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The fall finales are over (and remember when there never used to be “fall finales”?). It’s time to check the leaderboard!

For the first 12 weeks of the new season, the Big Three are representing in the top 10 thanks to the popularity of comedy mainstay The Big Bang Theory and dramas The Good Doctor and This Is Us, according to Nielsen. But when it comes to attracting the most orbs, football remains the program to have on one’s schedule.

Here are the top 75 most-watched shows on the broadcast networks from Sept. 25 to Dec. 17.

1. NBC NFL Sunday Night Football (18.2 million)
2. The Big Bang Theory (18 million)
3. The Good Doctor (16.7 million)
4. This Is Us (16.6 million)
5. NCIS (16.5 million)
6. Young Sheldon (15.8 million)
7. CBS Thursday Night Football (14.2 million)
8. Bull (13.8 million)
9. NBC Thursday Night Football (13.4 million)
10. NBC NFL Sunday Night Pre-Kick (13.2 million)
11. Blue Bloods (13 million)
12. 60 Minutes (12.9 million)
13. NCIS: New Orleans (12.3 million)
14. The Voice (11.7 million)
15. OT (11.56 million)
16. Grey’s Anatomy (11.53 million)
17. Will & Grace (11.3 million)
18. The Voice Tuesday (11.29 million)
19. Dancing with the Stars (11.23 million)
20. Hawaii Five-0 (11.1 million)
21. Seal Team (10.6 million)
22. Chicago Fire (10.3 million)
23. NCIS: LA (10.2 million)
24. Survivor (10.1 million)
25. Mom (10 million)
26. Chicago PD (9.7 million)
27. Football Night in America (9.5 million)
28. Criminal Minds (9.2 million)
29. Modern Family (8.8 million)
30. S.W.A.T. (8.8 million)
31. Chicago Med (8.7 million)
32. Blacklist (8.68 million)
33. Madam Secretary (8.65 million)
34. Wisdom of the Crowd (8.5 million)
35. Law & Order: SVU (8.4 million)
36. NCIS Encore (8.4 million)
37. Designated Survivor (8.27 million)
38. MacGyver (8.26 million)
39. Brave (8.14 million)
40. Scorpion (8.06 million)
41. Kevin Can Wait (8.0 million)
42. Life in Pieces (7.83 million)
43. Empire (7.7 million)
44. Scandal (7.6 million)
45. CBS NFL Thursday (7.1 million)
46. The Goldbergs (6.9 million)
47. The Middle (6.8 million)
48. Law & Order: True Crime (6.72 million)
49. Orville (6.7 million)
50. American Housewife (6.5 million)
51. How to Get Away with Murder (6.52 million)
52. Man with a Plan (6.43 million)
53. 9JKL (6.3 million)
54. The Good Place (6.233 million)
55. Lethal Weapon (6.231 million)
56. Me, Myself and I (6.13 million)
57. Dateline NBC (5.9 million)
58. Superior Donuts (5.8 million)
59. ABC Saturday Night Football (5.76 million)
60. Shark Tank (5.7 million)
61. Superstore (5.74 million)
62. Better Late Than Never (5.46 million)
63. Chicago PD Encore (5.45 million)
64. Speechless (5.3 million)
65. Football Night in America (5.3 million)
66. Star (5.28 million)
67. Black-ish (5.22 million
68. Gifted (5.20 million)
69. America’s Funniest Home Videos (5.19 million)
70. Seal Team Encore (5.13 million)
71. Blindspot (5.05 million)
72. America’s Funniest Home Videos rerun (5.01 million)
73. Dateline Classic Friday (4.8 million)
74. 48 Hours (4.6 million)
75. The Simpsons (4.5 million)

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

The way Mr. Robot thrillingly drew everything back to the start in tonight's Season 3 finale, you'd think it was the actual endgame for the series. I mean, it makes sense. Elliot was out to utterly undo the Five/Nine hack (not that he could ever bring back the thousands who died in the bombings), Angela learned that Phillip Price was her freakin' dad (a twist that deftly borrowed from another sci-fi classic, The Empire Strikes Back, and not Back to the Future), and Elliot learned that his father never pushed him out a window at all. All of this had the markings for a series finale.

