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During San Diego Comic-Con 2019, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 slate was unveiled by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. Among the sitcom antics of WandaVision and the wackiness of Thor: Love and Thunder lied a project that could arguably become the hidden gem of Marvel Studios: What If…?. Set to be Marvel’s first dive into the world of animation, What If…? will do as its title suggests: pose the age-old question and turn well-known MCU stories on their heads by changing one (or two, or three) pivotal moments in what fans know as the main MCU timeline....

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just started its journey, and it’s been met with praise from both critics and audiences. After the zaniness of WandaVision, Sam and Bucky’s quest to take down the Flag Smashers has brought fans back to reality, a really grounded one, at that. The first two episodes have given a truly human experience. While the first installment had a unique and fun action sequence, the rest of the time was dedicated to Sam and Bucky’s personal life....

For Marvel fans, this is the week they’ve been waiting for. In addition to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness making its May 6 theatrical debut, the season finale of Moon Knight is set to drop on May 4 on Disney+. While it’s true that the series has ushered Egyptian mythology and the Moon God Khonshu into the MCU, the show has largely focused on the mental and emotional realities of Marc Spector and his various personalities, as portrayed by Oscar Isaac....

Marvel Studios is set to close out 2022 in theaters with Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which has seen more challenges and controversy than almost any movie in MCU history. Thankfully, fans can rest easier knowing that the sequel finally finished shooting in the last few weeks as Marvel prepares for its November 11 release, returning to the world of Wakanda. Without the late Chadwick Boseman leading the way as T’Challa, other supporting players will do their best to step up into bigger roles for Black Panther 2....

Of all the actors that helped bring the MCU’s first movie Iron Man to life in 2008, almost none of them have stayed with the franchise longer than Paul Bettany. Starting off as the AI system JARVIS before playing Vision in three more movies, Bettany most recently played the role in last year’s WandaVision on Disney+ alongside Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch.That series seemingly brought Vision’s story to an end after nearly 13 years with the MCU, as the android faded away into nothing when Wanda took down her Hex surrounding Westview, New Jersey....

Spider-Man: No Way Home went all out in showcasing the Multiverse by bringing back previous Spider-Man villains such as Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, as well as featuring the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s respective web-slingers. While the Tom Holland-led threequel has been the subject of leaks and rumors in the past months, it wasn’t until the film’s premiere that fans laid speculation to rest when they finally saw the highly anticipated comeback in their own eyes....

Spider-Man: No Way Home has finally come home, as fans can now purchase the film on digital platforms like iTunes and Vudu. This comes as the MCU Spidey threequel continues its extended run in theaters, earning close to $800 million domestically so far - and rightfully so. No Way Home for a number of reasons brought fans back to the movie theaters to celebrate nearly twenty years of wall-crawling movies. The Tom Holland-led MCU epic saw Marvel Studio’s young hero get paired up with both past big-screen Spider-Men in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, ultimately ending in Holland’s webhead learning what it really meant to be Spider-Man....

A senior animator on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse revealed the upcoming wall-crawling sequel is not a kid’s movie. Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Verse 2 comes with the lofty task of not continuing the story of Into the Spider-Verse, but following up on a film that literally re-defined what an animated film could be. The first film took the medium of animation, broke nearly every rule for said medium, and did so by telling a mature and nuanced story that one may not expect from a bright and colorful animated film....

They’re not as green as they seem. Plastic was once hailed as a miracle material, but as its favored sheen slowly wears off with better understanding of its environmental repercussions, bioplastics are now rising to the forefront as the savior of the future. Bioplastics, the thinking goes, will enable our consumption habits to remain more or less the same because we won’t have to worry about where the plastic ends up after use....

Back before self-driving cars were a thing, Toronto’s Institute Without Boundaries held a design charrette to dream up what cars might look like in 2040. Institute without Boundaries/ movie and martini mode/CC BY 2.0 They concluded that they would be shared, lighter and smaller, electric and they wouldn’t look much like cars. In fact, just about the only thing they got wrong was that it would take until 2040 for this to all happen....

