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It's almost inconceivable that 40 years have passed since what's been called the greatest sci-fi action film of all time (and not just by us) assaulted theaters with the juiced-up sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, " Alien ."

Director James Cameron's propulsive vision for a gung-ho military-style movie would call upon Stan Winston Studio's elite creature effects crew from 1984's "The Terminator" — a team that would later work on "Predator," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Jurassic Park," and "Predator 2."

Cameron's "Aliens" greatly expands upon the xenomorph life cycle with the inclusion of a matriarchal beast that his screenplay described as "a massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black insect-Buddha. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen."

The brilliant filmmaker and Winston's energetic gang would craft and operate this 14-foot-tall articulated hydraulic puppet fabricated from fiberglass, foam rubber, and plastic. It contained two stunt performers in the torso and puppeteers on the ground manipulating legs and limbs.

Production was led by Stan Winston, Shane Mahan , Alec Gillis, John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff Jr., and Lindsay MacGowan, the core wizards who’d later found the acclaimed Legacy Effects firm with J. Alan Scott following Stan Winston’s unfortunate death in 2008. Gillis and Woodruff would eventually split off to form Amalgamated Dynamics in 1988.

We caught up with Mahan and MacGowan to have them offer memories of working on "Aliens" at Pinewood Studios and specifically constructing this magnificent drooling, hissing monster that's spawned countless nightmares since the blockbuster landed on July 18, 1986.

"It was 1983 when I started at Stan's on the first 'Terminator,'” Mahan tells Space. "I’d worked with Jim on a Roger Corman movie that Makeup Effects Lab was doing, 'Battle Beyond the Stars.' [...] During 'Terminator,' Jim had drawings of Sigourney and the Power Loader he'd brought into the shop. I'd see them out of the corner of my eye and knew exactly what it was supposed to be. It was clearly an alien of that world with Sigourney Weaver.

"I was intrigued by it all because four years before, when 'Alien' had come out, it was so amazing cinematically. The lifecycle of the creature , and the organic nature of it. I had no idea that seven years later we'd be in England doing a sequel."

Mahan and posse began working on the Queen's preliminary designs in Southern California at Stan Winston's shop, where they conducted the infamous 'garbage bag test' out in the back parking lot, so named due to the flailing puppet being wrapped in black plastic trash bags.

"It was a proof of concept of how that was going to work," he explains. "Moving to Windsor, England, and setting up shop at Pinewood Studios was extraordinarily exciting. We then started making the full-size process of making the Queen and all the other effects, and we met the English crew, and Lindsay was one of them."

MacGowan fondly remembers his experience on the ambitious project and being recruited to join Stan Winston and the rest of the guys.

"They were legends at that point for us. We were also young and goofy, and it's amazing they actually let us do what we did when we were that young," MacGowan notes. "I was at college at the time, and I’d skip off college and make my way to Pinewood. It was like here’s the rock ‘n' roll Americans, and then we have our more reserved English team that got influenced by the American team. It was a lot of fun and some of my favorite memories of starting in the business.

"I remember it being incredibly cold at Pinewood at the time. There was no insulation in the warehouse, and we had these giant propane jet heaters, and they kept going out. We’d be nice and warm, then suddenly the flame would be out. It was a great time to get to know Shane, John, Alec, and Tom. I look at them as my American brothers."

Having everything under one roof, being created pre-shooting, was a great asset as it allowed Cameron to constantly oversee the process and monitor the progress being made.

"We were life-casting all the actors, various teams were doing the xenomorph warriors and the eggs and the facehuggers," Mahan adds. "It was a pretty big build list, and we had four or five months to get everything done. John Richardson was a great special effects man from the Bond films, and we all thought that was cool to work with guys that had done James Bond movies.

"That was my first time in England, so the setting was very new and exciting. Of course, we blew off a lot of steam occasionally, but we were very serious about just getting it all done. We knew we had a lot to live up to because of the first film. Very few people, if any, had come back from working on that first film. You don’t know how it's going to turn out. We all thought the 'Aliens' script was great. Jim had a lot of turmoil there and didn’t have a good time on his own for various reasons, but we weren't really privy to that."

