how to categorize Alphaville. Not around whether it’s properly sci fi or properly noir or anything like that, but around the question of whether either of those components constitutes parody or pastiche or some other form of homage or mimicry. I generally find categorization discussions very tedious, and that’s still true here, but I am interested in how assigning any such description to Alphaville involves making assumptions about the tone and intent. I think more than one thing can be true: Godard was both admiring and mocking the detective noir genre, as he was both embracing and subverting the sci fi. In his version of noir the last hints of glamour are gone, the moody allure ground away. Audiences at the time reacted very negatively to the film, and it completely ended Eddie Constantine’s career as Lemmy Caution—as though the safe, stylized cynicism of traditional noir was fine, but expanding it to this outrageous fictional world in which every cynical belief is not only true but even worse than we expect was a step too far. Likewise, Godard’s version of a sci fi future doesn’t allow any comfortable distance between us and the dystopia, because there aren’t even gadgets or sets to set it apart. It’s just our world, with our history and our office blocks, our hotels and our swimming pools, and it’s barely even pretending to be otherwise. What this film is doing, I think, is using the language of one genre combined with the themes of another to tell a story about an imagined future. And, like all stories about the future, that means it’s also very much about the present—both the present in which it was made as well as the present in which we view it. What are your thoughts on Alphaville? What do you think of this particular vision of the future? Did anybody else have a weary “don’t invent the torment nexus” moment when the characters were talking about how artists have no place in a world ruled by computational probability? Next week: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. It’s time to watch Blade Runner. Find it on the torment nexus of your choice: Amazon, Google, Vudu, Microsoft, YouTube. Please note that the article will go up on Thursday, June 20 instead of the usual Wednesday.[end-mark] The post <i>Alphaville</i>: Hard-Boiled Noir Meets New Wave Techno-Dystopia appeared first on Reactor.

I remember where I was, and what theater I was in when I saw Mad Max: Fury Road. I remember feeling myself almost rise out of my theater seat, in the Battery Park movie theater in downtown Manhattan, when Furiosa slugged a man in the face with her stump. In case you haven’t seen Fury Road since then and don’t have as strong a memory as I do for the particulars of the film, or haven’t seen Furiosa yet and want a sense of how things go, here’s a brief, but spoiler-filled paragraph to catch you up to speed: Furiosa is a child born in a post-apocalyptic world where water is as scarce as ethics and morals in the wasteland. Gangs rove the deserts in search of bullets, water, and food, will do just about anything to get it, and no one cares about the safety of others. Also, things got weird after the fall of civilization. No one is “sane.” Furiosa is kidnapped from likely the only well-watered and -fed place in the world, watches her mother get murdered by Dementus, and spends the rest of her life trying to get home. During the course of her time on screen, she survives captivity, the loss of an arm, attempted assaults, the loss of a partner, and living in a misogynistic hellscape. And she tries to rescue others on her quest to just go home again. I hoped that when I saw the new movie, Furiosa, that I would find myself with similar emotions. But I was worried—would the film have the same disability justice motif that had made Mad Max: Fury Road so compelling to me? I assumed that the character would not have a disability for what I believed would be most of the movie. Prologues are writing a history of what came before, and that isn’t always a good thing. The upcoming Quiet Place: Day One is rewriting history, it looks like: creating a story about the monsters that prey on sound without the benefit of the Deaf-centric heroism that made the original two films so compelling to me. It is erasing what made the franchise groundbreaking to go to the safe ground of non-disabled heroes. I was utterly delighted to see that George Miller was not afraid to be bold. Imperator Furiosa is a disabled heroine, from start to finish. Within the first section of the film, she is kidnapped from her home, witnesses the horrific loss of her mother, and becomes selectively mute. The character does not speak (though she does scream) until an hour and fifteen minutes into the film. Selective mutism is a disability, typically acquired through experiencing a traumatic event. As someone who lost a parent to a disease that did horrible things to my father’s body, I can confirm that the loss of a parent is traumatic, whether it is by a disease that wreaks havoc on the body, or a demented wasteland warlord who does so. And so even before Furiosa loses her arm, she is disabled. This, too, is an excellent writing and directorial choice. Disabled people know how to adapt to new disabilities. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures As an example, when I started to lose more of my hearing, and had to go from one hearing aid to two, many people asked me if I was sad. Well, okay, they didn’t ask. They assumed that I was sad. The answer is that I wasn’t sad at all. My adaptive aids would work better, because I would be able to use the bluetooth capabilities that only one hearing aid denied me access to. Furiosa already knew how to adapt. She already had a sense of what a disabled body felt like. Adaptation was a skill she already had acquired, so even though the tools were new, the sensation in her body simply wasn’t. Furiosa has always been disabled. And because of that, Miller is telling a disabled story. One of the major critiques that I have had in my decade-long career as a media critic on disability is that there are no disabled heroes or heroines written by non-disabled people. We do not have blockbusters. But as I look back, I see that Imperator Furiosa was, and is, a turning point in our collective imagination. Much like in the first film, there was a moment in Furiosa when I found myself almost leaping out of my seat because the emotions within me were too much to hold. Furiosa had tattooed upon her left arm the map to get home, the only vestige she had left of her mother, and her only way back to where her childhood began. When she awakes and knows that her arm is gone, that her way home is gone, she transforms her trauma with her knowledge of the rigs, given to her by the people who helped her stay safe. What is truly empowering about Furiosa is that she takes what she needs, she fights for what she wants, and even when she fails, she perseveres. For so many disabled women, this is our reality. We need something, and we don’t get it, and we keep fighting even though the odds are against us. In the real world, people take ownership of their prosthetics, too. I have gemstone sparkly hearing aid molds, with streaks of gold in them. It looks like a tigers eye gemstone is sitting in my ear canal instead of a piece of plastic. Friends have modified their wheelchairs with bike spokes, or painted them fancy colors, or added lights (a little like a war rig!) and more. Owning a prosthetic, crafting it in some way with our own hands, is taking ownership of bodies that others want to control. It is the supreme act of self determination to craft for yourself the thing that you need most in this world. And Furiosa doesn’t just craft an arm. She crafts a tool. She crafts something that has pincers, she crafts something that sits just right on her shoulder, she crafts something that has tiny pulleys and levers so that she can control each movement. And by the second film, it is the key to her resistance, because it drives her rig. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Furiosa cannot be contained because she has found the well of self reliance that every disabled woman has to find. It is an endless well of rage, of frustration, and of body awareness. Watching Furiosa reminded me of my own power, it reminded me of the power of other disabled women I know. It echoed our rage, and our resistance, and our autonomy. And at the end, when Furiosa is screaming at her abuser to “give it back,” I felt myself screaming with her. Give it back. Give my dignity back. Give my childhood back. Give me the same things that everyone else has, and give them to me because I deserve it as a person in the world. Don’t give me pity, give me autonomy. Give me choices. Give me decisions. Give me my people. Furiosa is a testament to disabled resilience. Our disabilities are so often borne from trauma—even when we are born with our disabilities, the people who gave birth to us, who witnessed our bodies when they were small and vulnerable, saw us as traumas. Tiny traumas in blankets. And we survive. We thrive. Furiosa does not give up, she does not surrender. She builds her resistance with her own hands, and she takes her vengeance where she can. Furiosa is our first disabled heroine who is reliant upon no one, and I cannot wait to see more heroines like her. Because now we know: the audience is ready for us.[end-mark] The post <i>Furiosa</i> and the Disability Wasteland appeared first on Reactor.

