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Technology

Rick And Morty’s Space Jam cameo is a new kind of selling out

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From right to left: Rick, Morty, a weird badger thing.
Screenshot: HBO Max

Rick Sanchez wants your money. That’s not a secret—in fact, it’s a point Rick And Morty had returned to again and again, across its now five seasons on the air: There is no principle, friend, or family member that the gleefully amoral super scientist will not betray for a juicy enough incentive, or a big enough pile of cash. The mercenary attitude of the show’s central character extends well outside its universe, too: If you want Rick Sanchez to yell “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub!” while telling millennials to shove Hardee’s hamburgers in their faces—or show up to add some inexplicable Adult Swim cred to your new Space Jam movie—it’s pretty easy to pull off. Just pay the man, and make it happen.

Series co-creator/star Justin Roiland, who not only voices every enthusiastic ode to Old Spice or Pringles that tumbles from Rick’s puke-stained mouth, but who also writes pretty much all of Rick And Morty’s surprisingly numerous ad spots, is clearly aware of the loophole at work here. By crafting a character of functionally infinite cynicism, Roiland has created a paradoxically perfect pitchman: Rick can say anything, tell his ravenous audience to buy literally any product, and never slip out of character—so long as it’s clear he’s only saying this stuff because someone paid him to say it. Or, as Roiland put it in an interview with Collider last month:

Rick is the type of person that would see right through any fucking advertisement and who these big corporations are, the whole corporations weighing in on socio-political stuff. It’s just so fucking ridiculous. It’s funny to me, and Rick is somebody who would see right through that shit. It’s like they just want money. That’s all they care about. So I’m trying to keep all of that in mind while writing these commercials.

The end results are ad campaigns that feel effective in direct proportion to how checked-out their star sounds. An Instagram promotion that sees Rick effusing about the interactive wonders of the “Rickstaverse” constructed experience comes off as positively moribund, for instance, while the Old Spice spot, where Rick literally counts his ad money while reading from a sheet of provided copy, feels totally of a piece with the show. (After all, this is the series that’s had its heroes canonically hang out with Logic to promote his album, and beg Nintendo to send them shit—to say nothing of the enormously strange situation that bled out into real life when Rick waxed poetic about McDonald’s Mulan-themed Szechuan dipping sauce in the season 3 premiere.)

You can’t even really fault Roiland (or co-creator Dan Harmon) for trying to find a way to balance getting paid with maintaining the show’s own sensibility: They’re beholden to their corporate masters, after all, who are the ones actually selling ads that it’s then on Roiland to make feel authentically inauthentic. And it’s hard to deny that setting up a merch-filled Rickmobile to roam the country, or writing a crooning birthday song for Kanye West (apparently commissioned by Kim Kardashian for her now-ex husband), does feel like something Rick would do, provided the price was right.

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So why, given all the fast food endorsements, Pringles ads, and pickle-branded seltzer waters, does the sudden appearance of Rick and Morty in the new Space Jam movie still feel like some sort of nadir, a threshold crossed? It’s not just that the real Rick would come up with something way nastier than “dum-dums” to label the Tune Squad with after inexplicably returning the Tasmanian Devil to them. (Oh, for a version of A New Legacy that was rated PG-13, with the solitary “fuck” reserved for Roiland’s belch-filled ramblings.) No, the real problem with the scene, which went viral on the internet this weekend, is that Rick isn’t in on the joke. There’s no wink to camera, no allusions to a paycheck, no acknowledgement that his and Morty’s appearance is just one more empty IP gesture in a film so filled with them that it blocks out any other creative impulse that might try to bleed through. For once, Rick isn’t cheerfully selling out; he’s being sold. Space Jam does what not even the Galactic Federation, the Citadel Of Ricks, or the fully mustered might of the Wendy’s corporation could do: It tames Rick Sanchez C-137.

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Science

A New Kind of Ice That Bends Like a Noodle Without Breaking

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Ice is rigid and brittle — it would be astonishing to bend an icicle around a softball and have it spring back to its original straight shape. But that’s what researchers have now done, although on a much smaller scale.

They produced microscopic ice crystals that are not only elastic and flexible but that also transmit light remarkably well along their lengths. These “ice microfibers” could one day be used to study air pollution, the research team suggested in a paper published Thursday in Science.