Legacy Effects' Lindsay MacGowan between two armored supersuits created for 2008's "Ironman" (Image credit: Legacy Effects) Before hopping across the pond to the UK, Mahan and his ace crew did molds and castings using a quarter-scale maquette of the Alien Queen sculpted at Stan Winston's shop for their design master.

"Back then, everything had to be done by measurements, by plotting out, and by eye. Today, it's so simple to have a computer generate and mill out a perfectly formed section. You had to use a really focused artistic eye to get exactly where we were supposed to be.

"We also had to make action suits, and there were a lot of them. I think there were 13 or 14, and then there were like eight eight-foot-tall puppets that were more spindly and long that were going to be used on wires and get hit and blow up and get shot. Then there was one articulated half-animatronic that would play in various scenes. You have to imagine an era that was pre-CGI. There was no reliance on rod removal or performer puppeteer removal. You had to hide everything and everybody in the frame. So in the dropship fight, it’s an enormous amount of people making the Queen operate, and you don’t see them.

"That all comes down to Jim Cameron and his magnificent eye for framing this action scene without seeing the crane or any of the support devices. Directors today, most of them don't even have any idea how to do that. And that was the magic of Jim Cameron and still is. He had the designing thought of shot composition and action that played off the best attributes of that hydraulic/actor-driven Queen. Because there were two guys inside and nine of us on her tail, her head, the cable, her hands, the feet. We were everywhere."

MacGowan took his role very seriously to get the fit and finishing perfect for this elegant egg-laying beast that would end up being the seething, android-ripping superstar of the popular 1986 sequel. -

"It was really just to honor what Giger had done in the past, but also to give Jim what he was looking for in his vision for the Queen," he recalls. "The Queen is really Jim's design and entire look. Our focus was making sure that we got what Jim wanted, but still make sure that fans of the original movie, which was all of us, could really appreciate."

As a mentor to his dedicated young crew of VFX creators, Winston schooled them in the subtle art of injecting personality and emotion into their creature performances.

"It's something they always reinforced, but if you’re a student of horror and science fiction films, you know all the great creatures and monsters have got some sympathetic or some interesting personality," adds Mahan. "Even the xenomorph in the first film, the personality is that it does not care. It's just going to kill you. But that’s still a personality trait.

"We were always taught by Stan that these are not effects; these are characters that we’re making; these are actors in the film. It just happens to be a creature from space, or a robot from the future, or a dinosaur. Whatever it is, it has to be believed, and we’ve always carried that philosophy through."

As to the mystery of exactly where the original Alien Queen screen-used puppet ended up, Mahan has a few clues, but sadly admits that most of it has unfortunately been lost to time.

Legacy Effects' Shane Mahan working on a xenomorph design for "Alien: Romulus" (Image credit: Legacy Effects) "Jim has one in his museum, and I think collector Bob Burns did have a head," Mahan shares. "The rest of it might be that it's fallen into disrepair. I know when we left, a lot of it was put into containers at Pinewood, and it sat and rotted for years. We always wanted to get that back, but I’ve not seen a real Queen in a while.

While the classic design hasn't changed much over the years, Mahan notes that the materials used to make creatures like the Alien Queen have.

"The head was fiberglass and had other foam rubber parts. The materials back then were not very sophisticated," explains Mahan. "The materials we have today, like what we did on 'Alien: Romulus', are like from outer space. They're translucent silicones, and they stretch well, and there’s lightweight plastic 3D-grown parts."

"Back then, the only thing we had was clear urethane that I got the cowl of her head to kind of move around. The original idea was that the skin on her face was supposed to be translucent. It ended up being foam rubber painted to look translucent. A lot of those materials have just fallen apart. On screen, it's pretty impressive.

