Mickey Mouse is finally in the hands of the public, to do whatever they want with him. Well, in part. After Disney infamously helped delay the moment, today is the day Steamboat Willie, the first Disney animated short to star Mickey and Minnie Mouse, become public domain. But what does that mean? Simultaneously a lot and not much.

Why Is Steamboat Willie Entering Public Domain?

Legal copyright doesn’t last forever—and was never meant to. Copyright law is meant to balance a fine line between creators being able to have a legal stake in (and ability to financially profit from) their works for the duration of their lives, and the larger public good of having those works enter the public forum, where anyone can remix and reuse them, and develop new iterations, but also crucially archivists can safely collect and copy historical work for safekeeping without threat of legal reprisal.

The public domain is a living archive of cultural media history that anyone can access and use, and the end-goal of every piece of copyrighted work. Although different countries have different rules about just how long something can remain copyright before entering it (Steamboat Willie is entering public domain today specifically in regards to U.S. law), today’s additions mark a significant milestone for copyright law and the age of Hollywood studio dominance, because Mickey himself has spent decades being the face of the fight between the onerous grip of capitalism and the public domain.

Why Did It Take So Long for Steamboat Willie to Enter Public Domain?

The version of Mickey and Minnie that enter public domain today were created in 1928, and while they’re not the first significant characters to enter public domain in recent history—both Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh are notable recent ones—their arrival is so important because Disney has spent years fighting to stave off this moment. In 1998, citing attempts to protect the U.S. entertainment industry at large and also bring the country into line with European copyright laws, Congress signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which added a 20 year extension to the terms previously laid out in the Copyright Act of 1976.

Instead of copyrighted works expiring 50 years after the death of the author or after 75 years for work of corporate authorship (as is the case with Disney material like Steamboat Willie), it became 70 and 95 years, respectively. The act was derisively known, however, as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” given that Disney was a major force in lobbying for the extension in the hopes that it could keep Mickey Mouse in any form out of public hands for as long as it could. Although the Copyright Term Extension act wasn’t retroactive for already expired copyright cases, it retroactively applied to anything remaining under copyright at the time of passing, in effect closing the door on works entering the public domain from 1998 all the way until 2019, a huge blow for it as a source of archivable media history.

What Can People Do With Steamboat Willie Now?

Anything they want! Within limits. In the case of Mickey and Minnie specifically, the version that is now in the public domain is very specifically the designs that appeared in Steamboat Willie and the silent film Plane Crazy. Over the last near-century Disney has iterated on Mickey’s design, bringing him into color, changing elements (such as adding his trademark white gloves in 1929), and evolving his general features, perhaps most notably the shape and design of his eyes. For the most part, the things that make the modern Mickey Mickey—and form the basis for Disney’s current ownership of the rest of the character’s history—were first introduced in 1940 with the anthology film Fantasia (itself, ironically, a product that heavily utilized public domain music, and Mickey’s starring role in the “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poetic ballad of the same name).

Creators can add elements perhaps evocative of latter Mickeys and Minnies to the Steamboat designs—voices that they didn’t have in the 1928 material, colorized elements, general character traits like their affable nature—as these are elements that don’t actually reach the pretty low standards for copyrightable expression. They can also add entirely different interpretations and additions to those designs that are original elements unrelated to anything Disney has done with Mickey in the years since. What they can’t do is use either any of those still-copyrighted elements like the ones added for Fantasia and beyond, nor can they willingly mislead audiences into thinking their Mickey material is either sponsored by Disney or actually produced by the studio—that’s still protected by the trademarks owned by Disney, and operates under a different legal space. Most notably, unlike copyright, trademarks don’t expire after a certain date.

What Will Disney Do?

Nothing—and it doesn’t really need to. “Ever since Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, people have associated the character with Disney’s stories, experiences, and authentic products,” Disney said in a statement to the Associated Press in the run up to Steamboat Willie entering public domain. “That will not change when the copyright in the Steamboat Willie film expires.”

