In the “Social Network”, actor Armie Hammer play both of the Winklevoss twins, and amazed several people with the amazing detail in the work. Combining split-screen effects with digital face replacement, a new short (available on the home release as well) shows how it was done.
Watch as Hammer and model/actor Josh Pence play both of the twins — doffing shirts and changing hairstyles midway through a scene to play the other Winklevoss — and how an elaborate special-effects system using medical lasers and a contraption straight out of The Fly made it so that Hammer’s face could be grafted onto Pence’s in certain key shots, including the movie’s celebrated regatta rowing sequence.
The galaxy NGC 2841 – shown here in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, taken with the space observatory’s newest instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3 – currently has a relatively low star formation rate compared to other spirals. It is one of several nearby galaxies that have been specifically chosen for a new study in which a pick ’n’ mix of different stellar nursery environments and birth rates are being observed.
Star formation is one of the most important processes in shaping the Universe; it plays a pivotal role in the evolution of galaxies and it is also in the earliest stages of star formation that planetary systems first appear.
Yet there is still much that astronomers don’t understand, such as how do the properties of stellar nurseries vary according to the composition and density of the gas present, and what triggers star formation in the first place? The driving force behind star formation is particularly unclear for a type of galaxy called a flocculent spiral, such as NGC 2841 shown here, which features short spiral arms rather than prominent and well-defined galactic limbs.
In an attempt to answer some of these questions, an international team of astronomers is using the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) installed on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study a sample of nearby, but wildly differing, locations where stars are forming. The observational targets include both star clusters and galaxies, and star formation rates range from the baby-booming starburst galaxy Messier 82 to the much more sedate star producer NGC 2841.
WFC3 was installed on Hubble in May 2009 during Servicing Mission 4, and replaces the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is particularly well-suited to this new study, as the camera is optimised to observe the ultraviolet radiation emitted by newborn stars (shown by the bright blue clumps in this image of NGC 2841) and infrared wavelengths, so that it can peer behind the veil of dust that would otherwise hide them from view.
While the image shows lots of hot, young stars in the disc of NGC 2841, there are just a few sites of current star formation where hydrogen gas is collapsing into new stars. It is likely that these fiery youngsters destroyed the star-forming regions in which they were formed. Notes
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: M. Crockett and S. Kaviraj (Oxford University, UK), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (STScI) and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee.
We are literally bombarded with information, all the time, so, how does the brain deal with it? Well, Mindflash made an infographic about that. The cost of treating chronic diseases, by GOOD, and DocShop‘s look at the fattest cities in America are our next picks, and then a closer look at the World’s largest Social Network: Organized Crime, by Wired. For last, an oversight of the UK debt problem, by Money Debt and Credit.
A new press release from NVidia discusses an interesting project from the University College London Hospitals (UCLH) Heart Hospital and UK Visual effects company Glassworks. Together they build a virtual heart simulator perfect for transesophageal echocardiography (Imaging the heart through the mouth & esophagus) training. Using the impressive power of NVidia Quadro GPU’s and 3D Vision technology, they’re able to maintain realistic stereoscopic images running at a full 30fps. In fact, it’s already an integral part of training at Duke University.
“Simulation technology has enabled us to take a quantum leap forward in our teaching,” said Dr. Madhav Swaminathan, MD, FASE, FAHA, of Duke University School of Medicine’s Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesia. “This particular system essentially simulates the beating heart clearly. To explain how an ultrasound image is formed and how it correlates to anatomical features is extremely difficult. When you’re changing the image plane with a probe it’s hard to understand what parts of the heart you are seeing on the screen — because the heart is three dimensional, and you’re using 3D on a 180 degree plane. A simulator makes it possible to see side by side not only how an ultrasound image is generated, but what the cuts mean in a controlled, relaxed environment where you don’t have to worry about interfering with a patient’s clinical care or taking too much time. This virtual environment technology gives residents a jump start.”
An interesting note, this is done without CUDA. Currently, the application simply uses OpenGL and GLSL, meaning it should run on ATI cards as well. However, in the end they state they’re investigating improving performance by moving lots of the system to CUDA.
Autodesk has just announced their intent to acquire Scaleform Corporation for the tidy sum of $36M USD in Cash. Scaleform creates UI tools and Middleware platforms for lots of platforms, providing cross-platform support across PC, Xbox, PS3, and Wii. We just recently gave you the announcement of their “Scaleform GFx” for Flash, and now it looks like they’re gonna be an even bigger part of the gaming industry going forward.
“Our combined technologies will not only provide game developers with an improved authoring environment and runtime solution, but will also apply to the broader interactive entertainment industry ranging from film to mobile to the web” said Brendan Iribe, President and Chief Executive Officer of Scaleform. “We will finally realize our long standing vision of integrating 2D and 3D authoring technology while continuing our commitment to deliver leading-edge real-time graphics solutions to our customers.”
The deal is expected to close in Autodesk’s first quarter of fiscal 2012 (April 30th 2011). Get the full details after the break.
The New York Times has posted an interesting behind-the-scenes story and video of Pixar Studios. The story talks about some of the things that Pixar did to prepare for Toy Story 3, such as visiting day care centers. Of course, you might expect that to be normal research for the film. But would you think that they would dump trash in their lobby and have people run through it? It makes for a fascinating read.