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The battery revolution would see humanity move away from burning fossil fuels in favor of electric power, but in order to get there, we need metal. A lot of metal. Vast crops of “deep sea potatoes” have been located in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone bursting with crucial battery ingredients, but what do we know so far about the pros and cons of deep-sea mining?What is deep-sea mining?At depths of around 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) below the sea, transporting manganese nodules from the seabed to the surface isn’t a simple task. The proposed method for collection involves deep-sea vehicles using water to dislodge the nodules – which aren’t attached to anything – and effectively scoop them up and send them to the surface via a pipe.The key areas of concern center around what impact the plume created by the collectors might have, both when dislodging the nodules from the seabed, and that which gets dropped in the midwater when the nodules are transported to the surface. Sediment might not sound terribly dangerous, but there were concerns it might create dust storms that could travel long distances and choke small organisms."These particles could feasibly clog the feeding apparatus of these organisms for an area spanning hundreds of square kilometers from the point where the plumes generated,” said environmental manager for The Metals Company (TMC) Dr Michael Clarke, who after years working on environmental impact assessments for terrestrial mines has now moved to studying the impacts of mining the deep sea, speaking to IFLScience.“What we're actually finding when we go out there and do the tests is that the sediment goes into the vehicle and comes out the vehicle, forming what we call a turbidity flow. It behaves more like a liquid than a gas and doesn't rise much more than 2 or 3 meters [6.6 to 9.8 feet] above the back of the collector. So, it doesn't create the huge dispersive plumes that would be required for the sediment particles to travel hundreds of square kilometers and impact organisms over a huge area.”The plume generated at the midwater could feasibly have had the same impact, but tests have shown it’s very dilute.“You only have to get a few hundred meters away for it to dilute around 1,000 times and to become really hard to even find the sediment,” Clarke continued. “So, we really don't think there's much potential for these midwater sediment plumes to spread out over large areas either.”This stock diagram lays out the general jist of deep sea mining.Image credit: Naeblys/Shutterstock.comHowever, The Centre for Biological Diversity has stated that this “will inevitably harm” the sensitive ecosystems that exist across the marine environment, from sea-floor sponges and corals to turtles and sharks. As such, a group of 37 financial institutions has released a joint statement urging governments to not proceed with deep-sea mining until the risks are fully understood.Deep sea mining vs. terrestrial miningThere’s no getting away from the fact that we don’t currently have enough metals in circulation for recycling to supply enough energy transition metals, given the amount we need for the green transition. These source metals need to come from somewhere, so we’re faced with the dilemma of working out which approach has the best yield-to-impact ratio.“I've been implementing an environmental impact assessment like you would do for any mining project,” said Clarke. “The only difference is that this one is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a five-day sail from the nearest port at [a depth of] 4,000 meters.”That depth is a crucial point in the pursuit of manganese nodules, because pitted against terrestrial mining sites there’s comparatively very little life in the benthos. TMC told IFLScience there are 13 grams [0.46 ounces] of biomass per square meter on the abyssal seafloor, whereas in the rainforests of Indonesia (one of the leading countries for metal mining) you’re looking at closer to 30 kilograms [66 pounds] of biomass per square meter.Accessing metals from terrestrial sites means clearing forests, habitats, and ecosystems, making them vulnerable to erosion that can contribute to runoff, which ends up in the ocean. We know rainforests are biodiversity hotspots, and themselves act as a carbon sequestration tool, so while it’s important to establish the risks of deep-sea mining before we begin, there’s no getting away from the fact that existing methods are already incredibly damaging.Do the pros outweigh the cons?Academics across the globe have been researching life in the benthos to try and better understand this, hailing from institutions such as London’s Natural History Museum, the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, the University of Leeds, the University of Bremen, the University of Hawaii, Texas A&M University, and the University of Maryland, among others.What they’ve discovered is that while there is life on and around the nodules, including some larger animals, most of it is microscopic. Some of the earlier press directed at deep-sea mining has warned of the risk of mass extinction events, often using imagery of wildlife from shallower water to demonstrate potential victims, but given the already great cost of mining on land, it becomes a balancing act of where the greater harm lies.The manganese nodules might not look like much, but there's a lot of potential locked in these deep-sea potatoes.Image credit: V.Gordeev/Shutterstock.com“A lot of people have a real misconception of what the seabed looks like at 4,000 meters depth,” said Clarke. “There is life down there, there's no doubt about it, but it's not as abundant as is often portrayed.”At present, 50 percent of the nickel market comes from Indonesia, where rainforest is flattened to make way for operations. This land is used by both humans and wildlife, so its absence is very apparent and its recovery is slow due to ongoing use. By comparison, after a collector has scooped up the nodules from the seabed, it can recover more quickly because little activity is going on here.While these nodules do take millions of years to form, the argument that once it’s gone – it’s gone – is true of any source metal. On the other hand, only one option requires the ripping up of carbon-sequestering rainforest to reach it.Carbon has been raised as a concern around deep-sea mining, as much of it is stored in sediments, but TMC explained that at present there’s no known mechanism through which this could rise to the surface. A 2020 study actually found that using nodules puts 94 percent less sequestered carbon at risk and reduces emissions by up to 80 percent depending on the specific metal.