World’s smallest computer, measuring in at just over
one cubic millimeter, this miniscule microprocessor was designed as an
implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients. You may think
something this size would have to scrimp on the hardware, but modern
nanotechnology allows the computer to contain a microprocessor, pressure
sensor, battery, memory chip, and a tiny antenna that allows it to
transmit data to a reader device placed near the eye.
The system takes 15 minutes to collect pressure data and requires 10
hours of indoor light or an hour and a half of sunlight to recharge its
battery. This opens the door for millimeter-sized systems in the future
with all sorts of applications. Nanotechnology such as this could be
used for constant monitoring of other body parts, the environment, or
for making virtually any item ‘smart‘ and thereby traceable!
The gore-splattered Xbox One launch game
Ryse: Son of Rome has been attracting plaudits for its astonishing
visuals. But the game seems to have one familiar weakness: breast
physics
A video still from Ryse: Son of Rome
[Warning: this article contains plot spoilers]
It should have been a scene of remorse and tragic grandeur. Marius
Titus, the muscular hero of Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome, has
just discovered his family slaughtered in their home – victims of the
Emperor Nero and his paranoid bloodlust.
As our hero contemplates his loss, a goddess appears to him,
promising the chance for retribution. But for many gamers it seems her
words of solace and encouragement have gone unnoticed, thanks to a
distracting presence.
“The breast physics on Ryse,” writes Patricia Hernandez on US games site, Kotaku. “I don’t even know what is going on there.”
Sadly, this is only the latest example in a long and shameful history
of implausible breast modelling in video games. In the early days, with
famously licentious character designs such as Mai Shiranui from the
fighting game Fatal Fury, “jiggle” was attained through hand-drawn
frames of animation. Later, as 3D polygonal character models replaced 2D
sprites, designers started to experiment with physics, adding mass and
applying softbody dynamics.
The results could “best” be seen in Tecmo’s Dead or Alive series of
female-dominated fighting games, which later spawned the horrendous DOA:
Beach Volleyball titles – essentially a wretched collection of soft
porn fantasies masquerading as sports sims. Here, the helium-like breast
physics was such a central element of the experience, players could
often customise the jiggle settings.
“In Japanese animation, they have a concept of ’fan service’, in
which artists draw popular female characters in suggestive poses and
clothing to appease demand,” says Dom Clubb, artistic director at
Jonathan Ross’ Hot Sauce studio. “It’s a part of that culture. It’s
something we’re much more cautious about here.”
Indeed, more recently, the industry has somewhat matured, both in its
approach to character animation, and in its depiction of female
characters – hence the evolution of Lara Croft, from ridiculously
proportioned lad’s mag starlet in the nineties, to this year’s complex
and convincing characterisation. Earlier this year, meanwhile, the
writer Jenn Frank set up the Boobjam game design competition, calling
for games that reclaimed and demystified breasts.
Developers are now being asked to justify the depiction of sexualised
female characters in their games. Recently, when PC games site Rock
Paper Shotgun asked why the women in Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm game
were so scantily clad, the developer dodged the question entirely,
before later apologising for dismissing the issue. “It takes work to
make compelling characters, but it’s important to take a step back to
ensure that we’re not alienating our players,” he wrote. ‘Physics simulation for breasts is quite expensive’
In some senses, the maturation of the games industry is working
together with an acknowledgement that this is just a really tricky
physical element to get right. “The methodology is actually very similar
to simulating the look of body fat,” says Stewart Jones, an experienced
animator who has worked in both film and games.
“You create a skeleton out of around 15 joints and then add a couple
extra that sit in front of the chest area – these would then have motion
applied by the spline joints and driven by dynamic code. Most of the
issues tend to come from not properly tightening up all the inputs you
have under those physics-based objects.”
But for most game developers, this is just too much effort and time
for what is usually just a cheap piece of titillation. “One issue is
that running a physics simulation just for breasts is quite expensive in
terms of processing load, for what’s probably a relatively small part
of the overall scene,” says Paul Abbott, a veteran art director, now at
Brighton’s Wish Studios.
“At one place I worked, the breast physics went totally out of
control. We put the game on a ‘soak test’ – where we’d leave it running
overnight to see if it remained stable. When we came back in the morning
the breasts were literally as big as the entire world.”
As for Ryse, the sequence is comparatively subtle, but in a world of
rich convincing realism, it looks all the more absurd – a body-centric
variation on the Uncanny Valley theory. Clubb thinks the sequence shows a
team making short cuts to meet a tight deadline. “A character mesh is
made up of thousands of vertices. When the physics system is applied,
each vertex is given a value – lets say 0-1 – depending on how much the
artist wants the particular vertex to be affected by physics.
