TimeTravel
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Stop nuclear devastation at the heart of a never-ending Cold War
One of the most famous works of graffiti on the Berlin Wall is a depiction of former Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev kissing the ex-leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, full on the mouth. In the painting, called "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love," Brezhnev's profile commands a majority of the frame, as if he's sucking the life out of Honecker. It's based on a 1979 photo of the two statesmen locked in a fraternal kiss, a common form of greeting among socialist leaders at the time. Fast-forward to 2016, and artist Rafal Fedro of inbetweengames has updated this iconic painting to feature US president Barack Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin sharing their own fraternal kiss. In the studio's latest project, a spy tactics game called All Walls Must Fall, the new painting represents a wide range of scenarios: heightened tensions between the two countries that were at the heart of the Cold War, fraying international relationships, or the subconscious desire to love our enemies, to name a few interpretations.
White House streams time travel talk for BTTF Day
The White House jumped into the Back to the Future Day hooplah by hosting a panel discussion on the feasibility of time travel. Tom Kalil, director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, hosted the half-hour talk, which also featured University of Queensland physicists Tim Ralph and Martin Ringbauer. The trio discuss a variety of topics including quantum mechanics and recent accelerated particle experiments, though they don't dive particularly deeply into any one subject or even get to the part about the self-lacing Nikes. Check out the full discussion below. [Image Credit: Denver Post via Getty Images]
Scientists simulate time travel using light particles
We may never see practical time travel in our lifetimes, if it's possible at all. However, a team at the University of Queensland has given the Doc Browns of the world a faint glimmer of hope by simulating time travel on a very, very small scale. Their study used individual photons to replicate a quantum particle traveling through a space-time loop (like the one you see above) to arrive where and when it began. Since these particles are inherently uncertain, there wasn't room for the paradoxes that normally thwart this sort of research. The particle couldn't destroy itself before it went on its journey, for example.
The time travel movie 12 Monkeys is becoming a TV show in 2015
If you're so enamored with time travel in TV shows that even Doctor Who isn't enough, we have good news: you're about to get a lot more of it. Syfy has ordered production of a series based on Terry Gilliam's classic movie 12 Monkeys. While the show will go without most of the apocalyptic flick's cast and crew when it airs in January 2015, its first season (appropriately 12 episodes long) will involve original producer Charles Roven as well as veteran actors from Nikita and X-Men: The Last Stand. The story arc will likely be familiar to anyone who watched the 1995 film -- or 1962's La Jetée, for that matter -- but we're not going to complain about revisiting one of sci-fi's most enduring concepts.
Researchers turn to Twitter in the search for time travelers
Whether or not time travel is even physically possible remains to be seen. But researchers at Michigan Technological University have already started scouring the internet for evidence that we've been visited by tourists from the future. The theory is that anyone who has moved backwards through space-time may have left their mark by tweeting, updating Facebook or posting on Google+ (who knows, maybe it's super popular in the future). The team began looking for mentions of two particular terms, "comet ISON" and "Pope Francis" before they would have entered our lexicon on September 21, 2012 and March 16, 2013, respectively. The ability to backdate Facebook posts and the fact that Google Trends only picks up popular terms limited the effectiveness of those particular tools, but that did not deter the researchers. They also performed a version of an experiment first conducted by Stephen Hawking in 2012, who sent out an invitation to a party after he'd already thrown it. Not surprisingly, no one traveled back in time to attend after they'd received the invitation. The Michigan Tech team decided to use Twitter hashtags instead. They asked people to tweet with #ICanChangeThePast2 and #ICannotChangeThePast2, then searched for messages including those tags that would have been sent before they put out the call to the would be time travelers. Unfortunately, none of their work turned up any evidence that there are currently people from the future in our midst. Of course, we already know they're here -- Nic Cage is the only evidence we need. The full academic paper awaits you at the source link.
Vine now lets you edit and work on multiple posts over time
Vine may have caught on in a fairly big way, but it's been a decidedly limited app even beyond the six-second constraint on videos. It's become a bit more capable today, though, with two new features giving users more room to work with. The first of those, called Sessions, will let you save and work on up to ten posts over time before sharing them, which should please those looking to cram as much into those six seconds as possible. The other new feature, Time Travel, will let you go back and edit a post and remove, shift or replace shots as you like. The update covers both iOS and Android versions of the app, and is available for download now.
Chrono Trigger travels across mobile platforms, arrives on Android (video)
Pulling out another classic from its storeroom of 16-bit hits, Square Enix has finally ported Chrono Trigger, almost a year since we saw its reappearance on iOS. While it may have taken its time to get here (despite the Japanese version getting an early release), you can now relive the SNES hit on any Android device running version 2.2 or higher. The download resides at the link below -- and it'll set you back 10 bucks.
