Paramount Pictures is hoping to spin-dash to success for a fourth time. The studio has confirmed that it is working on Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and is targeting a theatrical release of spring 2027 for the movie. No details have leaked about the plot, but it's likely that the project will see actors Ben Schwartz and Jim Carrey reprising their roles as Sonic and Dr. Robotnik.The recent film adaptations of Sega's famous game franchise have become a consistent hit for Paramount. The first film secured the biggest opening weekend in history for a video game movie, only to be dethroned in 2022 by its own sequel. Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which adds Keanu Reeves to the already star-studded cast of the series, releases tomorrow. Variety is currently projecting the third entry to fall short of the financial bar set by Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but anything could happen. The movies have also received a television spin-off on Paramount+ due to air next spring. The show will delve into the backstory of Sonic's echidna ally Knuckles, voiced by Idris Elba.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/sonic-the-hedgehog-4-movie-confirmed-by-paramount-190234137.html?src=rss

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We sent you 233 emails this year; here are your favesPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min readJust now-- Its the Friday-est Friday of the yearIssue #233: ambiguity, art, and tab lifeWere about to take a much-needed vacation here at Medium HQ (though we still have a few issues coming your way next week!). Looking back, I sort of cant believe weve been sending this newsletter daily for almost a year (!). Thank you for your comments, questions, emails, and (if youre a writer on Medium) for publishing the stories weve all been reading, highlighting, and sharing.Our first issue, which went out on January 31, states the mission weve stuck to since the beginning: Real humans (hi!) who work at Medium sharing human perspectives that deepen understanding about the world. Weve featured over 800 writers and 1,000 stories this year. Over 2 million people subscribed. Here are the issues you loved this yearOur most-read issue: Persuasive people dont argue they listen. The title is a quote from Andy Murphys 16 Strange But Beautiful Paradoxes in Life.Our most popular theme this year? Creativity. Thousands of you nodded along with designer Ida Perssons advice for embracing ambiguity by exploring ideas that dont immediately reveal themselves as hits.Decision-making was another big theme for us here in Newsletterland. We explored cognitive biases like action bias (we prefer doing something to doing nothing, even when inactivity would be more beneficial) and bikeshedding (fixating on trivial improvements while ignoring underlying issues).Lastly, we solved every problem with generative AI this year, didnt we? Just kidding. But it was a huge topic in the newsletter. We explored how deepfakes are destroying the stock photo industry. We learned from an eighth-graders experiment to pit AI-generated poetry against human-written poetry. And we grappled with the age-old question: Can robots make art?And before I go maybe this is just me but will anyone else remember summer 2024 for grainy, lo-res images such as this beaut?If you played Zoom In, our slightly unhinged game in August, we see you. And we thank you. And maybe well see you in the new year? Harris Sockel What else were readingAfter a three-month trial, Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men were convicted of raping Gisle Pelicot over nearly a decade. As the judge read the verdict, Gisles supporters gathered outside the courthouse, singing and chanting: We are strong, we are proud, and feminist and radical and angry.Alfred Hitchcock is often cited as the inventor of spoiler warnings because he (a) hid the final pages of his scripts from actors, and (b) insisted audiences not tell friends about his films endings. On Medium, Monia Ali thinks weve taken spoiler alert a little too far. I hear it all the time in reference to any plot device or narrative element (even if its not actually a spoiler). I think this happened over the last decade or so, as weve all started watching shows asynchronously. (Fanfare)Do you have kids? might seem like an innocent conversation-starter, but as a former doula on Medium writes, it can imply social pressure to have them. (MD) A dose of practical wisdomGoogle Docs just made it easier to write your novel, dissertation, or multi-episode miniseries: You can weave together multiple docs in a single window via document tabs (its on the left).

