Hasta La Gadget!

After decades of middling results, video game adaptations are finally the hottest thing in entertainment, especially after those Super Mario Bros. Movie box office numbers. Streamer Peacock is joining the video game adaptation wars with a live action comedy based on the PS1-era vehicular warfare simulator Twisted Metal and it just dropped the first trailer.

For the uninitiated (anyone under 30), Twisted Metal was a hugely popular franchise that is sort of a riff on the Battle Mode from the Mario Kart series, with a heavy emphasis on comical violence and absolute destruction. Think Rocket League with guns. The show seems to be scrapping the arena-based nature of the games with a journey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The series stars the newly-appointed Captain America, Anthony Mackie and Brooklyn 99 standout Stephanie Beatriz. You can’t tell much from the apocalypse-soaked trailer, but the show’s description describes Mackie as a “motor-mouthed outsider offered a chance at a better life” and Beatriz as a “badass axe-wielding car thief.” It also wouldn’t be Twisted Metal without the iconic killer clown Sweet Tooth, described here as a “deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck.”

The franchise arguably reached its pinnacle in 1996 with Twisted Metal 2, and there hasn’t been a new release in over a decade, so who exactly is this show for? Who knows! But it has evil clowns and explosive car chases, so who cares? The first season premieres July 27th and consists of ten episodes.

This is just another step in Sony’s plans to bring its big gaming franchises into other media, which has so far included the plodding Uncharted movie and the mega-popular The Last of Us series on HBO. Prepare for an onslaught of PlayStation adaptations in the near future, including Horizon Zero Dawn, Gran Turismo and God of War.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/peacock-drops-first-trailer-for-high-octane-twisted-metal-adaptation-181201055.html?src=rss

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What’s your favorite Marvel movie? For me, it’s 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn’s first foray into blockbuster superhero filmmaking. A film no one expected to work, with characters no one really knew or cared about, which ended up being so beautiful, exciting, and vibrant, it made those characters into…

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We know that several startups are working on automating in vitro fertilization (IVF), a multimillion-dollar industry where trained embryologists delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope, but one such startup, Overture Life, has developed a sperm-injecting robot that they claim is an initial step toward automating IVF, potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.

The special robot was designed by engineers in Barcelona and sent to New York City, where they put it back together, and assembled a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. One of the engineers used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle, which eyed a human egg through a camera and then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. The robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs, resulting in healthy embryos and two baby girls, who researchers claim are the first people born after fertilization by a “robot.”

Other startups, such as AutoIVF, IVF 2.0, Conceivable Life Sciences, and Fertilis, have similar aims of automating IVF and making it more accessible to patients who can’t afford the high costs of IVF treatment. Overture has raised about $37 million from investors, including Khosla Ventures and Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube.

The goal of automating IVF is to make a lot more babies — about 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don’t have access to fertility medicine or can’t pay for it. The main challenge facing IVF is that it’s been 40 years of outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering, according to David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund. While an all-in-one fertility machine doesn’t yet exist, even automating parts of the process (like injecting sperm, freezing eggs, or nurturing embryos), could make IVF less expensive and eventually support more radical innovations like for example, gene editing or even artificial wombs.

Even so, fully automating IVF won’t be easy, as the process involves a dozen procedures — and Overture’s robot so far performs only one of them, and only partially. Other doctors are still skeptical that robots can, or should, replace embryologists anytime soon, as humans are far better than a machine at delicately handling sperm and eggs. One fertility doctor developed a robot that dispenses tiny droplets of growth medium for embryos to grow in, calling it a “low-risk” way to introduce automation to the lab. One obstacle to automating conception is that so-called microfluidics, another name for lab-on-a-chip technology, hasn’t lived up to its hype.

Robot-assisted sperm injection leads to successful births of first babies

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