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The Big Door Prize season 2: stream the acclaimed Chris O’Dowd comedy

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The residents of Deerfield continue their rollercoaster journeys of personal transformation following the arrival of a machine proclaiming their true “life potential” in the return of The Big Door Prize, season two.

The acclaimed dramedy reunites Chris O’Dowd with an excellent ensemble, among them Gabrielle Dennis and Josh Segarra, as the residents of the sleepy town dealing with the fallout of the Morpho machine on their lives. Read on below now, where our guide explains how to watch The Big Door Prize season 2 online from anywhere.

Watch The Big Door Prize season 2 online

Premiere date: Wednesday, April 24

New episodes: Every Wednesday at 12am midnight PT / 3am ET / 8am BST

Cast: Chris O’Dowd, Gabrielle Dennis, Patrick Kerr, Damon Gupton, Josh Segarra, Christian Adam, Sammy Fourlas, Djouliet Amara, Ally Maki, Crystal R. Fox.

Watch online: Apple TV Plus 7-day FREE trial

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‘Morpho’ mystery deepens in The Big Door Prize season 2 trailer

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The citizens of a small town called Deerfield continue to see their lives upended by a fortune-telling machine known as Morpho, according to the season 2 trailer Apple TV+ dropped Wednesday for philosophical comedy series The Big Door Prize.

Starring Emmy Award winner Chris O’Dowd, the well-liked comedy’s 10-episode second season debuts Wednesday, April 24, with three episodes.

The Big Door Prize remains a tantalizing mystery in season 2 trailer

In the first season of The Big Door Prize, a machine called Morpho mysteriously shows up in Deerfield grocery store. It issues cards to users stating their “life’s potential.” The townsfolk soon become obsessed over who they are and who they should be. And that obsession appears to deepen in the season 2 trailer.

Here’s how Apple TV+ describes season 2 of the show from Emmy Award-winning creator David West Read (Schitt’s Creek):

Based on M.O. Walsh’s novel, The Big Door Prize season two follows the residents of Deerfield as the Morpho machine readies them for the mysterious “next stage.” As everyone’s potentials are exchanged for visions, new relationships form and new questions are asked.

Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) and Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) decide to take time apart while Trina (Djouliet Amara) and Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) learn that they can shed their old labels. Giorgio (Josh Segarra) and Izzy (Crystal Fox) each find romance while Hana (Ally Maki) and Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) attempt to discover the purpose of the machine.

Residents of the small town are once again left questioning what they thought they knew about their lives, their relationships, their potential and the Morpho itself.

Cult of Mac’s reviewer seemed to like the first season of the show.

Ensemble cast welcomes newbies

The cast members mentioned above return to the show, produced by Skydance Television and CJ ENM/Studio Dragon, along with some other returning and new faces for season 2.

They include Justine Lupe, Aaron Roman Weiner, Mary Holland, Patrick Kerr, Cocoa Brown, Carrie Barrett, Elizabeth Hunter, Jim Meskimen, Matt Dellapina and Melissa Ponzio.

Showrunner Read serves as executive producer along with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Matt Thunell, Miky Lee, Jey-hyun Kim and Hyun Park, Bill Bost and Sarah Walker. Series directors are Steven Tsuchida, Heather Jack, Jordan Canning, Satya Bhabha and Declan Lowney.

Watch the season 2 trailer

Watch the first season on Apple TV+

You can watch the whole first season of The Big Door Prize before season 2 premieres on April 24. The service is available by subscription for $9.99 with a seven-day free trial. You can also get it via any tier of the Apple One subscription bundle. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch can enjoy three months of Apple TV+ for free.

After launching in November 2019, “Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 471 wins and 2,090 award nominations and counting,” the service said.

In addition to award-winning movies and TV shows (including breakout soccer comedy Ted Lasso), Apple TV+ offers a variety of documentaries, dramas, comedies, kids shows and more.

Watch on Apple TV

Source: Apple TV+



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Life Style

Abel Prize for randomness mathematician Michel Talagrand

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Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

An image from NASA's Mars Perseverance rover taken while it drills for rock samples.

