June 13, 2016

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Entertainment June 13, 2016

Today in Movie Culture: 'Ghostbusters' Lego Parody, 'Star Wars' Sushi Art and More

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

Movie Parody of the Day:

Scenes from the original Ghostbusters are re-created and lampooned in this stop-motion Lego fan film (via /Film):

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Movie Franchise Spoof of the Day:

The NSFW trailer for the new South Park game takes down the idea of superhero mega franchise cinematic universes:

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Toy of the Day:

Exclusively available at Comic-Con this year, here’s the Iron Man and couch toy you’ve wanted since you saw Iron Man 3 (via io9):

Visual Listicle of the Day:

Documentary filmmakers share thoughts on favorite fiction films in the below video, including Werner Herzog on The Dark Knight and Michael Moore on A Clockwork Orange (via Twitter):

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Speaking of A Clockwork Orange,here is Stanley Kubrick directing an iconic scene with Malcolm McDowell, who turns 73 today:

Mashup of the Day:

When you can’t decide if you want a My Neighbor Totoro cake or a Doctor Who cake, just mash it up (via Geek Tyrant):

Fan Food of the Day:

If cake is too sweet, maybe try out this veggie-based Star Wars sushi art by Okitsugu Kado (via Neatorama):

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— ???? (@tomokiy) June 9, 2016

Cosplay of the Day:

Sometimes to be more unique, cosplayers make costumes modeled after fan art like this Mermaid Leia from Star Wars (via Fashionably Geek):

Filmmaker in Focus:

The following supercut highlights the use of circles in the films of the Coen Brothers (via Cinematic Montage Creators):

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Back to School. Watch the original trailer for the Rodney Dangerfield comedy below.

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and

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Sports June 13, 2016

Cleveland Stays Alive In NBA Finals Against Depleted Golden State

LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers goes up for a shot Monday night in front of James Michael McAdoo of the Golden State Warriors in the first half in Game 5 of the 2016 NBA Finals in Oakland, Calif.

LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers goes up for a shot Monday night in front of James Michael McAdoo of the Golden State Warriors in the first half in Game 5 of the 2016 NBA Finals in Oakland, Calif. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Even with their best defensive player Draymond Green suspended, the Golden State Warriors were in a close fight with the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night in Oakland. It felt like the sort of game where one late run from guards Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson could settle Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and the entire series.

Then big Andrew Bogut toppled.

Andrew Bogut of the Golden State Warriors holds his knee in pain after sustaining an injury in the third quarter Monday night in Oakland.

Andrew Bogut of the Golden State Warriors holds his knee in pain after sustaining an injury in the third quarter Monday night in Oakland. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

A Cavaliers player landed on the 7-foot center’s left leg early in the second half, and Bogut immediately grabbed his knee. With both their starting big men out for the game, a close game turned into an eight-point Cavaliers lead. The Cavaliers never trailed again, and won 112-97. The Warriors lead the series three games to two.

The absences clearly hurt the Warriors’ defense. In the first four games of the series, the Cavaliers shot 47 percent from two-point range and 32 percent for three; those respective figures were 58 percent and 42 percent Monday night.

A fan holds up a cutout of Draymond Green's face Monday night. The Golden State Warriors player was suspended for Game 5 of the NBA Finals because of a flagrant foul he committed in the previous game.

A fan holds up a cutout of Draymond Green’s face Monday night. The Golden State Warriors player was suspended for Game 5 of the NBA Finals because of a flagrant foul he committed in the previous game. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

The game started as an offensive clinic; the 61-61 halftime score was the highest in the Finals in nearly 30 years.

This is the highest scoring 1st half in the NBA Finals since Game 2 in 1987 (Lakers led the Celtics, 75-56)

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) June 14, 2016

The Cavaliers were led by an outstanding shooting performance by Kyrie Irving, who had 41 points on just 24 shots, while Lebron James had the kind of Finals game only he’s delivered in recent years. It was the first time in Finals history that two teammates had scored 40 in the same game.

