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October 1942. "'Share The Meat' recipes. Braised stuffed heart. Brown the hearts on all sides in fat, then place in a covered baking dish or casserole. Add a half of cup of water, cover closely and cook until tender in a very moderate oven (about 300 degrees Fahrenheit). Calf hearts require about one and a half hours, beef hearts will require much longer -- four to five hours to cook till tender." Photo by Ann Rosener for the Office of War Information. View full size.

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The Make-a-Wish Foundation teamed with the city of San Francisco earlier this month to to give five-year-old Miles “Batkid” Scott his chance to protect “Gotham City” from criminals, but the young hero’s mission continues.

This morning, the Batkid appeared on Good Morning America to protect rapper Pitbull from the Joker, and a group of artists from SF has even produced a digital comic about his heroic story. Batkid’s starting to give Bruce Wayne a run for his money.

Scott, who was diagnosed with leukemia at 18 months old, underwent chemotherapy treatment and has been in remission since June of this year. So far he seems to have a bright future as a crimefighter ahead of him. Not a lot of folks can put “saved a pop star from the Joker” on a job resume.

Check out a video of Batkid’s appearance on GMA below.

The new digital Batkid comic, put together by ad agency AKQA, uses photos from Scott’s big day to tell his story as a cancer survivor and, now, superhero. A message at the end of the special comic invites readers to donate to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

The digital comic follows The San Francisco Chronicle’s special edition print publication of roughly 1,000 “Gotham City Chronicle” newspapers distributed in SF’s Union Square during Batkid’s adventure.

[Via EW and Robot6]

Heroes of the Storm game director Dustin Browder has issued an apology for comments he made in a press interview, during which he appeared to dismiss concerns about hyper-sexualized designs of female game characters.

"In a recent interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I responded poorly to a statement the interviewer made about over-sexualized character designs in games," he wrote on the Heroes of the Storm blog. "I want to apologize for that. This is a serious topic and I don't want anyone to think that I, or anyone else at Blizzard, is insensitive about how we portray our characters."

Heroes of the Storm is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game based on characters from developer Blizzard's roster of games, including World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft.

During an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, published last week, Browder responded to a question on female character design by saying that "we're not sending a message to anybody. We're just making characters who look cool." He added that some of the characters were already sexualized before they appeared in Heroes of the Storm. "I mean, Kerrigan is wearing heels, right?"

When pressed on the matter, he added that "we're not running for President. We're not sending a message. No one should look to our game for that."

In his statement today, Browder said that he wanted to ensure that players are not alienated by hyper-sexualized designs. "We have an amazing roster of heroes and we will always strive to make sure that everyone can have a hero that they identify with and feel powerful using. And at the end of the day, we all want the same thing. A great game where we can all have fun battling for glory and maybe some bragging rights."

It's been billed as the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, will cost more to complete than the London Olympics, and promises to drastically boost the speed and capacity of mass transit in that city and its surrounding area. Already, the half-finished construction of Crossrail — a mammoth railway system that will add 26 miles of underground tunnels to London — is yielding both disruption and development in affected communities.

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In a sweeping overview of the construction efforts and their end game — a railway whose trains each transport 1,500 passengers between 24 and 30 times an hour — The Guardian examines how Crossrail is already having an impact. Above ground, the railway system is causing road closures and detours, and has the potential to drastically change property values and commercial development patterns. But below ground, at least for now, the massive project is running remarkably smoothly. "The atmosphere is calm and methodical, of routinely performing tasks that have been done thousands of times before, and with the fundamentally simple aim of getting from A to B," the piece reads. "If engineering is sometimes called an adventure, down here every effort seems to be made to neutralise it."

From the very beginning, 23andMe was the stuff TED talks are made of, promising to harness the staggering quantity of information in the human genome with big data and user-friendly web savvy. Now, it’s all but shut down. This morning, the FDA ordered an immediate halt on sales of 23andMe’s saliva test kit, the company’s only product. Until the company passes the FDA’s marketing approval process, it will be forbidden from shipping anything to users. All of the company’s ambitious plans are officially on hold.

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Can the dream of the personal genome survive?

