Translating toys to the big screen is not an easy feat, as recently evidenced by the Transformers and G.I. Joe series, but The Lego Movie might just have a shot at being a critical success.

First of all, it’s a movie about Lego minifigs going on an adventure. Who in their right mind doesn’t want to see that? Second, Phil Lord and Chris Miller are the directors; they're the guys who somehow reimagined Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs as one of the best animated movies of 2009. Although BioShock Infinite’s Songbird might not make an appearance, expect plenty of cameos from the vast world of Lego characters when The Lego Movie “assembles” next year.

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Black holes are as complicated an entity as anything currently being studied in the far reaches of space. Although we’re a long way off from fully understanding black holes, astronomers are hard at work, trying to unravel the mysteries of the phenomenon.

A recent study by NASA, Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology has brought us one step closer to the truth. This study “trace[d] the complex motions, particle interactions and turbulent magnetic fields in billion-degree gas on the threshold of a black hole.” With the results of the study, the team has been able to reproduce a range of X-ray features with the assistance of a simulation on the Ranger supercomputer.

NASA posted a video on YouTube (embedded above) that shows the simulator in action. It's worth reading the feature on NASA’s website as well for a greater understanding of the technical ramifications of the study, but the conclusion is that “both hard and soft X-rays inevitably arise from gas spiraling toward a black hole.” Hard X-rays are “light with energy tens to hundreds of times greater than soft [or low-energy] X-rays,” and astronomers have been attempting to find the origin of these X-rays for over 40 years. This simulation helped them do exactly that.

"Black holes are truly exotic, with extraordinarily high temperatures, incredibly rapid motions and gravity exhibiting the full weirdness of general relativity," Julian Krolik, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told NASA. "But our calculations show we can understand a lot about them using only standard physics principles."

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Dish Network won’t try to beat SoftBank’s $21.6 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, apparently clearing the way for the Japanese service provider to buy Sprint.

Dish set off a bidding war for the third-largest U.S. mobile operator in January, and in April its offer for Sprint rose to $25.5 billion. But last week, when SoftBank sweetened its own offer, Sprint said Dish’s plan couldn’t be carried out and gave the company until Tuesday to submit its “best and final” offer.

Sprint said it had cut off talks with Dish and requested that its aggressive suitor destroy Sprint documents it had obtained in the due-diligence process.

Dish's reasons

In a statement Tuesday, Dish said Sprint had made it impossible to submit a new bid.

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Nvidia is to start licensing its graphics cores more widely in a bid to cash in on the need for powerful graphics in smartphones, tablets and other devices.

Nvidia will start by licensing graphics cores based on the Kepler architecture, which is used in its latest graphics cards, the company said Tuesday. Kepler cores will also be used in Nvidia’s Tegra 5 mobile chip, code-named Logan, which will ship next year.

“The reality is that we’ve done this in the past. We licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for the Playstation 3. And we receive more than $250 million a year from Intel as a license fee for our visual computing patents,” said David Shannon, Nvidia’s executive vice president and general counsel, in a blog entry.

“Now, the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort,” Shannon wrote.

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If The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was real, Aunt Viv would be statistically more likely to be a video game addict than Will or Carlton.

That’s according to the findings of a survey from the Entertainment Software Association (PDF), which found that overall the ladies are nearly as into video games as the fellas (45 percent versus 55 percent), and the average age of the most frequent video game purchaser is a solid 35. Taken together, the statistics fly in the face of conventional stereotypes and find that women above the age of 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of the gaming population (31 percent) as compared to males ages 17 and younger (a surprisingly paltry 19 percent).

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA)

While the ESA survey doesn’t break down specific video game habits by gender, several studies that have found that women over 30 are the most important market for mobile games. A 2012 survey found that 27 percent of women over the age of 30 spend three hours or more per day playing mobile games, a rate double that for either sex between ages 12 and 29.

Among mobile gamers, the two most popular categories of games are “Puzzle” and “Casual, Social,” each with 35 percent of the market. If women are playing more mobile games, which tend to be of the gender-neutral Candy Crush or Fruit Ninja variety, this may be a partial answer to recent criticisms highlighting the gaping chasm between the number of female gamers and the dearth of female game characters on dedicated gaming consoles. The stats, of course, still do not answer the question of why console game developers aren’t trying harder to bring the huge audience of female gamers into the fold.

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The new Man of Steel movie may not pump new life into the Superman franchise, but the film’s soundtrack at least offers something new: it includes an alternate mix that creates a simulated surround-sound experience through regular headphones. That mix is made possible by a new audio technology called DTS Headphone:X, and you can experience it via an Android or iOS device and whatever crumby headphones you care to throw at it.

