Now Luke Evans Is The Crow

Few reboots have seen as many casting rumors regarding its lead character as The Crow. Once upon a time, Bradley Cooper was attached to the film, which would reintroduce the character first brought to the big screen by Brandon Lee in 1994. That release is perhaps most infamous for the accidental death of Lee that took place during filming.

However, since Cooper dropped out, actors like James McAvoy, Tom Hiddleston and Alexander Skarsgard have all been rumored to lead the reboot, though no official casting announcements had been made. That all changes now, as the film ? which will be directed by Spanish filmmaker F. Javier Guti?rrez ? has apparently landed its star.

According to Deadline, Welsh actor Luke Evans (The Raven) has been cast as the vengeance-seeking character in The Crow. Evans was reportedly the first choice for the part but was unable to commit due to schedule conflicts. However, the film?s start date subsequently got pushed back in order to accommodate Evans, and the production is seemingly now back on track.

It?s easy to see why Evans was initially unavailable to lead The Crow. The actor ? best known at this point for his role as Zeus in the 2011 release Immortals ? has since snagged a number of juicy parts. In the next year or so, he will appear as the lead villain in Fast & Furious 6, Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and the title character in director Gary Shore?s Dracula origin story.

With that slate of films, Evans is an up-and-comer, to be sure. However, his casting here ? in a much-discussed relaunch of a franchise with a cult following ? is a tremendous vote of confidence in him by the creative team behind The Crow reboot. After all, the film has had a number of recognizable leading men attached to it over the years, and Evans is largely an unproven commodity as a leading man.

Still, the same could be said of Lee. His role in the original Crow film ? the tragic circumstances surrounding it, notwithstanding ? has certainly stood the test of time. Perhaps The Crow is the perfect launching pad for Evans to catapult his status from rising star to bonafide box office draw. Regardless, The Crow (especially being a film based on comic books) has a devoted cult following, and fans on both sides surely have their own opinions on how the character should be brought to life onscreen.

That being said, do you think Evans is the right man to help The Crow take flight? Sound off in the comments section below.

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The Crow reboot does not currently have a release date, but now that the casting has begun, expect that to change soon. Stay tuned to Screen Rant for the latest details.

Source: Deadline

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1927401/news/1927401/

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T. rex troubles: The last dino legal battle

By Wynne Parry, LiveScience

Almost a year ago, headlines proclaiming the sale of a largely complete T. rex-like dinosaur sparked an international custody battle that featured a confrontation at a public auction, a federal seizure of the fossils, charges related to smuggling against Eric Prokopi, the man who attempted to sell them ? and, finally, his guilty plea.?

This case appears to be winding down. Prokopi is awaiting sentencing, and during a ceremony in New York City on Monday, Mongolia ? the country from which Prokopi admitted he took the ill-gotten fossils ? will take formal possession of the finds.?

This is not the first time a fight over a prize dinosaur grabbed national attention and was followed by a criminal case.?

More than 20 years ago, a team led by Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research discovered and excavated what was at the time the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex specimen ever found. The dinosaur, named Sue after the woman who first spotted its fossils, became the focus of an ownership dispute, which caught the attention of federal prosecutors.

[ Image Gallery: The Life of Tyrannosaurus Rex]?

Sue's story ended at an auction in 1997, where the dinosaur sold for a landmark $8.36 million.?

While the two cases share some obvious similarities, Larson expresses no sympathy for Prokopi, the fossil hunter and dealer at the center of the current case, describing it as "something very different from the Sue case."?

Tyrannosaurus Sue's saga
Sue and Larson's story began in South Dakota in August 1990, when fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson discovered the T. rex in a cliff on a ranch on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation.?

An ownership dispute involving the institute, the rancher and the tribe arose. This caught the attention of the U.S. Attorney's office in South Dakota, which was already investigating allegations the institute had taken fossils from public lands. The National Guard carted Sue away from the Black Hills Institute in Hill City, S.D., prompting an outcry from residents of the town, where the institute planned to establish a museum displaying the dinosaur, according to an account in Steve Fiffer's "Tyrannosaurus Sue."?