Robert Smithson createdSpiral Jetty on Utah's Great Salt Lake in 1970. Dia Art Foundation / Nancy Holt / Holt/Smithson FoundationJutting from the shoreline of Utahs Great Salt Lake is an unusually long, curling limb of land. Titled Spiral Jetty, the large-scale swirl was constructed in 1970 by artist Robert Smithson, who was known for manipulating earth into abstract shapes. Now, the land artwork has been added to the National Park ServicesNational Register of Historic Places.We are delighted that Spiral Jetty has received this important recognition, which will help us spread awareness of the iconic artwork and advocate for its long-term preservation, saysJessica Morgan, a director of Dia Art Foundation, which owns Spiral Jetty, in astatement. In the 54 years that Spiral Jetty has existed, it has been both submerged by the Great Salt Lake and stood far from the lakefront, bearing witness to the changing landscape around it.Dia acquired Spiral Jetty in 1999, when Smithsons widow, Nancy Holt, donated the artwork. Over the years, the foundation has collaborated with theGreat Salt Lake Institute, theHolt/Smithson Foundation and theUtah Museum of Fine Arts to care for it. The Land art is made of black basalt rock. Holt/Smithson FoundationSpiral Jetty is one of the worlds most famous works ofland art: art thats created directly in and from a landscape, either by sculpting earth or building with natural materials. The medium became popular during the 1960s and 70s within theconceptual art movement, which prioritized artists ideas, plans and intentions over the artworks themselves.Smithson, born in New Jersey in 1938, rose up in the global art scene during the 1950s, making paintings, drawings and sculptures that often referenced science fiction, poetry and pop culture. He was also inspired by physical spacesespecially those in his home state. In the 1970s, Smithson began making earthworks, the art pieces that would define his career. Per theHolt/Smithson Foundation, he was committed to sculpture that would collaborate with entropyembracing the chaos of a natural space.I was always interested in origins and primordial beginningsyou know, the archetypal nature of things, Smithson once said, per the foundation. As an artist, it is sort of interesting to take on the persona of a geological agent, where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it. Robert Smithson (1938-1973) createdSpiral Jettynear the end of his life. Holt/Smithson FoundationIn 1970, Smithson traveled to the Great Salt Lakes Rozel Point peninsula, northwest of Salt Lake City, and arranged 6,000 tons of local black basalt rock into a 1,500-foot-long, protruding line, which reaches into the lake and curls counterclockwise into a spiral.I think it was just unimaginable to so many artists that had been working in their studios and creating works that you hang on a wall, or smaller sculptures, Kelly Kivland, a former Dia curator, told the Deseret News Court Mann in 2020.Smithson created other significant pieces of land art in the years that followed. In 1971, he builtBroken Circle/Spiral Hill: a rounded jetty and canal on the edge of a sand quarry in the Netherlands. In 1973, he startedAmarillo Ramp, a sloping semi-circle of raised earth in Texas, but he died in a plane crash before finishing it. Smithsons widow and two other artists completed it for him. Smithson'sBroken Circle/Spiral Hill is located at a sand quarry in Emmen, the Netherlands. Gerardus / Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsSpiral Jetty remains Smithsons best-known work. Over the years, it has drawn attention to the Great Salt Lakes natural features, like its otherworldly pinkcolor and ever-shifting water level. In 2017, Spiral Jetty was named the state of Utahsofficial artwork.As Dia curator Jordan Carter tellsArtnets Vittoria Benzine, the artworks new designation as a nationally registered historic place will not come with any physical signage or plaques. We hope the enhanced recognition will dissuade other interventions in the landscape that negatively impact the environment and the lakes ecology, he says.Beloved in Utah and far beyond, this artwork has come to mean many things to many people, says Morgan in the statement. We are proud to continue our work caring and advocating for Spiral Jetty to preserve it for generations to come.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: American History, Art, Art History, Artists, Arts, Cultural Preservation, Nature, Outdoor Travel, Painters, Travel, Water

