S.emmerling

EAUX, 2013

Rrose‘s 2011 techno smash “Waterfall” gets a remix treatment. The original version still blows my mind and this new “Birth” version is well worth checking out. Digital only for now, vinyl in early June.

BUY DIGITAL

Guillermo del Toro served as a guest of honor at the fourth annual Hero Complex Film Festival this past weekend in Hollywood, appearing on stage for a Q&A between screenings of two of his most personal films, the Spanish-language movies “The Devil’s Backbone,” a 2001 gothic horror movie set during the Spanish Civil War, and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” his Academy Award-winning dark fantasy set during Francoist Spain.

But the appearance also provided the writer-director with a chance to tout his latest, “Pacific Rim,” a $180-million love letter to the kaiju movies he loved growing up.

Showing the latest trailer for the film, which debuted online Thursday, spurred him to discuss his love for Japanese pop culture. He talked about reading manga series like “Astro Boy,” watching films by Toho, the Japanese production company behind Godzilla, and fancifully sketching giant robots. (To see Del Toro chatting about his inspiration for “Pacific Rim,” watch the video above.)

Due in theaters July 12, the film, which Del Toro co-wrote with Travis Beacham, takes place in a near future, after a race of giant alien monsters has invaded our world via an inter-dimensional portal, prompting mankind to build equally enormous robots called Jaegers to defeat them.

The hulking mechanized weapons are manned by an elite team of pilots, including Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Becket and Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori, who represent humanity’s best line of defense against the beastly threat.

Hosted by Hero Complex editor Gina McIntyre at the Chinese 6 Theatres, the festival started Friday night with a John Carpenter double feature and discussion and continued Saturday with a screening of “The Mist” featuring Frank Darabont and Thomas Jane.

Sunday afternoon featured a screening of “Independence Day” and conversation with director Roland Emmerich, producer Dean Devlin, star Jeff Goldbum and effects wizard Volker Engel. That was followed in the evening by a 20th anniversary tribute to “The X-Files” with creator Chris Carter and two of the series’ writers, Glen Morgan and Darin Morgan, and showings of three fan-picked episodes.

Look for more video excerpts from each of the conversations from the festival to be posted soon.

– Rebecca Keegan and Gina McIntyre

Follow us on Twitter: @LATHeroComplex

RECENT AND RELATED

HCFF 2013: Del Toro, Darabont, Emmerich, more

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Guillermo del Toro crafts ‘gothic tech’ for kaiju saga

Is ‘Pacific Rim’ the new ‘Transformers’?

Guillermo del Toro talks ‘Pacific Rim’ comic

Del Toro: Filmmaking is like hostage negotiation

Charlie Day on ‘Pacific Rim’ part: ‘This guy’s not an idiot’

Del Toro ‘not giving up’ on ‘Mountains of Madness’

Guillermo del Toro reflects on ‘Cronos’ scares

PHOTOS: On the set of ‘The Walking Dead’

Solitude hat sich die Produktionen von Sorrow zusammengesammelt und daraus diesen wirklich riesigen Mix gebastelt. Absolut großartig, auch oder gerade weil es hintenraus eher vertrackt elektronisch als dubsteppig zu geht.

(Direktlink)

Cedric Arnold was on assignment in Thailand when he first saw a shipyard worker covered head-to-toe in tattoos. This was Arnold's entry point into the yantra tattoo tradition, one that goes back hundreds of years and spans several countries in Southeast Asia.

Arnold's project, “Sacred Ink,” consumed four and a half years of his life and took him all over Thailand to cover this tradition in its entirety, from the giant ceremonies for devotees to the rare tattoos that are only found in certain parts of the country.

