Bruce Willis returns to space to kick some alien derriere in Breach trailer

Bruce Willis battles an alien life form aboard an interstellar ark  en route to a New Earth in Breach.

An interstellar ark transporting the last humans on Earth to a new home inadvertently brings along a shape-shifting alien stowaway in Breach, a new sci-fi action film starring Bruce Willis and directed by John Suits. The trailer just dropped, and the film looks like a fairly generic mix of elements from Alien, The X-Files, and Event Horizon. But anything that lets Willis "yippee-ki-yay" his gun-toting way to saving humanity from aliens in space is okay by me.

Suits is best known for 2016's Pandemic, essentially a zombie horror thriller shot entirely from a first person point of view, like a video game. He also directed the recently released short Diehard is Back, a fun Willis-starring commercial for Diehard batteries that pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the franchise, including a few cameos that should delight fans. ("From fighting his way to Advance Auto Parts to racing against the clock to install his new DieHard Battery—McClane will stop at nothing, to start his car again.") So I'm hopeful that Suits can bring a fitting mix of suspense, action, and humor to Breach, and just let Willis be Willis.

Originally titled Anti-Life, the film's premise is that a devastating plague has wiped out much of Earth's population, and the survivors are being evacuated via an interstellar ark to "New Earth." Willis plays Clay Young, described as a hardened mechanic who is part of the crew selected to stay awake and maintain the ark for the six-month journey. But then he discovers a shapeshifting alien (or "a malevolent cosmic terror," per the early press materials) has also stowed away on the ark, and it seems to be intent on killing everyone on board.

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Why Biden tapped several Big Tech staffers for his transition team

Enlarge / Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden arrives to speak at a "Build Back Better" Clean Energy event on July 14, 2020, at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Olivier Douliery | AFP | Getty Images)

On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced a roster of policy experts who will help ensure "a smooth transfer of power" and enable the new Biden administration to "hit the ground running."

The list has more than 500 members, and technology companies are well-represented on the list. It includes current employees of Airbnb, Amazon, Dell, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Lyft, Salesforce, Stripe, and Uber. It also includes employees from the philanthropic organizations of three tech moguls: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates), and Schmidt Ventures (former Google CEO Eric Schmidt).

The list also includes one representative from a technology-focused non-profit group: Gene Kimmelman of Public Knowledge will be part of the transition team for the Department of Justice.

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England faces a proper “argy-bargy” in Pennyworth S2 trailer

Jack Bannon reprises his role as former British SAS soldier Alfred Pennyworth for the second season of Pennyworth on Epix.

An alternate London is once again threatened by a sinister society aiming to take over the British government in the trailer for the second season of Pennyworth, a crime drama/prequel series based on the character of Alfred Pennyworth, aka Bruce Wayne/Batman's loyal butler. Like Doom Patrol and the cancelled Swamp Thing series, which languished in the hinterlands of the DC Universe streaming service—Doom Patrol has since moved to HBO Max—Pennyworth being aired on Epix limited S1's audience reach. And that's a shame because it's a solid series, even if it only has a passing connection with the DC Comics characters who inspired it.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series is set in an alternate London circa the 1960s. Jack Bannon stars as the titular Alfred Pennyworth, aka "Alfie," a former working-class British SAS soldier who has found work as a bouncer at an exclusive club and hopes to start up his own security firm.  Among his potential clients: an American businessman named Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), who is secretly a CIA agent working undercover with a group called the No Name League. Among the league's other American agents: Martha Kane (Emma Paetz), Batman's future mother.

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Nikola has $900 million in the bank, lost $117 million last quarter

Enlarge / The Nikola Tre semi truck. (credit: Nikola)

Electric truckmaker Nikola was widely ridiculed in September when a short-selling firm revealed that its first truck, the Nikola One, never worked. A promotional video of the truck "in motion" actually showed the vehicle rolling down a hill.

But the company's latest quarterly financial results, released Monday, show that Nikola has something it didn't have in 2016: truckloads of cash. Specifically, Nikola has $900 million in the bank—most of it raised when the company went public back in June.

Nikola says it spent $117 million in the third quarter of 2020 while bringing in no revenue. The losses were smaller than some analysts had expected, and investors reacted positively to the results, sending Nikola's stock price up by 2 percent in after-hours trading.

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Alex Trebek, 1940-2020

Enlarge / Alex Trebek, seen here hosting a themed Jeopardy tournament in January 2020—and while the tournament's name was about high-performing contestants from the series' past, today, we are going to say that it's specifically about Trebek himself. (credit: Getty Images)

The staff of long-running TV game show Jeopardy confirmed on Sunday that its beloved host Alex Trebek has passed away. He was 80 years old.

While the announcement did not go into details, other than confirming he passed on Sunday in the presence of family and friends, Trebek had previously been transparent with fans about his stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis, using YouTube to tell fans directly about the news in March 2019. At the time, he said he chose to speak to fans via YouTube "to prevent you from reading or hearing some overblown or inaccurate reports."

Since then, Trebek went on to continue hosting the series between rounds of treatment, posting regular updates to Jeopardy's YouTube account. The last such message came in July of this year, which confirmed that the show's regular production had been put on hold due to COVID-19 precautions. This allowed him, among other things, to write a memoir that came out shortly after that last YouTube message: The Answer is... Reflections on my Life.

