James McAvoy plays the hero, Wesley Gibson, who all his life has mistaken the superhuman ability to shoot the wings off a fly and make bullets turn corners with a predilection for panic attacks. Enter Fox (Angelina Jolie) and Sloan (Morgan Freeman (my co-star if you’re playing 6 degrees of Josh Colwell)) of the ancient “Fraternity” to show him that he’s actually someone special and not an anonymous loser. The Fraternity is that one that was created 1000 years ago by weavers who have a magic loom that tells them who to assassinate. Yes, being special in this world means killing people whose names are spit out in code on a piece of cloth. Wanted has the same appeal as most movies in the genre of “guilty pleasures”: impressive action set-pieces, flying cars and flying people, and bad guys having bad things happen to them. There are some nice humorous touches at the beginning when Wesley is still entrenched in the world of sheep (the real world) and being dragged into the world of assassins. But that quickly fades into a steady action beat with the occasional admonition to the audience to seize the day.

In the meantime, more and more scientists are working on the tremendous volumes of data returned by Cassini’s twelve instruments. NASA has funded two rounds of proposals to its Cassini Data Analysis Program and the third round of proposals was just submitted. This summer I’m co-organizing a workshop to discuss the new discoveries related to Saturn’s rings. That will be immediately followed by a symposium to prepare for a book summarizing what we have learned about the Saturn system as a whole.

Up to a point: it turns out that it is only energetically advantageous for nuclei to fuse elements as massive as iron or less. Fusing more massive nuclei, such as silver and gold, is like rolling the boulder back up the hill: it takes more energy rather than releasing it. That’s where supernovae come in. Once the core of a massive star has fused into iron, it’s not energetically advantageous for any further fusion to take place. The iron core gets more and more massive as fusion in shells around the core dumps more heavy elements onto it. At some point the electron degeneracy pressure holding the core up cannot support its own weight, and it collapses suddenly and violently. Now we’re back to the boulder rolling down the hill: gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy as the core collapses from something the size of the Earth to just a few kilometers across. This release of energy, which quickly bounces back outward into space, is a supernova. And it is in this very high energy event that atomic nuclei more massive than iron are created. Earlier this year astronomers serendipitously caught the early X-ray emission from a supernova in the galaxy NGC 2770 about 100 million light years from here. Because the bright X-ray flash is the first light to escape from the exploding star, catching it allowed the astronomers, led by Alicia Soderberg of Princeton, to alert the rest of the astronomical community to observe the supernova, providing an unprecedented record of the event from its earliest stages. Usually supernovae are not observed until days after the initial core collapse, because the brightness of the explosion in the visible part of the spectrum grows over the course of many days. They were fortunate enough to catch this one in the act because they were observing a supernova that had taken place in the same galaxy earlier. Perhaps the coolest thing about supernovae is that you probably have a fair amount of material made in an ancient supernova, whether it is a gold ring or silver necklace, every piece of that was blasted into space by a supernova explosion more than 4.6 billion years ago.