Incorporating elements of Buddhism, Animism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism, the tradition is believed to go back as far as the ninth century, and there’s even historical evidence of soldiers wearing the tattoos for protection in battle during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Yantra tattoos are still believed to have mystical powers and can be worn on the skin or drawn on other surfaces. Once seen as the mark of gangsters or even assassins, the tradition has become increasingly popular—and expensive. Yantra attracted international attention when Angelina Jolie got two of the tattoos on a trip to Bangkok. Now tourists travel there specifically to get inked, and the subculture has drawn lots of media interest.

“I wanted to do something a lot more personal,” Arnold said. “I chose 25 people that I found really interesting, and I narrowed it down to 15 for the final series. I wanted to know a lot about them.”

Throughout the course of the project, he came across a wide variety of people for whom yantra is a way of life, including a boxer, a monk, a construction worker, a policeman, and a taxi driver. He also got friendly with the tattoo masters, who let him behind the scenes of the complex ceremonies that are part of the tattooing process.

He saw men go into trances during the ceremonies—leaping around and clawing at the air when receiving a tattoo of a tiger, or hunching over and laughing wildly when getting a tattoo of a Hindu wise man. Arnold also learned about the ink involved.

“The ink is traditional Chinese ink but there's ash, snake venom, all sorts of things,” Arnold said. “It's very much a voodoo mix, sort of a witches’ brew in a way. There are some really wild rumors about certain tattoo masters who have all sorts of crazy things in there. One liquid people describe as corps oil, harvested from dead bodies.”

Getting access to this world involved overcoming one special hurdle.

“If you're not tattooed yourself in certain tattoo worlds, people will be very suspicious and not let you in. I explained this was a personal project, and I wanted to understand things. When they asked me why I didn’t have tattoos, I said, ‘I don't belong to this belief system, so I think it would be disrespectful for me to get one.’ ”

There were also technical hurdles. At one point, Arnold decided to try taking a photo of one of his subjects with his last sheet of Polaroid 55 film. It was 17 years out of date, so when Arnold looked at the print, it was damaged with lots of smears and marks. He loved how it looked, however, and then worked tirelessly to re-create the effect with chemicals.

Arnold also described the project as an intellectual journey. He had always been curious about superstition, and delving into this subculture helped him understand a lot about its role in Thai society, even as yantra changes and becomes more commercial.

“Yantra tattoos are going more mainstream, along the lines of Western tattooing. But the spiritual aspect of the practice in a modern, yet superstitious society like Thailand will no doubt keep it from becoming a mere fashion statement, at least for now,” Arnold wrote.

Caleb sez, "The Department of Defense ordered that 3d printed gun removed from the Internet. That didn't work out. You can still download it and print it. I did, and found that the files are a mess and not really functional. I also took a cool timelapse video of the printing."

1. the scale on the individual files was way off.

I suspect this has something to do with the printer it was designed for. It seemed very close to being 1 inch = 1 mm. Not a completely uncommon problem. Manually resizing got some files to look right, but I found many simply wouldn’t resize.

2. Almost every single item had errors.

If you’ve done 3d printing, you’ve found that a model can have all kinds of issues that will stop it from printing correctly. I found every single item for the gun had errors. I actually learned a lot about how to repair non-manifold items from this exercise, so it was good in the end.

Some items, like the hammer and the hammer springs simply would not print. I ran them through systems to repair them and fix errors. It would say that everything was fixed, but when I tried to “slice” them for printing, the software would crash. This means that my gun is incomplete. It has no hammer. Not really that big of a deal to me.

Timelapse of the 3d printed gun being printed. (Thanks, Caleb)

When he’s not lording it up as dubstep’s favourite son, Skream is also a disco fan – he’s also one of the few people who had something positive to say in yesterday’s Random Access Memories comment dump.

Before heading off on a tour of Asia, Skream has uploaded a new mix of disco – no tracklist, no Soundcloud stream, just a link that will at some point expire, so get on it here.

Update: There’s now a Soundcloud link courtesy of Do Androids Dance, below.

