What’s on your HDTV: ‘The Strain’, Shark Week, Hannibal Burress

Shark Week is in full swing on Discovery, as the network tries to find even more shark-related programming it somehow hasn’t covered yet. (The answer, apparently, is to just make stuff up — we won’t be fooled again by Alien Sharks and Ninja Sharks.) Still, Sunday night is packed, with the return of Ray Donavan, Masters of Sex and The Strain. On streaming Netflix is bringing a new Chris Tucker comedy special, and will also post Monsters: Dark Continent this week. Comedy Central has more Key & Peele, plus the debut of Hannibal Burress’ new show Why? It’s a sequel to the movie Monsters, which if you saw it, you probably also saw on Netflix streaming. In gaming, Rocket League is coming to PC, and on PS4 as a PlayStation Plus game. Look after the break to check out each day’s highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

Blu-ray & Games & Streaming

• House of Cards (S3)
• The Cell
• Joe Dirt
• Robot Jox
• Virtuosity
• Maggie
• Woman in Gold
• Rocket League (PS4, PC)
• Skullgirls 2nd Encore (PS4)
• Pneuma: Breath of Life (PS4)
• Monsters: The Dark Continent (Netflix, 7/9)

Monday

• Penn & Teller: Fool Us (season premiere), CW, 8PM
• The Fosters, ABC Family, 8PM
• American Ninja Warrior, NBC, 8PM
• So You think You Can Dance, Fox, 8PM
• WWE Raw, USA, 8PM
• Shark Week: Return of the Great White Serial Killer, Discovery, 9PM
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?, CW, 9PM
• Chasing Life (season premiere), ABC Family, 9PM
• Major Crimes, TNT, 9PM
• Shark Week: Alien Sharks: Close Encounters, Discovery, 10PM
• Teen Wolf, MTV, 10PM
• Murder in the First, TNT, 10PM
• Making of the Mob: New York, AMC, 10PM
• The Island (season finale), NBC, 10PM
• The Whispers, ABC, 10PM

Tuesday

• America’s Got Talent, NBC, 8PM
• WWE Tough Enough, USA 8PM
• Deadliest Catch, Discovery, 8PM
• Shark Week: Bride of Jaws, Discovery, 9PM
• Bullseye, Fox, 9PM
• Zoo, CBS, 9PM
• Teen Wolf, MTV, 9PM
• Rizzoli & Isles, TNT, 9PM
• Stitchers, ABC Family, 9PM
• Shark Week: Tiburones: Sharks of Cuba, Discovery, 9PM
• Inside Amy Schumer (season finale), Comedy Central, 10PM
• Hollywood Game Night, NBA, 10PM
• Royal Pains, USA, 10PM
• Scream, MTV, 10PM
• Clipped, TBS, 10PM
• Proof, TNT, 10PM
• Tyrant, FX, 10PM
• The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, Comedy Central, 12:30AM

Wednesday

• Operation Wild, PBS, 8PM
• Melissa & Joey ABC Family, 8PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 8PM
• Unsung: Xscape, TV One, 8PM
• Baby Daddy, ABC Family, 8:30PM
• Shark Week: Super Predator, Discovery, 9PM
• Suits, USA, 9PM
• Jim Rome, Showtime, 9PM
• Bullseye, Fox, 9PM
• Key & Peele (summer premiere), Comedy Central, 10PM
• Why? With Hannibal Burress (series premiere), Comedy Central, 10:30PM
• Catfish (summer premiere), MTV, 10PM
• Shark Week: Ninja Sharks, Discovery, 10PM
• Extant, CBS, 10PM
• Mr. Robot, USA, 10PM
• The Game, BET, 10PM
• The Ultimate Fighter, Fox Sports 1, 10PM

Thursday

• Food Fighters, NBC, 8PM
• Boom!, Fox, 8PM
• Beauty and the Beast, CW, 8PM
• The Astronaut Wives Club, ABC, 8PM
• WWE Smackdown, Syfy, 8PM
• Shark Week: Shark Planet, Discovery, 9PM
• Dates (series premiere), CW, 9PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 9PM
• Aquarius, NBC, 9PM
• Wayward Pines, Fox, 9PM
• Mistresses, ABC, 9PM
• Dominion (season premiere), Syfy, 10PM
• Lip Sync Battle (summer premiere), Spike TV, 10PM
• Rectify (season premiere), Sundance, 10PM
• Under the Dome, CBS, 10PM
• Graceland, USA, 10PM
• Rookie Blue, ABC, 10PM
• Hannibal, NBC, 10PM
• Maron, IFC, 10PM
• One Bad Choice (series premiere), MTV, 11PM

Friday

• Chris Tucker Live, Netflix, 3AM
• Masters of Illusion (season premiere), CW, 8PM
• Shark Week: Sharks of the Shadowland, Discovery, 9PM
• Defiance, Syfy, 8PM
• Killjoys, Syfy, 9PM
• Shark Week: Shark Clans, Discovery, 10PM
• American Greed, CNBC, 10PM
• Dark Matter, Syfy, 10PM

Saturday

• Lethal Seduction, Lifetime, 8PM
• The Millers, CBS, 8 & 8:30PM
• Shark Week: sharksanity 2, Discovery, 9PM
• Atlantis, BBC America, 9PM
• The McCarthys (series finale), CBS, 9 & 9:30PM
• 7 Days in Hell, HBO, 10PM
• Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, BBC America, 10PM
• Bridgett Everett: Gynecological Wonder, Comedy Central, 12:30AM