That might have some “please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad” energy, but while the short’s arrival in the public domain is a major milestone in copyright law, in terms of its overall impact on Disney it’s still relatively minor in the grand scheme of all things House of Mouse. As previously mentioned, Disney still has copyrighted ownership over the design elements of Mickey that for the most part are what the public thinks of when they think of the character—and they also have trademarks on Mickey as a brand identifier that will make a lot of public domain use of the character an intimidating challenge for some creators, especially considering Disney has trademarks on the Mickey and Minnie Mouse names. The company even still has some trademark elements for Steamboat Willie itself: in 2022, Disney updated its trademark on the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo, which, 15 years prior in 2007, had been updated to include a snippet of Mickey steering the paddle steamer as he does in the short film.

Just because someone can now make Steamboat Willie into a horror story, as is seemingly the common thing to do with newly-public-domain works if Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is anything to go by, doesn’t mean that Disney’s media empire crumbles overnight. People will still go ride Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway at Disneyland, they’ll still buy Mickey and Minnie plushes and t-shirts and kitchenware and anything under the sun those mice faces can be slapped on by the company. Mickey will continue to star in Disney material, because, well, for the most part Disney still owns him. There’s a reason Disney didn’t lobby for even further extensions on copyright yet in the run up to Steamboat Willie’s expiration date—it’s lost the battle, but it’s far from lost the war, so to speak.

What Else Is Entering Public Domain Today?

Steamboat Willie is the big one in terms of works entering public domain today, but it’s not the only notable arrival. Thousands of works from 1928 (and audio recordings from five years earlier, 1923) entered public domain today, including the original German version of All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and even The Man Who Laughs, the 1928 Paul Leni film known in part for inspiring the design of Batman’s legendary foil, the Joker. Following on from 2002’s arrival of Winnie the Pooh, 2024 sees the arrival of A.A. Milne’s story House at Pooh Corner, bringing Tigger into the public domain for the first time.

Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which has celebrated Public Domain Day every January 1 since the extensions brought on by the Copyright Term Extension Act began winding down in 2019, has a great roundup of some of the more significant entries into public domain this year that you can find here, as well as an important explainer about Mickey Mouse’s own debut.

What’s Next?

What happens now is anyone’s guess—Disney may attempt to legally tussle over just exactly what people can do with Steamboat Willie’s public domain status with regards to how it intersects with Mickey’s own trademark law protections. But for the most part today is a victory decades in the making in copyright law, the first steps in handing over the character that became an infamous face of draconian corporate influence on copyright to anyone who wishes to use them.

But hey, remember what we said about horror being the first port of call recently for people exploiting fresh arrivals into the public domain? January 1 2024 isn’t even over yet, and we already have a trailer for Infestation 88, a game by Nightmare Forge Games that turns Steamboat Willie into a twisted version of itself:

Nobody said those new works have to be particularly creative, to say the least.

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Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

The Korea Institute of Fusion Energy has installed a new diverter in the KSTAR tokamak, allowing the artificial sun to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.

KSTAR—called an artificial sun because it does nuclear fusion, the same reaction that powers our star—was completed in 2007 and achieved its first plasma in 2008. It is about one-third the size of ITER, the massive experimental reactor being built in France. Both reactors are tokamaks: doughnut-shaped devices that do nuclear fusion with plasmas, or electrically charged gases brought to super-high temperatures and pressures.

KSTAR uses a diverter, which sits at the bottom of the tokamak and manages waste gas exhaust and impurities from the reactor. The diverter is a plasma-facing component, meaning it sits within the tokamak and bears the full brunt of the internal surface heat. Currently, KSTAR is capable of plasma operations for about 30 seconds; scientists hope that the new diverter will allow plasma operations for 300-second periods by the end of 2026.