The wasp species known as the "velvet ant" has a pattern of white and ultra-black coloration. shrike2 via iNaturalist under CC BY-NC 4.0The Caatinga is a stark, dry shrubland in northeastern Brazil. In Tupi, an Indigenous language, its name means white forest, describing the arid grasses, thorny trees and pale, stony soil that dominate the landscape.But scurrying across this land of extreme whiteness is, paradoxically, one of the darkest animals on Earth: a species of velvet ant known as Traumatomutilla bifurca.With its furry exterior and distinct black and white markings, the insect looks like magic, Vinicius Lopez, an entomologist at the Federal University of Tringulo Mineiro in Brazil, tells Katrina Miller of the New York Times.As it happens, velvet ants, known colloquially to Brazilians as sorcerer ants, are actually a type of wasp, but the females, which are wingless, give the creatures their name. And, according to a study led by Lopez and published earlier this month in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, velvet ants have another claim to fame: The black parts of females possess a rare coloration known as ultra-black, so dark that it absorbs nearly all visible light.We have never seen this kind of color in the dragonflies or bees or beetles we have analyzed, Rhainer Guillermo-Ferreira, another entomologist at the Federal University of Tringulo Mineiro who collaborated with Lopez on the paper, explains to the New York Times.Unlike melanin, which makes animals like crows and black panthers appear dark, the researchers note that ultra-black is not just a matter of pigmentation. Instead, they write in the paper, these colors are formed in nature by a sophisticated arrangement of microstructures alongside dark pigments.In the female velvet ant, these microstructures include overlapping stacks of lamellae, or layers of tissue, beneath dense, hair-like setae. Combined with a black pigment, these features in the insects exoskeleton minimize reflectance and enhance light absorption, the researchers write. Visible and ultraviolet light gets trapped in the layers, and less than 1 percent is able to escape.Dakota McCoy, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the study, lauds the researchers use of multiple electron microscopy techniques to try to see what the whole story was, according to the New York Times. The mating display of a male superb bird of paradise shows off its ultra-black feathers. (A) Edwin Scholes / (B) Tim Laman via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0This type of research is cutting-edge, because ultra-black coloration is extremely rare in the animal kingdom. Traumatomutilla bifurca is the first known ultra-black member of the Hymenoptera order, which includes more than 150,000 species of ants, wasps, sawflies and bees. Along with some butterflies, it is one of the only ultra-black insects.Though this trait is rare, the advantages for animals that do possess it are wide-ranging. For peacock spiders and birds of paradise, the profound darkness may accentuate their vivid other colors and help them stand out to potential mates, according to a 2019 study. For deep-sea fish like the fangtooth, ultra-black serves as an evolutionary tactic that gives some fishes an invisibility cloak, Courtney Sexton wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2020. And for vipers, a 2013 study suggests the intense coloration can help the snakes regulate their temperature.In the case of female velvet ants, the little available evidence on their species mating preferences suggests the ultra-black hue doesnt have to do with attracting males. And while it might play a role in protecting the wasps from ultraviolet light, the team couldnt prove that.Instead, the researchers propose that the wasps ultra-black is related to protection from predators. Velvet ants are already known as indestructible insects because of their painful stings, venom and hard exoskeletons, according to the paper. Their dark color could serve as a warning to would-be predators.Some researchers see these natural advantages of ultra-black in animals as a blueprint for man-made materials. Ultra-black butterfly wings, for instance, hint at the possibility of extremely lightweight and absorptive material that could be used to harness solar energy, hone precision telescopes to detect the faintest light traveling across space or produce a camouflage coating for military vessels.The blackest black should be a constantly improving number, Brian Wardle, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, told Natalie Angier of the New York Times in 2019.What makes ultra-black butterflies so black?Watch on Scientists are also on the hunt for the counterpart of ultra-black:ultra-white, a color that reflects up to 97.9 percent of sunlight. As climate change elevates temperatures across the globe, engineered ultra-white paint could help cool airplanes, cars and spacecraft without relying on air conditioning.Still, many questions remain for researchers about how and why these extreme patterns of coloration occur in the wild. For instance, why do male velvet ants not have ultra-black pigmentation and instead reflect light at a much higher rate than females? What environmental pressures are responsible for dividing velvet ant evolution along these lines?But, as Guillermo-Ferreira points out to the New York Times, these waspy denizens of the Caatinga are rich with research potential. Every time we study velvet ants, they give us some new, interesting result.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Biology, biomimicry, Engineering, Innovations, Insects, Inventions, Nature, Technology, Wasps, Weird Animals

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