For the masochists amongst you, it’s worth noting that Skream’s recent set from Boiler Room and Ray Ban’s session from this year’s SXSW – the one where a drunker than usual Skream launched a CD-J into the crowd, along with other such antics – is now available to stream too.

In der Urheberrechtsdebatte melden sie gerne unterschiedliche Unternehmen aus der Unterhaltungsbranche zu Wort und beklagen sich lautstark ...

This is the third story in a multi-part series on taxonomy and speciation. It's meant to help you as you participate in Armchair Taxonomist — a challenge from the Encyclopedia of Life to bring scientific descriptions of animals, plants, and other living things out from behind paywalls and onto the Internet. Participants can earn cool prizes, so be sure to check it out! The deadline is May 20th

As depicted on Star Trek: The Original Series, the tricorder is a device that looks like the bastard love child of a Polaroid camera and a 1970s-era portable cassette deck. It was worn around the neck on a strap. It was black and clunky and definitely not what we would, today, call a sexy piece of electronics.

What made the tricorder a great piece of fictional technology wasn't its looks, but what it did. "Mr. Spock could use it to identify any organism, plant or animal, anywhere in the galaxy," said Carlos Garcia-Robledo, postdoctoral fellow in the department of botany at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. A portable tool that could quickly identify any species anywhere would be a game changer for science. Eventually, according to Garcia-Robledo and others, we'll have just that — put a piece of leaf or fur or insect leg into a machine and out pops its taxonomic information.

But what makes this really awesome is that — aside from the portable part — this is something we can actually do already. Garcia-Robledo does it regularly in his lab. The real-world tricorder isn't just something that's going to transform science someday. It's already doing that, right now.

The non-fictional tricorder is based on an idea called DNA barcoding, which originated in 2003 with Canadian biologist Paul Hebert. He thought there might be an easy way to quickly identify species using short DNA sequences that are unique to one species or another. If you had a database of these sequences, then all you'd have to do would be to match a sample to a sequence and you'd know what species you were looking at. It's similar to the way we store fingerprints, and then use those to match prints from a crime scene with an individual person.

Of course, like fingerprinting, DNA barcoding turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. The sequence most commonly used to barcode animals is a gene called CO1. It's a piece of mtDNA. This DNA is found inside the mitochondria — organelles within a cell that produce energy. It's there because, once upon a time, those mitochondria were independent bacteria, doing their own thing as single celled organisms. MtDNA doesn't create you, it creates parts of your cells.

The mitochondria, and their DNA, get passed down from generation to generation in egg cells — sperm don't usually have them. So you carry your mother's mtDNA. And she carries her mother's. But that mtDNA doesn't travel through the generations intact. Over time, it picks up little errors and changes to the sequence. This is where DNA barcoding — and its complications — come in.

Image: A room full of DNA sequencers, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jurvetson's photostream

The idea is that the changes that happen to CO1 should be able to serve as a marker between species. In order for that to work, though, the mutation rate has to hit a sweet spot, said Karen James, a staff scientist at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. She does a lot of work with DNA barcoding and described the ideal amount of variation in the DNA sequence as being a Goldilocks sort of problem. If you have too little variation (i.e., if the mtDNA doesn't change fast enough) then you'll have too many different species that share the same barcode. But if the mutations happen too quickly and you have too much variation, then you could get a bunch different barcodes within the same species. Either way, the barcode would be useless — just as if lots of people shared the same set of fingerprints.

The good news is that, for many animal species, CO1 hits that sweet spot. The bad news is that it doesn't work for everything. In fact, it doesn't work for plants at all. Their mtDNA changes too slowly. In 2009, James was part of a team that identified alternative DNA sequences that can be used to barcode plants.

CO1 also varies in how well it works for different kinds of animals. Like plants, mtDNA changes slowly in cnidarians — a phylum made up of more than 10,000 species, including many kinds of jellyfish. The plant sequences won't work for them, either, so cnidarians are notoriously difficult to barcode.

