ie8 fix

star

10 funny tweets about J.J. Abrams directing 'Star Wars'

Take a deep breath, perhaps even a Darth Vader-size breath. Reports indicate that Disney chose "Star Trek" director J.J. Abrams to direct the upcoming "Star Wars: Episode VII" sci-fi epic due in 2015. Have a laugh at a few of the amusing tweets about the rumored news, which caused a level of excitement perhaps equivalent to the noise inside Obi-Wan's head after the destruction of Alderaan.

One Twitter user quipped about how ol' J.J. seems to have his hand in everything star-related.

Might as well give J.J. Abrams Dancing with the Stars, … Read more

J.J. Abrams: One director to rule them all?

Since 1977, there's been "Star Trek" and there's been "Star Wars" and never the twain shall meet.

It's not that fans of one franchise couldn't be fans of the other. But for the most part, if you were involved in the production of one, you weren't involved in the other. But now, with word out of Hollywood that "Star Trek" and "Star Trek Into Darkness" director J.J. Abrams may helm the forthcoming "Star Wars Episode VII," we may have an unprecedented mixing of the … Read more

DIY Ewok cat hat: May the feline be with you

Ewoks aren't real. This is unfortunate. Sometimes we just have to make do with what we can find laying around the house. For Instructables user carlsonbryant, that happened to be a cat and some scrap leather.

Carlsonbryant lays out the steps for turning your regular domestic feline into a denizen of Endor. The ingredients are basic. You need a piece of leather or leather-like material about a foot square, a leather punch, scissors, and some type of twine or string to hold it all together.

I took on the mission of building my own Ewok cat hat using the instructions. It took about 20 minutes of drawing on a old piece of chamois, cutting out the pattern, punching holes, and tying it all together. The cats hovered around me as I worked, batting at the leather and strings.… Read more

Otherworldly Craigslist ad seeks 'Star Trek' role-players

Those ladies who are fluent in Klingon but just can't seem to find a boyfriend are now in luck. Apparently, a certain someone is seeking women for "Star Trek" role-playing -- strictly "The Next Generation."

A recent Craigslist ad titled "Make It So" is making the joke rounds on Twitter today. The ad promises "no nudity, no touching" but asks for two to three women to get in character with the ad's author as he plays the "honorable" and "intellectual" Captain Picard.… Read more

From Death Star to Disney, exploring the 'Star Wars' franchise (Q&A)

It's one of the biggest film franchises of all time. It's also one of the biggest merchandising franchises of all time. It's spawned dozens of novels, countless comic books, spoofs, video games, and even was responsible for the name of a controversial military defense system.

We're talking about "Star Wars," of course, George Lucas' mammoth empire that started back in the early-1970s as a much, much smaller creation. But don't think that Lucas didn't have big ideas. From the earliest days of working on the script of his sci-fi space opera, the &… Read more

The Empire gloats over White House Death Star petition

Poor President Obama. Not only does he have to deal with Congress, now he's also the target of some interstellar smack talk coming from none other than the Galactic Empire.

Recently, the White House responded to a petition on its "We the People" Web site calling for the federal government to construct an actual Death Star

The answer was a definitive no, citing budgetary constraints and the administration's opposition to blowing up planets.

"It is doubtless that such a technological terror in the hands of so primitive a world would be used … Read more

Near-lightspeed space travel: Not as cool-looking as you think

You're onboard the Millennium Falcon. You give the command to jump to lightspeed. The stars outside turn into long streaks of light and you're off. It's one of the most memorable images of sci-fi space travel ever created. It's also likely to be pretty far from reality, according to a study by a group of students from the U.K.'s University of Leicester.

The study, titled "Relativistic Optics Strikes Back," was published in the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics. You can indulge in all the delicious physics equations in the abstract.

The physics students started by imagining that the Millennium Falcon has accidentally wandered into our solar system, on a direct course for our sun. If it then engaged in near-lightspeed travel, the stars around it wouldn't appear to stretch out. Instead, it would look more like a disc of light.… Read more

X-Wing Fighter coffee table goes galactic in your living room

If Luke Skywalker had a living room with a big-screen TV, he would also have a hand-carved X-Wing Fighter coffee table made of wood and glass. The detailed model looks like it's in mid-flight, except instead of blasting the forces of the Dark Side, it's calmly guarding your coffee.

The table is designed so that half of the spaceship is above the glass and half is below. That means it takes up quite a bit of space that could otherwise hold mugs, half-eaten bags of Doritos, and vintage issues of "Starlog" magazine. Still, the design is so cool, you won't miss having the extra room.… Read more

White House shoots down petition to build Death Star

The White House has rejected a proposal to build a Death Star, saying that in addition to its prohibitive construction costs, the current administration does not advocate destroying other planets.

Today's lighthearted official statement came in response to a petition posted in November to the White House's We The People platform that called for the administration to begin construction of a moon-size military battlestation armed with a planet-destroying superlaser by 2016. The petition, which attracted well more than the minimum 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the White House, suggested that such a project could give … Read more

Marvel at massive Milky Way energy emissions

At the center of our galaxy, chaos ensues: a supermassive black hole absorbs everything, young stars materialize, and elder stars explode. This violently beautiful cycle of activity creates galaxy-size bursts of charged particles that eject from the center of the Galactic Plane, and now you can see what those emissions look like.

Ettore Carretti, who works with Australian scientific research organization CSIRO, along with several other researchers around the world, describes the mega waves of energy in last week's issue of Nature. Team member Gianni Bernadi notes that the supersonic outflows -- which travel in excess of 621 miles per second -- originate from more than 100 million years of stars forming and exploding at the center of the Milky Way. … Read more