The Perseverance rover drills a rock core from the edge of the ancient river delta in Jezero Crater on Mars.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA is facing some tough questions amid budget woes: where should its Mars rover Perseverance collect its final rock samples — and will it even be able to afford to fly them home? Bringing Perseverance’s precious samples back to Earth could cost as much as US$11 billion. Perseverance’s team is also debating whether to change the rover’s travel plans to save costs. “My focus is really on making sure that we get as much science out of what we can get,” says NASA’s Lindsay Hays.

Nature | 7 min read

For the first time, an artificial intelligence (AI) system has helped researchers to design completely new antibodies. Creating new versions of these immune proteins, which can be used as drugs, is usually a lengthy and costly process. An AI algorithm similar to those of the image-generating tools Midjourney and DALL·E was trained on thousands of real-world structures of antibodies attached to their target proteins. It then churned out thousands of new antibodies that recognize certain bacterial, viral or cancer-related targets. Although in laboratory tests only about one in 100 designs worked as hoped, biochemist and study co-author Joseph Watson says that “it feels like quite a landmark moment”.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

The winner of this year’s Abel mathematics prize, Michel Talagrand, developed formulae to make random processes more predictable. He showed that the contributions of many variables that influence processes such as a river’s water level often cancel each other out — making the overall result less variable, not more. Talagrand, who is retired, loves to challenge his fellow mathematicians: he keeps a list of problems on his website, offering cash to those who solve it as long as he’s “not too senile to understand the proofs I receive”.

Nature | 6 min read

Why is Earth so hot right now?

Record heat defies all predictions

We knew that Earth is heating up. But not this much. “For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale,” writes Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.”

Several factors might have contributed, besides the greenhouse gases we continue pumping into the atmosphere: the start of the El Niño weather pattern, fallout from the 2022 volcanic eruption in Tonga and a ramp-up of solar activity. But, even after taking all plausible explanations into account, statistical climate models are struggling to explain what’s happening. The worry is that a warming planet is “already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated”.

Nature | 5 min read

Infographic of the week

An infographic in two parts. The first image shows a partridge running up a steep slope, its wings folded. The second image shows the same bird running up a near-vertical surface while spreading its wings.

Fifty years ago, palaeontologist John Ostrom proposed that birds evolved from small, bipedal dinosaurs rather than from tree-dwelling animals. He reframed the debate about the origin of flight by focusing on its biomechanics. His ideas were later tested and supported by work — including a 2003 study on chukar partridges (Alectoris chukar) — which showed that wing movement can create a vortex that helps the animal to run up vertical slopes. (Nature News & Views | 8 min read, Nature paywall)

Reference: Quarterly Review of Biology paper (from 1974)

Features & opinion

Cartoon animation showing a cowboy riding a protein structure in a rotoscope-style.

Illustration: Fabio Buonocore

Time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy is turning still images of the tiny motors and devices that power life into motion pictures. Biomolecules are in constant motion, and capturing this action can help scientists to unravel dynamic processes such as how a muscle protein generates force or how a plant virus infects a cell to release its genetic material. There are various ways of creating these movies, for example freezing samples and using laser pulses to reanimate them for a few microseconds before they refreeze. The technique is “fussy and hard to control”, says structural biologist Bridget Carragher. But there is no shortage of interesting questions for scientists to tackle with it right now

Nature | 9 min read

A cyberattack can mean losing precious or sensitive files, such as health records, or having to pay a ransom to regain access to them. To prevent this from happening, “update your software regularly; implement firewall and antivirus solutions; control access and permissions to your systems; encrypt sensitive data”, says information-technology specialist Ildeberto Aparecido Rodello. If you’ve been hacked, “pull out the plugs and shut it down”, advises information-security expert Sarah Lawson. “Close it and then seek advice.”

Nature | 8 min read

Quote of the day

Olugbenga Samuel Oyeniyi explains how he went from a clinical scientist dreaming of finding a cure for malaria to working in public health with a focus on prostate cancer. (Nature | 6 min read)

Today I’m delighted to discover the science behind souvenir fridge magnets — of which I have plenty. In a study published in my new favourite journal, Annals of Tourism Research, researchers asked 19 Brits with at least 20 magnets about what their collections meant to them. Magnets “enable the past to haunt the present”, conclude the authors. “Every time a fridge door is passed by or opened it can fleetingly trigger memories of another time and place in unplanned and unanticipated ways.”

