firehose

When playing Nintendo's Super Mario 3D World, players will want to keep an eye out for cherries — every cherry collected will clone the player's character.

Polygon played a recent demo of new levels from the game and, playing as Princess Peach, every time we picked up a cherry, we received an additional Peach to our party. We were able to clone a sisterhood of five Peaches, all moving in tandem.

The cloned Peaches naturally gravitated toward each other, moving single-file through the levels. Players can also separate them using the 3D environment. We were able to separate our Peaches by walking some of them against a wall — those who were touching the wall stayed on the spot, while those who weren't against the wall continued along the path. Separating them was particularly useful, especially when we wanted want to scatter our Peaches on multiple platforms to increase our range of attack. When we picked up the fire ball power-up, this also meant we were able to spread them out and shoot from multiple locations.

Some levels will also have special areas that players can only access if they have a certain number of clones with them. This means players have to pick up cherries when they can and avoid getting hit by enemies, because every hit will eliminate a sister.

Other characters will behave differently when cloned. If players choose Luigi or Toad, those characters will have a tendency to drift apart. This makes them a bit more difficult to control but makes it easier for players to spread them out.

Super Mario 3D World will launch on the Wii U on Nov. 22 in North America.

Etsy is making significant policy changes today that will offer sellers more flexibility and convenience than ever before. But the new guidelines, which allow the sale of items produced entirely by "manufacturing partners," may also change what Etsy's users love about the site: its homemade, indie feel. But according to CEO  Chad Dickerson, it's a necessary change. "When Etsy started, we relied on one word to carry all our values out into the world: handmade," he wrote in a blog post detailing the new policies. "Almost immediately, that was a problem."

The new rules allow products to be labeled "handmade" so long as the original idea for that item — or its "authorship" as Dickerson says — comes from its respective seller. Further, Etsy businesses can now bring on as many helping hands as they deem necessary (and even hire workers in different locations). And sellers can finally ship orders via third-party couriers rather than the post office.

More flexibility, but at what cost?

According to the company's CEO, many users felt hamstrung by the old policies, criticizing them as confusing and overly restrictive. "Some sellers chose to work punishing hours to maintain a one-person shop, thinking that if they hired help, they would get kicked off the site," he said. Others "quietly began to bend the rules, hoping that no one would really notice." But Etsy is determined not to move away from its reputation completely. Sellers that wish to partner with outside businesses will need to apply for the company's approval by the start of 2014. As part of that process, they'll need to be completely transparent about where and how their items are being produced. Dickerson also notes that, even as the company works to make things clearer for its seller community, there's bound to be pushback. Speaking to All Things D, he said, "Policy changes can’t make everyone happy,”

Submitted by: Unknown (via Ann Wagner)

Premium networks like HBO and Showtime have long offered free preview weekends to get cable subscribers hooked on their programming, but now they're going online to get their customers where they're spending most of their time. Showtime is now streaming the premiere of season three of terrorism thriller Homeland on YouTube, as is HBO for the season four premiere of its comedy Eastbound & Down, starring Danny McBride.

It's not the first time that the networks have offered premieres on YouTube: the very first episode of Homeland made headlines when it was published online ahead of its network premiere, and the season 2 premiere was released on YouTube as well. Various premieres for Dexter, Ray Donovan, and House of Lies have received similar treatment in the past. Additionally, just last week Showtime published the first episode of Masters of Sex, which dramatizes William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson's 1950s research of the human sexual response, onto YouTube. For HBO's part, the network released the premieres of Girls and Veep onto YouTube, HBO.com, and other streaming services last year. It's a promising trend for major networks to embrace YouTube, but we'll all have to keep dreaming of a web-only subscription to premium networks that's not tied to costly cable bundles — the companies have expressed little interest to date.

A new fertility treatment has allowed a woman in Japan to give birth, even though she'd stopped producing eggs around four years prior. The new treatment is being called "in vitro activation," and it may be able to let women who have become infertile because of a condition called primary ovarian insufficiency (POI) have children. The researchers behind it think that it may be applicable to even more conditions than that, and it's already seeing its first success stories against POI. Another patient has become pregnant with the method, and three other women were able to produce eggs.

Ovarian follicles that had stopped growing were reactivated

The method involves activating ovarian follicles that have become inactive. Generally, a single one of these follicles will grow to maturity and release an egg each month, but POI prevents that from happening. This research, which was led from Japan's St. Marianna University School of Medicine with additional work by Stanford, has determined a way to activate those follicles again in some women. According to the Los Angeles Times, by removing part of the ovary, cutting the tissue into small cubes, and then treating the cubes with a drug that encouraged growth, the research team was able to prevent the process that would normally stop the follicles from maturing, and coax them into producing eggs.

After treatment, transplanting the cubes of tissue back to the women led to follicles growing on eight out of 13 patients, reports the LA Times. Five of the women produced eggs, which have been fertilized using in vitro fertilization techniques. Many embryos were successfully created in the process, though some still remain frozen while others have failed to establish a pregnancy after being implanted. The woman who did give birth is 29, and reportedly hadn't been producing eggs since she was 24. The researchers' findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lead researcher Kazuhiro Kawamura performed the Cesarean section for the successful birth himself. "I could not sleep the night before the operation, but when I saw the healthy baby, my anxiety turned to delight," Kawamura says in a statement. "The couple and I hugged each other in tears." The research team is now looking to see whether the method is effective in women who are infertile for other reasons, including sterilizing cancer treatments. Even though the new technique is only working with a single cause of infertility right now, Kawamura sees this birth as an important step forward: "I hope that [in vitro activation] will be able to help patients with primary ovarian insufficiency throughout the world."

Submitted by: Unknown