Kim Smith

The Oklahoma tornado disaster was chilling in terms of sheer power and devastation caused. In this week's picks, I highlight two articles about tornadoes. The first one, by Douglas Main , examines the underlying causes of such destructive tornadoes and the second one, by Adam Kucharski , looks at the challenge in forecasting seemingly unpredictable tornadoes.On a more joyous note, this week's picks comprises numerous blog posts from Scitable blogs, which just relaunched this week [full disclosure: I am the Community Manager of Scitable blogs]. The blog posts span a variety of topics including physics, cosmology, evolution, psychology, geology, oceanography among others. Scitable bloggers highlighted this week are: Thomas Nguyen , James Keen , Sedeer el-Showk , Jon Tennant , Jane Robb , Sara Mynott , Bruce Braun , Dana Smith and Kate Whittington .

THURSDAY AM: The Hollywood studios now think every weekend should start on Wednesday just to wring every last dollar from moviegoers (and ensure I’m even more sleep deprived than usual). The result is that these 4 1/2-day holidays render comps and records meaningless even within a franchise. Warner Bros claims The Hangover Part III co-financed with Legendary Pictures is off “to a great start” with $3.1M from Wednesday late shows and Thursday midnights before opening wide today in 3,555 locations. But that’s a lot less than the last one. The real question is how much this Memorial Weekend box office can expand over last year’s to accommodate three new movies tracking very well (Universal’s actioner Fast & Furious 6 opening Friday in North America as does Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios’ toon Epic: both with 70+% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) plus three still thriving pics already in the marketplace (Iron Man 3, The Great Gatsby, Star Trek In Darkness). What I don’t comprehend is why the weekend of May 31st stayed open for so long until at the last minute Sony Pictures moved Will Smith’s After Earth there. Hollywood expected either Warner Bros or Universal to blink. “But they just stared each other down as they both were driving off a cliff,” one rival studio exec marvels. Meanwhile, one Hollywood marketer is bound for hell ... Read More »