"When we did 'Alien: Romulus,' Lindsay and I had not done an 'Alien' film since 'Aliens.' When that opportunity came up to revisit that world, the sensory memories came flooding back. It's one of those movies where I think I remember every day that I was on set for that film.”

"Aliens" is available to stream on Disney+ in the UK, and to rent and buy on various platforms in the US.

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Jacob Fox, hardware writer

(Image credit: Future) This week I've been: Trying out a new mouse (a Superlight clone) and finally sacking off CS2's cheater-ridden Premier matchmaking for FaceIt.

I'm known around the PC Gamer streets as a bit of a mouse pad nerd. Though that's just because I take the surface my little rodent skates across seriously, as you should. If you're playing a game that requires good aim, a good pad can be just as important for your gameplay experience as high fps, up to a certain point.

Naturally, then, I fell under the spell of glass mouse pads for a while. With glass, there's the promise of a very slippery glide, if that's your thing, but more important is the promise of consistency and longevity. Cloth pads collect dust and dirt that can't just be wiped away, and the fibres change over time. That's why pros switch them out so often .

Glass pads aren't like this, though. They do have irregularities etched into their surface to help with friction and sensor tracking, but these don't wear down because they're harder than your mouse skates. Your skates, on the other hand, do wear down quicker, but these are easily replaceable, and a cheap pack of dot skates can last a very long time.

Glass pads do require more maintenance, but not as much as I initially thought. When I first started using one—a QPAD Obsidian —I would wipe it down with a microfibre cloth between almost every two-minute Counter-Strike round, just in case something had gotten on it that could cause the skates to feel horribly scratchy when they ran over it. This does happen, but nowhere near as frequently as I initially thought. But eventually, when using a glass pad, I just wiped it down once or twice every 45-minute game, or if I noticed scratchiness.

There's one other bit of maintenance required, too. Unless you're in a cold climate and have dry skin all the time, you'll probably want to use a gamer sleeve so your arm glides consistently over the pad while you aim, whatever the conditions.

(Image credit: Future) I got used to this maintenance and started using a glass pad, and for a while I was hooked. There's just something about having very little static or dynamic friction and having an incredibly consistent glide that makes you feel like you're in the driver's seat. Every little movement is in your control, as is how smoothly you make those movements.

That seemed fantastic at first, but over time I've found I often don't want that much control. Somewhat paradoxically, I gain control over my aim by giving up some control of my mouse. That shouldn't really be a surprise, though, because 'control' pads are designed to be slower, i.e., providing more resistance to your movements, giving you less free control over your mouse movements. That's the opposite of a glide-y glass pad.

There's definitely a place for glass pads, but I just don't think I'm the target market. They're great if you don't need pinpoint aim and love a smooth glide, or if you need the kind of pinpoint aim that benefits from smooth, consistent tracking with a long time-to-kill (TTK). Games such as Quake Champions or The Finals , for instance.

However, in tactical shooters like Counter-Strike 2 (my go-to game), I find I play much better when using a control cloth pad. I'm able to hold angles better and keep my gun very still, and I can make the small adjustments needed when peeking or occasionally flicking thanks to the increased stopping power and static friction.

I know that over time I could develop finer control over my aim with a glass pad, and maybe then I'd find them to be better. But I did try. I've put dozens of hours in on different glass pads, and I still feel a little relief when going back to a control pad like the Razer Gigantus V2 Pro or Zowie HSR-III , or even a smooth cloth pad like the SteelSeries QcK Performance Speed .

A Wallhack SP-005 glass mouse pad. (Image credit: Future) I've even tried a glass mouse pad that's designed to offer a bit more control: the Wallhack CR-005 . And this did feel better to begin with, to the extent that I wondered whether it could be my endgame pad. But that control feeling seemed to wear off a little over many hours of gameplay (perhaps, very speculatively, due to skate debris getting stuck between the micro surface bumps), and regardless I still felt on more solid ground, so to speak, when I whapped a cloth pad back on the desk.