WaterTower Music

In a movie theater, sounds emanate from multiple speakers placed at various locations around you. You might hear an explosion behind you and to the left, for example, because there’s a particular speaker tasked with delivering that sound as part of the overall mix. DTS’s Headphone:X technology seeks to recreate that surround sound experience using just two speakers, the left and right ones on your headphones.

At a press event at Warner Brothers’ Eastwood Recording Stage in Burbank, DTS demonstrated the new technology to reporters, conducting the old A/B test comparing the difference between real surround sound through speakers in the room, and the simulated surround sound of Headphone:X through headphones. One Entertainment Weekly reporter was sufficiently impressed:

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A team from the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo built a dynamic target-tracking camera that follows the movement of a high-speed object to keep it in the center of the frame. The camera uses a pan and tilt mirrors to its advantage for this technology to work. At 1/1000th of a second, the mirrors move rapidly in order to process the fast object, leaving you with a stable image—and an eerie visul effect!

The lab thinks the camera will be of great use to sports broadcasters, helping them provide new and interesting viewpoints of games.

[Ishikawa Oku Lab via PetaPixel]

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A cloud of dust grains fills the system around the star TW Hydrae, and in that cloud is an empty swath of space that experts think is caused from a forming planet. The thing is, there shouldn’t be a planet there.

Planets generally form from tiny bits of space debris floating around a star that collide and stick together. Then the not-as-tiny bits stick to other not-as-tiny bits and form kinda-bigger bits. This process continues until the bits become planets or gas giant planet cores.

NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI/AURA)

That’s all fine and well, but experts are puzzled because such a planet would run counter to existing theories in planetary formation. If a planet-in-the-making created that gap in the debris cloud, it’s way too far from the star, and there isn't enough nearby debris for it to form in the normal way.

Additionally, scientists believe this planet should have taken 200 times longer to form than it has, given TW Hydrae’s young age. In other words, there shouldn’t even be enough debris near the star to form a planet yet. As if that’s not enough, this planet-to-be seems to be moving slowly, which means it’s not gathering a lot of debris anyhow. To use scientific terminology: This one’s a head-scratcher.

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Frustrated by their difficulty prosecuting cases involving online content that is illegal or damaging to individuals, a group of state attorneys general are taking action.

The group is circulating a draft letter that it plans to send to the U.S. Congress, pressing for an amendment to the federal law that currently broadly protects Internet publishers and service providers from responsibility for third-party content on their sites.

The attorneys general are taking aim at Section 230—also known as the “Safe Harbor” provision—of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Other elements of the act have already been struck down as violating constitutional protections for freedom of speech.

The law protects publishers and site operators from being held liable for content written by third parties, except in cases involving federal criminal law, intellectual property law, and electronic-communications privacy law. So, while the U.S. Department of Justice has been able to prosecute cases where federal crimes are alleged, if state-level criminal laws are at issue, state attorneys general have not been able to hold defendants liable for online content.

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We’ve seen some pretty weird 3D-printed stuff, including Stephen Colbert’s tentiacle laden head, but a 3D-printed room with walls that look like they’re melting takes the cake. Designed by Benjamin Dillenburger and Michael Hansmeyer, the Digital Grotesque project is an amazing, gothic, yet organic architecture project that aims to create the world’s first completely 3D-printed room.

Digital Grotesque

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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has more than just one plan to make it possible for electric car motorists to drive across the country.

Musk took to Twitter Tuesday to say the company will demonstrate its battery-swap technology Thursday night at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne, California. The swap demo comes just weeks after Musk said Tesla would triple the number of supercharging stations across the U.S. in 2013, including stations in most major metropolitan areas.

Tesla plans to post its technology demo to the company web site on Thursday at around 9:30 p.m. PDT.

Swapping batteries

Battery swaps for Tesla cars have been hinted at for some time. The Tesla Model S was designed with battery swaps in mind. In May, Musk said, again via Twitter, there was a way for the Model S to be “recharged throughout the country faster than you could fill a gas tank.”

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It’s coming up on four years since Comixology’s app appeared on the iPhone, and that 2009 release was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between comic-book readers and their mobile devices. In the intervening years, though, the app’s reading interface hasn’t really changed—until now. The new version of the Comics iOS app, released Tuesday, adds two new reading modes that will be especially welcomed by users of Retina iPads and the iPad mini.

The new version of the app lets readers choose a two-page view or a fit-to-width view, in addition to the existing one-page and Guided View options.