All of this explains part of why DNA barcoding can't really be used to identify new species. If you don't know the organism well enough to know how quickly its mtDNA are mutating, than you have no idea whether the changes you see represent a new species, or just variation within an old one. But that's okay, say researchers like Garcia and James. It doesn't mean DNA barcoding is useless. Think back to the tricorder, and what Mr. Spock actually did with it. He wasn't identifying new species. Instead, he was figuring out which previously-identified species lived on which planet.

Rolled leaf beetles. Carlos Garcia-Robledo pulled half-digested plant bits out of their stomachs and used the DNA from those samples to find out what the beetles were eating. Photo by Charles Staines.

DNA barcoding can be used, along with traditional taxonomy, to help identify new species. Paul Hebert demonstrated this in 2004, when he figured out that a single species of tropical butterfly was actually 10 species of tropical butterfly, cleverly masquerading as one. But naming new species and pinning them to a board really isn't what the tool is best at — and it's not the most interesting way to use it, either. Even though the tricorder of today currently takes up a space the size of a room, it's already being used to study the world far outside the lab.

For example, Carlos Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to study the relationships between beetles and the plants they eat. His team figured out how to extract plant DNA from a beetle's stomach. Compare that DNA to a barcode library, and you start to get a good idea of what different beetles in different places are chowing down on. That matters, because the beetle's diets are changing along with the climate. As habitats get hotter, some plants can't survive. So what happens to the beetles that eat them? Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to track those patterns of adaptation and extinction.

Turns out, DNA barcoding is very good at helping us answer questions of sustainability and environmental change. It's especially important in places where it would be really hard to understand biodiversity and species interaction simply by collecting and counting — like the oceans, for instance.

We know that things people do can affect ocean ecosystems. And we know that some parts of the ocean bear more of the brunt of this than others. In order to understand what those differences really mean for wildlife, Smithsonian invertebrate zoologist Allen Collins has started collecting samples of all the biodiversity in a plot of ocean — from bacteria to charismatic megafauna. DNA barcodes tell him exactly what species live there. He can go back and sample the same spot over time to see how the mix of species has changed. And he can compare those changes in places relatively untouched by humans to what's happening in areas that have a lot of human impact. What, exactly, does "human impact" mean for ocean animals? That's what he's going to find out.

There are even consumer applications. Earlier this year, the ocean advocacy group Oceana released a report showing that restaurants and grocery stores have a habit of selling customers one fish, but labeling it as another. In fact, 33% of the 1200 samples they took over two years were mislabeled. When you think you're buying red snapper, you're often actually buying much cheaper tilapia. The secret swaps can affect your health and they can also affect fish populations. All Oceana's data came from DNA barcoding, Karen James said.

So far, all of this relies on bringing the world back to the laboratory for testing. But the real, portable tricorder is inching closer. We often talk about the $1000 genome, in terms of being able to sequence the entire thing cheaply. But the same technology that's making that dream a reality also applies to the much easier and faster task of sequencing a small strand of genome — you just have to adapt the tools to the purpose of barcoding.

Last year, a company called Oxford Nanopore announced that it had developed a miniature genome sequencer that could plug into a laptop's USB port. The device, called the MinION, isn't the real-world portable tricorder. It's designed to sequence entire genomes, for one thing, which isn't really what DNA barcoders want. It's also a one-time-use tool that's expected to cost $900 a pop — if it ever makes it to the marketplace. But the MinION is a step in the right direction. Someday (and probably someday soon), scientists will be able to study changing ecosystems instantly, while they're standing in that ecosystem — just like Mr. Spock.

Samples of organisms that Allen Collins brought back to the laboratory from a research trip to Bali. Someday, he'll be able to skip this step.

PREVIOUSLY:
• What leeches and ligers can teach us about evolution
• In the leech library: Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History
• Be an Armchair Taxonomist!: A challenge from The Encyclopedia of Life