The feds later slapped Larson, his colleagues and the institute with an array of charges related to collecting and selling fossils. None of the charges concerned Sue, and only a handful resulted in convictions.

[ Image Gallery: Amazing Dinosaur Fossils ]?

Larson pleaded not guilty, but was convicted of two felonies for customs' violations for failing to report cash and traveler's checks, as well as two misdemeanors, for which he received a two-year prison term. He has since returned to paleontology and the helm of the Black Hills Institute. Larson discusses the legal case and the discovery of Sue and other T. rex specimens in the book "Rex Appeal," co-authored with Kristin Donnan.?

In 1997, the auction house Sotheby's sold Sue at a public auction. The sale was unprecedented, and an article in The New York Times contained speculation the specimen would fetch " upward of $1 million." In fact, the dinosaur sold for a total of $8.36 million to The Field Museum in Chicago.?

A Mongolian dinosaur in America
Two decades later, Prokopi hoped to capitalize on the high prices that a prehistoric predator could attract. He imported rough, fossilized remains of a Tarbosaurus bataar from a dealer in England, prepared and mounted them. He placed the finished, 8-foot-tall and 24-foot-long (2.4 meters by 7.3 meters) Tarbosaurus bataar with Heritage Auctions for an auction scheduled to occur on May 20 last year. (Tarbosaurus was an Asian relative of the North American T. rex.)?

News of the sale sparked protest from the Mongolian President, Elbegdorj Tsakhia,who said the specimen had likely been taken illegally from his country, whose laws designate all fossils as state property. Paleontologists supported this claim, saying that all nearly complete Tarbosaurus specimens have been recovered from a rock formation in Mongolia's share of the Gobi Desert. Federal prosecutors seized the Tarbosaurus, Prokopi fought to keep the dinosaur, and prosecutors charged him with crimes related to smuggling the Tarbosaurus and other fossils into the country.?

"If you are exporting from a certain country, you should know the laws," Larson said. "It is just a standard thing everybody should do."?

Although Mongolian regulations do not allow for the export of fossils excavated within the country's borders, fossils known to come from Mongolia began appearing on the market in the United States at least 10 years ago, Larson said.?

In December, Prokopi pleaded guilty to charges related to fossil smuggling. The plea should help stop the plundering of Mongolian fossil sites, Larson said. "And that's a good thing."?

Hurting science
These smuggled fossils arrive without crucial information about where they were found, creating problems if paleontologists want to study the remains. For example, researchers, including Larson, disagree on the identity of a small dinosaur sold to an American collector without a known origin.?

If excavated in China, the dinosaur may be a miniature ancestor to T. rex and Tarbosaurus, one side argues. Meanwhile, Larson and others say these fossils are more likely to represent a young Tarbosaurus from Mongolia.?

"The scientific conclusions are completely different depending on where it is from," Larson said.?

Paleontology & capitalism
In http://www.livescience.com/21145-fossil-dealer-speaks-out.html">a statement Prokopi released in June, he described federal prosecutors' involvement as an effort "to please a foreign government out for a political trophy." Later, in an interview for The New Yorker magazine conducted after his plea, Prokopi emphasized how common Tarbosaurus fossils are and suggested that the finds were exported from Mongolia with the sanction of that country's officials, in spite of its law.?

Regardless of Prokopi's defense, both this case and Sue's call attention to the divide between academic and commercial paleontology. Some academics believe the sale of fossils harms science, although museums often acquire specimens from commercial paleontologists.?

Prokopi addresses the hostile response that he said news of the Tarbosaurus' sale provoked, writing in his statement: "Do people really think everything they see in a museum was found and prepared by the people that work there? The truth is many spectacular finds in paleontology have been privately funded."?

Although he works in the fossil business, Larson straddles the divide to some degree, collaborating with academic paleontologists on research and authoring scientific publications.?

"I am a capitalist, too," he said. "I think it's very important. People need to make a living. [But] they need to do it legally, whether they agree with the law or not. If not, it hurts everybody. It hurts the science, it hurts the public who are cheated from not being able to see the specimen.?