“90 percent of the world's exploration contracts for nodules are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which represent less than half of 1 percent of the global seafloor,” TMC PR and Media Manager Rory Usher told IFLScience. “But this represents the largest source of manganese, nickel, and cobalt, anywhere on the planet and that dwarfs everything on land by many orders of magnitude. There are enough metals in situ at two of the sites that would satisfy the needs of 280 million cars, which represents every car in America, or a quarter of the world's vehicle fleet.”Research continues into the suitability of deep-sea mining for the task at hand, as well as the potential impacts it could have on the health of ecosystems, as well as humans – as some studies have found they may not be safe to handle due to radioactivity. They might only be the size of a potato, but there’s a lot of potential locked in those little nodules, we just need to work out if unleashing it is a good idea.An earlier version of this article was published in May 2023.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres, has warned the world not to allow artificial intelligence (AI) a role in the decision to launch nuclear weapons.Speaking at a meeting of the Arms Control Association (ACA), Guterres warned that "humanity is on a knife's edge", with the risk of nuclear weapons use being at "heights not seen since the Cold War". "States are engaged in a qualitative arms race," Guterres said in his address. "Technologies like artificial intelligence are multiplying the danger, nuclear blackmail has reemerged with some recklessly threatening nuclear catastrophe, meanwhile the regime designed to prevent the use, testing, and proliferation of nuclear weapons is weakening. Dear friends, we need disarmament now."      The Secretary-General urged countries to disarm, and for those that already possess nuclear weapons to lead the way. "I also urge the United States and the Russian Federation to get back to the negotiating table, fully implement the new START treaty, and agree on its successor," he continued. "Until these weapons are eliminated all countries must agree that any decision on nuclear use is made by humans; not machines or algorithms."While that last part may sound like a far-off threat, automation played a part in the Cold War. A "dead hand" system of ensuring nuclear annihilation in the event that the Soviet Union's command was destroyed by a nuclear blast monitored seismic activity, radiation levels, and air pressure for signs that a nuclear weapon had been launched at the superpower. If the system detected such a strike, it would then check if communication lines between top Soviet officials were open. If they were, it would shut down after 15 minutes, as it would mean people who could decide on whether to launch a strike were still alive. If lines were dead, authority to launch nuclear weapons would be transferred to lower-level operators of the dead hand system inside a protected bunker, placing the fate of the world in the hands of a lower-level officer and a computer system.This was never activated, which you can tell on account of how you're alive. However, on September 26, 1983, a missile-detection system appeared to detect five nuclear missiles heading towards the Soviet Union. Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, skeptical of the detection, refused to tell the Soviet command to launch a retaliatory strike. The detection turned out to be the result of the Sun’s glare reflecting off high-altitude clouds, which looked like a potential strike from satellite data. Perhaps we should be wary of automating – via algorithms or AI – decisions that could wipe out humanity. If it was up to them, humanity could have already been wiped out due to clouds.

Disney's destruction of the Star Wars franchise has reached peak demolition with its new series, The Acolyte. In the past, Disney has created Star Wars shows that are woke, incoherent or girl-bossy, with the exception of early seasons of The Mandalorian and Andor. But the "House of Mouse" has straight-up lost its mind with this new series, released on June 4th. The first two episodes of The Acolyte, set long before the Republic crumbled and the Empire took over, premiered last week. The opening episodes fulfilled Hollywood diversity quotas while rolling out a murder mystery in which Jedi are killed by a mysterious woman with force powers. In episode one, "Lost," a former Padawan named Osha (Amandla Stenberg) is arrested as the likely suspect. By episode two, "Revenge/Justice," the Jedi realize that the murderer is actually Osha's evil twin sister, Mae (also played by Stenberg). Last night, Disney premiered episode three, "Destiny," which revealed the twins' back story. It's in this new episode that the series went off the rails. It turns out that Osha and Mae were created and birthed by two lesbian witches, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva).  As the lesbian couple tells each other: Koril: I carried them. Aniseya: I created them.   Lesbian conception#Acolyte pic.twitter.com/w7ZKqUpNce — Nerdrotic (@Nerdrotics) June 12, 2024 In this galactic feminist fantasy, lesbians don't need a man to make a baby. Their coven has an "ascension ceremony" which looks like it could be from an old episode of a CW teen witch show. This is Disney Star Wars BWHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA#Acolyte pic.twitter.com/EZ4FcnNWb8 — Nerdrotic (@Nerdrotics) June 12, 2024 The ritual is interrupted by four Jedi who know the witches are hiding kids with potential powers of the Force. When Osha says she thinks the Jedi are good, Mother Aniseya tells her, "This isn't about good or bad. This is about power and who is allowed to use it." How very Marxist of mommy. When Jedi inquire about the twin's paternity, Aniseya proudly says, "They have no father." Mae lies during a Jedi test to hide her specialness, but Osha decides she wants to study with the Jedi. The thought of losing her twin to the Jedi causes Mae to go crazy. She burns down the whole coven with all the witches, including her lesbian mothers. One of the Jedi rescues Osha as the coven headquarters burn. The witches' peaceful existence is thus destroyed by the intrusion of the Jedi. Five more episodes remain of this new series, created by Leslye Headland, who was Harvey Weinstein's former personal assistant. Needless to say, any creator who worked for years with Weinstein is uninterested in topics like honor, heroism and timeless battles between good and evil. Future episodes will undoubtedly have more lesbian/Marxist/feminist "subversion" of patriarchal heteronormative narratives. Apparently, Disney still has a lot of nails left to hammer into Star Wars' coffin.

