The science of soap – here’s how it kills the coronavirus

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2020-03-20 Pall Thordarson

Alcohol-based disinfectants are also effective, but soap is a highly efficient way of killing the virus when it’s on your skin

… Health authorities have been giving us two messages: once you have the virus there are no drugs that can kill it or help you get rid of it. But also, wash your hands to stop the virus spreading. This seems odd. You can’t, even for a million dollars, get a drug for the coronavirus – but your grandmother’s bar of soap kills the virus.

So why does soap work so well on the Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? The short story: because the virus is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. Soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and dies – or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/12/science-soap-kills-coronavirus-alcohol-based-disinfectants

Machine Learning Takes On Antibiotic Resistance

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2020-03-09 Katherine Harmon Courage

In the February 20 issue of Cell, one team of scientists announced that they — and a powerful deep learning algorithm — had found a totally new antibiotic, one with an unconventional mechanism of action that allows it to fight infections that are resistant to multiple drugs. The compound was hiding in plain sight (as a possible diabetes treatment) because humans didn’t know what to look for. …

Collins, Barzilay and their team trained their network to look for any compound that would inhibit the growth of the bacterium Escherichia coli. They did so by presenting the system with a database of more than 2,300 chemical compounds that had known molecular structures and were classified as “hits” or “non-hits” on tests of their ability to inhibit the growth of E. coli. From that data, the neural net learned what atom arrangements and bond structures were common to the molecules that counted as hits. …

The researchers … also trained the algorithm to predict the toxicity of compounds and to weed out candidate molecules on that basis. …

They then turned the trained network loose on the Drug Repurposing Hub, a library of more than 6,000 compounds that are already being vetted for use in humans for a wide variety of conditions.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learning-takes-on-antibiotic-resistance-20200309/

Sonic’s very fast redesign

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2020-02-24 Mike Seymour

When the redesign [of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie] was commissioned, Artist Tyson Hesse, who had worked on previous Sonic the Hedgehog media, was brought on to lead the redesign. “But a lot of the work that the team had already done as far as the look of Sonic’s fur, should he have eyelashes and what they look like…how we should handle the eyes…all that kind of stuff was actually directly translatable over to the new design,” comments Wright. “I think the redesign took only seven or eight weeks, which is a record at MPC for the design of a 3D character.”

The process was helped by Hesse having a strong relationship with Sega previously. The team flew to London, “where we all sat with the guy that was concept sculpting and literally just did it in real-time.” Wright felt that because there was a clear remit for Hesse to take the redesign lead, it allowed everything to fall into place very simply. “Actually, funnily enough, the redesign was pretty painless. In some respects, a more exaggerated character is a simpler thing for the team to execute,” he comments.

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/sonics-very-fast-redesign/

Breaking the Loop: A Look at the Cinematic Music of Breath of the Wild

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2017-08-16 Jason Yu

“Do you think that games could ever move out of those kinds of constraints [of needing to loop indefinitely]?”

The music of Breath of the Wild is breaking the Loop Constraint all the time, in different ways, and for different reasons.

http://jasonyu.me/breaking-the-loop-botw/

Discovered from:
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JasonYu/20181121/305038/Breaking_the_Loop_A_Look_at_the_Cinematic_Music_of_Breath_of_the_Wild.php

 

Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

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Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

https://standardebooks.org/

 

Real-time, in-camera background compositing in The Mandalorian

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2020-02-06 Jay Holben

For decades, green- and bluescreen compositing was the go-to solution for bringing fantastic environments and actors together on the screen. . . . However, when characters are wearing highly reflective costumes, as is the case with Mando (Pedro Pascal), the title character of The Mandalorian, the reflection of green- and bluescreen in the wardrobe causes costly problems in post-production. . . .

The solution was what might be described as the heir to rear projection — a dynamic, real-time, photo-real background played back on a massive LED video wall and ceiling, which not only provided the pixel-accurate representation of exotic background content, but was also rendered with correct camera positional data.

The Mandalorian: This Is the Way in American Cinematographer

Also see The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian, Season One at YouTube.

Discovered from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22378679