"[The fossils] deserve respect. They are part of the http://www.livescience.com/28127-dinosaur-extinction-caused-by-comet.html">history of life on the planet, and they are not just something to tear apart because you can," he said.?

Follow us?@livescience,?Facebook &?Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2b891145/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A50C0A50C180A674470Et0Erex0Etroubles0Ethe0Elast0Edino0Elegal0Ebattle0Dlite/story01.htm

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OK, maybe some sages shouldn?t be on stages (Unqualified Offerings)

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Discovery helps show how breast cancer spreads

May 5, 2013 ? Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered why breast cancer patients with dense breasts are more likely than others to develop aggressive tumors that spread. The finding opens the door to drug treatments that prevent metastasis.

It has long been known that women with denser breasts are at higher risk for breast cancer. This greater density is caused by an excess of a structural protein called collagen.

"We have shown how increased collagen in the breasts could increase the chances of breast tumors spreading and becoming more invasive," says Gregory D. Longmore, MD, professor of medicine. "It doesn't explain why women with dense breasts get cancer in the first place. But once they do, the pathway that we describe is relevant in causing their cancers to be more aggressive and more likely to spread."

The results appear online May 5 in Nature Cell Biology.

Working in mouse models of breast cancer and breast tumor samples from patients, Longmore and his colleagues showed that a protein that sits on the surface of tumor cells, called DDR2, binds to collagen and activates a multistep pathway that encourages tumor cells to spread.

"We had no idea DDR2 would do this," says Longmore, also professor of cell biology and physiology. "The functions of DDR2 are not well understood, and it has not been implicated in cancer -- and certainly not in breast cancer -- until now.

At the opposite end of the chain of events initiated by DDR2 is a protein called SNAIL1, which has long been associated with breast cancer metastasis. Longmore and his colleagues found that DDR2 is one factor helping to maintain high levels of SNAIL1 inside a tumor cell's nucleus, a necessary state for a tumor cell to spread. Though they found it is not the only protein keeping SNAIL1 levels high, Longmore says DDR2 is perhaps the one with the most potential to be inhibited with drugs.

"It's expressed only at the edge of the tumor," says Longmore, a physician at Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital and co-director of the Section of Molecular Oncology. "And it's on the surface of the cells, which makes it very nice for developing drugs because it's so much easier to target the outside of cells."

Longmore emphasizes that DDR2 does not initiate the high levels of SNAIL1. But it is required to keep them elevated. This mechanism that keeps tumor cells in a state that encourages metastasis requires constant signaling -- meaning constant binding of DDR2 to collagen.

If that continuous signal is blocked, the cell remains cancerous, but it is no longer invasive. So a drug that blocks DDR2 from binding with collagen won't destroy the tumor, but it could inhibit the invasion of these tumors into surrounding tissue and reduce metastasis.

One possible way DDR2 may govern metastasis is its influence on the alignment of collagen fibers. If fibers are aligned parallel to the tumor's surface, the tumor is less likely to spread. While fibers aligned perpendicular to the surface of the tumor provide a path for the tumor cells to follow and encourage spreading. Tumors without DDR2 or SNAIL1 tend to show the parallel fiber alignment that is protective against spreading.

"This whole notion of fiber alignment and the tumor interface is a hot topic right now," Longmore says. "Our co-authors at the University of Wisconsin have developed a scoring method for collagen alignment that correlates with prognosis. And the bad prognosis disappears when you take away DDR2."

With the current emphasis on genetic mutations in cancer, Longmore is careful to point out that 70 percent of invasive ductal breast cancers show DDR2. But in 95 percent of these tumors the genes in this pathway -- from DDR2 to SNAIL1 -- are entirely normal, without mutations.

"If you did genomic sequencing, all of these particular genes would be normal," Longmore says. "You have to be careful not to just focus on mutations in cancer. This is an example of normal genes put together in an aberrant situation. The change in the environment -- the tumor and its surroundings -- causes the abnormal expression of these proteins. It is abnormal, but it's not caused by a gene mutation."