KSTAR originally had a carbon diverter, but in 2018 scientists began working on a tungsten diverter for the tokamak. Tungsten has a higher melting point than carbon and improves the heat flux limit of the reactor two-fold, according to a recent release from Korea’s National Research Council of Science and Technology. A prototype of the new diverter was completed in 2021, and installation was finished last year.

“In KSTAR, we have implemented a diverter with tungsten material which is also the choice made in ITER,” said KFE president Suk Jae Yoo in the release. “We will strive to contribute our best efforts in obtaining the necessary data for ITER through KSTAR experiments.”

Research into nuclear fusion has may slow but significant strides; in 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory managed net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. We’re still very (read: very) far from the vaunted goal of a reliable, zero-carbon energy source, and the achievement came with caveats, but it nonetheless showed that the field is plodding forward.

ITER’s first plasma is expected in 2025, and first fusion is slated for 2035. But the reactor’s timelines have slipped while its costs have ballooned, from about €5 billion in 2006 to over €20 billion, according to Scientific American, so we may be waiting even longer than that.

Still, these are heady times for tokamak reactors. Last month, the six-story JT-60SA reactor in Japan was inaugurated; researchers affiliated with the project estimate it will take two years for the reactor to develop plasmas needed for experiments. There are more than 50 tokamaks operating around the world, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Plasma experiments with KSTAR’s new tungsten diverter will continue through February, according to the National Research Council of Science and Technology, as the tokamak scientists make sure the environment is stable for experiments and that the 100-million-degree plasma can be reproduced in it.

More: Will Nuclear Fusion Ever Power the World?

Leave it to modders to push the boundaries of what was once (and arguably still is) one of the most impressive visual showcases of modern gaming: Cyberpunk 2077. A skyrocketing post on Reddit shows off some pretty remarkable graphical feats that one enterprising player has achieved. Featuring a handful of mods that bring some real-life cars into the game, and a couple of others that tweak the lighting and textures, these scenes will easily trick your brain into thinking what you’re seeing is real.

“I swear at first I thought this was a real video until the second clip holy shit,” reads one reply. Another merely says “how tf.”

We can’t promise that you’ll be able to achieve the same results on your PC, but at least you have this gorgeous video to feast your eyes on.

The video comes courtesy of NextGen Dreams, a YouTube channel that regularly posts some mind-bending graphics videos of games like Cyberpunk, ARK, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and even shows off how modders keep Skyrim looking stunning in 2024.

But okay, let’s say you want to see this running in real time on your machine. What do you need? Well, obviously you’re gonna need at least an RTX 4090, Nvidia’s top-of-the-line offering. That’ll set you back about $1,600.

As mentioned in the YouTube description of the video showcasing the mods, you’ll need Nova LUT which tweaks the game’s colors and Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project for an overhaul of the game’s textures. This specific video also uses a custom Reshade mod made by the original poster on YouTube, NextGen Dreams (no link was provided for this one).

You’ll also need to grab a few car mods. The ones in use in the video include:

As mentioned in NextGen Dreams’ YouTube channel description, there’s more than an RTX 4090 at work here. The 4090 is joined by an Intel i9-13900KS and 64GB of RAM. So yeah, we’re talking thousands of dollars if you want to build this yourself.

Good thing YouTube’s free!

Buy Cyberpunk 2077: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

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Last year, a NASA mission proved that humans could change an asteroid’s course by crashing into one with a spacecraft. But if an impact alone is not enough, we do have at least one alternative option: nuking it.

A new study, released after NASA‘s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully moved an asteroid moonlet, studies how a nuclear device could redirect an errant space rock coming to Earth. (We haven’t found any problems yet despite decades of searching, but searching and research continues as a precaution.)

“If we have enough warning time, we could potentially launch a nuclear device, sending it millions of miles away to an asteroid that is headed toward Earth,” Mary Burkey, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a Tuesday (Dec. 19) statement.