Sunday

• Shark Week: Shark Island, Discovery, 8PM
• 2015 MTV Fandom Awards, MTV, 8PM
• Miss USA 2015, Reelzchannel, 8PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 8PM
• Ray Donavan (season premiere), Showtime 9PM
• The Ultimate Fighter (season finale), Fox Sports 1, 9PM
• Battlebots, ABC, 9PM
• True Detective, HBO, 9PM
• Humans, AMC, 9PM
• The Last Ship, TNT, 9PM
• Masters of Sex (season premiere), Showtime, 10PM
• The Strain (season premiere), FX, 10PM
• Ballers, HBO, 10PM
• Falling Skies, TNT, 10PM
• Halt and Catch Fire, AMC, 10PM
• Naked & Afraid, Discovery, 10PM
• Brink, HBO, 10:30PM
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO, 11PM

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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NASA’s latest Pluto images actually show a planet

At last, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that the dwarf planet is starting to reveal some meaningful detail. There’s still no explanation for those giant spots, but it’s evident that there’s a “continuous swath” of dark ground near the equator. And if you’d like pictures that are better than fuzzy, you might not have to hold out for too much longer. New Horizons should be considerably closer when it recovers from its recent glitch, and the expected July 14th flyby should produce a ton of extra detail.

[Image credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI]

Filed under: Science

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Source: NASA

In these new cars, your phone gets its own air conditioner

By Kim Lachance Shandrow, Entrepreneur Staff

Smartphones don’t play well with hot cars. If you’ve ever received the dreaded temperature warning on your phone’s home screen after leaving it in a sizzling vehicle for too long, you know exactly what we’re talking about. And so does General Motors.

The struggling American automaker knows your phone needs to cool out in the dog days of summer, too, just like you. If it doesn’t, if the temperature around your iPhone, Android or, fine, your BlackBerry, exceeds about 95 degrees, the high heat can shorten its battery life and potentially slow down its processor. Double bummer. Worse, permanent damage could occur and, in rare cases, the gadget you can’t live without could completely go kaput.

Terrifying, right? Well, GM, in a bid to “find new roads” and connect with tech-savvy younger drivers, doesn’t want any of the above to happen to your precious phone either. That’s why the 107-year-old company is adding a fancy new smartphone air-conditioning feature to some of its 2016 Chevy models, a modern move its hailing an “industry first.”

Finally, your phone can chill out in its own, personal “Active Phone Cooling” cubby, basically a nook outfitted with a plastic a/c vent nozzle. That is if you get behind the wheel of a wireless-charging equipped 2016 Chevy Cruze, Impala, Malibu or Volt.

GM says its engineers stumbled upon the idea while testing a smartphone wireless charging feature. “They noticed some smartphones would suspend charging or shut off all together after only a few minutes in high temperatures inside a car’s cabin,” a statement from the Detroit-based company reads. To combat the problem, they simply directed an air vent connected to the car’s a/c and ventilation system at the “charging bin where the phone rests.” And — easy, breezy — cooled air helps keep your phone from frying like an egg. Crisis averted…or so they say.

“Innovation doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel,” Impala engineer Dan Lascu says. “Sometimes simplicity offers the most elegant solution to a problem.”

Simple — or just plain silly — we see this thing catching on, given ‘Murica’s incurable addiction to smartphones. Someday, probably sooner than later, maybe smartphone a/c will come standard in all vehicles, even the ones we won’t drive. Either way, here’s to hoping better backseat a/c routing rolls out first to keep other precious cargo — like living things, pets and kids — cool.

For more on how the chill new feature works, check out this video:

Related:

• In These New Cars, Your Phone Gets Its Own Air Conditioner
• Google Pilots Carpooling Program That Could Challenge Uber
• The Future of Mobile Payments Awaits Your Fingerprint
• Texting and Driving? Not So Fast — General Motors is Watching You
• GM Open to Working With Google on Developing Self-Driving Cars
• This Handy Gadget Is Like Google Glass For Your Car
• Proceed With Caution: Should Smartphones Come With a Warning?

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Mobile

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Laser projection creates galloping horse movie on the clouds

A bright green horse was projected across the sky over Nottingham late last month. It wasn’t a Bat-Signal-style projection that was made from a searchlight on the ground. Instead, the silhouette of a rider on a horse was projected directly onto the clouds from a Cessna 172 aircraft that flew over the city in the UK. Artist Dave Lynch created the first of its kind mobile projection with a zoopraxiscope, a movie projector that made its debut back in 1879. He repurposed the historical device and swapped its original light source with a laser for precision and efficiency. The display wasn’t clear from the ground, but viewed from the plane it looked like a horse galloping through the dark clouds.

The original zoopraxiscope was created by Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer who pioneered and studied motion photography. The device used a slit method and each pocket held a glass disc with an image. When rotated, the sequential images would project the illusion of movement. This method worked well at the time but it created images that were too dim for Lynch’s project. He needed to sustain a projection on the clouds from about 50 meters away. He turned to scientists Mike Nix and Ben Whitaker in the chemistry department at University of Leeds for insight into new laser techniques. “[Laser] gives a sharp focus at any distance which is critical to attempt projection on the nebulas media of clouds at such short range,” Lynch told us. “We also adapted the zoopraxiscope with a series of specially made lenses, which make the 19th century technology [much] more efficient so we can see the projection against the clouds.”

Lynch spent the last three years working on mobile projections. He first thought of it when he read a detailed paper on non-lethal weapons by the US Air Force published in the early ’80s that listed the concept of “Holographic, Prophets.” The idea that the image of an ancient god could be projected over enemy territory as a psychological experiment inspired Lynch to create the projection in the sky. Initially he wanted to create an open source version for artists and activists. But over the years, he became cautious of the implications. “We specifically chose to stay away from the commercial requests, away from logos and social media stunts,” he said. “We all have a relationship to the clouds, the sense of looking up and dreaming, the project is rooted in [those] hopes and dreams.”

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