Of course, there was still Dom being under the Dark Army's terrifying thumb now and Elliot being beholden to Whiterose and her crazy Congo scheme. There were still issues to deal with and evil plots to thwart, but the rest of the story had all the hallmarks of a final episode. The Rules of a Part 3, as stated in Scream 3 - namely "Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it" - came alive here, giving "shutdown -r" a nice feeling of closure. As if, perhaps, mastermind Sam Esmail wasn't sure about a Season 4. Mr. Robot is uniquely and wonderfully crafted, and mostly critically acclaimed, but it's never quite been a ratings smash. There was an undercurrent of uncertainty this season, especially given its "back to basics" approach to storytelling that leaned more into the suspense of Season 1 than the "smoke and mirrors" of Season 2.

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WARNING: This article contains spoilers from the season 3 finale of Mr. Robot. Read at your own risk!

Mr. Robot barreled forward at a thrilling pace throughout its third season, but at the end of it, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) wound up in an entirely surprising spot.

The fix that Trenton teased in the season two coda — the fix for the 5/9 hack — was real, and Elliot seems to have been able to undo the damage he and fsociety inflicted on Evil Corps data.

It was an insane twist that provided some deep and beautiful character growth for Elliot and refocused his energy toward the real target, White Rose and the Dark Army.

To help us through all of the insanity, series creator, executive producer, and director Sam Esmail talked to EW about the finale and what might happen when the show returns for the recently announced season 4.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The season ends with the suggestion that the hack will be undone. Was this the plan from the outset?SAM ESMAIL: If I’m going to conjure up my original feature plan, this was always part of it. The plan was that basically toward the end of act two, he would reverse what he did, but still kind of be in a position of now pivoting and targeting the real top one percent that orchestrated the 5/9 hack behind his back. That was always a plot point, but as you can see, that kind of gets unwieldy because your main character’s goal is essential reversed as you go through the second act of the story.

Yeah, it’s basically Mad Max: Fury Road, turning back around and going back to where they came from.Exactly. It’s literally turning the main motivation and main dramatic drive upside down. It’s kind of an Odyssey structure. With Elliot, because the journey is really internal and really about his emotional growth, having the plotline be circular like that lent to that more internal exploration.

Right, so that turn only makes sense if it’s just about Elliot. What do you think that return means for him as an evolving character?I think Elliot starts off the whole series by having this really deep pain. He tries to externalize that and put it on the world, that the world is broken and needs to be fixed — not him. Then he goes through this journey of fixing what he presumes to be what’s wrong with the world. He sort of ends up realizing that what’s wrong has been inside him all along. He makes that discovery on the subway platform at the end of the finale, when he decides that he needs to undo this for him. He’s coming to that realization that this whole thing was kickstarted by him externalizing the pain he had been going through.

And from a story perspective, he has a much clearer idea of what and who is wrong with the world.Exactly. Throughout all of this, he may have bungled his main mission, to genuinely try to save the world, but in doing so, he kicked the hornet’s nest and exposed the real top one percent of the top one percent. Now he’s sort of moving forward with more clarity on that.

Does that make him less vulnerable to manipulation now?Yeah, so this is when we sort of realize that Elliot’s plan had been co-opted from the beginning. His anger was used against him and his aspirations to change the world for the better. That’s actually something we wanted to explore. We kind of did it with Angela’s character too, this idea of belief and faith being radicalized and perverted for nefarious motivations by a higher organization. We paralleled that with a lot of what’s going on in the world today. There is that sense that good things that people believe in and want for the world are continually being co-opted and perverted for selfish means.