LeBron James w/ 36/12/6. Since ’03, only players to match those #s in Finals: LeBron (’15 Game 2), LeBron (’15 Game 3) & LeBron (’15 Game 5)

— Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) June 14, 2016

The Warriors were led by a shooting barrage from Thompson, who scored 37 points on 20 field goal attempts and nine free throws. NBA MVP Curry had 25 points but didn’t shoot particularly well.

Harrison Barnes, a 6-foot-8 natural small forward who at times was the Warriors’ biggest player on the floor, struggled. He shot 2-14 for the game, including 0-6 in the fourth quarter.

Golden State will get Green back for Game 6 at 9 p.m. ET on Thursday in Cleveland. Bogut’s status is unknown.

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Business June 13, 2016

Microsoft To Buy Tech Giant LinkedIn For $26.2 Billion

Microsoft announced it’s buying another tech giant, LinkedIn, for $26.2 billion. The companies, both leaders in the productivity marketplace, believe the move could boost their income potential by 50 percent in that market. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, talks on the massive deal began in March.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Microsoft surprised the tech world today by placing a massive bet on the social networking site LinkedIn. The software giant said it is buying the career-focused site for $26.2 billion. The deal is the largest acquisition ever for Microsoft and one of the biggest in the industry’s history. In today’s All Tech Considers, NPR’s Aarti Shahani reports on Microsoft’s push into the connected workplace.

AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: First let’s talk about the business news, and then let’s delve into what it could mean, practically speaking, for you and me at work. On a call with investors, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella rattled off the deal’s specifics.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SATYA NADELLA: Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for $196 per share in an all-cash transaction.

SHAHANI: That 196 per share is 50 percent above what LinkedIn stock was worth on Friday, so Microsoft is paying a lot.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NADELLA: Reid Hoffman has stated his full support for the transaction.

SHAHANI: Hoffman being the much-revered founder of LinkedIn. The two companies entered talks about the deal just this past February. They came to an agreement pretty quickly and got their respective boards to bless it all under the radar. They kept it impressively quiet until this morning, that is.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NADELLA: And we expect this transaction to close by this calendar year.

SHAHANI: Linkedin has come under scrutiny. In 2015, the number of people using it didn’t grow that much. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner assured investors his platform has north of 433 million members, and…

JEFF WEINER: Worth calling out there – China remains our fastest growing and not surprising given the size of the addressable opportunity there.

SHAHANI: That’s a jargony a way of saying 1 in 5 of the world’s knowledge workers and students on a professional track lives in China. And while U.S. tech companies constantly fret over how to penetrate that country, LinkedIn is there. Regulators in the U.S. have to approve the deal. Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, says he’s confident it’ll happen.

BRAD SMITH: This merger is what antitrust lawyers would term highly complementary. There’s not any significant overlap between the products and services of the two companies.

SHAHANI: And therein lays the potential. Each company already dominates the, quote, unquote, “productivity marketplace.” But they don’t already work together in a seamless way. Right after the investor call, the CEOs of both companies explained to NPR what that could look like. Microsoft’s Nadella…

NADELLA: So for example, today I go every day to the LinkedIn feed, and I already get a lot of information. It knows me. It knows my job. It knows my company. It knows my industry.

SHAHANI: Now just imagine if that newsfeed talked to your Outlook calendar, if it knew all the meetings you were going to have in the next month, the customers you’d see.

NADELLA: And it lit up news articles of those customers.

SHAHANI: That’s an example of efficiency, saving you the trouble of having to go to look things up yourself. The greatest technologies change human behavior, our relationship to the world and each other. Asked to talk about that – the things we may not already do that the new joint team is dreaming up – Nadella brings up the Microsoft personal assistant called Cortana.

NADELLA: Just imagine a world where this wakes up just before I enter a new meeting with people I’ve never met before.

SHAHANI: And Cortana is smarter because she has access to LinkedIn, so she can tell you.

NADELLA: Oh, wow, you went to school with this person, or, you worked at the same company. One of your colleagues at my – in your company, in fact, knows this person.