In early drug development efforts, Longmore and his colleagues have done some preliminary work looking for small molecules that may inhibit DDR2 binding to collagen.

"Currently there are no DDR2 specific inhibitors," Longmore says. "But there is great interest and work being done here and elsewhere to develop them."

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/8YoQt0a2cgM/130505145807.htm

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Flight of the RoboBee: Tiny hovering robot creates buzz

The successful controlled flight of the tiny RoboBee ? designed by a team at Harvard ??represents a key step in the development of insect-size drones with a range of potential uses.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / May 2, 2013

Five individual robotic flies of identical design are shown alongside a US penny for scale, demonstrating that the manufacturing process facilitates repeatability and mass production.

Courtesy of Kevin Ma, Pakpong Chirarattananon

Enlarge

A robotic fly with a body not much taller than a penny standing on edge has taken to the air, passing its tests with flying colors. The RoboBee, as it's called, is the smallest artificial insect yet flown, according to the team that built it.

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It lifts off the table, hovers, and flies in different directions. At this point in its evolution, the bug is still tethered by thin wires that allow its designers to power and guide it. And landing remains an issue. The robot ends its sorties with all the grace of a mosquito nailed with a burst of Raid.

Still, the tiny craft's success ? the team that designed it said it was the first such object to fly in a controlled manner ? represents a key step in developing insect-size drones that designers say could one day search collapsed buildings for survivors after a disaster, sample an environment for hazardous chemicals before humans are sent in, or pinpoint enemy soldiers or terrorists holed up in urban areas.

Some members of the team suggest that future generations of the bug could serve as a robotic pollinator for plants, though without the side benefit of honey.

Over the years, researchers have marveled at insect flight in no small part because it appears to violate every principle that keeps a bird or an airliner aloft.

Together with an announcement this week that another team of researchers has developed a buglike compound lens for collecting video taken with small aerial vehicles, the description of RoboBee appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science signals how far robotic bug research has come in the past decade.

"Just fantastic," enthuses John Rogers, who heads the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when asked about RoboBee. Dr. Rogers guided the team that developed the artificial compound lens.

RoboBee is something of a misnomer. The team modeled its bug after a hoverfly, which looks like a bee. Hoverflies show remarkable control over their movements ? from hovering, as the name implies, to lightly touching down on a wind-tossed blossom.

The hoverfly wanna-be was built by researchers and graduate students at Harvard University and weighs a scant .003 ounces. Its wingspan stretches just over an inch, and its wings flap as many as 120 times a second, with each stroke covering an angle of 110 degrees ? all comparable to a hoverfly's characteristics. Each of the two independently controlled wings weighs about .00003 of an ounce.

The bug is far too small for hardware typically used in robots as stand-ins for muscles and joints, so the team "had to develop solutions from scratch, for everything," said Harvard engineering professor Robert Wood, who led the team, in a prepared statement.

The body of the bug was made from carbon-fiber composites with thin plastic strips serving as joints. The team crafted muscles from thin layers of ceramics that expand and contract when electricity is applied to them. The bug's overall power consumption is a paltry .019 of a watt ? so small a flashlight bulb wouldn't notice.

Over the past two years, the team has refined the manufacturing process to such a degree that they can replace a bug that augers in fairly quickly. In the past six months, the team has gone through 20 prototypes, according to Kevin Ma, a graduate student at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and one of two lead authors on the formal research paper appearing in Science.

The team's next challenge is to gradually move the bug from tethered to increasingly autonomous. At some point, that means it needs to see where it's going.

One potential solution appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, where an international team ? including Kenneth Crozier, with Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences ? formally unveiled an artificial eye similar in design to the eyes of a fire ant or bark beetle. It boasts an array of 256 microlenses, 180 of which are used for imaging. Each of these imaging lenses sits atop a light sensor. All sit in tidy order on a half sphere.

In nature, this arrangement gives insects an extraordinary field of view and an ability to keep virtually everything they see in focus, no matter how close or distant.