Does the end of season 3 feel more like a chapter ending than the previous two?I look at every season as an act or a piece of an act. What’s interesting about the third season is that it comes pretty close to being the end of act two. Just the go-to classic screenplay structure, the first and third acts should be shorter than the second act. The second act is really kind of the bulk of a film. Usually, you kind of separate the second act into two acts, divided by this midpoint event. Structurally, I always felt that seasons two and three were of a whole, meaning that the end of the first season kicked off the story and was the end of the first act. Seasons two and three completed that journey. In that way, there is sort of a closing of a story thread and a pivot into a new direction. By no means, obviously, it’s not the end. This is probably the most revelations we’ve given the audience in terms of the mystery behind Stage 2 and the 5/9 hack and White Rose. But it also spins us into a new direction to go into that final act of the story.

How drastic do you think the pivot into a new direction is going to be?It’s ultimately actually kind of lives up to the promise of Elliot’s initial motivation, to take down this invisible controlling group behind the scenes. In that circular way, it comes back to the original premise. In a weird way, it doesn’t really change what the show is but, in a deeper way, underlines what the original premise was all about.

I didn’t see the Angela-Price twist coming. What’s exciting for you about that dynamic going forward?I’ve read this somewhere — though I wasn’t conscious of it when creating the show — that people consider this a family drama. In a weird way, I see the underpinnings of that. Obviously you have Elliot, Darlene, and Mr. Robot being this weird dysfunctional family. But then you throw in Angela, who, because she’s such a close friend, she is sort of part of that family unit that Elliot created growing up. One of the things that I think drives a lot of our characters are those family ties and the history of their families. In fact, that’s how they even know each other — because of Elliot’s father and Angela’s mother going through the same trauma. What I always felt was interesting was to reveal that this whole thing was actually kicked off by another family connection that we had no idea about: Price being the estranged father of Angela. If you peel back the onion and think about it. That caused this chain reaction. It’s because of Price’s connection to Angela that he hired this company that had no business being a cybersecurity company for a major conglomerate, and it’s because Angela worked at Allsafe that Elliot was offered a job there and had the idea to initiate the 5/9 hack. I thought it was interesting that, when you boil this massive global tragedy down, it was really these family connections that motivated and kicked off this whole event. That was always there from the get-go. In fact, that was the one reveal I thought people would most likely guess by the end of the first season, given how close we played Price and Angela together.

If people watched until after the credits (Note: If not, do so now), they saw Vera return to New York. How did you decide how you wanted to leave the audience before the break?As with any season ending of Mr. Robot, I think there’s a mixed bag of renewed motivation, a new mission comes to light in a way that should be energized. But in a way, there’s still a mystery there that fans are hopefully intrigued by and wanting to know more. I think the way this season ended, there is a strong pivot of Elliot’s real mission being realized and being energized by that.

Do you intend for White Rose to remain a target for Elliot?Yeah, I believe that the thing about the show is that we set up Tyrell as the main villain, when in fact, it’s White Rose, and that’s something that comes out this season. The ultimate target is White Rose and the Dark Army. Moving forward, that’s the pivot we’re trying to make. Elliot is going to go after them.

I have time for only one question, so I’m going to make it count. Does the pee tape exist in the world of Mr. Robot?I think far worse than the pee tape exists in the world of Mr. Robot and our real world.

Read the Mr. Robot season 3 finale recap here.

Since the earliest days of cinema, there’s been a love affair between Hollywood and gambling. Even back in the silent movie era, games of cards in westerns were frequent scenes, with the accompanying music helping to raise the tension. In the modern day, gambling action has played a part in almost every genre of film, […]

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Check out our spoiler-free review of the eighth episode in the Skywalker saga.

Wil Wheaton’s got jokes! In a super meta moment on Thursday, the actor dared wear a Star Trek uniform to a screening of Star Wars: The Last Jedi at the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.