Limin Tong, a physicist at Zhejiang University in China, and his colleagues said they were inspired to study ice after working with a type of silica glass. Everyday experience teaches us that glass shaped into windows or drinking vessels is brittle, Dr. Tong said. But long, thin pieces of glass, like fiber optic strands, are flexible. Maybe the same is true of ice, the researchers hypothesized.

Ice occurs in a wide variety of natural settings like glaciers and icebergs, but Dr. Tong and his colleagues needed to make frozen water that matched very particular specifications. This ice had to be nearly perfect.

The team began by making a circular chamber just over an inch in diameter in a 3-D printer. Using liquid nitrogen, they cooled the space within the chamber to negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit. They then inserted tiny tools into this miniature laboratory, including a metal needle with 2,000 volts of electricity applied to it. That voltage created an electrical field, and water molecules present in the air responded to the field by settling on the needle. Very slowly, at a rate of roughly a hundredth of an inch per second, rodlike microfibers of ice grew from the tip of the needle.

The microfibers never got very long — they could barely be seen with the naked eye — but high-resolution imaging revealed that they were single crystals. That means that the atoms within them are arranged in repeating patterns. “The atoms are ordered like honeycombs,” Dr. Tong said.

This structural perfection, paired with the microfibers’ relative lack of microscopic defects — such as tiny cracks, pores and missing atoms or molecules — renders them much more flexible than naturally occurring ice, said Erland Schulson, an ice scientist at Dartmouth College, who was not involved in the research.

“There are no grain boundaries, no cracks, no features that otherwise limit how much elastic strain a body can experience.”

To demonstrate that flexibility, Dr. Tong and his colleagues used microscopic tools to push on the microfibers. They showed that the ice could be bent like a cooked noodle into almost complete circles before returning, unchanged, to its original rodlike shape. “There was no permanent deformation,” said Dr. Schulson, who wrote a perspective article that accompanied the study in Science.

The team also found that the microfibers effectively transmitted light along their lengths. When the researchers sent visible light into one end of the microfibers, more than 99 percent emerged at the other end. They function just like fiber optic strands that enable fast internet communications, Dr. Tong said. “They can guide light from one side to the other.”

These microfibers could one day be used for studying air quality, the researchers suggest. Particles associated with pollution — soot and metals, for example — often stick to bits of ice in the atmosphere, where they change how the ice absorbs and reflects light. By building a microfiber from polluted ice and studying how light propagates through it, it may be possible to better understand the amount and type of pollution in a region, the team suggests.

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Business

A New Kind of Ransomware Tsunami Hits Hundreds of Companies

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It was probably inevitable that the two dominant cybersecurity threats of the day— supply chain attacks and ransomware—would combine to wreak havoc. That’s precisely what happened Friday afternoon, as the notorious REvil criminal group successfully encrypted the files of hundreds of businesses in one swoop, apparently thanks to compromised IT management software. And that’s only the very beginning.

The situation is still developing and certain details—most important, how the attackers infiltrated the software in the first place—remain unknown. But the impact has already been severe and will only get worse given the nature of the targets. The software in question, Kaseya VSA, is popular among so-called managed service providers, which provide IT infrastructure for companies that would rather outsource that sort of thing than run it themselves. Which means that if you successfully hack an MSP, you suddenly have access to its customers. It’s the difference between cracking safe-deposit boxes one at a time and stealing the bank manager’s skeleton key.

So far, according to security company Huntress, REvil has hacked eight MSPs. The three that Huntress works with directly account for 200 businesses that found their data encrypted Friday. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see how much worse it gets from there, especially given Kaseya’s ubiquity.

“Kaseya is the Coca-Cola of remote management,” says Jake Williams, chief technology officer of the incident response firm BreachQuest. “Because we’re going into a holiday weekend, we won’t even know how many victims are out there until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. But it’s monumental.”

Worst of Both Worlds

MSPs have long been a popular target, particularly of nation-state hackers. Hitting them is a terrifically efficient way to spy, if you can manage it. As a Justice Department indictment showed in 2018, China’s elite APT10 spies used MSP compromises to steal hundreds of gigabytes of data from dozens of companies. REvil has targeted MSPs before, too, using its foothold into a third-party IT company to hijack 22 Texas municipalities at once in 2019.

Supply chain attacks have become increasingly common as well, most notably in the devastating SolarWinds campaign last year that gave Russia access to multiple US agencies and countless other victims. Like MSP attacks, supply chain hacks also have a multiplicative effect; tainting one software update can yield hundreds of victims.