Next time you see an ant, count its legs because you might really be looking at a spider. And this isn’t a rare phenomenon - scientists have found that as many as 300 spider species around the world mimic ants. Spiders like Myrmarachne melanotarsa, a jumping spider, will hang out with ants and adopt ant behavior to blend in - and they do it to scare away predators. That may seem counter-intuitive to us since more people have arachnophobia than myrmecophobia (ant-phobia), but it turns out that many spiders and spider predators are terrified of ants....

When most people think of President Richard Nixon, the term “environmentalist” isn’t the word that immediately leaps to mind. The 37th president, who resigned from office in 1973 after the Watergate scandal, left a surprisingly strong environmental legacy, giving our nation new legislation governing protection of the air, water and wilderness. His motives may have been purely political (he once said environmentalists wanted to live like “a bunch of damned animals”), but his administration did a lot of good for nature....

My dog is a big yawner. The very first time I picked him up when he was a puppy, he was a yawning, bundle of squirm. (You can see his photo from those yawny puppy years below.) It’s two years later, and he’s still a vocal yawner. He yawns when he plays, when we’re training and when he’s sleepy. Canine behaviorists say there are several reasons our canine best friends open their jowls so wide....

Fishing is one of the world’s oldest activities. There are references to it in ancient Greek literature, biblical texts, and prehistoric illustrations. While fishing is a worldwide pastime, the way in which people fish varies greatly depending on where they are and what species they’re pursuing. They may use nets, spears, baited hooks, traps, or even their bare hands. Some people don’t catch the fish themselves and rely on trained animals to do the work for them....

Sometimes there’s not a word that sums up a feeling or a state of being, so we have to use a phrase or a descriptive sentence. A friend asked on Facebook the other day why there’s no word for “that feeling of nostalgia and wistfulness engendered by the ending of summer/beginning of the school year, and the cool mornings of fall.” And then she noted that if there was, it would probably be in German....

Our view from Earth has always been pretty good, aside from clouds and glare. It was transformed by telescopes in the 1600s, though, and has improved wildly ever since. From X-ray telescopes to the atmosphere-bypassing Hubble Space Telescope, it’s hard to even believe what we can see now. And despite all they’ve done, telescopes are just getting started. Astronomy is on the verge of another Hubble-like disruption, thanks to a new breed of mega-telescopes that use huge mirrors, adaptive optics and other tricks to peer deeper into the sky — and further back in time — than ever before....

Passivhaus is a hard sell. The building standard, often referred to as Passive House in English-speaking countries, was really an energy standard, and for most of the last decade, energy was cheap. I have tried to explain other benefits with posts, like “How Do You Sell the Idea of Passive House?,” but many of the benefits of Passivhaus are invisible. It is hard to get people to pay for what I have called inconspicuous consumption....

For many people, the ideal vacation involves the beach. These warm-weather tourists think sunshine, white sand, cocktails in coconut shells and clear water make a perfect holiday. But what if you don’t see it that way? What if you’re one of those people who thinks of the beach as a place for sunburn, toe-searing sands and skin-drying salt water? Or maybe you’re not so negative. Perhaps you think an afternoon on the beach is fine....

As quickly as it came, The Book of Boba Fett has now completed its seven-episode run on Disney+. The series shone a spotlight on the former bounty hunter’s time in the sands of Tatooine following Return of the Jedi while exploring his pursuits as a crime lord in the present day. After a slow start, a slew of iconic characters ventured into the series in differing roles, sending fans into a frenzy....

Leading up to Andor’s three-episode debut, the Star Wars fan base was expecting the series to be a stand-alone story in more ways than one. In addition to being a spin-off and a prequel to 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, where audiences already know the fate of its primary character, Andor was seen as a passion project by showrunner Tony Gilroy.Now, even though Gilroy penned Rogue One, he isn’t as deep into the Star Wars lore as Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, nor was Andor intended to be a continuation of their Mando-Verse....