The actor, who played Wesley Crusher from 1987 to 1994 on Star Trek: The Next Generation, shared a photo of his costume on Twitter saying, “Oh, and I went in costume for the first time ever, because I am an adult and I get to decide what that means.”

I loved #TheLastJedi! It hit all the right notes for me, and seeing it in the Chinese Theater, surrounded by my fellow nerds was glorious. The Force was with us.

Oh, and I went in costume for the first time ever, because I am a damn adult and I get to decide what that means. pic.twitter.com/mTqB0LP4hV

— Wil 'Kick the Nazis off the tweeters' Wheaton (@wilw) December 15, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

In 2015, Wheaton appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory, and during one episode, he took in a Star Wars movie while wearing a Star Trek uniform. His choice of attire attracted some hecklers and Wheaton delivered the unforgettable line, “Live long and suck it!” (Watch the clip here.)

No need to worry if the gimmick was ill-intentioned: Wheaton had nothing but good things to say about the latest Star Wars installment. “I loved #TheLastJedi! It hit all the right notes for me,” he said on Twitter. “Seeing it in the Chinese Theater, surrounded by my fellow nerds was glorious. The Force was with us.”

Mr. Robot has been renewed for a fourth season.

USA Network announced the news today, Variety reports.

Mr. Robot stars Rami Malek and Christian Slater, the latter of whom received his third consecutive Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a TV Series. Martin Wallström, Grace Gummer, Portia Doubleday, Carly Chaikin, Michael Cristofer, BD Wong, and Bobby Cannavale also star in the show.

Series creator Sam Esmail serves as an executive producer, alongside Steve Golin and Chad Hamilton. Mr. Robot is co-executive produced by Kyle Bradstreet and Joseph E. Iberti.

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We’ve all seen them. Scroll down far enough through your Netflix library and they start to appear, those categories that seem just a little too specific. They’ll start innocently enough. Maybe Netflix will assemble a collection of “Quirky comedies” for your amusement, or “Historical TV Dramas”. 

But pretty soon things can start getting weird. “Critically-acclaimed social issue dramas”, “Suspenseful movies starring Denzel Washington” and “Raunchy TV Comedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead” are all categories that have been spotted out in the wild. 

You can blame Mike Hastings for all of the categories you see while browsing Netflix. A former film critic with an passion for categorisation, Hastings is in charge of the 30-person strong team that watches and categorizes Netflix’s entire catalogue. 

Their aim? To work out what you like to watch, understand what you like about it, and to recommend you more content that you might like. 

Tagging the beast

Hastings has an obsession with rating and categorising movies. When Netflix moved towards its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system and away from a 5-star rating system, he lamented the loss of the feature.

“I love stars because I’m kind of a nerd and I love clicking them,” he explains, before explaining why the change had to take place, “the product manager that introduced thumbs up thumbs down did a lot of testing to find that not all people are like me and like making a five star decision on a title.”

“Netflix has shown me that as much of a nerd as I am, and as much work as I’m willing to put into this, not everyone wants to put in that much effort in terms of selecting stars.”

With each piece of content on Netflix amassing an average of 250 individual tags, Hastings and his team have their work cut out. 

When it comes to content catogories, genre is still king. “I keep thinking that genre is going to go away and be replaced by something else but genre continues to be the thing that people respond to first,” Hastings explains. 

Genre is also where Netflix sees the biggest regional variations. The ‘Action’ genre is almost universally the most popular worldwide...except in the UK where it’s actually outranked by ‘Horror’ and ‘Family friendly’. Italy, perhaps unsurprisingly considering national stereotypes, skews heavily towards ‘Romance’. 

Once genre has been established, Netflix can start moving onto more esoteric tags. They’ll try and describe a show’s tone, be it ‘humorous’, ‘cerebral’, or ‘irreverent’, and its characters. Are they an ‘everyman’? A ‘smart aleck’? A ‘strong female’?