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Liveblog: All the news from Apple’s November 10 “One More Thing” event

Enlarge / The splash image for Apple's (probably) final event of 2020.

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At 10:00am Pacific time (1pm Eastern) on Tuesday, November 10, Apple will hold yet another live event—the third in as many months—to announce new products. This time, the company is expected to reveal the first Macs that will replace Intel processors with Apple Silicon, the company's in-house-designed ARM-based chips.

As with the prior two events, we'll be liveblogging the proceedings right here. Just return to this page before the show starts to see all the updates from Cupertino.

The previous two events announced two new Apple Watch models, a new iPad, and four new iPhones, among other things. But the tagline for this event is "one more thing," suggesting the focus will singularly be on Apple's long-rumored, recently confirmed ARM transition.

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Carmakers want to ditch battery packs, use auto bodies for energy storage

Enlarge (credit: Viaframe / Getty Images)

Elon Musk made a lot of promises during Tesla’s Battery Day last September. Soon, he said, the company would have a car that runs on batteries with pure silicon anodes to boost their performance and reduced cobalt in the cathodes to lower their price. Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more. He hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in engineering—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.

“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London and the engineering chair in emerging technologies at the Royal Academy. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on structural batteries, an approach to energy storage that erases the boundary between the battery and the object it powers. “What we’re doing is going beyond what Elon Musk has been talking about,” Greenhalgh says. “There are no embedded batteries. The material itself is the energy storage device.”

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Coronavirus cases skyrocket: Over 116,000 new cases, 53,000 hospitalized

Enlarge / Coronavirus testing in Wisconsin, November 2. (credit: Getty | Star Tribune)

The United States on Wednesday reached an alarming milestone in its failed pandemic response: a day’s tally of new coronavirus cases reached over 100,000 for the first time. But the record was short-lived. Today, Thursday, new cases surpassed 116,000.

The country’s third spike in cases is now towering over those before it, which saw peaks of daily new cases no higher than around 76,500. It’s unclear how high the new peak will ultimately get, but it’s likely that Friday will see yet another frightening record.

Overall, the country has seen a 20 percent jump in cases since last week, according to The COVID Tracking Project. While nearly every state in the country is seeing cases increase to some extent, the areas propelling the rise are the Midwest and the Mountain West. In fact, the Midwest’s current number of cases per capita are well above that of any other region during the pandemic, the Project notes in a blog post Thursday.

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After 20 years of service, the Space Station flies into an uncertain future

Enlarge / The essentially complete International Space Station in 2010, as seen by space shuttle Atlantis. (credit: NASA)

The Cold War had been concluded for less than a decade when NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, crammed themselves into a Soyuz spacecraft and blasted into orbit on Halloween, 20 years ago.

Two days later their small spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, then a fraction of the size it is today. Their arrival would herald the beginning of what has since become 20 years of continuous habitation of the laboratory that NASA, leading an international partnership, would continue to build for another decade.

Born of a desire to smooth geopolitical tensions in the aftermath of the great conflict between the United States and Soviet Union, the space station partnership has more or less succeeded—the station has remained inhabited despite the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and later, nearly a decade of no US space transportation. NASA, Roscosmos, and the European, Japanese, and Canadian partners have been able to rely on one another.

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Eta forms, tying Atlantic record for most tropical systems in a season

Enlarge / Tropical Storm Eta's satellite appearance on Sunday morning, Nov. 1.

Late on Saturday night, the National Hurricane Center upgraded a tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea to become Tropical Storm Eta.

This is the 28th named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, and ties 2005 for the most tropical storms and hurricanes to be recorded in a single season. The Atlantic "basin" covers the Atlantic ocean north of the equator, as well as the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

Eta poses a distinct threat to land. Although the storm's track remains ultimately uncertain, Eta should move somewhat due west for the next few days, likely strengthening to become a hurricane before landfall in Nicaragua by Tuesday evening or Wednesday. As it will be a slow-moving, meandering storm, Eta will produce a prodigious amount of rainfall, with up to 30 inches possible over parts of Nicaragua and Honduras. This will lead to significant flooding, with landslides and swollen rivers.

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What to wear when you’re battling giant, venomous hornets

Enlarge (credit: Washington State Department of Agriculture)

By now you’ve surely seen the pictures: A dozen humanoid forms encased in full-body, white nylon suits are working on scaffolding at the base of a saran-wrapped tree by the red glow of headlamps, one of them raising a plexiglass vacuum tube between its blue-gloved hands in triumph. Inside, 85 wasps, each the size of a human thumb, are piled against one another in cold-induced slumber. No, these weren’t scenes from the next great biothreat thriller. Over the weekend, Washington State Department of Agriculture workers took out the first Asian giant hornet nest found in the United States.

Come to think of it, it was sort of a biothreat thriller. A bit anticlimactic, perhaps. But it had great costumes.

The enormous honeybee-beheading predator, nicknamed the “murder hornet,” was first discovered in Whatcom County late last year. Since then, state entomologists have been working nonstop to track the invasive insect, using traps and radio transmitters in the hope of locating their nests and eradicating them before they can gain a foothold in the Pacific Northwest. But taking out a nest is dangerous work. With a 6-millimeter, automatically-reloading stinger, the hornet can inject massive amounts of venom into its victims. It can also spray that venom from a distance. In Japan, they kill about 50 people every year.

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