“This will make the cloth vertices sway and the flesh vertices stay
rigid. But because Ryse was probably rushed to make the Xbox One launch,
I’m guessing the character was given a single physics system for the
whole mesh rather than one for skin and a separate one for cloth. If you
were to do the physics properly, there are lots of parameters to deal
with, like stiffness, sway and stretch, and the cloth on the breasts
would have to deform separately. That would have been a computational
nightmare.” ‘This is supposed to be a moment of emotional gravity’
Really though, this probably isn’t a question of technology or
technique, it’s one of taste and awareness of wider issues. Right now,
the difficulties with representing the female body are an ironic
metaphor for the industry’s awkward gender politics. Yet as character
models increase in visual complexity, and as game narratives mature, the
issue of authentic physicality is one developers will need to face.
Perhaps one day there will a game that deals in the sensual or even just
the non-sexualised physical reality of nudity, rather than in
exploitation.
But that day is not here, and Ryse, with its simple story of gore and
conquest, is not the game. “I think it was a bad decision to have her
in those clothes,” says Clubb finally. “This is supposed to be a moment
of emotional gravity. Just dress the character.”
Natasha Demkina, is a young woman from Saransk, Russia, who claims to
possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies
and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical diagnoses. She is
hailed in Russia as “the girl with X-ray eyes”. She describes her
phenomenal abilities it as follows:
“I have two sights. I can switch any minute without
reason, should I want to see the state of health of a person,” Natasha
said. “This switching makes no difficulty to me; I just need to think
about it. I can see the full structure of a human body – how internal
organs are positioned and how they function. It’s hard to explain how I
identify diseases. Afflicted organs produce a kind of radiation. The
second sight is active only in the daytime; it does not work at night.”
According to Natasha and her parents, she
discovered her unusual abilities at the age of ten. At first Natasha
scanned her acquaintances and relatives. This phenomenon was widely
covered by television in the winter of 2003-2004. At that time Natasha
was about to finish school. In January of 2004 Natasha with her mother
were invited to London by the English press and she demonstrated her
abilities live on the British television. She also participated in an
experiment organized by The Sun. The girl demonstrated her extraordinary
powers on The Sun reporter Briony Warden, who had suffered multiple
injuries in a car accident. The girl contrived to describe all the
fractures of the woman.
Briony, 36, said that she had been fully dressed and let the girl
scan her. This is how she described her meeting with the Russian
wunderkind:
“Her pupils dilated and she seemed to have fallen into a trance.”
“At first she started scanning the injured part of my back that she
called “a lockout”. In fact I have four healing fractures of the back
and slight nerve damage.”
“She described my pelvis as asymmetrical and pointed to the right
side with several fractures. She pointed at my jaw and said she saw
“some foreign body” there”. Later Briony said that she had a titanic
plate there to support bones.
“The most wonderful moment was when she discovered damage in my left leg.”
“In fact both my shin and spellbone are broken. I was surprised
because she found two separate fractures and said that I had problems
with bending a knee joint.”
“Then she said she saw “the traces of several metal pins and screws
that dinted in the bone”. Without seeing the scars she could not know
that a fortnight ago my leg was fastened with several pins and screws.”
“She even said that the scars left by pins and screws were covered
with a new tissue, which was absolutely true, for my last X-ray
photography had showed it.”
Dumbfounded Briony added: “Natasha is an amazing person. I was very
skeptical until she concentrated on my major fractures. I was strongly
impressed by that. It seemed that she was looking at my X-ray image. My
consulting orthopaedist alone might know more.”
After the examination The Sun reporters described the accident that
had happened to Briony. Natasha said that she could see that “all her
injuries would close up well”.
Natasha understood that she had a gift at the age of ten. One day she
told her mother about the structure of the human body. The little girl
did not know the actual medical terms and she described kidneys as beans
and bowels as a goffered hose. Her mother was scared and she decided to
consult experts. At the doctor’s Natasha described the structure of his
organism. Doctors were at a loss.
The girl can scan organs, determine their condition, and detect
cells, bacteria or viruses in the organism. She can switch to the second
sight at will, but she has terrible headaches after long sessions.
However, she can neither scan nor heal herself.
Tatyana Demkina (the mother) tried to conceal the daughter’s anomaly,
but their apartment soon became the place where many sick people would
come for help. Once came a woman who could not become pregnant for nine
years. Natasha agreed to help her and the woman gave birth to a boy in
due time. But the happy family did not even invite Natasha to see the
baby.
Natasha dreams of becoming a doctor to do her work legally and save
patients. Her mother consulted experts several times to confirm her
daughter’s gift.
“We’ve been hiding our daughter’s gift for a long time,” said Nikolai
Demkin, Natasha’s father. “But her uniqueness became public property,
and after that our family was haunted by reporters. Local newspapers
also wrote about her and some articles brought us much sorrow,” the man
said.
In 2004 Natasha finished school and entered the Medical Department of
the Moscow State Medical Stomatological University. She currently works
at the Moscow Center for Special Human Diagnostics.
It’s a common story for most of us: You eat right, exercise, but
still can’t seem to lose those extra pounds. Is it genetics, age, or
just something unknown that’s keeping you looking and feeling heavy?
The surprising truth is that it may be your digestive system.