In the past, researchers have developed layouts that mimic to some degree a compound eye, but the arrays have been either flat or hemispherical but laboriously handcrafted.

The team the University of Illinois's Rogers guided found a way to use elastic materials to give the overall array the shape it needed without throwing the microlenses and the light sensors each was paired with out of alignment. The compound lens is just under half an inch wide.

In an e-mail, Rogers says the team hopes to improve the compound lens's resolution ? its ability to distinguish between two closely spaced objects. Indeed, he says he's confident that the approach will yield lenses that outperform even the best insect eyes.

"We are working on that, and on schemes that allow the overall size of the camera to be reduced," he says, including a size befitting a RoboBee.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/hOVUjL6Oo6U/Flight-of-the-RoboBee-Tiny-hovering-robot-creates-buzz

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UPDATE: Travel Insurer Decides To Listen To Customer's Doctor ...

Last month, we told you about a California woman whose travel insurance claim was denied because the insurance company posed her doctor a single yes/no question rather than let him explain his patient?s condition. After being shamed in public, the insurer is changing its tune ? at least for this case.

Those who have perfect recall can skip ahead a few paragraphs, but here?s the background for those in need of a refresher. The woman had paid $29.33 for travel insurance for a flight from L.A. to Washington, D.C. She later began experiencing shortness of breath and her doctor said she was not medically fit to fly.

She attempted to make a claim, hoping to get a refund of the full $451 airfare. Her cardiologist provided Allianz, the insurer, with a statement explaining that her shortness of breath could be attributable to heart or kidney trouble, and included a list of all her visits to his office for more than a year. He further indicated that none of these visits involved this latest diagnosis of possible heart or kidney trouble.

But then Allianz sent a second form, asking, ?Was the patient symptomatic of or receiving treatment for the primary or underlying conditions? in the four months before booking her trip? It was a simple yes or no question, and it was worded so generally that the cardiologist could not answer anything but ?yes,? even though that could be ? and was ? interpreted as indicating that the patient suffered from a pre-existing condition, which would void her claim.

?I had to say, ?Yes,?? the cardiologist told the L.A. Times? David Lazarus. ?What else can you say??

However, since Lazarus? story was published, Allianz decided that maybe it should allow the doc a chance to explain the difference between an underlying condition and a pre-existing condition.

?It is unfortunate that this information was unable to be conveyed to you during your decision-making for [the woman's] insurance claim,? the cardiologist wrote in his subsequent explanation to Allianz. ?The form letters that were sent me did not offer a chance for a proper explanation.?

After presumably pretending to listen to the doctor and just wishing this story would go away, Allianz decided to refund the $451 to the woman.

?We apologize for any inconvenience she may have experienced while we worked to obtain more information from her doctor,? a company rep tells Lazarus, ?but we?re glad that we could provide coverage in this circumstance and we wish her the best in her future travels.?

But, as Lazarus points out, the Allianz rep declined to answer whether this incident would give the insurer any reason to re-think its claims approval process.

Just keep this all in mind when deciding whether or not to buy travel insurance, especially for your tickets to outer space.

Source: http://consumerist.com/2013/05/03/update-travel-insurer-decides-to-listen-to-customers-doctor-after-public-shaming/

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DARPA wants your ideas for a mobile ad hoc network, no internet please

Creating a mobile ad hoc network is tricky when rounding people up for a game or two, let alone when linking thousands of soldiers whose lives are at stake. DARPA has had enough trouble getting such large-scale networks off the ground that it just put out an official request for solutions. The agency wants ad hoc technology that grows both elegantly and automatically, and it's prepared to ditch legacies like internet-based networking to get there -- in fact, it would rather not rely on IP technology when 20 years of research in that area hasn't panned out. Anyone sitting on a brilliant solution has until May 24th to submit an abstract for consideration ahead of an August 7th symposium. We hope at least a few people answer the call, if just for the possibilities that breakthroughs spill over to civilian life -- DARPA helped build the networking we're using right now, after all.

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