Technology

The CTA has plans to introduce on-board bus tracker screens on buses that travel on one express route between the Loop and South Deering, the agency said Friday. The CTA for months has been testing a bus tracker screen aboard one No. J14 Jeffery Jump bus, the agency's first route with elements of bus rapid transit, express bus service that typically relies on dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority for buses. By this summer, all 25 Jeffery Jump buses will have the screens, which show arrival times for buses that connect to the route, CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase said.

Visitors at The 3D Printer Experience in River North can have their body scanned while a tiny machine assembles a small plastic replica of their head in a half an hour. They also can design jewelry on a computer program wear it after a few quick minutes. Then there's a display area where they can see a fully functioning violin, medieval-style chainmail glove or a slipper that looks like it once belonged on Cinderella's foot--all made with the same kind of automated technology. It's a lot like being beamed up to a “Star Trek”-like world of the science fiction future, right?

*** (out of four) Tom Cruise runs like a maniac. It's kind of awesome. The much-maligned but still very commanding movie star's relentless, up-for-anything energy keeps the blood flowing and the stunts, uh, stunting in the first “Mission: Impossible” movie since 2006's great “Mission: Impossible III.” I mean, I can't say how much Cruise did or didn't do atop the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building in Dubai, but the scene...

*** (out of four) Like many of us, Jiro Oro possesses an intense love of sushi. Unlike the rest of us, the award-winning Japanese chef knows first-hand the value of massaging an octopus for 40-50 minutes to give it a soft texture. I mean, when I massage an octopus, it's just for my own relaxation. In “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” this 85-year-old master, the oldest chef to earn a three-star Michelin rating, demonstrates a formula for success through the unrelenting pursuit of perfection.

NBC has ordered a full season of "Chicago Fire," an "action-driven drama exploring the complex and heroic men and women of the Chicago Fire Department. " The series pilot was filmed in Chicago and, according to an NBC rep, the series will continue to be filmed in the Windy City. From "Law & Order" creator Dick Wolf, the series stars Taylor Kinney ("The Vampire Diaries"), Jesse Spencer ("House"), Monica Raymund ("The Good Wife"), former Chicagoan David Eigenberg ("Sex and the City")

EAT Gauge your interest The Gage, 24 S. Michigan Ave. 312-372-4243 Five years ago, chef Dirk Flanigan created a five-course menu featuring speck-wrapped smelt, lamb chop stew vindaloo and more for owners Billy and Catherine Lawless, which landed him the job as The Gage's executive chef. For the fifth anniversary celebration, he offers those menu items a la carte ($9-$32) plus $5 commemorative beers he co-created with Half Acre and Goose Island breweries.

  **** (out of four) Personally, I prefer sci-fi with a relatively low quantity of sci. Writer-director Rian Johnson seems to feel the same. In his spectacular "Looper" Johnson creates a futuristic world and connects the dots as needed, but several times in the film a character says something like, "I don't want to talk about time travel [bleep]," referencing the confusion that can come from exaggerated attempts at iron-clad logic. That said, the universe of "Looper" offers imagination and purpose, rather than a thinly conceived world of shiny objects and bizarre technology.

*1/2 (out of four) After the 12 endings that wrapped up 2003's Best Picture-winning “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” Peter Jackson could have parted with J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations and gone out on top. Alas. The director/co-writer instead decided to take Tolkien's “Rings” predecessor, “The Hobbit,” and turn the 300-page children's story into another big-screen trilogy totaling approximately 7,000 hours. At least that's how one feels sitting through part one of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” a nearly three-hour slog in which what was once - especially in the first “Rings” installment, “The Fellowship of the Ring” - a world to get lost in now provides only reasons to space out. In a prologue as entertaining as watching the last bits of ketchup drip out of the bottle, Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm)

With help from a $600,000 National Science Foundation grant, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago will work together with the Argonne National Laboratory to use city data to develop projects impacting Chicago's policy, design and urban planning decisions under a partnership announced last week. The collaboration, called the Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD), brings together researchers and city officials to take advantage of the City of Chicago Data Portal, an initiative dedicated to opening government data to the public.