Gingrich Meets Adele; Batman Goes Lego

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We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: In space, no one can see you butcher a handshake, The Dark Knight Rises has inspired people to get out their toys, and we can now consider the gaps in Newt Gingrich's life thoroughly filled-in.

The Atlantic Wire's Elspeth Reeve noted that Newt Gingrich's Facebook timeline has a few unexpected gaps. Imagine our surprise to hear most of them overdubbed into Adele's performance of "Someone Like You" from the Grammys. Funny concept, funny execution, stronger-than-expected pipes. The whole thing works, plus, you just might learn some things. Mainly, embarrassing things about Newt Gingrich. [Venga Productions via The Atlantic]

A robot named R2 shook hands with an astronaut named Dan aboard the International Space Station today. People who are paid to hail such things say this is a major milestone in man's evolving relationship with machines. But this confuses civility in outer space with genuine understanding. If you sent us to space, put cameras on us, and introduced us to a creature named R2, of course we'd shake his hand, because we're friendly, and we assume the robot NASA wants us to meet is friendly as well. It's called manners. [NASA]

The next time someone starts telling you how they're not quite sold on The Dark Knight Rises -- which, if early returns are any indicator, will happen 700 more times before the film comes out this summer -- show them the Lego version of the film's prologue. If nothing else, it's been exciting enough to get various ages down on the carpet and playing. That's what summer blockbusters are all about. [Shockya]

Now this, this is cool: it's footage of cells coming together at an embryonic level to form a beetle. The whole scene takes place beneath the microscope of a professor at the University of Manchester. As novel imaging methods go, it's pretty extraordinary: Cell nuclei are tracked and you can see what develops when. Earth-shattering if you're in the beetle development field, but endlessly interesting -- if only just from a technical perspective -- for the rest of us. [New Scientist]

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.