Storylines are another key series of tags. Does the show, like Master of None, deal with storylines about ‘friendship’? ‘Dating’? Or, like the recently released Dark, is it about a ‘Missing Person’, a ‘Family in crisis’ and ‘Unintended consequences’? 

Throughout the years Netflix has had to expand the tagging categories as it launches into more markets. Before it launched in Japan it didn’t measure ‘Cuteness’ as a metric, but were forced to in response from demand from viewers there. 

More importantly, its ideas around mature content have had to evolve as it’s been exposed to differing sensibilities around the world. Americans are much more lenient when it comes to violent content, so its tags surrounding violence are relaxed slightly. In Australia meanwhile, violence against animals is a particularly sensitive area, causing Hastings and his team to start measuring it when they hadn’t been before. 

The darker side of algorithms 

With so much data being thrown into the system, and with many tags alluding to racial elements of movies and tv shows, we were keen to understand what Netflix is doing to prevent these tags assembling into inappropriate categories. 

After all, over the last year we’ve seen what appear to be bots creating disturbing content on YouTube kids, while Google inadvertently surfaced holocaust denial websites when asked if the Holocaust happened. 

“Algorithms can do funny and unexpected things,” Hastings acknowledges, “Sometimes you get some results that seem a little tone deaf.”

But he also keenly emphasises that the team keeps close tabs on the categories that the algorithms create, both before and after they are served to the Netflix-viewing public.

Hastings and his team set up “tester accounts” that are given different personalities, and so are exposed to different combinations of tags. “We’ll have one that’s in to one type of content, one that’s into another type of content, and we’ll see both our rows and our algorithmic rows, are they making sense, are they doing anything that’s strange?”

Once the algorithms are let loose in the wild, the team’s work continues with them monitoring social media for any mentions of odd combinations of tags. “We watch Twitter for screenshots of recommendations that people think are wrong or bad.” 

At every stage in the tagging process humans play a vital role in generating the data that guides Netflix’s algorithms, but that may change as machine learning and AI grow increasingly dominant in Silicon Valley. Hastings indicated that although these currently play no part in the tagging process at present, their use is something that Netflix is looking into. 

Surprisingly, none of this data is fed into the commissioning process for Netflix’s original content. 

“We let the ‘total creative freedom’ part happen and then we follow behind,” Hastings explains, “We don’t use the tag data to dictate content at all, we usually let the creators do what they’re going to do.”

“Algorithms aren’t going to replace the creative process when it comes to content.”

Bursting the bubble

The idea of the ‘social media bubble’ has come to define the modern era. Rather than being forced to share a public space with those around us, the sheer breadth of the internet has allowed us to retreat into ‘bubbles’, where we can surround ourselves with people who match, rather than challenge, our views of the world. 

The same has happened in the world of media. Now that we’re not limited to watching what’s on the same channels as everyone else, we’re free to watch exactly the content we want to watch. The whole world might be talking about the hot new show on NBC, but you can get your TV fix without having to go anywhere near a mainstream channel. 

But at its heart, Netflix seems to be gently tugging people out of their comfort zones. You might spend every waking moment of your day watching sci-fi shows, but if Netflix’s algorithm’s work out that the sci-fi you engage with most all feature a quirky tone, then it can start recommending you quirky content from other genres. 

It’s motivated by self-interest (after all, Netflix wants you to watch enough content that you’re happy to continue paying your subscription), but if it succeeds then it might just be able to broaden our worldview, one tag at a time. 

Now, if you’ll excuse us we have some raunchy TV comedies featuring a strong female lead to watch. 

• The best TV shows on Netflix has everything you need to get started with the service

Stephen Colbert addressed the “scary” situation in New York on Monday when a man set off a makeshift bomb at the Port Authority bus terminal. After the attacker was arrested, the host of The Late Show chuckled at the absurdity of the guy’s plan.

