deerstalker
https://www.themarysue.com/trapped-in-suburbia-with-vivarium/
Film and television have long explored the sinister underpinnings of suburbia. From Edward Scissorhands to Disturbia to Weeds to countless others, there is something inexplicably unsettling about rows upon rows of identical tract homes, stacked one after another in an endless labyrinth of conformity.
Now, a new horror film is taking that fear to the next level. Vivarium follows a young couple looking for their starter home. When they are unable to escape the neighborhood, they resign themselves to living in the community. Things take a strangely domestic turn when they are put in charge of a baby, who they must raise in order to be released from their prison.
The synopsis reads: “Tom and Gemma (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) are looking for the perfect home. When a strange real-estate agent takes them to Yonder, a mysterious suburban neighborhood of identical houses, Tom and Gemma can’t leave quick enough. But when they try to exit the labyrinth-like housing development, each road takes them back to where they started. Soon, they realize their search for a dream home has plunged them into a terrifying nightmare, in this taut thriller filled with white-knuckle suspense.”
The film is directed by Lorcan Finnegan (Without Name) and written by Garret Shanley. As a resident of Los Angeles, I can confirm that there is nothing more terrifying than the real estate market.
(image: Saban Films)
- Snakes don’t eat people, but they LOVE remakes. A new Anaconda film is in the works. (via Collider)
- The release of the Tom Holland film Uncharted keeps getting pushed. (via Deadline)
- Let’s celebrate the Year of the Rat with the most important character in the MCU:
- Robert Zemeckis set to give us all nightmares with the live-action Pinocchio reboot. (via io9)
- Check out this behind the scenes look at Cameron Monaghan’s transformation into the Joker. (via CBR)
- Tag yourself in the comments:
Happy Chinese New Year!#YearoftheRat pic.twitter.com/kJBhLCNVzL
— Hero Within (@HeroWithinInc) January 25, 2020
fuck your star sign, what hairstyle do you want carol to have in captain marvel 2? pic.twitter.com/Zg5Fg22eEg
— amy (@endgamevalkyrie) January 24, 2020
What are you up to today, Mary Suevians?
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According to Wikipedia, the widespread use of vaccinations has “greatly reduced the incidence of many diseases in numerous geographic regions,” a fact most people already know. But tracking who’s received vaccinations and which ones remains a daunting task for medical professionals, especially when it comes to keeping tabs on children. Now, a group of MIT researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says that invisible tattoos may be the best way to deal with this tracking issue, although there are some ethical concerns with their proposed solution.
In a paper recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine (via Futurism), the group of researchers, led by Kevin J. McHugh et al., says that it is exploring a novel approach for maintaining accurate vaccination records by testing the implantation of “near-infrared quantum dots,” or NIR QDs, into pig skin, rat skin, cadaver flesh, and synthetic human skin. NIR QDs are water-soluable, biocompatible fluorescent nanocrystals—with diameters ranging from 2 to 10 nanometers—that emit near-infrared light and are safe for deep tissue insertion. As of right now, researchers are exploring NIR QDs for numerous medical uses, including, most notably, in vivo tumor imagining.
An illustration of how the NIR QDs would be applied and read. Kevin McHugh / Rice University
In the case of vaccinations, the plan is to inject NIR QDs concurrently with a given vaccine via a small patch of partially dissolvable microneedles. (The video below offers a demonstration of this process on synthetic human skin.) After insertion into a person’s skin, the NIR QDs would then continuously emit a wavelength of light not visible to the human eye, but easily imaged by certain types of cameras. This would effectively imprint a kind of invisible tattoo on people who receive vaccinations, identifing them as already inoculated. The NIR QDs used in this particular study were readable with a modified smartphone aided by machine learning algorithms.
The fight to #EndPolio has vaccinated more than 2.5 billion children and mobilized 20 million volunteers around the world since 1988.
We’re 99.9% of the way there. With continued support, we will overcome the last hurdles to eradication! pic.twitter.com/6ZoOaHwKaT
— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) January 24, 2020
The researchers say that they could read NIR QDs nine months after initial injection into rat skin, and resisted photobleaching even after receiving the simulated equivalent of five years of exposure to sunlight. The researchers also found that the NIR QDs didn’t interfere with the efficacy of the vaccines they accompanied, and they can easily customize their injection patterns in order to label or distinguish between different types of vaccinations.
This method of injecting invisible tattoos along with immunizations could potentially address the challenge of keeping accurate vaccination records in poorer countries, where centralized medical databases are hard to create or maintain. According to the researchers, if this method does indeed prove itself to be effective, it could eventually help to mitigate the 1.5 million vaccine-preventable deaths that occur each year. This would be particularly critical for children, who are especially susceptible to infectious diseases thanks to their relatively underdeveloped immune systems.
