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5 sci-fi movies on Netflix you need to watch in February 2025

5 sci-fi movies on Netflix you need to watch in February 2025

Yahoo14-02-2025

February has been a light month for new sci-fi on Netflix. Thankfully, sci-fi remains one of the stronger genres on Netflix, with many top movies to stream this month. With the Oscars coming in early March, now is an ideal time to revisit Dune: Part Two. If Dune isn't your speed, try one of the Mad Max movies to experience the Wasteland.
This month, we curated a list of five sci-fi movies to watch. Our recommendations include a stunning space adventure, a 'choose your own adventure' saga, and an intriguing psychological thriller.
We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
Black Mirror typically leaves viewers in mental pretzels. Whatever happens, happens, and there's nothing you can do about it… until Bandersnatch. In 2018, Black Mirror scribe Charlie Brooker wrote the first interactive movie in the anthology. Titled Bandersnatch, the film revolves around Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), a programmer tasked with adapting a book into a video game.
The movie becomes a 'choose your own adventure' story for the viewer. When presented with a choice, the Netflix user has ten seconds to make a decision. Whatever they choose will lead them to the next plot point. This opens the door for multiple endings and outcomes. While Bandersnatch admittedly works better as a concept than a movie, Brooker made an admirable attempt to introduce a story about free will and fate.
Stream Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix.
Chris Hemsworth might have been responsible for killing the Mad Titan in the MCU. However, the Australian did a more upbeat Thanos impression for Spiderhead, a sci-fi thriller from Top Gun: Maverick's Joseph Kosinski. Based on George Saunders' short story Escape from Spiderhead, the Netflix original brings viewers to Spiderhead, a revolutionary prison where inmates serve as test subjects for research chemicals.
Leading the Spiderhead facility is Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth), a larger-than-life persona. Steve is testing the prisoners every day with chemicals that disrupt their emotions. After an inmate, Jeff (Miles Teller), gets a peek behind the curtain of the drug trials, he realizes that Steve has a nefarious reason for administering these tests. Now compromised, Jeff must take out Steve to stop the procedures.
Stream Spiderhead on Netflix.
On a resume with The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's defining cinematic achievement is arguably Interstellar. When Interstellar was rereleased in December, the sci-fi space adventure grossed $24.5 million worldwide. Fans love Interstellar, and rightfully so. It's Nolan's most personal work.
With humanity facing extinction due to a crop blight, former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is recruited by NASA to fly an expedition to a wormhole outside Saturn. NASA believes the wormhole could be a door to another galaxy, with three habitable planets on the other side. Backed by stunning visuals and a heart-pounding story, Interstellar proved that Nolan could create an emotional story about a parent's love for their child.
Stream Interstellar on Netflix.
Upon its release, The Last Days of American Crime was destroyed by critics and fans. It's regarded as one of the worst Netflix movies ever. What I'm about to say is not a typo: The Last Days of American Crime has a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. That reason alone is enough to check it out and see for yourself, especially if you've watched all the hits on the sci-fi page.
In an alternate 2024, the United States government is days away from launching the American Peace Initiative (API), a signal that will prevent humans from committing crimes. Hoping to complete one last crime, thief Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez) teams with Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster) and Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt) to rob the city's 'money factory. They better do it fast before the API is turned on.
Stream The Last Days of American Crime on Netflix.
Seven-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker) has lived inside for her entire life. Chloe's father, Henry (Lone Survivor's Emile Hirsch), has kept her inside to protect her from Abnormals, people with superhuman abilities hunted by the government. Fed up with her sequestered life, Chloe successfully ventures outside and discovers she has telepathic powers.
Thanks to her powers, Chloe discovers that Abnormals, including her father, have been living in hiding. When Chloe believes her mother might still be alive, she ventures to a top-secret facility to try and break her out.
Stream Freaks on Netflix.