Related: ‘HAMMER’ Time? Spacecraft Could Nuke Dangerous Asteroid to Defend Earth 

Planetary defense researchers are actively investigating the very cinematic possibility of fending off an impending asteroid with a nuclear detonation, just like Bruce Willis did in the 1998 Hollywood movie "Armageddon." As part of that research, Burkey and colleagues developed a new model that simulates what a nuclear detonation’s high-energy, X-ray emissions will do to an asteroid.

On paper, nuking an asteroid has advantages over a mission like DART. The biggest is energy: Nuclear devices are capable of producing more energy per mass than any human technology. And because space launches must always minimize mass, a nuclear warhead can deliver a far more powerful punch than a DART-like spacecraft can ever manage. 

“We would then detonate the device and either deflect the asteroid, keeping it intact but providing a controlled push away from Earth, or we could disrupt the asteroid, breaking it up into small, fast-moving fragments that would also miss the planet,” said Burkey.

A nuclear detonation delivers much of its energy in the form of X-rays. If a nuclear explosion strikes an asteroid, this powerful radiation can wash over the asteroid, potentially vaporizing any material unlucky enough to be in its path. Burkey and colleagues developed their model to simulate these effects on four different asteroid materials and under a range of conditions.

It is critical to ensure that any sort of asteroid deflection attempt actually deflects the asteroid on a non-hazardous course — and does not cause collateral damage by sending asteroid shards toward humans. For that reason, the researchers say they hope that planetary defense scientists can use this model to get a clearer picture before they try anything.

The research was published on Dec. 19 in The Planetary Science Journal.

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Sniffing Women’s Tears Makes Men Less Aggressive

By Rachel Nuwer

When someone starts to cry, other people oftentimes feel empathy and concern. But the biological reasons for shedding tears can extend beyond merely prompting a sense of compassion. The tears themselves appear to take on a role as a chemical peacemaker between men and women, new research has discovered.

Women’s tears act to reduce aggression in men who are close enough to catch a whiff of the waterworks, according to findings published in PLOS Biology and confirmed through human behavioral studies, brain imaging and molecular biology. The researchers speculate that tears from people who aren’t women likely have a similar effect, but this has yet to be tested.

The new paper suggests that a fundamental reason why women shed emotional tears is “to convey a chemical signal that lowers aggression,” says Shani Agron, co-lead author of the study, which she conducted for her doctoral degree in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. (Agron has since graduated.) “We believe this is a shared mechanism of many mammals.”

Producing tears has long been considered a uniquely human behavior, but that’s a flawed notion, says co-senior author Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who was Agron’s adviser. Dogs, for example, shed tears when they reunite with their owners after a period of separation. Baby mouse tears contain molecular cues that sway female mice to reject male advances, while pheromones in female mouse tears encourage males to stop fighting each other and mate with the female instead. Mole rat subordinates, moreover, go so far as to cover themselves in their own tears to chemically deflect aggression from dominant members in their group.

Humans, like other mammals, communicate information with body odors. But it wasn’t obvious that tears would have any olfactory effect on human behavior because people cannot perceive a smell from them. Additionally, while most mammals have a second olfactory organ that is responsible for detecting pheromones, in humans, this organ is thought to be vestigial.

The first evidence that tears can chemically influence human behavior emerged in 2011, when Sobel and his colleagues published a study in Science that showed that women’s tears reduced levels of testosterone and self-reported sexual arousal in men. This earlier work raised more questions than it provided answers for. It took years of effort to conduct a more thorough follow-up, in part because of the difficulty of collecting tears from donors. The researchers need at least one milliliter of tears to use on each experimental participant, which is “a lot of tears,” Sobel says. Using an onion or other irritant to force someone’s eyes to water is not an option, Agron adds, because “these are a completely different type of tears.”

To collect the tears used in the new study, the team put out a call for volunteers who cry easily. Only a few men showed up, and none was able to produce enough tears to qualify. Of the 100 or so women who volunteered, only six were able to supply sufficient amounts of tears to warrant collection. Participants could use any means they wanted to elicit the tears—from listening to sad music to reading a sad letter—but most turned to the lab’s expansive “library of sad movies,” Agron says. In addition to tears, the researchers also collected drops of saline solution that they trickled down women’s face for use in control experiments.

