December 28, 2015

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Entertainment December 28, 2015

Today in Movie Culture: Radiohead's 'SPECTRE' Theme Song, 'Star Wars' Pranks and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Alternate Theme Song of the Day:

Radiohead unveiled their unused song written for the James Bond movie SPECTRE, and you can hear it below over the movie’s actual title sequence.

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Jedi Prank Trick of the Day:

Magician Rahat Hossain has fun with the current Star Wars mania by pulling a prank inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death (via Geek Tyrant):

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Movie Mashup of the Day:

If you still haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens, spoiler: Kylo Ren is Ren the chihuahua, and here he is with his cat friend, Stimpy (via Live for Films):

Fan Theory of the Day:

Speaking of characters’ actual identities in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, here’s a look at the theory that Rey is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s granddaughter:

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Movie Comparison of the Day:

It’s pretty noticeable that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is similar to the original movie, but here’s a breakdown of all the evidence that they’re the same story:

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Vintage Film of the Day:

Today is the 120th anniversary of the first, famous public showing of the Lumiere Brothers‘ original short films, including Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, at the Grand Cafe in Paris. Watch one of these films, the very first comedy, The Sprinkler Sprinkled, below.

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Cosplay of the Day:

We hear Slimer is back for the Ghostbusters reboot. But no, this cosplaying pug is not playing the ghost in the movie (via Fashionably Geek):

Clever Short Film of the Day:

Watch a short narrative film about a drug deal in which all the dialogue is made up of movie titles — with their posters shown on screen (via Design Taxi):

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Movie Science of the Day:

Nerdist’s Kyle Hill explores the reality of building up an immunity to a poison, a la Wesley in The Princess Bride:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 70th anniversary of the theatrical release of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Spellbound. Watch the original trailer for the thriller starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman below.

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Business December 28, 2015

Buying A New Car Can Trim Your Carbon Footprint, But There's More To It

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If you drive an older, less efficient vehicle, ever think about swapping it for a new, more efficient one? It’s a good way to reduce your carbon footprint. But there are a lot of factors to consider.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

All the recent talk about curbing climate change has many wondering how they can reduce their carbon footprint. Some are switching to more environmentally friendly vehicles. NPR’s John Ydstie takes a look at what you should know if you’re thinking about getting a new car.

JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: I started by calling Sport Chevrolet in Silver Spring, Md., to find out what options I might have if I traded in my gas-burning car for an electric or a hybrid. They told me to come by one morning and have a look, so I did. And salesman Norm Kristall started out showing me a small electric car called a Chevy Spark.

NORM KRISTALL: Well, it’s a commuter vehicle, and we hope that most people who buy it are just driving a certain amount of miles every day. It gets up to 80 miles, so…

YDSTIE: So around 80 miles on a single charge but no auxiliary gas engine. So when the battery dies, you’re stuck. We decided to go for a ride.

KRISTALL: Kind of a very quiet start, almost like a space ship. You know, there’s no engine sound when you turn it on.

YDSTIE: Other companies also make this kind of four-seater commuter car. The Nissan leaf was one of the first. Dan Sperling, co-director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis, says there are a number of things you should consider before you buy an electric car. First, do you just need a car for commuting or other relatively short trips, and what fuel produces the electricity you will use to charge it?

DAN SPERLING: If you buy an electric car in an area where the electricity is made mostly from coal, your car will be the same or possibly even a little worse than a gasoline car.

YDSTIE: Ouch. To find out the source of your electrical energy, search EPA power profiler, and enter your ZIP code. If you’d like an electric car for commuting but need a car with a longer range for weekend trips, you could consider a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt or the Toyota Prius Plug-in hybrid. Sperling says they typically have a 25- to 50-mile all-electric range, enough for most people’s commute. Of course, the cost of a new electric or a hybrid is also a big consideration. Sperling says these days, many are quite affordable partly because automakers are selling them below cost to try to build a market.

SPERLING: So you can actually get an electric car now for a very low price.

YDSTIE: Some are available for less than $20,000 after subtracting a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government, and many states provide tax incentives, too. There is another thing to consider in making a decision, and that’s the amount of carbon emitted in manufacturing a new car.

SPERLING: Ten to 15 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from that car over the life of the car would be associated with the manufacturing.

YDSTIE: So, Sperling says, you won’t get any overall reduction in your carbon footprint until you’ve driven your new, more-efficient car 10,000 to 20,000 miles. Another big consideration is how much you drive. Sperling says if you have an older car and you’re only driving a few thousand miles a year, it’s probably not worth it to upgrade to a cleaner car.

SPERLING: If, however, it’s a car that is being used quite a bit – say, 10,00 miles a year or more – there’s definitely a high payoff because now there are cars that get 50 miles per gallon compared to your 25.

YDSTIE: Of course, the best thing to do for the environment, says Sperling, is walk or bike or use mass transportation. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

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Health December 28, 2015

Gene Editing Tool Hailed As A Breakthrough, And It Really Is One

Editing DNA has never been easier.
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Editing DNA has never been easier. Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Corbis hide caption

toggle caption Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Corbis

Every once in a while a technology comes along that completely alters the way scientists do their work.