The two-page view is great for people with good eyes and Retina iPads. If you hold your iPad in landscape mode, it’ll place the left and right pages of a comic together, whether it’s a two-page spread or two single pages. This makes the text and art pretty small, but eagle-eyed readers might find it acceptable on the iPad’s high-resolution display.

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Huawei generated some buzz Tuesday with the announcement of the Ascend P6, which the company bills as the world’s thinnest smartphone.

At 0.24 inches thick, the Huawei Ascend P6 sounds stunning, especially compared to the 0.3-inch frame on Apple’s iPhone 5 and the 0.31-inch thickness of Samsung’s Galaxy S4.

But if you live in the United States, good luck getting a chance to try the Ascend P6 yourself. The odds of this phone landing on U.S. shores are slimmer than the handset’s aluminum chassis. (Huawei itself has not responded to a request for comment.)

No sales

Huawei has hardly any presence in the U.S. market right now. The company’s Windows Phone 8-based W1 is only available through Walmart as part of a prepaid Straight Talk plan, and other phones like the Ascend Y and Premia 4G are only sold through smaller carriers, such as TracFone, MetroPCS and U.S. Cellular.

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Cue dramatic music, please. This backlit Mega Man 25th Anniversary NES is, according to its creator, the first and the only of its kind in the world. Maybe. Regardless of the veracity of that statement, however, a refurnished Blue Bomber-themed NES is still, well, the bomb. It has custom decals for the AV ports and the cartridge door, a backlit Mega Man comprised of 50 individual parts, and love. Lots of love.

The proceeds from the auction will go toward funding new "backlit NES systems," so if you're interested in contributing to the cause, go get $1000 ready.

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Last weekend, Brooklyn was home to its own rendition of SXSW called the Northside Festival, an event filled with music, tech startups, and most importantly, the Red Bull Creation completion. This year’s Red Bull Creation challenge was called Signal to Noise: Makers had only 72 hours to build themselves a DIY instrument from scratch.

One of the most impressive projects I saw was Autoloop by MB Labs. Think of it as a synthesizer that's on some seriously geeky steroids and, oh, did we mention that it’s attached to a robotic drum kit?

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An Australian research team recently published the findings of an ambitious project to survey a patch of remote Cambodian jungle in order to map the ancient city of Mahendraparvata. The team used lasers mounted on helicopters to peer beneath the dense foliage and was able to uncover roads, highways, and a downtown of a once-bustling metropolitan area that predates the nation’s top tourist destination: Angkor Wat.

The thing with nature is that unless it is battled on a constant basis, it tends to take over. And that is what happened to Mahendrapavata—it lost its fight with the jungle when it was mysteriously abandoned at some point in the distant past. To peer beneath the centuries of accumulated foliage and earth, the team shot laser pulses from a helicopter hovering 800 meters above ground and measured the reflecting signal. The technology, known as lidar, unveiled a 14-square-mile metropolitan area and previously undiscovered temples.

“No one had ever mapped the city in any kind of detail before, and so it was a real revelation to see the city revealed in such clarity," University of Sydney archaeologist Damian Evans told The Guardian. "It's really remarkable to see these traces of human activity still inscribed into the forest floor many, many centuries after the city ceased to function and was overgrown."

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Microsoft has been playing around with the idea of a social network for a few years, but its lab-grown Socl has been slow to catch on with the kids. On Tuesday, Microsoft is introducing a handful of new features to pump up the volume on what it now calls its "social network for creatives.” And what better path to Internet domination than cat GIFs and pictures with funny words on them?

A meme generator and GIF creator are two brand-new tools Socl users will see on Tuesday. Picotale is a strange name for a feature that lets you enter a phrase and browse photos that would fit the meme. Blink is the animated GIF creator that comes in the form of a stand-alone app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The app, also released on Tuesday, lets you start with an image blast, which you can then animate, turn into a looping reel (sort of like Vine), or simply choose the best image to post.

The success of Vine and Instagram have proved that people like to create and share their own works, not just links and images they find around the Internet. Even Pinterest, which is essentially a vast collection of pretty images, lets you curate the life you want through bulletin boards.

Microsoft FUSE Labs general manager Lili Cheng says the company noticed that people on Socl were finding memes and GIFs from outside the network and sharing them on the site. But the community was clamoring for more. Picotale and Blink are designed to satisfy that urge. People can also upload their own photos to Collages—before, they could only add images and links on the Web to create themed Collages (think: Paris street scenes, favorite celebrities).

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Last summer, Brooklyn design studio Pensa decided to test out a public solar-powered charging station for mobile devices in the studio’s home borough. The idea immediately took off and what started as a trial project in Dumbo, Brooklyn’s Pearl Street Triangle in 2012 has become a citywide effort in 2013.