“Seriously?! You try to terrorize New York subway commuters? Nice try! Nice try,” he said during his opening monologue. “New York commuters don’t even flinch when the subway breakdancers kick two inches away from their face. They have to battle rats for the seat, which for the record you should only give up if the rat is pregnant.”

“You try to sow chaos and confusion in the Port Authority bus station?” he added. “That is the normal state of affairs at the Port Authority bus station. There’s a pretty good chance your little explosion may have scoured some of the grime off the wall. Thanks! Now you’re going to jail for a long, long, long time and all New Yorkers want to know is, does that mean your apartment is free and is it rent controlled?”

The man, a 27-year-old inspired by ISIS, prematurely detonated the device, causing injury to himself and three others. Though, there were no fatalities.

“You tried to terrorize New York and it failed,” Colbert said. “The worst you did is make the subways run late and the MTA does that just fine without your help.”

Watch Colbert in the clip above.

We could all use more Christine Baranski in our lives.

Fortunately, CBS All Access is ready to help. The streaming service announced today that The Good Fight — the spin-off of The Good Wife that stars Baranski — will return for a new, 13-episode season on March 4.

Here’s the official tease for season 2 from the streaming service: “The world is going insane, and the Chicago murder rate is on the rise. Amidst the insanity, Diane (Baranski), Lucca (Cush Jumbo), Maia (Rose Leslie) and the rest of the law firm find themselves under psychological assault when a client at another firm kills his lawyer for overcharging. After a copycat murder, the firm begins to look at its own clients suspiciously. Meanwhile, Diane battles with a new partner at the firm, Liz Reddick-Lawrence (Audra McDonald); Maia becomes tougher after her parents’ scandal puts her on trial; and Lucca is brought back into Colin’s (Justin Bartha) orbit.”

The series, like the original, is from Robert and Michelle King and also stars Delroy Lindo, Sarah Steele, Michael Boatman, and Nyambi Nyambi.

CBS All Access is CBS’ digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service.

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Netflix's The Witcher series adaptation has found its showrunner.

Variety reports Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, co-executive producer on Marvel's The Defenders and Daredevil as well as Starz's Power, will serve as showrunner and executive producer on Netflix's new show based on the fantasy saga. Along with Hissrich, Sean Daniel and Jason Brown of Sean Daniel Company, as well as Tomek Baginski and Jarek Sawko of Platige Image will executive produce.

Andrzej Sapkowski, author of the eight The Witcher novels, will serve as a creative consultant on the series. Tomas Baginski, who has directed the intro videos for the three Witcher games from CD Projekt RED, will direct at least one episode per season. No release date or casting has been announced yet.

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In Monday’s midseason finale of The Good Doctor, Sean (Freddie Highmore) goes AWOL after Dr. Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff) tries too hard to micromanage his home life, Dr. Claire Brown (Antonia Thomas) is sexually harassed, Dr. Jared Kalu (Chuku Modu) loses his job, and Jessica (Beau Garrett) tells Dr. Neil Melendez (Nicholas Gonzalez) that she doesn’t want kids. We asked executive producer David Shore to recap the episode and tease what we can expect when the drama returns to ABC in January.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The gamer provided a great way into addressing Sean’s need for independence. Has it been a challenge balancing out how much to focus on Sean’s autism and your need to get busy telling medical stories?DAVID SHORE: The answer is that one services the other. Whenever we look at medical stories to begin with, what we are really looking for are opportunities to highlight something about the way Sean sees the world. What will it allow us to say? One of the things I really like is how Sean says these things like, “You are very arrogant. Does that help you be a better doctor?” The things he asks are the things we ask ourselves. The medical stories give us the opportunity to allow Sean to face these challenges.

In real life, I would think that patients would ask a guy like Sean every day, “What’s wrong with you?” But you can’t keep doing that, right?Yeah. There are certain things that may happen all the time. What I liked about the is that he has dealt with autistic people in his life. I think the gaming world has more than its fair share of people with autism. He embraces them and thinks they are great. we don’t have to go to that well and have explain that over and over again every week.