The researchers next gathered data from 25 male volunteers who played a game in the lab that is often used in studies of aggression. During the competitive game, participants were led to believe that their opponent was another person. It was in fact a computer algorithm, however. Occasionally, the opponent stole money from the participants, who could then either choose to take revenge, with no monetary gain for themselves, or let their opponent get away with it but continue collecting more money for themselves. The researchers calculated aggressiveness by the number of times a participant chose revenge divided by the number of times they were provoked. The team also repeated this experiment in a second group of 26 male volunteers who played the game while inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, allowing their brain activity data to be collected.

All participants played the game twice, and before each session, they were asked to inhale from a “sniff jar” that they were told contained “assorted odors” but that in fact held either tears or saline. The researchers found that when the men sniffed the women’s tears, they were nearly 44 percent less aggressive in the game than when they sniffed the saline solution. The behavioral reduction in aggression was also accompanied by neuronal changes. The researchers observed that the men’s brain post-tear sniff exhibited less activity in the prefrontal cortex and the left anterior insula, regions that are associated with aggression and decision-making. Connectivity between the anterior insula and amygdala, a region that is responsible for emotional processing and also part of the olfactory network, increased as well.

Working with colleagues at Duke University, the team used molecular biology methods to test the effects of tears and saline on 62 human olfactory receptors in a lab dish. They identified four receptors that responded to tears but not saline. This finding helps to answer “a major question” about how pheromonelike signals are processed in humans, Agron says.

Agron, Sobel and their colleagues are now interested in running future experiments to test the effect of women’s tears on other women and that of babies’ tears on adults. Sobel hypothesizes that baby tears, especially, will likely have an aggressiveness-lowering effect on adults. “Babies cannot communicate with you in language,” he says. “But evolution may have provided babies with this tool to lower aggression.”

The fact that people continue to be able to produce tears throughout adulthood, Agron adds, indicates that crying is probably “a behavior that serves us throughout life.”

NASA has completed its first laser link with an in-orbit laser relay system, marking a significant advancement in space communication technology.

The successful demonstration of two-way laser communications on Dec. 5 between laser terminals in different orbits could provide a basis for faster communications between Earth and the moon or even beyond. 

The experiment has taken years to set up. The Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) payload was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) on November 9, flying aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of NASA’s 29th commercial resupply services mission. 

After installation onto the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility, engineers conducted tests to ensure ILLUMA-T’s functionality. ILLUMA-T was then used to communicate with NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) satellite, launched in 2021 and operating high up in geostationary orbit. 

Related: Artemis 2 will use lasers to beam high-definition footage from the moon (video)

While the ISS orbits around 230–275 miles (370–460 km) above the Earth, LCRD is orbiting at 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator. This gap allows for a long distance test of laser communications.

Laser communications, also known as optical communications, use infrared light rather than traditional radio waves to send and receive signals. The much shorter, infrared wavelengths of lasers allow much greater amounts of information to be sent with each transmission compared with the longer wavelengths of radio.

Challenges include precisely aligning the transmitters and receivers and making the components small, light and power efficient enough for use in space.

ILLUMA-T and LCRD belong to NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. Using laser communications greatly increases the efficiency of data transfer and can lead to a faster pace of scientific discoveries, according to a NASA statement.

"Laser communications will not only return more data from science missions, but could serve as NASA’s critical, two-way link to keep astronauts connected to Earth as they explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond," Dr. Jason Mitchell, director of SCaN’s Advanced Communications and Navigation Technology division.

"We are now performing operational demonstrations and experiments that will allow us to optimize our infusion of proven technology into our missions to maximize our exploration and science," David Israel, a NASA space communications and navigation architect, added.

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