SHAHANI: At a minimum, we’ll be better at feigning familiarity, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll uncover deep, real-life connections faster. Weiner points out a brand new way to think about the help tab in PowerPoint or Excel. Maybe you used to go there for tips on exporting a file. Once Microsoft’s Office 365 is integrated with your social network, it’ll mean another kind of help.

WEINER: The ability to connect with people in your network who can help with your question, the ability to connect with freelancers who are experts in that area.

SHAHANI: LinkedIn shares surged after the deal was announced, and Microsoft shares dipped down. Aarti Shahani, NPR News.

Copyright © 2016 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 Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health June 13, 2016

Here's Really Where Zika Mosquitoes Are Likely In The U.S.

Counties where Aedes aegypti was reported between Jan. 1, 1995, and March 2016. Counties in yellow recorded one year of A. aegypti being present; those shown in orange recorded two years; and those shown in red, three or more years.

Counties where Aedes aegypti was reported between Jan. 1, 1995, and March 2016. Counties in yellow recorded one year of A. aegypti being present; those shown in orange recorded two years; and those shown in red, three or more years. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hide caption

toggle caption Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

A few months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a startling map that showed the parts of the U.S. that could harbor mosquitoes capable of carrying Zika.

Many readers, including myself, thought, “Zika could come to my town! It could come to Connecticut! To Ohio and Indiana! Or to northern California! Oh goodness!”

The map made it look like a vast swath of the country was at risk for Zika, including New England and the Upper Midwest.

Well, not quite.

On Thursday, CDC scientists published another mosquito map for the U.S. And it paints a very different picture.

The new map shows counties in which scientists, over the past two decades, have collected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the type of insect thought to be spreading Zika in Latin American and the Caribbean.

“The new map is more accurate than the initial one,” says Thomas Scott, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. “The distribution of the A. aegypti mosquito is much more restricted than the initial map showed.”

In the map, counties colored yellow reported A. aegypti mosquitoes during one year between 1995 to 2016. Orange counties had the mosquitoes in two years. And red counties are the hotspots: Scientists there found A. aegypti mosquitoes during three or more years in the past two decades.

This map represents “the best knowledge of the current distribution of this mosquito based on collection records,” entomologist John-Paul Mutebi and his colleagues at the CDC wrote in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Many of the hot spots for this mosquito aren’t surprising. They’re places that we already knew are vulnerable to Zika, including counties in southern Florida, along the Gulf Coast and southern Texas. These places have had problems with a virus closely related to Zika, called dengue. They’re already on high alert for Zika.

But several hot spots are bit more unexpected — and concerning. “Perhaps the most concerning development for A. aegypti is its establishment in the Southwest, most recently in California in 2013,” Mutebi and his co-authors write.

Other surprises include parts of the Bay Area, greater Washington, D.C., and the Dallas-Fort Worth region, which all have established populations of A. aegypti, the map shows.

“The country is really a patchwork,” Scott says. “When you drill down into one particular state, you find that the mosquito isn’t found across the whole state. And when you drill down into a county, you find the same thing. The mosquito is found in just a small part.”

So why did the first map from the CDC make it look like such an extensive part of the country was at risk for Zika?

“The two maps show different things,” Mutebi tells Shots. “The first map showed where the climate is able to sustain populations of A. aegypti. This new map shows reports from counties where these mosquitoes were found in the last 20 years.”

And the new map, Mutebi says, is not complete. “Not all counties have mosquito surveillance programs looking for mosquitoes,” he says. In places that do, they are often targeting the mosquito that causes West Nile virus, not A. aegypti.

“So just because a county hasn’t reported having any A. aegypti mosquitoes, doesn’t mean they’re not there,” Mutebi says.

A. aegypti mosquitoes are nasty critters. They chase down people so they can feed on their blood, says virologist Scott Weaver at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

“A. aegypti lives in close association with people, feeds almost exclusively on people — not animals — and even comes into people’s home,” he says. “Its behavior and its ecology are almost ideal for a mosquito to transmit a human virus.”

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