A look at the partially soluble patch of microneedles. Kevin McHugh / Rice University
Looking forward, these researchers would like to survey health care workers in various developing countries in Africa, with the intent of gaining insight into the most effective way to implement this kind of tattooed record keeping. But there people who are wary of this method of invasive record keeping, like Grace Lee, an infectious disease pediatrician at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Lee, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Smithsonian Magazine that this kind of record keeping could potentially lead to confusion, as the NIR QDs could be misapplied, or misread thanks to their fading over time. Lee also told Smithsonian that this kind of on-the-body record keeping could lead to privacy concerns and discrimination, which could potentially render the benefits of the invisible on-the-body vaccination records totally moot.
A video of the soluble patch of microneedles containing the NIR QDs being applied to synthetic skin.
What do you think about this method of using invisible markers to keep track of who and who hasn’t been vaccinated? Is this a brilliant way to save tons of lives in developing countries, or just a frightening invasion of privacy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Feature image: Kevin McHugh / Rice University
The post Scientists Propose ‘Tattoos’ To Solve Vaccination Issues appeared first on Nerdist.
Birds of Prey breaks ground on many fronts. Its Feb 7th release will mark the first superhero movie both written and directed solely by women. The film will also make its mark as the first female-led R-rated superhero flick, and depending on how the Harley Quinn-led girl gang movie performs, it could break some box office records too. At a recent event to celebrate the launch of the film, Nerdist joined a small group of journalists who sat down with creator, producer and star Margot Robbie to talk about her five-year journey developing what she hopes is DC’s next smash hit superhero flick.
Warner Bros.
Robbie is clearly passionate about Birds of Prey, which makes sense since the actress-turned-producer first envisioned the project half a decade ago. But she explained that the rarity both R-rated and female-led superhero flicks threw up considerable road blocks as the process began.
“Even the quickest movie making process can be at least three years, I reckon,” Robbie told Nerdist. “But this one, it took a little longer, it was a tall order. It was before anyone had done an R-rated comic book film. I was saying, ‘I want to do an R-rated film.’ It was before Wonder Woman and I was saying, ‘I want a female-led action film’ – you know, those things weren’t being done yet. I think they wanted to make sure that if they’re going to take a risk like that, that it was going to be done correctly. So we spent a lot of time developing the script and making everyone feel confident in the material. Then once everyone was on board, some other things started coming out to help them feel like, ‘Oh yeah, this could work.’ After that it started to move really fast, but in the initial stages I think what I was pitching sounded crazy.”
Warner Bros.
Her inspiration for the film came during the press tour for Suicide Squad, when Robbie first fully encountered the huge fandom for her character as well as the amazing roster of female characters that the DC Universe had to offer.
“During Suicide Squad–when we would go to Comic-Con and such–I started to realize there was just such a huge fan base for Harley,” she remembered. “Whilst I was researching the character I started to read Birds of Prey and first I fell in love with Huntress, and I started looking into all of that. I was like, ‘Wow, there’s so many cool female DC characters and no one knows anything about any of them!’ So what if we had a platform for fans to get to know and fall in love with some of these other amazing women? Focusing on the Gotham City Sirens, there were only three of us and we were all well known, whereas with Birds of Prey you can pick any grouping for that, and I thought that might be the perfect platform to introduce some female characters who might really have some legs in the DC Universe.”
Warner Bros.
Once she’d convinced the studio that Birds of Prey was a winning idea, Robbie was quick to find her creative collaborator in Bumblebee scribe Christina Hodson.
“Christina was one of the first writers that I met with,” she said. “We met, we started workshopping it, and we had a script within the first year, but we did get stuck in the treatment stage for a bit. Then it gets to the fun part, we’re good to go, we can bring in a director, we can bring in a cinematographer, we can start to cast… which is really the most fun part, when you see those actors reading your words and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is real!'”
As for how it feels now that the film is almost out there for the world to see, Robbie didn’t hold back her excitement – or anxiety.
“This is the scariest part,” she admitted. “I always find when you’re putting a film out there and you’ve spent years putting it together but it’s picture locked and you’re just waiting for everyone to see it, now I can’t do anything about it. I just have to wait for everyone to see it and that’s a scary thing, but I am really excited for people to finally see it. I just hope that they like it.”
Birds of Prey hits screens on Feb 7th.
The post Margot Robbie’s Five-Year Fight To Make BIRDS OF PREY appeared first on Nerdist.