On Tuesday, Solar power technology firm Goal Zero, Pensa, and AT&T unveiled the first of many solar-powered charging stations that will keep New Yorkers powered up this summer between work and a night out on the town.

Dubbed Street Charge, the first station is set-up at Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn with plans to expand the stations to popular locations across the five boroughs such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, Coney Island, Governor’s Island, Union Square, and Summerstage in Central Park.

Each station features six USB outlets including connectors for iPhones (30-pin and lightning), as well as micro USB connectors for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. There are also regular USB ports for anyone who brings their own cable.

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Nuance’s Dragon Mobile Assistant app for Android has just received a big update, including a Driver Mode that automatically starts listening for voice commands and reading notifications when you’re behind the wheel.

Driver Mode is supposed to prevent you from ever having to touch your phone in the car. Instead of fiddling with buttons, you can simply say “Hello Dragon” to begin a voice command. Driver Mode can be set to turn on automatically when your phone connects to the car’s Bluetooth system, docking station, or by audio cable. In theory, Dragon can also turn on Driver Mode when the car starts moving by detecting the phone’s GPS location.

The motion detection feature is most interesting, because many cars still don’t have built in Bluetooth or a docking station for Android phones. However, I didn’t have much luck getting this feature to work properly.

While driving around my neighborhood with GPS tracking and motion detection enabled, Dragon’s Driver Mode never activated on its own. Strangely, background voice detection did engage on occasion when I opened the Dragon app, but I couldn’t reliably duplicate this occurrence. Besides, having to open the app defeats the purpose of automatic voice detection.

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Huawei Technologies’ much-leaked Ascend P6 smartphone is the world’s thinnest at 6.18 millimeters, and has the highest-resolution front-facing camera at 5 megapixels, the company claimed at the phone’s London launch.

In comparison, Apple’s iPhone 5 measures 7.6mm and has a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. The phones have similar 8 megapixel rear cameras, however, and the P6 is a shade heavier at 120 grams to the iPhone’s 112g.

The P6 is perhaps better compared to the more recent Galaxy S4 from Samsung Electronics.

Huawei Technologies

Both run Android 4.2.2, but the S4 has the faster processors: It has either a 1.9GHz quad-core or a 1.6GHz octa-core processor, compared to the P6’s 1.5GHz quad-core chip.

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Japan’s public television broadcaster, NHK, has developed an array of video cameras that are synchronized to create “bullet time” shots like those popularized in the film The Matrix.

Video shot using the system can be used to create an effect where the subject freezes and the camera angle pans around it, commonly called “bullet time” after a famous Matrix scene. NHK has used the system with a dozen cameras synched together.

Jay Alabaster

The system links its multiple cameras, each on motorized mounts, so that they can be operated by a single cameraman. One of the cameras is chosen as the master, which the others use for positioning and auto focus. Once the video is shot it is sent directly to a computer system, which can generate a clip in about a minute.

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BlackBerry doesn’t want to die.

It’s been hurting for a long time. The company formerly known as Research in Motion has gone from being the top smartphone maker in the world—one of the first whose devices merited the term—to a community laughingstock. Part of that blame can be laid on the iPhone: It changed the industry BlackBerry helped found, and the company has been trying to figure out a way forward ever since—not always successfully. Its profitability has taken a topsy-turvy ride, jobs and services have been cut, and its marketshare has plummeted.

So what do you do when your brand is being mocked and analysts are shouting your demise? You focus on your customers, not your critics, and you keep moving. To do so, BlackBerry decided to become a patron of the arts.

Rebranding the advertorial

When you purchase a smartphone, you have your traditional feature checklist, but above all you want to know that it can support you in your life. You want to be able to communicate, to share, and to play. You want a digital companion as much as a device. Apple uses apps (and those who use them) to make this point. Microsoft captures celebrities’ daily routines. But when you’re on the ropes, it’s not enough to ape another company’s style. You have to reintroduce users to your brand, and you must do so in a way that doesn’t feel forced or contrived.

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Fancy a race? Whether you’re looking to unleash your inner petrolhead and tinker with mechanics, or just hop into a shiny gas guzzler and knock out a few laps, we’ve got you covered with the best racing games we’ve played in the last few years.

All comers are welcome, whether you’re on a PC, kicking back on the couch with a console, or on the bus with your phone.