Please trigger our thoughts in unexpected ways with your feedback on this newsletter. Your e-mails are always welcome at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Gemma Conroy and Katrina Krämer

Want more? Sign up to our other free Nature Briefing newsletters:

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Life Style

Mathematician who tamed randomness wins Abel Prize

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Michel Talagrand.

Michel Talagrand studies stochastic processes, mathematical models of phenomena that are governed by randomness.Credit: Peter Bagde/Typos1/Abel Prize 2024

A mathematician who developed formulas to make random processes more predictable, and helped to solve an iconic model of complex phenomena, has won the 2024 Abel Prize, one of the field’s most coveted awards. Michel Talagrand received the prize for his “contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics”, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo announced on 20 March.

Assaf Naor, a mathematician at Princeton University in New Jersey, says it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Talagrand’s work. “There are papers posted maybe on a daily basis where the punchline is ‘now we use Talagrand’s inequalities’,” he says.

Talagrand’s reaction on hearing the news was incredulity. “There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” he says. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”

The Abel Prize was modelled after the Nobel Prizes — which do not include mathematics — and was awarded for the first time in 2003. The recipient wins a sum of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (US$700,000).

‘Like a piece of art’

Talagrand specializes in the theory of probability and stochastic processes, which are mathematical models of phenomena governed by randomness. A typical example is a river’s water level, which is highly variable and is affected by many independent factors, including rain, wind and temperature, Talagrand says. His proudest achievement was a set of formulas that poses limits to the swings in such a stochastic process. His formulas express how the contributions of many factors often cancel each other out — making the overall result less variable, not more.

“It’s like a piece of art,” says Abel-committee chair Helge Holden, a mathematician at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. “The magic here is to find a good estimate, not just a rough estimate.”

Thanks to Talagrand’s techniques, “many things that seem complicated and random turn out to be not so random”, says Naor. His estimates are extremely powerful, for example for studying problems such as optimizing the route of a delivery truck. Finding a perfect solution would require an exorbitant amount of computation, so computer scientists can instead calculate the lengths of a limited number of random candidate routes and then take the average — and Talegrand’s inequalities ensure that the result is close to optimal.

Talagrand also completed the solution to a problem posed by theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi — work that ultimately helped Parisi to earn a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. In 1979, Parisi, now at the University of Rome, proposed a complete solution for the structure of a spin glass — a simple, abstracted model of a material in which the magnetization of each atom tends to flip up or down depending on those of its neighbours.

Parisi’s arguments were rooted in his powerful intuition in physics, and followed steps that “mathematicians would consider as sorcery”, Talagrand says, such as taking n copies of a system — with n being a negative number. Many researchers doubted that Parisi’s proof could be made mathematically rigorous. But in the early 2000s, the problem was completely solved in two separate works, one by Talagrand2 and an earlier one by Francesco Guerra3, a mathematical physicist also at the University of Rome.

Finding motivation

Talagrand’s journey to becoming a top researcher was unconventional. Born in Béziers, France, in 1952, at age five he lost vision in his right eye because of a genetic predisposition to detachment of the retina. Although while growing up in Lyon he was a voracious reader of popular science magazines, he struggled at school, particularly with the complex rules of French spelling. “I never really made peace with orthography,” he told an interviewer in 2019.

His turning point came at age 15, when he received emergency treatment for another retinal detachment, this time in his left eye. He had to miss almost an entire year of school. The terrifying experience of nearly losing his sight — and his father’s efforts to keep his mind busy while his eyes were bandaged — gave Talagrand a renewed focus. He became a highly motivated student after his recovery, and began to excel in national maths competitions.

Still, Talagrand did not follow the typical path of gifted French students, which includes two years of preparatory school, followed by a national selection for highly selective grandes écoles such as the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Instead, he studied at the University of Lyon, France, and then went on to work as a full-time researcher at the national research agency CNRS, first in Lyon and later in Paris, where he spent more than a decade in an entry-level job. Apart from a brief stint in Canada, followed by a trip to the United States where he met his wife, he worked at CNRS until his retirement.

Talagrand loves to challenge other mathematicians to solve problems that he has come up with — offering cash to those who do — and he keeps a list of those problems on his website. Some have been solved, leading to publications in major maths journals. The prizes come with some conditions: “I will award the prizes below as long as I am not too senile to understand the proofs I receive. If I can’t understand them, I will not pay.”

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