This Week in Geekdom

Hi everyone; hope you're all warm and cozy as you read this. We're back up to something near normalish temperatures for January (about 28F/-2C versus the -2F/-19C we had most of this past week) though, honestly, between our latest giveaway, the goings on in our Playtesting Lab, and a few more fun developments that will hopefully be headed your way soon we haven't had time to give much thought to how freezing it's been. It is, however, a little surreal to think that PAX is just over 50 days away. Gah! I promise, there will be all sorts of details about fun new things and what you can look for during PAX in the very near future. For now, let's get down to the Week in Geekdom.

TV/Movies

It's no secret that 2014 was chock-full of comic book movies. Well, what if they were all one movie? This trailer gives us exactly that.

Rich Ross, the new president of the Discovery Channel, is planning to return to programming akin to what the channel was once known for. No more anaconda stunts or misleading 'documentaries'. 

Fans of the Belcher family rejoice! Bob's Burgers has been renewed for a sixth season!

The new season of Game of Thrones will premiere on April 12th. If that's just too long for you to wait, two episodes are being digitally remastered and will be shown on your local IMAX theater in the interim.

The ladies of Downton Abbey playing Cards Against Humanity. That is all.

 Games

This is a library of over 2200 MS-DOS games available to you for the low, low price of free.

When people think of virtual reality gaming, the Oculus Rift almost immediately springs to mind. The Sulon Cortex is in the process of trying to change all that.

Science/Technology

The bitter cold of this past week was at the forefront of the minds of just about everyone in North America. If a team of Stanford researchers is successful in their venture to create hyper insulative cloth, cold may be merely a passing thought.

Biologists at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences believe they may have unraveled the mystery behind what allows certain individuals to be able to practice the art of throat singing.

When two stars get a bit too close to one another the gravity between them can result in strange and astounding behaviors. Little things like, say, time and light being distorted. 

Speaking of the wonders that gravity is capable of, turns out that the force may just be the thing that allowed our universe to survive in the presence of the Higgs boson.

The Hubble telescope delivered some new images of the Eagle Nebula to us this week and they are positively astounding.

Did you miss any of CES 2015? Catch up with the best and the worst of what the show had to offer. Amongst the highlights of CES is this perpetual motion machine.

We've gotten a steady stream of buzz about self-driving cars, but Australian company Seeing Machines wants to add some automated safety features to existing vehicles. The firm has developed a series of sensors that alerts your car if you are fatigued or distracted, allowing the car to try and bring your attention back to the road.

Microsoft hasn't confirmed it yet, but this screenshot may depict the successor to Internet Explorer. This. Is. Spartan.

We've talked a bit about how 3D printing can revolutionize palliative care for those individuals who have lost limbs and the technology continues to expand in that arena by leaps and bounds. Check out the newest incarnation of 3D printed prosthetic limbs.

The discovery of antibiotics has had a massive impact on public health and even how we cultivate our food, but their overuse is resulting in resistant strains of bacteria among other unforeseen maladies. Researchers at Northeastern University may just have a response for this.

Does the temperature of your nose determine the probability that you'll get sick? Researchers at Yale believe that it may.

General Awesomeness/Feats of Nerdery

Image Credit

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (better known under the acronym JPL) has produced some incredible technologies during its history, but it's not always serious business for the organization. Check out these beautiful, fun, and informative posters that JPL put together advertising to would-be travelers to various exoplanets.

It took him two years to complete, but player Koala_Steamed was able to build a fully functional word processor in Minecraft.

How much snow does it take to cancel school in Canada? What is Point Nemo? What are the least populated areas of North America? These infographic maps will answer these and so much more.

The alphabet, as brought to you by Marvel. 

A team of Polish archaeologists have unearthed what may be the world's oldest palindrome. 

As always, best wishes for an excellent week ahead!