You can start to see, then, why a supply chain attack that targets MSPs has potentially exponential consequences. Throw system-crippling ransomware into the mix, and the situation becomes even more untenable. It brings to mind the devastating NotPetya attack, which also used a supply chain compromise to spread what at first seemed like ransomware but was really a nation-state attack perpetrated by Russia. A more recent Russian campaign comes to mind as well.

“This is SolarWinds, but with ransomware,” says Brett Callow, a threat analyst at antivirus company Emsisoft. “When a single MSP is compromised, it can impact hundreds of end users. And in this case it seems that multiple MSPs have been compromised, so …”

BreachQuest’s Williams says that REvil appears to be asking victim companies for the equivalent of roughly $45,000 in the cryptocurrency Monero. If they fail to pay within a week, the demand doubles. Security news site BleepingComputer reports that REvil has asked some victims for $5 million for a decryption key that unlocks “all PCs of your encrypted network,” which may be targeted to MSPs specifically rather than their clients.

“We often talk about MSPs being the mother ship for many small-to-medium business and organizations,” says John Hammond, senior security researcher at Huntress. “But if Kaseya is what is hit, bad actors just compromised all of their mother ships.”

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Technology

A Different Kind Of 3D Printer: Desktop Holograms

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Holograms aren’t new, but a desktop machine that spits them out could be available soon, presuming LitiHolo’s Kickstarter pans out. The machine will have a $1600 retail price and fits in a two-foot square. It can generate 4×5 inch holograms with 1mm hogels (the holo equivalent of a pixel).

The machine allows for 23 view zones per hogel and can create moving holograms with a few seconds of motion — like the famous kiss-blowing holograms.

Of course, you’ll also need a special self-developing film and a way to get 3D images into the printer such as software or a camera set up to do a 3D scan. In the 4×5 size, the film runs about $13 a plate which will create one hologram.

Since 5 inches is 127 mm the hogel resolution of the result is about 101×127, and the samples on the website and the video below certainly don’t look like they are in HD.

Will people pay $1600 for low-resolution holograms? More importantly, is there a market for grainy holograms that would let you earn back the investment? Maybe not, but that hasn’t stopped us from buying 3D printers and other workshop toys. Plus, if this catches on, what will be available in ten years time?

Of course, if you have the laser gear, you can already make your own holograms. You can even get kits that have most of what you need.

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Entertainment

Despite palace fears, Meghan Markle has only ‘kind words’ for Kate Middleton in Oprah interview

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Buckingham Palace is terrified that Meghan Markle will say nasty things about Kate Middleton on Sunday’s interview with Oprah Winfrey — but sources assure The Post that the duchess offers only “kind words” for her sister-in-law in the otherwise bombshell sit-down.

Markle dissing Middleton — and exposing the dirty details of their notorious rift — is feared as something that would wreak “vast” damage to the British monarchy, the U.K.’s Sun newspaper reported Saturday.

One scared source even described the interview as equivalent to a “nuclear option” for Markle, the Sun reported.

PRINCE HARRY BRANDED ‘THE HOSTAGE’ BY ROYAL STAFFERS BEFORE MARRYING MEGHAN MARKLE: REPORT

But a source with knowledge of the Oprah interview, set to air Sunday, tells The Post that Buckingham Palace has nothing to worry about in that regard.

Meghan and Prince Harry had only “kind words” about Prince William and Kate, a CBS insider told The Post, denying the Oprah sitdown would expose the extent of any rift between the quartet.

Still, royal watchers are waiting in trepidation for any bombs that might fall Middleton’s way, particularly given Markle’s outspoken displeasure over her time in the U.K., which she will describe as “almost unsurvivable.”

“If she has chosen to speak candidly about her time with Kate then the damage that could be done to the monarchy is vast,” royal sources told The UK Sun.

“She has the power to lay bare just how bad things really were between her, Harry, William and Kate.”

During the marathon chat, Markle is also expected to discuss the breakdown of her relationship with dad Thomas Markle, who didn’t even attend the royal wedding.

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“Oprah is likely to show Meghan clips of things Thomas has said — and then ask for her response. It should lead to some dramatic moments,” the source told The Sun.

To read more from the New York Post, click here.

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Entertainment

Meghan Markle has only ‘kind words’ for Kate Middleton in Oprah interview

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Buckingham Palace is terrified that Meghan Markle will say nasty things about Kate Middleton on Sunday’s interview with Oprah Winfrey — but sources assure The Post that the duchess offers only “kind words” for her sister-in-law in the otherwise bombshell sit-down.