I could have stuck it out with glass, but I ask myself: why ? If pro players are able to reach their heights on cloth, then I see little incentive to switch to glass over the long-term, and there's little incentive to try and stick it out when I'm not getting the benefit in the short-term, either.

Whenever I boot up Counter-Strike, I sleeve up too

So, unless I ditch Counter-Strike and pick up Quake Champions once again (I'll be holding out for that fabled arena shooter genre comeback until the day I die), I'll be sticking with cloth, I think.

There is one thing that using glass pads has given me which I will continue to use, however: the gamer sleeve.

As I mentioned earlier, in most cases, using a sleeve with a glass pad is essential if you want to keep your arm moving across its surface consistently every time. But a couple of months ago, I heard someone say somewhere (I can't remember where) that a gamer sleeve can even be of benefit when using a cloth pad. So I tried it, and now I can't go back.

(Image credit: Future) Yes, whenever I boot up Counter-Strike, I sleeve up too. Even though I play on cloth. I felt a little sheepish the first few times, but I kept reminding myself that some pro players use them and that nobody is here watching me anyway. But now, it feels as natural as putting on my coat before I go outside in the winter.

And if I forget? It's just as noticeable as forgetting my coat. Without my gamer sleeve on, moving my arm around the mouse pad—aiming with low sensitivity, as you do in Counter-Strike—feels inconsistent at best, and downright slow at worst. But with my trusty half-palm-and-forearm sheath properly donned, my arm scoots around deftly, in exactly the same way every time I boot up the game, whatever the weather.

So thank you, glass pads, for opening my eyes to the wonders of the humble sleeve. You might not have won me over for playing my tactical shooters on your slippery surfaces, but you've given me that.

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Much of the discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on grand ideas such as the rise of a hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence . Speculation swirls around the likelihood that the technology will thin out the job market, or even precipitate the death or evolution of human creativity . We haven't focused as much on the multitude of subtle yet hugely consequential ways in which AI is reshaping the social fabric of our society, and how we collectively imagine the future.

That's the argument sociologist and AI researcher Mona Sloane , an assistant professor of data science and media studies at the University of Virginia, puts at the center of her new book, " Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life " (University of California Press, 2026). Whether we consider email filtering, prediction markets or social media platforms, AI systems are embedded in the heart of how we interact with the digital world. Indeed, AI is so ubiquitously integrated into everyday interfaces that it's given rise to a new kind of "prediction logic" that makes assumptions about who we are and how we are likely to behave.

In this excerpt, Sloane compares the AI technology we use today with the oracles of ancient Greece, framing it as an omnipotent presence that has moved to organize society through the prism of prediction models. This in turn affects how we learn, live, love and even picture the future.

We live in a world of oracles. These oracles constantly feed us predictions that shape our social lives — how we socialize, love, work, gain access to resources. Like in ancient Greece, predictions occupy a prominent role in our society. We consider our oracles so mighty that their predictive power rules over the fate of whole economies and even geopolitical constellations. Where the oracle is, there is the center of the world.

But unlike in ancient Greece, our oracles aren't high priestesses delivering divine prophecies. They are artificial intelligence (AI) systems melted into the infrastructure of everyday life. Today, it is nearly impossible to evade the grasp of AI predictions. I voluntarily and involuntarily use AI on a constant basis: by using email providers that build on the predictive properties of AI for spam filters, by conducting online banking and getting enrolled into AI-automated fraud detection, or by using generative AI for supporting administrative chores. It has become part of how I experience the world.

It can be a relief when it helps me do things I dread or am bad at, such as produce a spreadsheet template I desperately need, help streamline language produced by different authors for a report, or generate a specific image for a presentation. Often, I must intently handhold the AI, checking and fixing its outputs. And sometimes, with deep frustration, I give up and start all over to complete my task manually.

The omnipresence of AI prediction can make it easy to think of these systems as inevitable, quasi-natural phenomena we are subject to, rather than a part of. But they are quantitative concepts that arise from social agreements about how we ought to capture and interpret the world around us.