Scientists prove cosmological speed limit, time travel moves a little further out of reach
The cosmological speed limit remains unbroken. A team of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, led by Du Shengwang, claim to have proven that a single photon is incapable of traveling faster than light. The support for Einstein's special theory of relativity all but rules out the simplest form of time travel -- breaking the universe's traffic laws to condense time within a vessel. Don't get freaked out though, this doesn't mean time travel is impossible, only that it will be much more difficult than firing up a warp drive. General relativity still holds hope for bending and ripping the space-time continuum to meet our eon-hopping desires. Looks like it's time to get working on our flux capacitor technology.
Captain's Log: The reverse slingshot effect
Captain's Log, Stardate 65056.3... Hello, computer (and players)! The slingshot effect is a maneuver, shown throughout the Star Trek franchise, which allowed starships to move back through the time continuum. By traveling at a high warp factor towards a star with a large gravitational pull, the ship would whip around it and time travel. While this seemed to only exist within the realms of the IP, it looks as though Star Trek Online's Executive Producer Dan Stahl took us on a reverse slingshot course, giving us a glimpse into the future of the game. Before we returned to the original timeline, he made sure to write up everything we saw along the way for those who couldn't make the trip. In layman's terms, for those of you who missed the news earlier this week, July's Engineering Report has been released. While this is a monthly publication that contains the development pipeline for STO, including some items that have been featured in past issues, there are always a few bullet points added that seem to spark a healthy amount of debate -- one of these includes the ability to auction off your in-game Emblems, a form of currency, for C-Store points that have been paid for with real money. For information on this, including a response from Cryptic's PR department, and more, read ahead past the jump for this week's Captain's Log entry. Ensign, warp 10! Let's pull a slingshot maneuver of our own...
Theorists get us closer to believing time travel is possible via the Large Hadron Collider
Hard to say if Doc Brown would give this his coveted seal of approval, but our gullible minds have already been made up: time travel is not only possible, but it's well within reach. A gaggle of scientists have apparently figured out a theory that could use the Large Hadron Collider to move a Higgs singlet back and forth through time. The 'catch' is that they have yet to prove the existence of said singlet, but the upside is that nothing in theory violates any laws of physics or experimental constraints. In other words, this wouldn't enable a human to move back and forth along the universal timetable à la Fringe, but it could allow for messages to be sent forward and back. About 14 other improbable things have to happen before this could even be tested, but if you're even remotely interested in the concept (c'mon, you are), you owe it to yourself to give those source links a peek.
Modern technology sent through time vortex, redesigned for 1977
A brilliant homage to today's gadgets and yesterday's penchant for Sepia tones, graphic designer Alex Varanese has reimagined four modern-day gadgets and created a series of print ads for his ALT/1977 collection: Pocket Hi-Fi, LapTron 64, MobileVoxx, and Microcade 3000. We're smitten, but of course we'd be irresponsible not to point out the paradox here: should Varanese ever accomplish his mission of traveling back in time with modern gear, it'll expedite technology advancement up to the point where he originally left and create a recursion of infinite improvements... oh, just quit thinking and enjoy the pretty pictures already!
LG's XM-900 4D mouse could enable time travel
LG just announced its new XM-900 mouse for Korea. Besides featuring an adjustable 800 or 1600 dpi sensitivity this mouse also features a "4D" scroll wheel with touch sensor. A quick swipe of which allows you to navigate the space-time continuum, presumably. Well worth ???18,240 (about $20) or any price, really.
TGS07: Time Hollow adds to the DS time-travel game genre
Coming right on the heels of Chronos Twins, Time Hollow is a game about a heroic cat who wakes up high school students from scary dreams. Welll, not really-- that's just our favorite part of the trailer (the green button on the website). From what we can tell, Konami's Time Hollow is actually a game about a high school student who, using a magic pen, goes back in time to fix tragedies that have affected his life, including the loss of his parents in a house fire.The game involves using the magic time-travel pen to investigate areas across time: as the IGN preview puts it, you can "cut through the present day to look at what the same area was like at times gone by." From the two seconds or so of in-game video buried in the trailer, it appears to be a 2D graphical text adventure, with hand-drawn environments to investigate.[Via Dengeki]
Off the Grid reviews Chrononauts
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor. Looney Labs -- makers of Fluxx and those bizarre Icehouse pieces -- are once again in their element with Chrononauts, a time-traveling card game that is almost too clever to work. Almost.Unlike other games, it's the complexity of Chrononauts that saves it from mediocrity. With a heady central "timeline" mechanic, and a 44-page booklet of rules that reads like an operations manual for the Flux Capacitor, it would be pretty easy for the crunchy game to fold under the weight of its own ambition. Luckily for Looney, time travel was never meant to be easy, and it's too damn fun hopping through history to allow a little bit of complexity to get in the way.