It’s hard to imagine astronomy without a telescope or high energy physics without an accelerator.

From here on in, it’s going to be impossible to imagine biology without CRISPR-Cas9.

Simply put, CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists to make specific changes to specific genes in living cells. Such a thing was possible in the past using technques called zinc finger nucleases and Talens. But those techniques were cumbersome and weren’t widely adopted.

In the three short years since the first scientific papers appeared about CRISPR-Cas9, the technique has been “spreading like wildfire,” says Ramesh Akkina, a molecular immunologist at Colorado State University.

And for 2015, the journal Science called CRISPR the “breakthrough of the year.”

There have been lots of ethical debates about what the new gene editing technique could do, such as creating designer babies or making mutant species. But most biologists aren’t interested in making designer babies or mutant species. They just want to understand basic things like how the cells in our bodies work, or how certain genes function. They expect CRISPR-Cas 9 to be very, very helpful with those lines of inquiry.

Recently I visited Colorado State University to give a talk, but I realized it would be a great place to assess just how far and wide CRISPR-Cas9 had spread.

First, I talked with Christopher Allen, a scientist in the environmental and radiological health sciences department who studies the genes that are important for repairing DNA inside our cells.

When that repair process goes wrong, the result can be cancer. So Allen would like to be able to compare cells side by side: one that has a gene he thinks is important in the repair process, and one that is missing that gene. To do that, he has to modify the genome of a cell, something CRISPR-Cas9 will let him do easily.

Another scientist, Carol Wilusz, studies how and when genes are expressed in stem cells. She says CRISPR-Cas9 is going to make a difference in her work, “because it’s going to enable us to do experiments that we’ve been struggling to do through other approaches.”

Now, Wilusz and Allen aren’t trying to cure diseases, at least not directly, but CRISPR might be useful for that, too.

“The work we’re doing now is to use CRISPR-Cas technology to delete HIV genome from infected cells, such that the cell can be cured completely,” says Ramesh Akkina, a virologist at Colorado State. Right now he is perfecting that trick in cells in the lab, but he is working on a scheme to do it in patients as well.

CRISPR-Cas9 isn’t just useful for working organisms in the animal kingdom. It’s useful in forests and fields.

“I study diseases of plants,” says plant geneticist Jan Leach, “and my goal is to try to make plants that are resistant to different pathogens.”

She says there are a host of genes inside plant cells that turn on when the plant tries to fight invasion from bacteria or fungi. She’d like to be able modify all of them. With CRISPR-Cas9, she can.

“I’ve been working in this particular area for over 20 years, and in 20 years I’ve been able to do one or two genes,” says Allen. “With CRISPR-Cas I’ll be able to do 20 or 30.”

In two days, I spoke with nine different researchers. I asked them all the same question. “Will CRISPR-Cas9 have an impact on your work?”

Honestly, it’s stunning to witness the impact CRISPR-Cas9 has had on biology. It ranks with the most important tools invented in the past century. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins Science magazine’s breakthrough of the year next year too.

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Sports December 28, 2015

Meadowlark Lemon, Star Of The Harlem Globetrotters, Dies

Meadowlark Lemon talks with Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly in St. Louis on Dec. 5. The legendary Harlem Globetrotter died at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Sunday. He was 83.

Meadowlark Lemon talks with Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly in St. Louis on Dec. 5. The legendary Harlem Globetrotter died at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Sunday. He was 83. Bill Greenblatt/UPI/Landov hide caption

toggle caption Bill Greenblatt/UPI/Landov

Meadowlark Lemon, a star with the Harlem Globetrotters for nearly a quarter century, died on Sunday at the age of 83. He had dreamed of playing for the Globetrotters when he was growing up in the Jim Crow South and joined the team in 1954 after serving in the Army. He went on to arguably become its preeminent player, earning the moniker “the clown prince of basketball.”

Created in the 1920s, the Globetrotters provided one of the few opportunities for African-American men who wanted to play professional basketball. Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, spent one year with the team before joining the NBA in 1959.

Lemon, who was known as “the clown prince of basketball,” offers a pretzel to a referee during a game at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 18, 1978. Suzanne Vlamis/AP hide caption

toggle caption Suzanne Vlamis/AP

“Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen,” Chamberlain said in a television interview shortly before his death in 1999, according to the New York Times. “People would say it would be Dr. J or even Jordan. For me, it would be Meadowlark Lemon.”

Lemon was an elite athlete. He thrilled audiences with his long hook shots and ballhandling skills. But he and the Globetrotters emphasized their comedic side as well. Lemon would throw buckets of confetti on unsuspecting referees and fake injuries, among other gags.

Lemon left the Globetrotters in 1978 over a contract dispute and subsequently formed his own traveling teams, including Meadowlark Lemon’s Bucketeers and Meadowlark Lemon’s Harlem All-Stars. His likeness also appeared on the cartoon series Scooby Doo.

After his retirement, he became a Christian minister and along with his wife founded Meadowlark Lemon Ministries in 1994.

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