After seing this, I’m pretty sure most of you are thinking that this is only a parody video, but no, it’s actually a real game made by the people over at the Stabyourself game studio.
Two genre defining games from completely different eras: Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. and Valve’s Portal. These two games managed to give Platformers and First-Person Puzzle Games a solid place in the video game world. But what if Nintendo teamed up with Valve and recreated the famous Mario game with Portal gun mechanics?
It’s here, Geeks. The DC relaunch starts today, and whether that brings you joyous fits of geekgasm or barely-controllable geek rage, our friends at Lumberjack Films just want you to know that it’s going to be okay, guys.
Probably.
Starring Mike Curran and Ariana Vacs Renwick; Music by Kevin MacLeod
We’ve featured Raygun Robin’s clothes here before, but some things can’t be discussed enough–like how awesome the dresses from Robin’s shop are. Now, aside from the Firefly, Squid Tentacle and TARDIS versions, Robin has a new option: The Elder Sign Dress. Now you can protect yourself against the Darkness You Shall Not Name in 55% cotton, 45% polyester jersey.
You can pick yours up in the Raygun Robin shop for $36. They’re super-soft, comfy, and get even better the more you wash them.
(We know this because Bad Staffer practically lives in her Firefly dress. The rest of the staff have asked that she kindly get a new one, or at least a couple to alternate.)
Since Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant in 1967, medical science has been kind of stuck with transporting organs on ice, quickly, to the recipient. Maybe not for long, though–if the breakthrough method of organ transport and storage shown in the video below receives FDA approval, the lifetime of a donor heart would be extended from the current 6-hour “safe to use” window, possibly long enough to travel cross-country if necessary to find the best donor-recipient match.
Content warning: This is a live, beating heart inside a box. Don’t watch if that sounds like a thing you don’t want to see.
The special delivery was part of an ongoing national, multi-center phase 2 clinical study of an experimental organ-preservation system that allows donor hearts to continue functioning in a near-physiologic state outside the body during transport. The trial is being led by principal investigator Dr. Abbas Ardehali, surgical director of the heart and lung transplantation program at UCLA.
Rob Evans, 61, the CEO of a nonprofit in Arizona, had been waiting nearly four years for a new heart. When asked if he was interested in enrolling in the research study, he said he thought the concept of a “warm, beating heart” sounded like common sense. His transplant surgery took place in June.
The Organ Care System (OCS), developed by a medical device company called TransMedics, works this way: After a heart is removed from a donor’s body, it is placed in a high-tech OCS device and is immediately revived to a beating state, perfused with oxygen and nutrient-rich blood, and maintained at an appropriate temperature. The device also features monitors that display how the heart is functioning during transport.
Currently, the phase 2 trial is still underway. But should it prove consistently as successful as it was in Evans’ case, this will be the biggest breakthrough in organ transplant surgery since 1967.
Swedish artist Andreas Englund has created a series of paintings that examine what might happen if supers weren’t granted the gift of eternal youth, as we’re accustomed to seeing. They’re funny, and sometimes sweet, but awesome overall.
Obligatory artist’s statement:
“Humor can be the carrier of messages that are otherwise hard to convey. For me, it liberates my thoughts and ideas from pretentiousness while at the same time it opens doors to new routes and angles.”
For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world´s first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS)
This is the Eris Simulation, the first complete and accurate simulation of a spiral galaxy, created by researchers at the University of Zurich using a supercomputer and 20 years of amassed data. The video shows 13.7 billion years of time-lapsed formation, the result of nine months of constant number-crunching. You can see that the Eris Simulation closely mimics the shape of our own Milky Way in this side-by-side comparison of the two, shown here in UV-only with Eris on the left and Milky Way at right.
“The simulation follows the interaction of more than 60 million particles of dark matter and gas,” says Piero Madau from the University of California in Santa Cruz, leader of the study conducted with Javiera Guedes from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Zurich.
Apple’s iTunes streaming service has begun testing, and it appears to be better than expected.
The service, known as iTunes Match, will be a paid-for feature ($24.99 a year) in iCloud, the company’s online storage service. The word match is the key there as this isn’t cloud computing in the traditional sense and in the way rival music services such as Google Music work.
Instead of users uploading their music files for remote access, which a pain in the butt for users with large collections, Apple instead scans a user’s iTunes library and matches it to its own set of files. Users are then automatically able to access a 256Kbps copy of the relevant files on Apple servers, which is good news for those who now regret ripped their disc collection at a lower bitrate. It appears there’ll still be a separate copy of the file online for each user, so it’s not a space-saving measure for Apple.
The matching library includes all four major record labels, which was one of the barriers to launching the service. If you have music that isn’t in Apple’s library, you can still store it online, but you’ll have to upload it. There’s a limit of 25,000 songs covering both matched and uploaded tracks.
Once the library is in place, you can download it to any Mac or internet-connected iOS5 device. You can also stream it without downloading first, using either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. The service works for up to 10 devices, of which up to five can be computers.
The bad news is that the service will be US-only at launch, and the need to get separate streaming licenses for other countries means it could take a long while to roll out internationally.
The service is currently available to registered Apple developers only. They’ll have to pay the $24.99 fee now, but once the service goes public they’ll get 15 months’ membership without any additional payment.