Computers are a necessity, but the acting — the voice-over work — comes before the animation. The animators themselves are cast like performers, with some specializing in comedy and others in emotional moments, Mr. Podesta said. And animated moviemaking uses many of the same tools as live action, including costuming, production design and cinematography. As part of their substantial awards push this year, the marketers at Pixar (another category the company excels at) decided to pull back the curtain on the magic factory a bit.
While this looks cool, I am not certain that I would want to be sitting on the couch when the texture is being projected. When the projector is off, then all you get is a boring white room.
We created a unique physical 3D video-mapping experience by turing a white living room into a spacious 360° projection area.
This technique allowed us to take control of all colors, patterns and textures of the furniture, wallpapers and carpet. All done with 2 projectors.
The nebula Messier 78 takes centre stage in this image taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, while the stars powering the bright display take a backseat. The brilliant starlight ricochets off dust particles in the nebula, illuminating it with scattered blue light. Igor Chekalin was the overall winner of ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition with his image of this stunning object.
Messier 78 is a fine example of a reflection nebula. The ultraviolet radiation from the stars that illuminate it is not intense enough to ionise the gas to make it glow — its dust particles simply reflect the starlight that falls on them.
Despite this, Messier 78 can easily be observed with a small telescope, being one of the brightest reflection nebulae in the sky. It lies about 1350 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter) and can be found northeast of the easternmost star of Orion’s belt.
This new image of Messier 78 from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory is based on data selected by Igor Chekalin in his winning entry to the Hidden Treasures competition.
The pale blue tint seen in the nebula in this picture is an accurate representation of its dominant colour. Blue hues are commonly seen in reflection nebulae because of the way the starlight is scattered by the tiny dust particles that they contain: the shorter wavelength of blue light is scattered more efficiently than the longer wavelength red light.
This image contains many other striking features apart from the glowing nebula. A thick band of obscuring dust stretches across the image from the upper left to the lower right, blocking the light from background stars. In the bottom right corner, many curious pink structures are also visible, which are created by jets of material being ejected from stars that have recently formed and are still buried deep in dust clouds.
Two bright stars, HD 38563A and HD 38563B, are the main powerhouses behind Messier 78. However, the nebula is home to many more stars, including a collection of about 45 low mass, young stars (less than 10 million years old) in which the cores are still too cool for hydrogen fusion to start, known as T Tauri stars. Studying T Tauri stars is important for understanding the early stages of star formation and how planetary systems are created.
Remarkably, this complex of nebulae has also changed significantly in the last ten years. In February 2004 the experienced amateur observer Jay McNeil took an image of this region with a 75 mm telescope and was surprised to see a bright nebula — the prominent fan shaped feature near the bottom of this picture — where nothing was seen on most earlier images. This object is now known as McNeil’s Nebula and it appears to be a highly variable reflection nebula around a young star.
This colour picture was created from many monochrome exposures taken through blue, yellow/green and red filters, supplemented by exposures through an H-alpha filter that shows light from glowing hydrogen gas. The total exposure times were 9, 9, 17.5 and 15.5 minutes per filter, respectively.
This zoom sequence opens with a wide-field view of the Milky Way. We close in on the constellation of Orion and as we zoom in on to a region close to Orion’s famous belt, a fascinating region of dust and reflection nebulosity starts to come into view. The final scene reveals a colourful and richly detailed new image of Messier 78 taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Credit:
ESO/S. Brunier/Chris Johnson, (cuttinedgeobservatory.com) and Igor Chekalin. Music: John Dyson (from the album Moonwind)
NVIDIA has just released details on Project Kal-El. What is Project Kal-El? Well, remember that NVIDIA has just released the Tegra 2 smartphone chip. This is being followed closely by the Tegra 2 3D. As you may surmise, the 3-D version is just a Tegra 2 with support for 3D content, and may some clock speeds being adjusted upwards. NVIDIA has also promised to release the Tegra 3 this year. Project Kal-El is the Tegra 3. In short, what NVIDIA did for the graphics cards with 6 month cycles, they now want to do for smartphones and tablets. Anandtech is reporting that tablets based on the Tegra 3 (aka Project Kal-el) are due to arrive in August 2011.
Whereas Tegra 2 is a two-core chip, Project Kal-el will be a quad-core chip. Personally, I wonder how long it will be before lawyers come after NVIDIA for using these names. Take a look at Anandtech’s article. They have some videos of the chip already running decoding full HD movies.
Today’s selection starts with TechKing‘s latest infographic, about the history of computers. The cost to connect is analyzed by Intuit, and Kiss Metrics breaksdown the Shopping Cart Abandonment rate in e-commerce websites, while 901am dives into the journey of Amazon. To close up, My Cricket explains how does a Touch Screen Phone work.
In the “Social Network”, actor Armie Hammer play both of the Winklevoss twins, and amazed several people with the amazing detail in the work. Combining split-screen effects with digital face replacement, a new short (available on the home release as well) shows how it was done.
We are literally bombarded with information, all the time, so, how does the brain deal with it? Well, 
Autodesk has just announced their intent to acquire Scaleform Corporation for the tidy sum of $36M USD in Cash. Scaleform creates UI tools and Middleware platforms for lots of platforms, providing cross-platform support across PC, Xbox, PS3, and Wii. We just recently gave you the announcement of their “Scaleform GFx” for Flash, and now it looks like they’re gonna be an even bigger part of the gaming industry going forward.
Today’s selection starts with 
VizWorld.com 
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