We already want to see Sean beat the odds and succeed. Will we ever see him get diagnoses wrong?I think we have to, and we already have seen him make mistakes and he has to continue to make mistakes, otherwise the victories become false. He becomes a cartoon character who is just getting everything right. We want to play him fully dimensional with great strengths but he has weaknesses as well. He will be wrong, just like we all would be.

Freddie Highmore is so believable. Do you have to give him any notes at this point, or is he just off and running, all on his own?He is pretty much off and running, all on his own. We continue to talk regularly, and the directors contribute stuff. But he is so fantastic. He understands this character and he works very hard and is very insightful. He’s a pleasure to work with.

Is there much more to say about Sean’s autism? When do you stop mining his condition for B-stories?It can never just be about the autism. The condition is there, it’s part of who he is. If it’s just about the autism, I think it will grow tiresome at some point. Who he is and what his strengths and weaknesses are, we can continue to explore that, hopefully, for many years.

Can you say what will happen to Sean next? I’m assuming he just found another apartment.Well, he’s gonna disappear. He is gone and hasn’t just rented another apartment. He is gone and not sure what he wants to do. He has to find those answers and he will go on a little journey.

Will Aaron learn to lay off?Aaron is who Aaron is. He will learn he needs to lay off. How effective he will be in that, is another question.

Did you come up with the plot about Claire being harassed after the Harvey Weinstein allegations surfaced?It was before.

Did you make any adjustments to the script after the issue of sexual harassment became big news?We did a rewrite but only because we would have done that anyway. We suddenly became very aware. We knew we were dealing with something important, but it became a much more sensitive issue. A different eye was brought to it.

Will we see the harasser again?There will certainly be a shadow left by him.

How the heck is Jared going to get out of this?Attorneys will be involved. I’m an ex-lawyer — that’s where I go on everything.

Have we heard the last from Jessica’s rich dad?He has set something in motion that will have substantial consequences.

You did a nifty thing a few weeks back where you had Neil and Sean work on a 3-D heart. Will you be doing more of that?I hope so. You don’t want to go to that same well over and over again, but there are some really cool things being done, really cool cutting-edge medical technology, and we’re looking into that stuff.

So where does this show live, the medical mysteries?I like where it is right now, I like these emotional stories. I like the impact that these stories have on our characters’ home lives. That has always been the sweet spot for me and what I always wanted to do. These are young people who are literally saving lives by day, literally reaching into the human body and saving lives. At night, they have to try to figure out what their place in the world is. I like seeing both sides of that and how one impacts the other.

The Good Doctor will return in January on ABC.

Ever watched a James Bond movie and considered what changes you’d make if you were the villain? Cooler jumpsuits for your henchmen, extra time spent in those online poker courses, and of course finishing Mr. Bond off rather than assuming your over elaborate death trap will do the job after you’ve left the room.

But the one thing you would keep is that awesome aquarium, the one built into the wall of your volcanic lair. Who wouldn’t want an HQ with a view looking out into a gorgeous seascape filled with giant manta rays and white-tipped reef sharks – even if they don’t come equipped with frickin’ lasers!

Well, guess what, we always wanted that too. But we don’t have a millions needed to build a supervillain aquarium – nor the host of minions to clean it.

What we do have though is a PlayStation 4 attached to a big screen TV. So, we did the next best thing and created Aqua TV.

Aqua TV is more a piece of eye candy than a game. You choose your environments (tropical reef or traditional aquariums of varying sizes) and then populate it with a choice of fish and other sea creatures. And that’s just about it!

During development we had many (sometimes heated) discussions about adding some simple gameplay mechanics, but kept coming back to our initial goal – to create that ‘supervillain aquarium’ vibe – and that meant creating a beautiful – but passive – experience.