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Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past
Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past

CBS News

time18 minutes ago

  • CBS News

Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past

The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the chance to study an asteroid sample uncontaminated by Earth's atmosphere. A tiny, black fragment might not seem exciting, until a scientist explains it's a specimen from space. "It's an honor of a lifetime to be able to study this sample," said Field Museum curator Dr. Philipp Heck. How did Heck feel when the little rock first arrived at the museum and he held the vial containing the sample? "It was amazing. I was looking forward to that moment for a long time," he said. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission was planned decades ago. In 2016, a spacecraft launched. In 2018, it arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sears Tower is tall. The mission collected pieces of the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2023. "This is the first U.S. mission that sends a spacecraft to the asteroid and brings a sample back to Earth," said University of Chicago graduate student Yuke Zheng, who is part of the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team. "It's a tiny, dark, black fragment that is fragile, so we want to protect it very carefully." She'll use the museum's scanning electron microscope to get an up-close look at a tiny sample of Bennu. "What struck me is how dark the sample is. I had never seen such a dark sample," Heck said. The fragment is like a time capsule, taking scientists back 4.6 billion years. "We believe Bennu contains part of the ingredients for life, and part of the ingredients of the formation of Earth," Heck said. Suddenly, a fragment at the bottom of a vial can have you pondering your place in the universe. "I've never studied a pristine sample from an asteroid," Heck said.

TV's Nepo Babies: Meet the Kids of Celebrities Breaking Out on the Small Screen
TV's Nepo Babies: Meet the Kids of Celebrities Breaking Out on the Small Screen

Yahoo

time30 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

TV's Nepo Babies: Meet the Kids of Celebrities Breaking Out on the Small Screen

Good genes aren't just a plus when it comes to skin care. They can be a big help when trying to break into Hollywood, too. For as long as there's been a Hollywood, we've seen the children of stars forge their own showbiz careers, from Liza Minnelli to Charlie Sheen. And right now on TV, nepo babies are having a moment, with the kids of famous folks popping up everywhere you look on broadcast, cable and streaming. Some, you might be able to guess — The White Lotus star Patrick Schwarzenegger is an easy call, for example — but others, you might not even know that their parents have illustrious performing careers of their own. Well, not until now. 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Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole
Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole

Yahoo

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Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole

We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles. The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun. From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. 'We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk,' says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. 'But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.) Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles. For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle. At solar minimum, the lowest-activity part of the cycle, the sun's magnetic field is what scientists call a dipole: it looks like a giant bar magnet, with a strong pole at each end. But as the sun spins, the roiling plasma generates sunspots, dark, relatively cool patches on the sun's surface that are looping tangles of magnetic field lines. As sunspots arise and pass away, these tangles unfurl, and some of the leftover magnetic charge migrates to the nearest pole, where it offsets the polarity of the existing magnetic field. The result is a bizarre transitional state, with the sun's poles covered in a patchwork of localized 'north' and 'south' magnetic polarities. In the solar maximum phase (which the sun is presently in), the magnetic field at each pole effectively disappears. (It can be a bumpy process—sometimes one pole loses its charge before the other, for example.) Then, as years pass and solar activity gradually declines, the continuing process of sunspots developing and dissipating creates a new magnetic field of the opposite charge at each pole until, eventually, the sun reaches its calm dipole state again. These aren't matters of academic curiosity; the sun's activity affects our daily lives. Solar outbursts such as radiation flares and coronal mass ejections of charged plasma can travel across the inner solar system to reach our neighborhood, and they're channeled out of the sun by our star's ever changing magnetic fields. On Earth these outbursts can disrupt power grids and radio systems; in orbit they can interfere with communications and navigations satellites and potentially harm astronauts. So scientists want to be able to predict this so-called space weather, just as they do terrestrial weather. But to do that, they need to better understand how the sun works—which is difficult to do with hardly a glimpse of the magnetic activity at and around our star's poles. That's where Solar Orbiter comes in. Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena. For example, the image above maps the magnetic field at the sun's surface. And from this view, Müller says, it's clear that the sun is at the maximum period of its activity cycle. Heliophysical models predict 'a tangled mess of all these different patches of north and south polarity all over the place,' he says. 'And that's exactly what we see.' As their accordance with theoretical models suggests, the solar poles aren't entirely mysterious realms. That's in part because while Solar Orbiter is the first to beam back polar images, it isn't the first spacecraft to fly over these regions. That title belongs to Ulysses, a joint NASA-ESA mission that launched in 1990 and operated until 2009. Ulysses carried a host of instruments designed to study radiation particles, magnetic fields, and more. And it used them to make many intriguing discoveries about our star and its curious poles. But it carried no cameras, so despite all its insights, Ulysses left those regions as sights unseen. Fortunately, heliophysics has grown a lot since those days—and space agencies have learned that, in the public eye, a picture can be worth much more than 1,000 words. The result: Solar Orbiter can finally put the spotlight on the sun's poles.

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