First things first: if you’re a devoted racing fan, chances are you’ve been a subscribing member of iRacing.com’s legendary online community for years, as it’s the undisputed champion in the PC racing space. But if you’re not ready to dive into a 40,000 strong virtual racing nation (and shell out for a monthly subscription), strap in, grab your racing wheel (or controller, or mobile device) and check out some of the best new racing experiences around.

1. Forza Motorsport 4

Xbox 360

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I don't know what's funnier, the confusion that the JesterLads engineered with their Jedi tricks or the fact that no one actually got out to see what's going on. The premise of the prank is simple: One guy, dressed like a modern day Sith, gets into an elevator while his friend lurks close by. Each time the Sith lord waves his hand, his accomplice will charge up to press the elevator button outside. It's all a little silly, but it's Monday so, have a few laughs on us!

[YouTube via The Awesomer]

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That didn’t take long. Four days after Spotify promised to bring the Pink Floyd discography to its music service if—and only if—the classic track “Wish You Were Here” was streamed one million times, the company announced Monday that the milestone was shattered. All the Pink Floyd tunes you could ever want are now available to soothe your savage breast over on play.spotify.com or via the Spotify desktop application.

Well, sort of. Purists will quickly note that the digital discography consists of remastered versions of the original tunes, but to be fair, diehard Floyd fans probably weren’t holding out for Spotify streaming to get their psychedelic fix.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Spotify discography rocks the regular “Discovery” editions of Pink Floyd’s remastered albums, rather than the beefed-up “Immersion” and “Experience” editions that were released in recent years.

Even so, it’s hard to complain. Pink Floyd is on Spotify!

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Samsung Galaxy users will soon get supersized bragging rights to go with their supersized displays. They’ll be given the opportunity to get their ears on Jay-Z’s new album Magna Carta Holy Grail before it’s released to the general public. And they'll get it for free.

Viewers tuning in to Sunday’s NBA Finals game to watch the Heat fail to catch anything remotely resembling heat against the Spurs were treated to an extended docu-mercial featuring the Brooklyn MC.

The mysterious ad featured behind-the-scenes footage of Hova working on some tracks with other illustrious music folk such as Pharrell, Timbaland, and a derelict-looking Rick Rubin before closing with the title card “The Next Big Thing is Here” and a prompt to vist MagnaCartaHolyGrail.com.

The website features a countdown clock for the exact moment the Magna Carta app from Google Play (no link yet available) comes available on June 24. The first 1 million Galaxy S3, S4, and Note 2 users who download the app will get free access to the album on July 1 at 12:01 AM, a full 72 hours ahead of the album’s official release on July 4.

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When I launched my beloved Google Reader tab this morning, a pop-up box reminded me of a sad truth I’ve been trying oh-so-hard to ignore: The service’s last day is just around the corner.

With Google’s July 1 deadline looming (sob), Betaworks just unveiled details about the beta version of its highly anticipated alternative Digg Reader, which will be available to all comers by June 26.

Given the tight time crunch, the initial version of Digg Reader will—like Google Reader itself—largely stick to basics. The development team focused on creating a clean, simple design and integrating an easy-to-use tool to import your feeds from Google’s RSS reader, according to the Digg blog.

All the boxes you’d expect to be checked are: You’ll be able to subscribe, share, organize, and save your feeds and stories in the basic build. The screenshots posted by Digg don’t feature overt social-sharing buttons, however.

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LOS ANGELES—Each day at E3 2013, we’ll wear the GoPro camera as we walk around the show floor for awhile, giving you a first-person view of what it’s like to be at E3.

In this wrap-up of our first-person videos, Carlos heads to the Los Angeles Convention Center’s South Hall and recorded a lot of unusual things. He then took a break and got ice cream!

Our TechHive Video Center features all of our E3 video reports in one convenient place.

As rumors of Apple’s budget iPhone continue to circulate, the U.S. tech giant has been pushing sales of its older iPhone 4 model in China as a way to grab market share in the nation’s mid-tier market, according to research firm IDC.

Shipments to China of the iPhone 4 8GB version were up in this year’s first quarter, increasing by 211 percent from the previous quarter, IDC said on Monday. Apple, however, ranked fifth in China’s smartphone market with a 9 percent share, still far behind had market leader Samsung, which had a 19 percent share.

The company’s latest smartphone, the iPhone 5, is still selling well, IDC analyst Teck Zhung Wong said in an interview. But lower-end Android models that cost consumers $200 or less have been driving smartphone shipments to China, he added. The iPhone 5, in contrast, starts at $859 when bought straight from Apple.

“What’s happening here is that there’s a flood of lower price Android phones available in China,” he said. “Close to 90 percent of the shipments are Android, so Apple doesn’t really have any competitive product at those lower price points.”

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