Okay, you can do some stuff other than just decide what you want in your scene. Like picking camera angles, zoom positions and background music; but it’s all about having something beautiful on your wall when you’re listening to your tunes, or just generally chilling out. At least that’s the theory. Try to get a bunch of game developers to agree on a playlist though, and even Aqua TV finds keeping the peace a challenge!

And speaking of getting devs to agree, there was a lot of debate on WHAT creatures to include. Sharks, sure. Rays, definitely. But outside of that everyone had their own favourites and with so many fish in the sea we couldn’t include everything!

Oh, and the art team decided that the only way to model everything ‘just right’, given all textures were to be hand painted, was to request ‘research’ scuba-diving trips to Mauritius, Hawaii, the Caribbean and more (understandable I guess given the Scottish weather).

They were more than a little disappointed when a box of super high quality fish photography and Blu-rays arrived! But I hope you’ll agree that even without trips to far flung places they did a great job on the 25 creatures that make up our selectable species list, along with the dressings, backgrounds and floors for the aquariums.

Aqua TV launches on 12th December in Europe, with a limited time 30% discount for PS+ members!

The post Turn your PS4 and TV into an aquarium fit for a supervillain with Aqua TV appeared first on PlayStation.Blog.Europe.

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Samsung on Tuesday announced that it had developed a way to improve Lithium-Ion batteries with its new material called graphene balls. The company says that batteries featuring the new material charge five times faster than conventional Lithium-ion accumulators and enable a considerably higher volumetric energy density.

The new battery technology developed by Samsung SDI and its partners* uses the so-called graphene balls (a 3D structure synthesized from silicon dioxide, Si02) to cover a cathode and also as an anode material. Graphene balls on the cathode suppress damaging side reactions while also providing efficient conductive pathways. This enables faster charging (as graphene features 140 times faster electron mobility than silicon) and increases the number of cycles a cell can withstand. According to Samsung, a battery cell featuring graphene balls has a 27.6% higher volumetric energy density compared to a similar cell without graphene balls. Furthermore, the cell also retains 78.6% of its capacity after 500 cycles at between 5°C and 60°C.

Samsung articulates that graphene balls could enable batteries with up to 45% higher capacities (than contemporary batteries) that can charge in 12 minutes – or five times faster than today’s batteries, as Samsung puts it. However, what Samsung is not saying when it intends to use the technology for commercial applications. Incorporation of a new protective layer for cathode and switching anode material changes battery production technology, which generally affects costs. Meanwhile, Samsung claims that the graphene ball material is not expensive to produce using its new chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. To grow graphene around SiO2 nanoparticles with diameters of 20–30 nm, Samsung feeds them into a furnace and feds methane (CH₄) into it at 1000°C.

“Our research enables mass synthesis of multifunctional composite material graphene at an affordable price,” said Dr. Son In-hyuk, who led the project on behalf of SAIT*. “At the same time, we were able to considerably enhance the capabilities of lithium-ion batteries in an environment where the markets for mobile devices and electric vehicles is growing rapidly. Our commitment is to continuously explore and develop secondary battery technology in light of these trends.”

Samsung expects to use its Li-ion batteries featuring graphene balls for electric vehicles and various mobile devices. Since the improved batteries can handle temperatures of around 60°C, they are a good fit for both applications. The most important question is of course when exactly Samsung SDI plans to commercialize them. To that end, it is noteworthy that earlier this year an unnamed executive from Samsung SDI told a newspaper that the company would be able to produce solid-state batteries for smartphones sometimes in 2019.

*The new battery technology was co-developed by Samsung SDI (the company’s battery arm), Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) as well as Seoul National University’s School of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Related Reading:

• Hands On With the Samsung Galaxy Note8: Think Big
• Samsung Galaxy S8 Showdown: Exynos 8895 vs. Snapdragon 835, Performance & Battery Life Tested
• Samsung Announces Notebook 9 Pro 2-in-1, Includes S Pen Stylus
• First Look: Samsung Galaxy S8

Sources: Samsung, Nature