Share this Rating. Title: Mammoth (2009) 6.9 /10. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. Orange County's source for local news and information.

Replicants, superheros, and reboots await you in our Fall Movie Guide. Plan your season and take note of the hotly anticipated indie, foreign, and documentary. Exclusive look at Transworld's Arcadia snowboarding movie intro. Full TransWorld SNOWboarding Movie Arcadia available now on iTunes. I played a lot of make-believe as a child. I’d take my dad’s spare gun holster and draw guns made of air from it, or steal my sister’s cape, emblazoned with an. · Will bringing back the woolly mammoth save humanity from itself? Marvel Legacy #1: Full Avengers 1,000,000 BC lineup revealed, including Ghost Rider on a flaming mammoth. Billionaire Paypal founder Peter Thiel 'bankrolls woolly mammoth resurrection project' Peter Thiel has reportedly put $100,000 of his own funds into the scheme.

Playstation's VR Gun Is a Deeply Satisfying New Way to Slaughter Aliens. I played a lot of make- believe as a child. I’d take my dad’s spare gun holster and draw guns made of air from it, or steal my sister’s cape, emblazoned with an S for her first name, and fly around like Superman. But you reach a point where making pew pew noises becomes gauche. So as an adult, if you want to play make believe without getting committed, you’ll need something like Playstation VR’s Aim Controller.

What is it? A controller for playing shooting games in VR. Like. It makes any shooter game instantly more fun. No Like. It is super, super niche. The Aim Controller is a gun- like device intended for use with the PSVR headset. So far only a handful of titles have announced compatibility. Most prominently, the controller works with Farpoint, a first person shooter that sets you on a distant alien planet full of bugs. The game itself is..

The graphics are nice, and the VR is suitably immersive, but you have to move around the game by “walking” using the joystick on the Aim Controller, and the sensation of dashing across an alien landscape while your physical body is not in motion will make many people nauseous. The only reason I managed to power through the game is because of the Aim Controller.

The Godfather Part II is a 1974 American crime film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a screenplay co-written with Mario Puzo, starring Al Pacino and.

This thing is a major step up from Duck Hunt (or that crappy Sega Genesis Terminator 2 game). It’s got enough weight to it that you never forget you’re holding it, and the trigger has a nice snap that makes it fun to squeeze, whether the gun in the game is an assault rifle, pistol, or even a shotgun. The Aim Controller doesn’t really resemble a gun. Instead it’s a parallelogram, with a trigger on an inside corner and a big glowing bulb (so your Playstation Camera can track its movements) on the opposite outside corner.

There’s a joystick, for movement, and all the other Playstation controller buttons, repositioned so you rarely have to adjust your grip while playing. It looks dorky, which is fine as you’ll be using it with a VR headset, and dorkiness and VR is more or less a given. As soon as you slip the headset on, the gun becomes a pistol you’re firing with one hand, or a rifle you’re holding in two. You can hold the gun up and peer down the sights before squeezing off a few rounds off into alien spiders. It is deeply, deeply satisfying. Up there next to shooting skeet in a field or pinging friends with paintballs.

I kind of love the thing, but, you know, there’s one big problem with the PSVR Aim Controller. There’s only five games that currently work with it, including Farpoint, and all five require the VR headset—as Sony has announced no plans for the Aim Controller to work with non- VR games. Underbelly Files: The Man Who Got Away Movie Watch Online on this page.

So to have some sweet, and safe, gunplay action in your living room you need to drop $3. Playstation 4, $5. VR kit, and then another $8.

Farpoint bundle. That’s $8. VR! It’s a lot of money, and you should not spend all that money just for Farpoint. But if you’ve already spent money on a PS4 and a PSVR system then the $8. Aim Controller bundle is a no brainer. This thing is one of the big reasons people say VR is great for gaming. It’s immersive, and more importantly, is really damn fun. So much of VR is about proof of concept virtual reality experiences.

The Aim Controller is the first component in modern VR that has me wanting to do what VR is supposed to do best—play some video games. READMEFarpoint is not a good game, but killing alien spiders is a lot of fun. The Aim Controller is solidly built, pairs quickly, and has all the buttons needed for controlling your Playstation.

Yet it is an accessory. Don’t buy it unless you have a PS VR setup ready. Give me a super realistic hunting game and some target practice games, and I might never stop using this thing.

Why Bringing Back a Wooly Mammoth Is No Longer Science Fiction. Dr. George Church is a real- life Dr. Frankenstein. The inventor of CRISPR and one of the minds behind the Human Genome Project is no longer content just reading and editing DNA—now he wants to make new life. In Ben Mezrich’s latest book, Wooly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures, Church and his Harvard lab try to do the impossible, and clone an extinct Woolly mammoth back into existence.

Mezrich, author of the books that would become the feature films 2. The Social Network, seems to have graduated from college to a bioengineering Ph. D with his latest work, which is chock- full of scientific explanation detailing every aspect of the Church lab’s efforts to rewrite the DNA of an elephant to look like a wooly mammoth. But Mezrich is even more interested in telling the stories of the people trying to make the mammoth a reality, dramatizing the lives of Church, his wife, Harvard Professor Dr. Ting Wu, their fellow scientists, researchers working for a competing cloning lab in Korea, and the conservationists at the Siberian preserve where the mammoths will finally reside. While at times his predictions feel too good to be true, Mezrich’s prose rarely fails to engage. Gizmodo sat down with Mezrich to talk about a few of the themes present in his book, as well as the future of de- extinction and scientific breakthroughs in general.

Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of the interview. Gizmodo: What brought you to extinct species revival in particular? Mezrich: I’ve been interested in mammoths since I was a kid, basically, and I’ve always been a fan of Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park, so it’s always been on my mind to tell a story like that. Then a couple years ago, I started hearing about Dr. George Church and the Mammoth Revival project, and I decided I just needed to tell this story. So I basically reached out to him blindly.

He let me embed myself in his lab, so I spent a while just living there seeing what was going on, and just getting really into it. Gizmodo: An early chapter of the book opens four years in the future, when humans have succeeded in bringing mammoths back to life. What makes you think the project will succeed so soon?

Mezrich: Even at this moment, right now, there are three prehistoric woolly mammoth [genomes] alive, living in elephant cells, so we’re on the verge of it. I was talking to George [the previous night]. Even though he doesn’t put a date on it, I put the four year date, but he sees that as totally possible. The slowest part of the process right now is the gestation period of an elephant. Whether we’ll have a woolly mammoth in three years or just be very close in three years, I don’t know, but a lot depends on the money and on the elephant. The initiative is how they work on it, but it is feasible. Gizmodo: Let’s talk about the money.

That’s a huge motivating factor behind the project, but it seems like the wealthy are the ones funding scientific efforts a lot of the time (Editor’s Note: The Church Lab’s Genome Sequencing project is funded mainly by private computing and biotechnology companies). Is this a good thing? How do you feel about science funded on the whims of oligarchs? Mezrich: Well it’s interesting, you look at this marriage between incredibly wealthy people and science, and in some ways it’s a very good thing. You know, in some ways it pushes science forward.

You’re not gonna see (and I wish you would) Donald Trump pouring money into the woolly mammoth revival project, you’re not seeing the government doing these things. Scientists] do often have to turn to outside sources, and if someone like Peter Thiel wants to live forever, he needs to fund the things in George Church’s lab. So whatever his personal goal, it’s good for everybody. I look at it as a positive thing, I think big money has always influenced outside- the- box science, look at what Elon Musk does or what’s going on at Amazon, Facebook or Google. It’s very very wealthy people throwing money at crazy ideas, and hopefully we all benefit from it.

Peter Thiel put in $1. Gizmodo: This book and The Accidental Billionaires both had the protagonists receive additional funding from Peter Thiel. How do you feel about his involvement in particular in such immediately relevant work? Mezrich: Yeah, I’ve written about him twice. Editor’s Note: Mezrich also covered Peter Thiel in his book Accidental Billionaires) In this case the way George tells the story, he basically ran into Peter Thiel, and told him about a couple of projects. Thiel said tell me your craziest projects, and he listed a couple of them, and [Thiel] said, ‘the woolly mammoth, that’s the one I want to do.’Gizmodo: Speaking of other projects, is Church working on anything half as crazy as a mammoth?

Mezrich: Yeah, absolutely, Church and his lab [are] doing the anti- malaria mosquitos, working with the Gates foundation, they’re building domes over villages in Africa and releasing mosquitoes that can’t carry malaria, to test them out. Also, his student Ken Esfeld at MIT is working on transgenic mice to beat lyme disease. The goal is to release 1. Lyme disease onto the island of Nantucket, which is kind of a wild story.

In his lab, they’re also working on the pigs with human- compatible livers. They’ve a couple of pig embryos with livers that can be used in humans. You’re looking at the future of transplantation, which is incredible. They’re working on projects to extend lifespans… but the mammoth project and the ones with the transgenic species are the craziest. Gizmodo: Do you think meddling with ecosystems and reviving lost species could have negative effects on living ones?

Mezrich: You have to be very ethical and responsible because you’re working with technology that is very powerful. The same technology that allows you to create a woolly mammoth or an extinct species allows you to eliminate a species if you want. You could eliminate mosquitos (Editor’s Note: Scientists are discussing the possibility of doing this with a controversial and speculative technology called gene drive), but that brings up enormous issues in ecology. I think bringing back an extinct species like the mammoth is generally a good thing, I think that the people who don’t want Church to do that are usually thinking what does it mean for the Asian elephant population, which is endangered. But it’s not a zero sum game—we’re not giving up on these endangered species . We now have the technology to bring back a species we mostly ate out of existence. It’s like a karmic righting of a wrong, and there’s been a lot of talk about the sixth extinction, species are going extinct all over the place, but the fact that we can bring one back is a huge moment, I think, in human history and our ability fix the things we were breaking.

We have to live with our environment, but we also have to figure out ways to make it better, and if bringing back a woolly mammoth to help the environment is something we can do, it’s something we should do. We have to live with our environment, but we also have to figure out ways to make it better, and if bringing back a woolly mammoth to help the environment is something we can do, it’s something we should do. Gizmodo: Church isn’t the only one working to clone a mammoth.

There’s also Hwang Woo- suk’s Korean dog- cloning lab, Soaam Technologies. Can you talk about how you got involved with them? Mezrich: This is a wild story—this is the story of a disgraced scientist. He was the one who claimed to clone human cells, but it turns out he had been forcing his students to donate their eggs, and secondly that his clone cells are fraudulent, so he’s trying to resurrect his reputation by being the first to clone a mammoth. So, he has supposedly got incredibly preserved frozen mammoths out of the ice [in the Arctic] in conjunction with some Russians, and is going to use those cells to clone [the mammoth].