I’m so glad our police force is focused not on combating crime and keeping our cities safe but rather on hiring someone to cater to queer people’s emotions and sensitivities  On Tuesday the Fairfax County Police Department shared three images of PFC Tiara Goode who will serve as the county’s new LGBTQ Liaison Officer.  “We’re proud to introduce PFC Tiara Goode as our new LGBTQ Liaison Officer! Starting her journey in the McLean District, PFC Goode is a valued Honor Guard member and currently works as a detective in our recruiting section. Her role is vital in fostering inclusivity and support within the department and the community,” the group wrote in the Facebook post. It looks like Goode’s role will be to amplify and celebrate LGBTQ voices both within the Fairfax police department as well as the surrounding community.  I can’t say this is too surprising. Fairfax is a relatively progressive area and the Fairfax County Police Department seems to be pretty “all-in” when it comes to ramming "pride" in everyone's face. The group posted a reel on its social media pages with the caption “Celebrating #PrideMonth with the FCPD!” The video showed cops walking around a local pride event in the Mosaic district of Northern Virginia. It also showed some drag queen performances and highlighted a photo where two cops posed with a drag queen. In response to the announcement of Goode’s role, people actually worried about the area’s safety shared their concerns. A few different people commented on the group's Facebook post: “What does that have to do with police work?” One user wrote, “A ‘what’?? You can't think of a better use of the time/money than to cater to the permanent-victim crowd? I'm disappointed in this. Glad I don't live in that area anymore.” Similarly, over on X, Libs of TikTok shared an image of the post and wrote, “I have a wild idea but hear me out… what if police help stop crime and focus on protecting all citizens equally regardless of who they like to have s*x with.” Comments flooded in writing things like, “You know what would help bring everyone together? Less crime” or others called this “insanity” and “s**t” that “has to stop.” Hey, they’re right. If you live in the Fairfax, Virginia area, you may want to be extra cautious this summer since it’s clear your police officers are more focused on gayness than actually keeping you safe.  

Following the three felony convictions of Hunter Biden on Tuesday, ABC seemingly exposed the identity of one of the jurors against his will. The contrast was obvious, ABC broadcasted his face across the country while CBS News and NBC News both noted that he didn’t want his identity revealed and took precautions to protect him. ABC senior national correspondent Terry Moran seemingly ambushed Juror 10 in a parking garage somewhere and shoved the camera in his face, wanted to know why and how they convicted President Biden’s “only survived son”: MORAN:  First the jury was divided according to juror number ten. JUROR 10: Believe it or not, it was a split vote. MORAN: 6-6. JUROR 10: 6-6. MORAN: That was the first vote? JUROR 10: That was the first vote.     “So, you didn't buy the notion that for those few days around the purchase of the gun, he wasn't abusing drugs?” Moran pressed Juror 10. “No, not at all,” the juror responded. “But after sleeping on it, they decided there was enough evidence to prove that Hunter was abusing drugs in the critical timeframe, including from his own text messages; especially one sent the day after he bought the gun saying he was waiting for a dealer name Mookie,” Moran admitted. Contrast Moran’s interaction with that of CBS’s Weijia Jiang, who apparently interviewed Juror 10 on a sidewalk. “We spoke to juror number 10. who asked not to be identified,” she said, the interview was conducted with the juror’s back to the camera. Over on NBC, Capitol Hill Correspondent Ryan Nobles and more of a sit-down interview with Juror 10. “Juror number 10 telling NBC, Hunter's powerful family played no role in their decision-making process. He asked us to conceal his identity,” he said. Nobles’ interview with him also had the camera pointed at the back of Juror 10’s head and took the added step of blurring his form. It would be bizarre for Juror 10 to give ABC permission to show his face but deny it for the others. It seems as though ABC may not have disclosed that protecting his identity was an option.