New submitter Diakoneo writes “According to the BBC, ‘Visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion wizardry graced such films as Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, has died aged 92. The American animator made his models by hand and painstakingly shot them frame by frame to create some of the best-known battle sequences in cinema.’ Some of my fondest cinematic memories from my youth are from Ray Harryhausen.”
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A startup called Catabasis is developing drugs that hit diseases at multiple targets.
Sometimes a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The startup Catabasis Pharmaceuticals is hoping that will hold true for the multifunctional drugs it’s developing.
Sifting through the search queries of 6 million people turns out to be a better way to discover drug-to-drug interactions than the current gold standard, the Adverse Event Reporting System. [Read more]
CNET News
Welcome to the future, where you can essentially make a movie with believable special effects right on your smartphone.
Cinefy, an app that just launched on the App Store, makes this possible.
pigrabbitbear writes “Is bottled beer nuclear bombproof? The United States government conducted a couple tests in the 1950s to find out—it exploded nuclear bombs with ‘packaged commercial beverages’ deposited at varying distances from the blast center to see if beer and soda would be safe to drink afterwards. The finding? Yep, surviving bottled and canned drinks can be consumed in the event of a nuclear holocaust, without major health risks.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A biotech company called Cerulean says its nanoparticle-delivered cancer drugs are better at attacking tumors.
One result of the side effects of cancer treatments is that patients often can’t tolerate or survive a combination of different drugs at the same time—which can limit a doctor’s ability to knock out the disease. The head of a Boston-area biotech called Cerulean Therapeutics thinks the solution is nanoparticle-delivered drugs, which have fewer and less severe side effects. They could make it easier for doctors to mount a multipronged attack on tumors and kill the cells before they can develop a resistance to any one compound.
A few weeks ago, Craigslist penned a “Cease and Desist” letter aimed at Padmapper, the popular apartment listings site, to stop its use of Craigslist data for the third-party service. While Craigslist has behaved this way before, the startup community does not particularly like these types of letters. It was not too long ago that the City of San Francisco sent a “Cease and Desist” letter to a company called, at the time, Ubercab, a letter that again brought startups together in a mutual display of support for new business models in the face of regulations and conveniently-timed rules enforcement. In the case of Craigslist, the power, wealth, and sometimes confusing policies of the small private company exposes the philosophical rifts among many in startup community who believe the global community message board stifles the advancement of products and services like Padmapper and, in the process, doesn’t create the best possible consumer experience.
New submitter Drinking Bleach writes “Eric Raymond, coiner of the term ‘open source’ and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM’d games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X).”
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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a contrarian take on the power of Facebook from hacker Benjamin Mako-Hill: “A lot of people interested in free software, and user autonomy and network services are very worried about Facebook. Folks are worried for the same reason that so many investors are interested: the networks effects brought by hundreds of millions of folks signed up to use the service. … Facebook is vulnerable to the next thing more than many technology firms that have benefited from network effects in the past. If users are given compelling reasons to switch to something else, they can with less trouble and they will. That compelling reason might be a new social network with better features or an awesome distributed architecture that allows freedom for users and the ability of those users to benefit from new and fantastic things that Facebook’s overseers would never let them have and without the things Facebook’s users suffer through today. Or it might be a sexier proprietary box to store users’ private information. It doesn’t mean that I’m not worried about Facebook. I remain deeply worried. It’s just not very hard for me to imagine the end.”
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One pharmaceutical company aims to lengthen a stroke’s drug-treatable period from hours to months.
For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six months or more after a stroke.
Upcoming CS6 versions of Adobe’s flagship video software change significantly, with a streamlined interface for Premiere Pro and performance improvements for After Effects.
[Read more]
CNET News
February was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage.
But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site’s population of donors can handle?
Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The site’s big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding.
TechCrunch
Stowie101 writes “Today is Dynamic Range Day, which is an event to educate the public about the ‘Loudness Wars’ that are compressing and harming the quality of today’s music. Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and founder of Dynamic Range Day, explains why music lovers should avoid MP3 files. ‘The one that springs to mind is to avoid MP3, especially if it’s 128 kbps. Apple uses a more advanced technology called AAC, but if someone can get lossless files like FLAC that’s a better place to start.’ Shepherd says it’s actually harder to make a good ‘lossy’ encode of something that has been heavily musically compressed. Very heavy dynamic compression and limiting makes MP3s sound worse, so the loudness wars indirectly make MP3s sound worse.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nikon 1 future plans revealed: 4k video, brighter lenses, picture effects originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Engadget
Lucas123 writes “First HP, then EMC, and now NetApp has hiked up the price of its hard disk drives by 5% to 15%. The vendors sent letters to users stating that the flooding in Thailand had caused major component shortages, and while they tried to absorb the supplier price increases, each had to eventually give in. Lenovo also announced it has run out of certain drives for its PC systems including some popular 7,200rpm models.”
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The Holga case brings some retro camera filters to your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S. Instead of digital filters as you would get with the Instagram app, the Holga case tacks on a physical wheel of special effects lenses to the back of your iPhone. The wheel looks like a rotary dial and features ten [...]
SlashGear
Sometimes photo apps just don’t cut it. Sometimes you want instant color filters and split image gratification. Now they’re here with a turn of a dial, though it looks suspiciously like something your parents might have played with in the distant past. Holga’s iPhone Lens Filter will fit both iPhone 4 and 4S models and there are nine different lens effects to meddle with. The case itself is up for grabs in some curiously Nokia-esque colors options available for $ 25 in white, silver, black, blue and red. If tinted photography sends you into a spin, you can direct yourself to the source link below.
iPhone case offers up literal kaleidoscope of Holga lens effects originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Engadget
While Verizon and Motorola assure us that the back of the DROID RAZR by Motorola is not meant to be removed and that the battery is certainly not meant to be replaceable, the folks at iFixit never ever take no for an answer, starting their traditional teardown process with no less than the traditional Japanese [...]
SlashGear
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