In June, we highlighted a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s forthcoming stop-motion animated fantasy film. Laika Studios released an extended teaser in May, which racked up over 90 million views. And now we've got the gorgeous full trailer, set to a haunting cover of Avicii's "Wake Me Up."

The film is an adaptation of the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy—frontman of indie folk-rock band The Decemberists—and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis live in Portland, Oregon, near Forest Park, where they often hike the trails. In Wildwood, they transformed that local landmark into a magical hidden world filled with talking animals and lurking threats, only accessible to people of The Wood—and select Outsider “half-breeds.”

Twelve-year-old Prue McKee discovers the forest while out walking with her baby brother, Mac. A murder of crows swoops down and carries him away, and Prue discovers the Wilderness while hunting for him. Her schoolmate, Curtis Mehlberg, follows her, and both are able to enter that magical world. Fantastical adventures ensue as the pair encounter a mysterious woman, Alexandra, who has lost her son, along with coyotes, bandits, and some pretty big secrets.

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Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it.

Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal. It’s a slasher nerd’s dream, with a David Fincher-esque attention to detail in the opening sequence, which was designed using insights gathered from horror convention-goers. Written to indulge superfans, the movie also makes sure to not lose the general audience. Just as the geeky navel-gazing threatens to become tedious, a joke or a wink keeps the audience laughing and focused on the fantastical story Schoenbrun actually wants to tell—which isn’t a genuine slasher at all.

The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a "woke" reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th. On her way to meet the reclusive final girl from the original Camp Miasma film—Billy Preston, portrayed deliciously by a junk food-obsessed Gillian Anderson—Kris fails to nail her pitch and instead gets yanked into a fantasy buried deep in her psyche while at the abandoned set where Billy now lives.

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For the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers, climate change is poised to exacerbate the harms of pesticides, a growing body of research shows.

Heat stresses the body, making it more vulnerable to pesticides and other toxicants, and protective clothing worn in the heat only adds to this stress. Hotter temperatures can also lead to higher evaporation rates, increasing farmworkers’ exposure as more pesticides are applied to crops. And heat can boost rates of chemical transformation of pesticides into more toxic compounds.

“When it’s in the air, you are inhaling it through your nose. You are exposed to it through your other organs like skin. Your skin can absorb some of the pesticides [that are] in the air, and also when you’re sweating as part of doing your work you are increasing the pore size of your skin,” said Omanjana Goswami, a scientist in the food and environmental program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “It is awful. There is no other word for it.”

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It was a busy first day at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event, in Anaheim, California, with Marvel Studios releasing the first trailer for VisionQuest. We also got the first teaser for Ahsoka S2; the public release of the Avengers: Doomsday special footage featured last month for attendees only at San Diego Comic-Con; a special sneak peek (for attendees only) for Star Wars: Starfighter; casting news for the MCU's X-Men movie; and a trailer for an animated special, LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian, coming to Disney+ next month.

(Some spoilers below. One MAJOR spoiler for Spider-Man: Brand New Day; we'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

VisionQuest

Marvel's streaming TV portfolio has kind of been all over the place: a handful of hits, a few misses, and a bunch of middling offerings. One of the standout hits was WandaVision, followed by an excellent sequel (of sorts), Agatha All Along. VisionQuest will complete the trilogy. Yes, Vision (Paul Bettany) died in Infinity War, but WandaVision resurrected an all-white version whose memories were restored in the finale. We finally get to learn what happened afterward.

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There is a lot of excitement and some trepidation among The X-Files fans about Ryan Coogler's reboot for Hulu, currently in production. While we're waiting, Hulu just released Chris Carter's revamped (and R-rated) director's cut of the 2008 standalone spinoff film The X-Files: I Want to Believe, distinguishable from its predecessor with a slightly different title: The X-Files: I Want to Believe–Vrach Frankenshteyn.

(Minor spoilers below but no major reveals.)

I Want to Believe received mixed reviews at its release and didn’t exactly light up the box office, but it still grossed $68 million against its $30 million budget. By 2015, the project led to the return of The X-Files as a limited-run TV series, with the six-episode season 10 debuting in 2016. Mulder and Scully were reunited 14 years after the events of season 9 as the FBI reopened the X-Files under Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). The response was strong enough to warrant a follow-up ten-episode season in 2018, focusing on Mulder and Scully’s search for their missing son, William.

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Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds.

The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.

The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use "varies depending on availability and need," a USDA spokesperson told Ars.

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In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker "Bard of Google."

Six months later, a disillusioned Stapleton resigned, claiming she had been demoted during the most recent restructuring as retaliation for helping to spearhead the walkout. The story of how she went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google.

Stapleton didn't set out to be a rabble-rouser. When she joined Google out of college in 2007, it was like "getting the golden ticket in Willy Wonka," she told Ars. Awareness of her good fortune offset any initial uneasiness or skepticism, although Stapleton was sufficiently independent-minded not to move into what was then Google's new corporate housing development in Mountain View, California. Stapleton was very good at her job, and she quickly moved up the ranks, playing a key role in shaping the company's public image.

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Over the past few years, it has become a rather rare treat when I end up genuinely, unequivocally enjoying the latest superhero film. Mostly I find them to be middling entertainment, sometimes a bit dull—and for The Eternals, nearly unwatchable—with the notable exception of 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine and last year's Thunderbolts*.

Add Spider-Man: Brand New Day to that list of exceptions. Tom Holland's latest outing as the titular web-slinger reminds us that superhero movies can still be very, very good—as much about well-drawn characters with interesting developmental arcs and well-timed emotional beats as CGI-filled action extravaganzas. There's plenty of the latter in Brand New Day, of course, but it's the grounded humanity at its heart that makes director Destin Daniel Cretton's film work so well.

(Spoilers below but no major reveals until after the gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there)

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Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June.

It was a disaster.

When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so.

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Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since the first casting and design reveals, igniting afresh with each new trailer. The film has garnered plenty of well-deserved accolades (and earnings) since its release, and yet somehow the debates rage on between classicists and the general public alike—all this over an adaptation of an epic poem that's been around since roughly the 8th century BCE.

My take: the IMAX scale might be epic, but Nolan gives the story an intimate feel, weaving a captivating, nearly three-hour cinematic spell. While the magic slowly starts to dissipate once one leaves the theater, the powerful imagery will resonate for days. And the film gave me, personally, a fresh perspective on the central character of Odysseus.

(Spoilers below.)

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Everyone knows that great gimmicks are the key to hiring top developers for your startup.

That's why small AI startup LemonLime—which "optimizes your existing data to work with AI"—has so many of them. Want a job interview? Score a perfect 7/7 on the company's own "Is it a Lemon or a Lime?" game. Or—hear me out—get something permanently tattooed on your flesh.

LemonLime has tried both tactics in the past few weeks. The tattoo stunt generated the most publicity, of course, much of it negative. According to a writeup in Inc., seven people took the deal and got tattooed with the LemonLime logo during a party.

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