Many physicians and nutritional experts are pointing to an
under-active digestive system as the real culprit behind all kinds of
stomach issues. To put it simply, if your gut isn’t doing its job, your
stomach can become a breeding ground for nasty bacteria—bacteria that
cause painful stomach aches, embarrassing gas, and uncomfortable
bloating.
So that expanding waistline you’ve been unsuccessfully fighting, might actually be your body’s reaction to food build up.
And the surprising solution? Specialized probiotics.
For years, health experts have discussed how the healthy bacteria in
probiotics can help with digestion, but a new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition links
probiotics to fat loss as well. After 12 weeks, people consuming
specific probiotic formulas dropped roughly 8 to 9 percent of their
visceral fat—a particularly unhealthy type that builds up around your
heart and organs — and 1 to 3 percent of their belly fat.
People often think of yogurt when discussing foods containing healthy
probiotics, but most brands have tons of calories, carbs and sugars.
Look for products that contain Lactospore and green tea extracts.
LactoSpore has been shown to promote healthy digestion, help relieve
gas, bloating, constipation and diarrhea, and even promote clearer skin
by helping to balance the body’s pH.
Green tea leaf extract contains compounds that help increase
thermogenesis and fat oxidation to help burn calories, and caffeine for
both improved workouts and appetite supression. There are also healthy
fruit extracts that work as prebiotics, providing nourishment for the
probiotics that are produced by LactoSpore.
So consult you doctor today and make a resolution to loose the extra pounds!
The boy's mother said officials at Lincoln School of Science and
Technology in Canon City, a Colorado city of 16,000, are over-reacting.
Jennifer Saunders said her son was suspended once before for kissing the
girl and had other disciplinary problems, and she was surprised to find
out that he would be forced out of school again for several days. First
grader Hunter Yelton told KRDO-TV (http://tinyurl.Com/lyhxh7l) that he has a crush on a girl at school and she likes him back.
"It was during class, yeah. We were doing reading group, and I leaned
over and kissed her on the hand. That's what happened," he said.
Saunders said she saw nothing wrong with her son's display of
affection. She said she punished him for other problems in school,
including rough-housing. She was shocked when the school's principal
brought up the term "sexual harassment" during a meeting.
"This is taking it to an extreme that doesn't need to be met with a
six year old. Now my son is asking questions. What is sex mommy? That
should not ever be said, sex. Not in a sentence with a six year old,"
she said.
District superintendent Robin Gooldy told The Associated Press on
Tuesday the boy was suspended because of a policy against unwanted
touching.
"The focus needs to be on his behaviour. We usually try to get the
student to stop, but if it continues, we need to take action and it
sometimes rises to the level of suspension," he said.
He said officials have not heard from the girl's parents, and no
legal action is anticipated because it was only a violation of school
policy.
In recent years, Colorado and other states have been moving to relax
zero-tolerance disciplinary policies blamed for increasing the dropout
rate and giving students criminal records for relatively minor
infractions. However, those policies have dealt mostly with safety
issues, such as students fighting or bringing a replica gun to school,
not sexual harassment.
Actor Sonu Sood says his "Happy New Year" co-actor Shah Rukh Khan is jealous of his talent of portraying negative characters.
Sonu
has tried his hand at negative and positive roles in his career, but
King Khan is particularly in awe of his portrayal of a villain
At
the unveiling of the cover of Health and Nutrition magazine featuring
him Monday, Sonu was asked why he hardly features in positive roles.
Shah Rukh Khan starrer Happy New Year poster will be out on January 2.
He
said: "I have done a lot of positive roles and I have a positive role
in 'Happy New Year' also. But like I said, times have changed. You just
need to entertain, whether it's a positive or a negative role."
"Recently,
when we were shooting for 'Happy New Year,' Shah Rukh told me that 'I
get very jealous of you when you do negative roles and I also want to do
an out-and-out negative roles without any songs," added Sonu, who was
seen as villain Chhedi Singh in "Dabangg".
Sonu said he is open to all kinds of roles, provided they are good.
Bollywood actor Sonu Sood will be playing a negative role in the film. Pic by Yogen Shah
The Tamil Nadu-based MDMK is likely to be part of the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the forthcoming general elections, party
leader Vaiko said on Wednesday.
MDMK -- or Marumalarchi Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam to give its full name -- is a Dravidian party formed
in 1994 in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.
Speaking to reporters here,
Vaiko said he had held preliminary talks with leaders of the Bharatiya
Janata Party on the issue of forming an alliance for the general
elections.
He said MDMK's main objectives are to remove the
Congress-led government at the centre and also prevent formation of any
other government with Congress support.
According to Vaiko, support for BJP is gaining and there is a (Narendra) Modi wave across the country.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is the BJP's prime ministerial candidate for the general elections.
Vaiko said Modi will become the country's prime minister.
The boy's mother said officials at Lincoln School of Science and
Technology in Canon City, a Colorado city of 16,000, are over-reacting.
Jennifer Saunders said her son was suspended once before for kissing the
girl and had other disciplinary problems, and she was surprised to find
out that he would be forced out of school again for several days. First
grader Hunter Yelton told KRDO-TV (