"Quantitative concepts are not given by nature: they arise from our practice of applying numbers to natural phenomena," wrote Rudolf Carnap, a logician and professor of philosophy of science, in 1966. His point was that numbers can be useful, because they allow for information to travel more easily across contexts, as a sort of language. They also make mathematical predictions possible.

To him, this was first and foremost useful for engineering modern life: A quantitative language allows for the articulation of quantitative laws that, in turn, facilitate the routine generation of mathematicized predictions, particularly in the realm of physics. Being able to predict how energy, compounds, and materials will behave in certain configurations is the reason humans were able to build the conveniences of airplanes, cars, and telephones. For Carnap, predictions were simply instrumental in this way.

AI's ability to predict is changing how we think about the future. (Image credit: Yana Iskayeva via Getty Images) Today, almost 60 years later, this pragmatic approach to mathematical prediction has been turned on its head by AI. Prediction is no longer just a handy tool in physics or engineering. The promises of AI's oracular power have turned prediction into a logic for structuring social life. This is a dangerous proposition. It implies that AI is always necessary or even inevitable and diverts attention from the social forces shaping ideas around this technology in the first place.

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AI systems are not natural phenomena that happen to us. They are collective expressions of society. As such, they are not just a hype or a deception concocted and executed by global tech elites. They indicate a wider shift in how we imagine and enact society. Many critical discussions of AI characterize this phenomenon chiefly as heightened surveillance and capitalist extraction. But this is a myopic diagnosis. AI's most powerful effect is the subtle yet comprehensive recalibration toward prediction as a guiding principle for organizing society. In this book, I call this phenomenon the prediction paradigm.

AI is something that we do as part of going about our lives and participating in society — it is social infrastructure, affecting how we relate to one another and how we act in public and in private. Like all infrastructures, AI allows resources and ideas to flow in certain directions, but not others. AI uses data from our collective past to predict our individual future. And because AI deals in futures, it solidifies a linear time regime that hardens our social commitment to causality: The past always predicts the future. The problem of AI is not the rise of intelligent machines, but the extraordinary social significance ascribed to this linearity, fetishizing the future and leaving little room for deliberations about what (other) futures may be possible or we may want.

Reprinted from Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social LIfe by Mona Sloane, courtesy of the University of California Press. Copyright 2026.

University of California Press

Predicted: How Ai Is Restructuring Social Life: 1 (co-Opting Ai)

In Predicted , Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change.

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Rockstar Games' open-world adventures almost always try to one-up their predecessors, at least in terms of sheer size, and that's not a pattern one former GTA 5 developer anticipates will change when GTA 6 finally blasts onto the scene.

John Ricchio, a former producer on everything from GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption to Max Payne 3, was recently asked about whether he'd even want to be part of the studio ahead GTA 6's imminent launch.

"I think the fact that every single time they do a GTA, it's ludicrously bigger than before is like something that I think about," Ricchio says in a chat with YouTuber Kiwi Talkz. "Like, I can only imagine the size of GTA 6. Like it must be monstrous. Or if not monstrous, it's probably way more detailed."

That's an expectation he has based on Rockstar Games' track record so far. As he notes, GTA 5 was "significantly bigger than GTA 4," which itself was much bigger in many ways than the original Red Dead Redemption. "Even between GTA and RDR, they were continually growing the size of the world," he adds. And while the ballooning scope adds extra wrinkles for the development team, "it really does make you feel like you're in a place."

Circling back to the question, Ricchio then laughs and says, "I'm pretty happy that I'm not on GTA 6. Not that it wouldn't be cool to work with those people… but it is really difficult, and it's a hard period of your career when you're working that hard on something." Despite the hard work, seeing how excited people get over his work is "magic" and "so rewarding" for Ricchio.

GTA 6 is on track for "the strongest pre-order campaign ever recorded" and up to $5 billion in sales by "the end of launch week," analysts say