It’s very bad news for 23andMe. And for anyone who bought into the dream of personally managed genetic data, the FDA’s move is bewildering. For all the site's problems, including occasionally threadbare scientific data, giving users access to their genome was a potentially industry-changing idea. Now, the abrupt halt has left more questions than answers. After six years on the market, why is 23andMe's sole product being barred from sale now? And without the company that pioneered it, can the dream of the personal genome survive?

23andMe, for its part, seems to be remaining optimistic. In an official response to the FDA's letter, the company came off as penitent. "We recognize that we have not met the FDA's expectations regarding timeline and communication regarding our submission," the statement reads. "Our relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us and we are committed to fully engaging with them to address their concerns." In short, they're working on it.

23andme is way behind in doing the necessary studies to back up their claims

The FDA’s marketing requirements put 23andMe in a particularly tricky spot. The requirements are designed to make sure that anyone marketing a medical product isn’t lying about what their product can do. If I want to start advertising Cholesterol-Lowering Pills, I have to prove to the FDA that the pills really do lower patients’ cholesterol — usually with a battery of scientific studies that takes years and costs millions. 23andMe’s claims are even trickier to prove. The website bills the service as a "first step in prevention," to help users in "mitigating serious diseases." They may not seem like it, but those are medical claims — and 23andMe is way behind in doing the necessary studies to back up their claims.

"The FDA and 23andme have done a sort of strange frenemy dance."

To make matters worse, the FDA seems furious. The agency’s public letter to 23andMe takes an unusually frustrated tone, detailing the hundreds of emails and 14 face-to-face meetings that led up to the block. As of January, the company still had not completed the studies it would need to make a marketing submission, despite operating for more than five years. It’s unclear whether it was startup arrogance, bad test results, or simple naiveté that led 23andMe to ignore the warnings, but the company’s marketing push only increased. A recent surge of television ads seems to have been the final straw.

Finally, the agency seems to have run out of patience

For many observers, the FDA’s rebuke has been a long time coming. As geneticist Misha Angrist puts it, "The FDA and the company have done a sort of strange frenemy dance since the beginning." The mere fact that 23andMe was able to operate for six years without marketing approval speaks to how much leeway the FDA was willing to extend at first, especially while many doctor's groups were skeptical of personal genetics from the beginning. As early as 2008, the New York State Department of Health had banned 23andMe from operating within the state, requiring laborious workarounds for New York-based users. But federal agencies were more patient. The FDA dispatched its Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health to work with 23andMe on approvals, but according to the letter, the company kept stalling. "I think the FDA was antagonized by what it perceived to be 23andMe's inattention to its demands and the company's simultaneous ramp-up of its marketing campaign," Angrist says. Finally, the agency seems to have run out of patience.

"There's always the potential for results to be misused or misinterpreted."

Some medical groups have already eagerly seized on the letter as a chance to point out the failings of any genetic testing outside the medical sphere. Speaking to The Verge this morning, the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, Rebecca Nagy, said the ruling highlights the questions consumers should be asking about personal genomics services. "Is a genetics professional involved in ordering or interpreting the test? If not, there's always the potential for results to be misused or misinterpreted," says Nagy. That's a larger issue than just 23andMe's failure to work with the FDA — but after this morning's order, everything seems to be on the table.

"It's simply gotten too cheap and too easy to do."

And in a sense, they're right. Many of the FDA's complaints are aimed at the core idea of personal genomics: that a delicate and expensive medical test could become as simple as an iPhone app. 23andMe didn't invent the saliva test, after all. All it did was bring such testing outside the doctor's office and make it available without the headaches of the health-insurance system. It was a consumer-grade version of a professional service: cheaper, easier, and not quite as good. And because the testing could be done in bulk, the service added a lot of genes that would never be tested in a medical lab, from the gene responsible for "asparagus pee" to the markers used to track a person’s Neanderthal ancestors. But that same fast-and-loose approach can cause problems if a faulty test turns up in an area with real medical complications, as vividly recounted here. And when the bad news does arrive, whether it’s an increased risk of Parkinson’s or a higher chance of heart disease, 23andMe didn’t have any counselors on hand to guide users to the medical options available or provide the proper context for understanding the results. Even if the service solves its marketing problems, those issues are likely to remain.

