Do not mess with anyone whose knuckles are literally made of metal. (credit: Hardcore Henry)

If you need an antidote for the overblown blah of Batman v Superman, your medicine has arrived in the form of Hardcore Henry, a surprisingly great sci-fi shoot-em-up that moves at the pace of a first-person shooter on speed—and crack, and some LSD for good measure. It’s the comic-violent tale of deadly cyborgs, dope-smoking clones, and a telekinetic gangster-corporate oligarch in Russia. And it has a great soundtrack, too.

Shot entirely from the perspective of Henry with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the movie begins with a familiar cyborg premise. We watch through Henry’s eyes as he boots up, looks down in confusion at the newly installed power ports in his chest, then watches as an engineer screws on his new bionic arm and leg. The engineer tells Henry that she’s his wife, and she hopes one day he’ll remember how much they loved each other. But there’s no time for lovey-dovey, nor to install Henry’s voice box, because the lab is immediately attacked by bad guys. As they run for their lives, Henry discovers that the lab is actually in a zeppelin, and he and the engineer barely have time to launch themselves in the sole remaining escape pod.

In the middle of all this, we realize that the engineer—who jokes that Henry “never liked” her work—has done kind of a half-assed job covering Henry’s bionic arm with skin. She’s left his knuckles bare, so that four gleaming metal joints show through. Of course, these perma-brass knuckles will come in handy, because Henry is going to spend this entire movie wordlessly pounding the crap out of people using every weapon on his body and in his arsenal.

Stephen Hawking and others at the Breakthrough Starshot announcement. (credit: John Timmer)

NEW YORK CITY—The top of the new World Trade Center building was buried inside the clouds, but everyone's focus was on the stars. Yuri Milner, the man whose investments have helped fund the Breakthrough Prizes and Breakthrough Initiatives, was here to announce his newest venture: Breakthrough Starshot, an effort to send hardware to the nearest stars quickly enough for many of us to live to see their arrival.

Present to back the project was physicist Stephen Hawking. "I believe what makes us unique is transcending our limits," Hawking told the audience. "Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America."

He went on to ask, "How do we transcend these limits? With our minds and our machines. The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it."

SpaceX

SpaceX flew its Falcon 9 rocket into space on Friday and then landed it on a drone ship. Here's what that looked like from on board.

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On Friday, the Falcon 9 rocket soared into space and launched its cargo toward the International Space Station. And then for the first time in history, the rocket fired its engines to slow its horizontal velocity and make a guided descent back toward an ocean-based platform where it landed—without toppling over.

After the autonomous drone ship made its return to Port Canaveral early on Tuesday morning, SpaceX collected images from the on-board cameras and released them. They show the dramatic landing up close and in your face.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said this rocket and its nine engines will be tested 10 times to ensure that everything functions properly. And if that's the case, this rocket could be launched into space as early as June. Luxembourg-based satellite company SES has already indicated that it would be willing to fly on a reused rocket.

A few months ago, Blizzard launched a closed beta for its upcoming shooter Overwatch—and I've been engrossed in the PC version ever since. For all its faults—and there are many faults—it's hard not be impressed with not just how much fun Overwatch is, but how Blizzard's managed to successfully combine a solid first-person shooter along the same lines as Team Fortress 2 with the mechanics of a modern MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) like its own Heroes of the Storm and Riot's League of Legends.

That Blizzard's managed to create a compelling online experience comes as little surprise. This is, after all, the same studio that kept millions upon millions of players hooked to World of Warcraft for over a decade, and created Hearthstone, one of the most popular online collectible card games. With Overwatch, it has its sights set not just on creating the most popular online shooter, but one that can take on MOBAs on their home turf: the e-sports arena.

It's been hard to picture Overwatch as a crowd-pleasing, e-sports giant as I've sat alone in my bedroom moaning about what a bully Bastion (a transforming battle robot character) is to others over a clip-on voice mic. But now, sat with a team playing a huge multiplayer game at an event in London's Soho, and struggling against an unfair number of turrets from the opposition, Blizzard's e-sports vision is a little clearer.

The researchers told study participants that they were taking part in an anatomy lesson. As each body part was named, they were asked to touch it on the robot's body. Meanwhile, researchers measured their levels of physiological arousal. (credit: Jamy Li)

Humans didn't evolve in an environment full of machines, and as a result we have a lot of instinctive reactions to robots that mirror our reactions to other humans. Studies have shown that people have a hard time being rude to a robot's face, just as we do with other people. We even use the same part of our brains to recognize robot and human faces. A research group at Stanford recently wondered if our instinctive reactions to robots would extend to the way we touch their bodies. And they did a series of tests in which subjects were asked to touch robots in "accessible" regions like the hands and then "inaccessible" ones like the buttocks and genitals.

The researchers will present the results of their work this week at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Fukuoka, Japan. They wanted to focus on people's reactions to touch because there is already a large body of evidence showing that humans have complex reactions to touching each other, ranging from emotions to physiological changes we aren't always aware of. As robots take on the roles of caretakers, workplace helpers, and service workers, it's important to explore whether touch should be incorporated into how we design robot interfaces. But first, we need to understand whether humans react to robot touch the way they react to human touch.

To answer that question, the researchers used a human touching scale developed back in the 1960s by Sidney Jourard. Jourard used the term "body accessibility" to rank body parts based on how willing people were to allow others to touch them. As the researchers wrote:

The New Shepard rocket made its third flight on Saturday from West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

After Blue Origin completed the third flight of its New Shepard launch system on Saturday, the spaceflight community applauded the effort. And on Sunday, after video emerged showing the dramatic firing of its engines just before the rocket would have struck the ground, the response was again approbation. This third test in a little more than four months demonstrated that Blue Origin has continued to progress toward its goal of launch, land, and repeat—the holy grail of low-cost spaceflight.

But among the cheers were also a few mutterings. What does it matter if all Jeff Bezos is going to do is take rich people on joy rides, some said. Or, if researchers want to do suborbital experiments, can't they get those done in conventional aircraft flying parabolas? Others have complained that New Shepard's propulsion module is relatively small and has only a single engine, and flying to suborbital space requires a fraction of the energy that getting into orbit does. In short, some critics say Bezos is just dabbling at the edges of space, not doing the hard stuff of going all the way.

This may all be true, but it misses the point. Much like Mercury represented America's first tentative steps into outer space, so does New Shepard represent only a beginning for the company. New Shepard, after all, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space who rode inside a Mercury capsule. It may or may not succeed, but Blue Origin aspires to be much more. It's trying to build a scalable, reusable architecture from the ground up, and that takes time.