Making of the “spinning house” sequence in Twister (1996)

Earlier this year filmmaker Stu Maschwitz posted on Twitter a series of messages recounting the work he did, as a then junior visual effects artist, on the scene of the house crashing on the road in the 1996 summer blockbuster, Twister. He later copied them to his website: go read it there.

The story comes with a fair amount of detail, hacks and tricks to make the best of the technical limitations of the time, and gives an idea of the amount of work such a scene in a prominent Hollywood film entails.

The physics of cloaking

In this seminar, Dr. Greg Gbur presents the current state of research on cloaking devices, the differences between science fiction and what seem to actually be possible, and different applications beyond invisibility, like protection from thermal radiation or earthquakes.

Molecular Visualizations of DNA

This post is a topic a bit different from the usual on this blog, but I thought the following video to be really worth sharing. Made back in 2003, it was featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday (if you want your daily delivery of stunning pictures, just subscribe to their feed) and shows a visualization of the DNA, including the incredible replication process.