Still, you shouldn't count out personal genetics just yet. "I think the cow is a fair ways out of the barn," Angrist says. "Ultimately, I don't think the FDA can keep people from learning about the content of their own cells. It's simply gotten too cheap and too easy to do." But in the future, companies might need to be more modest in their goals. They might steer clear of high-stakes tests like BRCA, which is so strongly linked to breast cancer that it often spurs preventative surgery, and is currently included in the 23andMe pack. Instead, companies could focus on genomics as a hobby or a deep dive for geneology buffs. It would mean less world-changing ambition, and less startup bravado, but that might not be a bad thing. Mostly, it would mean less of a challenge to the medical industry.

A report published today on last year's Sandy Hook massacre, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn. has detailed the killer's relationship with games. The report lists his game collection but draws no conclusions about their impact on his state of mind. It does not include games in its conclusions as to his motives.

The summary report was filed by Connecticut State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III, and details the events of Dec. 21, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and, using a military-style assault rifle, murdered the children and teachers before turning the gun on himself. A more detailed report from state police is due to be released at a later date.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Lanza's interest in video games became a focal point for media, politicians and investigators. According to reports at the time, Lanza owned a large collection of violent video games, and kept a meticulously researched spreadsheet of past massacres, that was compared by law-enforcement officers to a video game score sheet.

The report shows various games owned by Lanza and collected from his house, by police. It shows that his interest in games included violent and non-violent games. The list mentions brands including Left for Dead, Metal Gear Solid, Dead Rising, Half Life, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Shin Megami Tensei, Dynasty Warriors, Vice City, Team Fortress and Doom.

According to the report Lanza "liked to play a game called Dance Dance Revolution, which is a music video game in which the player stands on a platform, watches a video screen and moves his feet as directed by the video. A home version of this was seen and photographed in the shooter's home. Several videos of him playing DDR were found on digital media taken from the home."

Investigators said he owned an "Xbox" and that his gaming history included titles including Call of Duty 2: Big Red One,  Halo 2, Lego Star Wars, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Splinter Cell 2, Star Wars Battlefront and Worms: Forts Under Seige.

It also added the he owned a PlayStation 2 with a collection including Dynasty Tactics, Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 2, Onimusha and Dynasty Warriors.

A section on his social history said that he was often a loner, but that he had hosted a LAN party at his house in 2008. The reported added that, "he played video games often, both solo at home and online. They could be described as both violent and non-violent. One person described the shooter as spending the majority of his time playing non-violent video games all day, with his favorite at one point being Super Mario Brothers."

In its conclusion, the report made no mention of games. It states, "What we do know is that the shooter had significant mental health issues that, while not affecting the criminality of the shooter's mental state for the crimes or his criminal responsibility for them, did affect his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even those to whom he should have been close. Whether this contributed in any way is unknown. The shooter did not recognize or help himself deal with these issues. He had a familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders, in particular the Columbine shootings."

Following the massacre, The National Rifle Association issued a statement blaming video games for real-world violence. "There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people," said NRA head Wayne LaPierre. "Isn't fantasizing about killing people to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?" he added.

President Obama met with video game industry executives at the White House in January as part of a fact-finding mission, before making a recommendation that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conduct further research into the relationship between video games, media images and violence.

"If there's even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we have an obligation to try it," said President Obama. "I will put everything I've got into this, and so will Joe [Biden], but I tell you the only way we can change is if the American people demand it." At the time, vice president Joe Biden said that the Government was making "no judgment" on the alleged link between violence and video games.

Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic Senator from West Virginia, introduced a bill to the Senate three days after the massacre, calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and violent video programming on children. "In today's world, where kids can access content across a variety of devices often without parental supervision, it is unrealistic to assume that overworked and stressed parents can prevent their kids from viewing inappropriate content," he said. Rockefeller has long been critical of violence in entertainment and the media. Polygon has sent a request for comment on today's report to his office.

At the Game Developers Conference in February, a panel of speakers including author Ian Bogost and former Epic boss Mike Capps argued that the public perception of gaming is overwhelmingly one that is tied to violence and violent games.

Polygon's coverage of video game issues related to the Sandy Hook massacre can be found here.