Posts Tagged: "Marvel"

Disney to enter streaming video market in late 2019 with networks for sports, family entertainment

This August, The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) announced that it will be releasing two large Netflix-like streaming video services which will both be available in late 2019 according to a report from The New York Times. One of the networks that Disney intends on creating will offer movies and television shows from all of Disney’s holdings, including the Star Wars franchise produced by Lucasfilm. On the other streaming service there will be a focus on providing sporting events produced by ESPN. In its first year, the ESPN streaming service will broadcast a reported 10,000 regional and national sporting events including baseball, hockey and college sports.

Disney Slams Characters for Hire for Tarnishing the Disney Image

One of the interesting theories posed by the case is Character for Hire’s claimed right to use Disney characters, which derive from Norse mythology or centuries-old fairy tales. In its response to Disney’s motion for summary judgment, Characters for Hire argues that many of the Plaintiffs’ copyrights are based on prior works that have been in the public domain for hundreds of years such as Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Princess Aurora, Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid, Thor and Loki. “It will be interesting to see how the Court delineates between established fairy tale characters and the original expression added to them by Disney,” Furey said.

Superhero Tech: Google, Sony vision tech mirrors implanted lens of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Mike Peterson

If you were to ever wake up and find that messages were being transmitted directly to your eye, as was the case with Mike Peterson, you might be able to blame it on Alphabet Inc. Alphabet subsidiary Verily Life Sciences filed a patent application recently published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as U.S. Patent Application No. 20160113760, filed under the title Intra-Ocular Device. It would protect a method involving injecting fluid into an eye’s lens capsule after the lens has been removed, positioning an intra-ocular device having an electronic lens providing optical power within that fluid and then solidifying the fluid which couples the lens capsule to the intra-ocular device.

Superhero Tech: Iron Man’s suit features futuristic nuclear fusion tech

Perhaps the most important component to any Iron Man suit is the arc reactor core, which provides the energy required to power the suit’s repulsors and other equipment. Although there is no true real world equivalent to the arc reactor, it’s been speculated based on cinematic depictions of the unit that it functions as a multi-isotope radio decay cell for nuclear energy generation using a palladium core. It’s also assumed that the reactor could not be a hot-fusion reactor as it sits within Tony Stark’s chest and would char him from the inside out… Last August, reports on a breakthrough in nuclear fusion reactor design from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could indicate that commercially viable tokamak reactors could be running within five to ten years. MIT’s reactor design, based on essentially the same physics behind ITER and other tokamaks, incorporates the use of superconductors composed of rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, which have become commercially available only in recent years. The new superconducting materials enable stronger magnetic fields for even more plasma control, allowing smaller reactors to increase fusion power by a factor of 10. This would allow MIT to build a reactor half the size of ITER which would produce about the same amount of energy at a much lower cost. One working ARC reactor, which is what MIT calls its nuclear reactor design, could produce 200 megawatts (MW) of power delivered to the electric grid from a 50 MW input.

Superhero Tech: Captain America’s shield presages bullet-stopping armors

In the world of superheroes, Captain America reigns as one of the most popular figures thanks in no small part to the original 1940’s comic book series as well as the recent string of films making up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Recent news reports suggest Captain America technology, particularly his shield, may be closer to becoming a reality than many might otherwise believe. With this in mind, as fans of Captain America and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are anxiously awaiting the release of Captain America: Civil War on May 6, 2016, we thought it might be an opportune time to unveil a new series — Superhero Tech.