Back in 1994, when the internet was just a wee thing and computer animation was only just beginning to lose its gills and walk on land, there was a cartoon called Reboot that was the first full half hour fully computer animated cartoon. A lot of people liked Reboot, but even at the time, I thought the animation was nauseatingly bad, but maybe in the 21st century it won’t look quite as bad. Maybe?
I haven't seen Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity yet, but I want to. The movie will enter general release here in the US on October 4. It stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts having what looks to be a really, really bad day in space. Trailers for the movie show them flying around in their space suits, yelling and crying and dodging debris from exploding satellites and space ships and space stations, all lit by a beautifully rendered and untouchably distant Earth in the background.
The director and the studio have taken great pains to recreate the experience of operating in microgravity as accurately as possible. Cuarón consulted with NASA astronauts on the particulars of moving in microgravity, microgravity and,according to theNY Daily News, the movie's production designers studied thousands of NASA photographs in order to make their vision of space look authentic.
When asked how far that commitment to verisimilitude stretched, though, Cuarón said that while the movie strives for accuracy, "it would be disingenuous to say we did it 100 percent, because this is a movie, and we needed to take certain liberties."
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Cyanogen, makers of popular software based on Android that extends the abilities of smartphones, is making a bid for the mainstream. The four-year-old company, which began as a one-person side project, said today that it has raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. others. The goal is to vault past Blackberry and Windows Phone to become the third-most popular mobile operating system, after traditional Android and iOS. And the company is already closer than you might think.
CyanogenMod, the company’s free open-source replacement firmware, has more than 8 million users, CEO Kirt McMaster says. But that counts only users who have elected to share data with Cyanogen, he says, estimating that the true number is two to three...
Pharmaceutical company Sumagen Canada announced yesterday the successful completion of a Phase 1 Clinical Trial of SAV001-H, a vaccine against HIV and AIDS. The trial ran for over a year, from March 2012 through last month, and was designed to test the "safety, tolerability and immune responses" of the drug in real live human subjects. Phase 1 trials are the point at which researchers go from seeing whether their drugs work in animals to making sure that they don't do weird and bad stuff to people, so the stakes are obviously very high. SAV001-H passed flawlessly: in the randomized, observer-blinded, placebo-controlled study of HIV-infected, asymptomatic men and women, there were "no serious adverse event[s]," meaning that Phase 2 trials (seeing how well the vaccine actually works) can come next.
SAV001-H is what's called a "killed whole virus vaccine," meaning that it includes actual HIV viruses. This sounds like something that you don't want to get injected with, but as part of the vaccine-making process, the live HIV viruses are genetically re-engineered to eliminate pathogenicity, chemically treated, and then irradiated with gamma rays to make sure that they're dead dead dead. While other HIV/AIDS vaccines that haven't used killed whole viruses (relying instead on targeting specific components of HIV) have failed in Phase 3 trials, Sumagen is optimistic about their drug because other successful vaccines (including polio, influenza, rabies, and hepatitis A) work on the same principle.
The vaccine prevents HIV infection by massively boosting the production of a variety of antibodies in the human immune system. We won't get detailed statistics on how effective SAV001-H is until the completion of the Phase 2 trials, but even during Phase 1, the researchers were able measure boosts in the production of a variety HIV-specific antibodies ranging anywhere from eight to 64 times higher than with a placebo. Plus, these increases in antibodies were maintained over the entire duration of the study. Based on these data, Sumagen is "[forecasting] a success of the Phase 2 human clinical trial."
It would be premature to get too excited about this, since many vaccines encounter issues in Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical trials. But, we're excited anyway. 35 million people have died of HIV/AIDS, and nearly as many are currently infected. 40% of new infections occur in people between the ages of 15 and 24. According to Sumagen, when this vaccine comes to market (and it's getting closer), it could mean "the eradication of HIV/AIDS for human beings." Eradication. Forever.
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