Since its premiere in April, Teen Titans Go! has consistently ranked among Cartoon Network’s top ten programs, so it comes as no surprise that a second season of the Michael Jelenic/Aaron Horvath-produced superhero comedy series was recently ordered from Warner Bros. Animation.
An extension of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans and freely adapted from the popular DC Comics title of the same name, the show, which focuses on the adolescent angst and domestic squabbles of superhero roommates, mixes a kindergarten cartoon production style with a FLCL anime influence. Season one of Teen Titans Go! is currently airing and new episodes will continue to premiere on Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm.
For this summer station ident, Cartoon Network hired various international animators and commercial studios to animate ten seconds’worth of their network’s characters. The animation was later stitched together into the 60-second piece you see above. The artists and studios that contributed were Alex Grigg (England), Eamonn O’Neill (England), Impactist (US), CRCR (France), Awesome Inc. (US), and Rubber House (Australia). It’s encouraging to see this kind of creative cross-pollination happening between the commercial mainstream and indie animation communities. It marks the second time in recent months that CN has collaborated with independent artists, the first being David OReilly’s episode of Adventure Time.
Cartoon Network has released a seven-and-a-half-minute preview episode of theibr upcoming series Steven Universe. The show was created by Adventure Time artist (and Singles director) Rebecca Sugar. Notably, she is Cartoon Network’s first-ever solo woman series creator.
See more Cartoon Brew coverage about Rebecca Sugar.
Cartoon Network has unveiled a poster for Steven Universe, the new animated series by Rebecca Sugar:
Slated to debut in 2013, Steven Universe is a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Steven, the youngest member of a team of magical Guardians of the Universe. The animated series was conceived as part of the shorts development initiative at Cartoon Network Studios, and is created by Emmy and Annie Award-nominated writer and storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar (Adventure Time). Sugar is Cartoon Network’s first solo female show creator.
See more Cartoon Brew coverage about Rebecca Sugar.
By Eric Scerri
As far back as I can remember I have always liked sorting and classifying things. As a boy I was an avid stamp collector. I would sort my stamps into countries, particular sets, then arrange them in order of increasing monetary value shown on the face of the stamp. I would go to great lengths to select the best possible copy of any stamp that I had several versions of. It’s not altogether surprising that I have therefore ended up doing research and writing books on what is perhaps the finest example of a scientific system of classification – the periodic table of the elements. Following degrees in chemistry I wrote a PhD thesis in the history and philosophy of science and specialised in the question of whether chemistry has been explained by quantum mechanics. A large part of this work dealt with the periodic table, the explanation of which is considered as one of the major triumphs of quantum theory, and the notion of atomic orbitals.
As I often mention in public lectures, it is curious that the great 20th century physicist, Ernest Rutherford, looked down on chemistry and compared it to stamp collecting. But we chemists had the last laugh since Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry and not for his beloved field of physics.
In 2007 I published a book called The Periodic Table, Its Story and Its Significance, which people tell me has become the definitive book on the subject. More recently I was asked to write a Very Short Introduction to the subject, which I have now completed. Although I first thought this would be a relatively easy matter it turned out not to be. I had to rethink almost everything contained in the earlier book, respond to comments from reviewers and had to deal with some new areas which I had not developed fully enough in the earlier book. One of these areas is the exploration of elements beyond uranium or element number 92, all of which are of a synthetic nature.
At the same time there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the elements and the periodic table especially in the popular imagination. There have been i-Pad applications, YouTube videos, two highly successful popular books, people singing Tom Leher’s element song in various settings as well as artists and advertisers helping themselves to the elegance and beauty of the periodic table. On the scientific side, elements continue to be discovered or more precisely synthesised and there are official deliberations concerning how the recently discovered elements should be named.
On November 4th The International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) officially announced that elements 110, 111 and 112 are to be known officially as darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn). The names come from the German city of Darmstadt where several new elements have been artificially created; Wilhelm Konrad Roentgenm, the discoverer of X-rays; and the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus who was one of the first to propose the heliocentric model of the solar system. Of the three names it is the last one that has caused the most controversy. Apart from honouring a great scientist it was chosen because the structure of the atom broadly speaking resembles that of a miniature solar system in which the nucleus plays the role of the sun and the electrons behave as the planets do, an idea that originated with the work of Rutherford incidentally. Except