Markle dissing Middleton — and exposing the dirty details of their notorious rift — is feared as something that would wreak “vast” damage to the British monarchy, the U.K.’s Sun newspaper reported Saturday.

One scared source even described the interview as equivalent to a “nuclear option” for Markle, the Sun reported

But a source with knowledge of the Oprah interview, set to air Sunday, tells The Post that Buckingham Palace has nothing to worry about in that regard.

Meghan and Prince Harry had only “kind words” about Prince William and Kate, a CBS insider told The Post, denying the Oprah sitdown would expose the extent of any rift between the quartet.

Still, royal watchers are waiting in trepidation for any bombs that might fall Middleton’s way, particularly given Markle’s outspoken displeasure over her time in the U.K., which she will describe as “almost unsurvivable.”

“If she has chosen to speak candidly about her time with Kate then the damage that could be done to the monarchy is vast,” royal sources told The UK Sun.

“She has the power to lay bare just how bad things really were between her, Harry, William and Kate.”

During the marathon chat, Markle is also expected to discuss the breakdown of her relationship with dad Thomas Markle, who didn’t even attend the royal wedding.

“Oprah is likely to show Meghan clips of things Thomas has said — and then ask for her response. It should lead to some dramatic moments,” the source told The Sun.

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Science

NASA Perseverance rover: See ‘first of its kind’ footage from Mars descent on Monday

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The Perseverance rover being lowered to Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The photo was taken about 20 meters from the ground. 


NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance rover is safe and sound on the surface of Mars, ready to survey its new home for signs of past life. We’ve already seen the fruits of its early labors in stunning images from its descent and landing. Now, NASA is teasing the release of video footage from the landing with the tagline “See Mars Like Never Before!” and buzz is building. The landing was always going to be must-see TV and just a few days post-touchdown, NASA’s ready for broadcast.

Here’s how you can see the latest Perseverance images and video from the red planet.

Mission experts will present the latest update at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET on Monday, Feb. 22. A number of mission scientists and NASA staff have really been hyping this one up on Twitter, so we’re expecting to see some mind-blowing footage. And you don’t need to go anywhere — just press play on the link below:

NASA also provides all the raw images beamed back from Perseverance at its homepage. Once the first few weeks of exploration are well underway, the agency will begin dumping hundreds of photos on the site, so it’s worth checking in every now and again.

Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020, beneath the early morning sun of the Florida coast aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V. It spent the last seven months traveling from Earth to Mars, shielded from the harsh environment of space within the Mars 2020 spacecraft. 

When it reached Mars, it jettisoned its outer layer and slammed into the red planet’s tenuous atmosphere. Only 10  minutes later, it had planted its six wheels firmly on the Martian soil in Jezero Crater, a location that scientists believe was once a lakebed. Where there’s water, there’s potential for life — and Perseverance will seek signs Mars was once inhabited by alien microbes.

Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.    

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Health

This Year’s Flu Numbers Are Kind of Stunning

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(Newser)
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It may be hard to fathom, but the pandemic seems to have an upside, too: The flu is pretty much nonexistent this year. Popular Science delivers the remarkable stat: In 2019, the US recorded 65,000 cases from late September to late December. In 2020, that figure dropped to 1,000. It seems that all the precautions people are taking to ward off COVID—masks, social distancing, avoidance of indoor social activities, etc.—are working to keep the flu at bay, too. In addition, flu shots are up. Researchers also are studying the theory that some kind of complex interplay between COVID and the flu is at play. As in, the virus behind COVID might be raising people’s immunity levels against the flu, per the Wall Street Journal. However, more research is needed to understand that possibility.

“This is an extremely puzzling phenomenon,” says pediatrician Norio Sugaya, who sits on the World Health Organization’s influenza committee. “We’re in a historic, unbelievable situation.” It’s not just in the US: Flu numbers are similarly down around the world. The trend began in Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, where flu cases typically peak between June and August, notes Smithsonian. The big question is what happens when COVID goes away. As Science explains, one fear is that the flu will come back strong next season because so few people got it this year. But that could be mitigated if people adapt COVID safety protocols more permanently or perhaps make more of a point to get their flu shots. The flu typically kills hundreds of thousands of people annually worldwide, and “we need to ask ourselves whether we are going to continue to allow it in the future,” virologist Tetsuya Mizutani tells the Journal. (Read more flu stories.)

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