Chinese scientists claim to have created a'real-life Death Star' capable of devastating enemy satellites in orbit. The science-fiction-inspired weapon combines pulses of microwave radiation into a single powerful beam - just like the planet-destroying lasers shown in Star Wars. In order to merge, the electromagnetic pulses must hit the exact same target within 170 trillionths of a second. That requires levels of timing more precise than the atomic clocks on advanced GPS satellites - a feat previously thought to be impossible. However, the weapon has now completed experimental trials for potential military applications thanks to breakthroughs in'ultra-high time precision synchronisation'.

Adobe plans to announce a ridiculously cool photo editor at Adobe Max, dubbed Project Stardust, that uses AI to understand objects in your photos as…objects -- allowing you to quickly edit and modify them. Adobe released a teaser for Project Stardust on YouTube, where Adobe employees showed off how Stardust could "understand" that a photo of a woman pulling a suitcase was made up of discrete objects. Simply by clicking on the suitcase, Stardust appears to understand that it's an object, and that it can be moved around or deleted. Though somewhat late to the AI party (following the launch of Midjourney and other early examples of AI art generators), Adobe launched its Firefly AI generative tool last year and quickly added AI features like outpainting to Photoshop before adding Firefly to Photoshop via generative art tools, albeit with a credit plan. Now, Adobe seems poised to take the next step.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines for Dec. 19 are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. The first "Star Wars" film, "A New Hope" was released 42 years ago in 1977. Since then, countless films, video games, television spin-offs and books have been produced to fill in every corner of the galaxy far, far away. What started out as a campy, low-budget sci-fi flick that was expected to flop, quickly grew into a juggernaut of a film franchise with plenty of content for everyone.

A simple young farmboy gets a magic sword from an old wizard so he can defeat an evil knight, rescue a princess, and save the world. Granted, they don't always do it with knights. Sometimes the farmboy is a farmgirl. Sometimes the wizard is a scientist and sometimes the evil knight is a dragon or a cyborg. But Lucas knew all that. He was a Northern California kid who grew up watching movies and racing cars, a tyro moviemaker at a moment when American film had become very serious. The movies of the 1970s had genre goofs like The Exorcist and Rocky, but the gold-standard stories of were adult things about violence, sexuality, and the treachery of dreams. Heroes in these movies lost--like, all the time. Sometimes the whole movie got you to like bad guys, and sometimes they died anyway!

Lauren Hayes, a 27-year-old model and entrepreneur, is famous at the automation software company IPsoft. At a recent conference the company hosted in New York, suited c-level executives stopped her in the hallway to take photos. An executive at one of the largest insurance companies in the United States told her that 65,000 of his employees loved her. And during his keynote presentation, the CEO of IPsoft, Chetan Dube, called Hayes on stage to guest star in a faux game show. Her opponent was Amelia, who is also the reason for her contextual fame.

Some people are famous only among fans of a particular sport, a specific age group, or their hometown locals. Lauren Hayes, a 27-year-old model and entrepreneur, is famous at the automation software company IPsoft. At a recent conference the company hosted in New York, suited c-level executives stopped her in the hallway to take photos. An executive at one of the largest insurance companies in the United States told her that 65,000 of his employees loved her. And during his keynote presentation, the CEO of IPsoft, Chetan Dube, called Hayes on stage to guest star in a faux game show.

With the clock ticking down on the biggest film of his career, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," director Gareth Edwards wrestled with the high stakes ace up his sleeve: using computer graphics to digitally insert actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, into Edwards' new "Star Wars" film as the iconic villain Grand Moff Tarkin. "We were ultra-paranoid about it," Edwards told The Times ahead of the home video release of "Rogue One," which crossed the billion-dollar global box office mark just 39 days into its December release. "Even a month away, there was this feeling of, 'Is this going to work? Plenty of pressure already hung over "Rogue One," the first standalone side story in the "Star Wars" franchise. Anchored by a new heroine named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), recruited into leading a team of characters on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the prequel to 1977's "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope" would tell a darker, more violent tale than its predecessors in a galaxy far, far, away. "In the early conversations about the end of the movie, we knew we were going to hand it off in some form, like passing the gauntlet to Princess Leia," Edwards said of the film's final sequence, in which the Death Star plans land in Leia's hands, leading into the events of "A New Hope." In Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest festival last month, Edwards recounted the challenge. The task of creating a young CG Leia by digitally blending Carrie Fisher's face, and a single word of dialogue she delivered in 1977 -- "hope" -- with the motion-capture performance of actress Ingvild Deila, went to Industrial Light & Magic. Fisher, who died Dec. 27, did not film scenes for "Rogue One." "We knew we were probably not going to be able to get away without showing her without it feeling like a cheat," Edwards said. "You could do some gag where you just saw the back of her.

Of course, no discussion of 2015 science fiction movies would be complete without mention of this year's modest little endeavor from Disney/Lucasarts: On the meta level, the film doesn't have much direct conjecture on contemporary technology -- everything happened a long time ago, after all, in a galaxy far, far away. Plus, "Star Wars" has always been more about space fantasy than hard sci-fi, anyway. But those interested in the "soft sciences" of sociology and anthropology will find plenty to chew on. The movie is basically a masterclass on how mythology works -- how we tell ourselves the same story, over and over, in different times and places. The year's second-tier sci-fi films had some lessons to impart as well.

That "galaxy, far, far away" in the famed opening lines of "Star Wars" flicks actually is part of "our reality," according to a commentary released on a key site, KurzweilAI, that deals with artificial intelligence and the like. It's because the newest chapter of the long-running series, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," has a robot as a key character. The robot previously was part of the "Imperial Empire" but was captured and reprogrammed to become part of the rebel group that sets out to steal plans for the "Death Star" and uncover a fatal flaw. Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology, warns that robotic technology used in military conflicts could be turned back against those who created and released it. "Without giving away too many spoilers, K-2SO is part of the Rebellion freedom fighter group that are tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star, the infamous moon-sized battle station from the original Star Wars movie," he said. "Some robotics engineers and researchers are working on exactly this and have started to develop the algorithms that will enable autonomous military robots to be ethical.

This weekend marked the opening of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latest entry in the nearly 40-year-old film series, and the first "standalone" release to take place outside of the episodic Star Wars installments--that is, of course, if you don't count those WTF (Way Too Fuzzy) Ewoks movies. Rogue One, as you likely know by now, tracks a group of Rebels (played by Felicity Jones and Diego Luna, among others) as they attempt to steal information vital to the Empire's brand-new Death Star. Along the way, they witness daring dogfights and catty robots, and occasionally find themselves face-to-face with beloved galaxy-questers from previous Star Wars films. Rogue One Relatives: 10 More Star Wars Standalone Movies Disney Should Make The Alt-Right Hates Rogue One, Because of Course It Does Want to Really Get Rogue One? Read the Prequel Novel Want to Really Get Rogue One? Read the Prequel Novel Want to Really Get Rogue One? Read the Prequel Novel But as Rogue One chugs along to certain box-office domination, we can't help but wonder: Is this latest Star Wars story really necessary? Or is it merely a temporary diversion--an escape pod--from the dauntingly gargantuan ongoing narrative that is the traditional saga? WIRED's Brian Raftery and Angela Watercutter discuss the movie below--and, lest we be accused of Dianoga-like stealth and sneakiness, we should be upfront about the fact that spoilers are everywhere.