Month: March 2016

(credit: ^ndrew)

A Florida jury today ordered Gawker Media to pay $115 million for publishing a sex tape showing Terry Bollea, also known as Hulk Hogan, having sex with his friend's wife.

The stunning sum, which may have punitive damages added to it, is a life-threatening event for the New York-based network of news and gossip sites. Gawker media was one of the first successful, large digital-only news companies. The final sum is even more than the $100 million Bollea was seeking. Bollea also sued Gawker founder Nick Denton and former editor Albert Daulerio, and the jury found those two men personally liable as well.

The sex tape was made about a decade ago, during a period in which the professional wrestler Hogan testified that he was going through a difficult phase with his then-wife. Todd Clem, a Florida radio personality who later legally changed his name to Bubba the Love Sponge, encouraged Hogan to sleep with his wife Heather.

(credit: ramsey beyer)

If there’s anything scientists know about the best type of desk for an office worker’s long-term health, it’s that they don’t really know anything, according to a new analysis of the scientific literature on the matter.

After closely examining 20 of the highest quality studies about workplace interventions to reduce sitting time, which include standing, pedaling, and treadmill desks, researchers concluded that there simply isn’t enough data to say whether any of the alternatives are better that just plopping in front of a standard desk.

A number of studies in the past had found that planting your bum in an office chair for hours at a time can up your chances of heart failure, disabilities, and even shorten your life. Collectively, the data spurred a trend for alternative workstations that are aimed at reversing those negative effects, boosting calorie burning, and improving overall health.

They were dancing on podiums.

(Deleted originals to blur faces of the dancers) pic.twitter.com/pG1BxmtbnO

— Kamina Vincent (@spamoir) March 18, 2016

Gaming industry parties and events used to be dominated with scantily clad models, nearly all of which were female, to promote games and get attendees' attention. Thanks to criticism and larger conversations about gender parity in the industry, that trend has since plummeted in the West. And all of that made a single exception at this year's Game Developers Conference so notable.

On Thursday night, Microsoft hosted a private, Xbox-branded party that included a number of women provocatively dressed in cleavage- and midriff-baring shirts, thigh-high stockings, and short, Xbox-green skirts, all dancing on pedestals to electronic music. The scene, which was filmed by a partygoer and posted to Twitter, resembled something from an average Tales From The Crypt nightclub scene.

The following morning, Xbox chief Phil Spencer sent a memo to the entire Xbox division of Microsoft, which confirmed that the party was "Xbox-hosted," as opposed to pawned off to some other external organizer. Spencer's letter also unequivocally spoke to attendees who complained about being uncomfortable at the party.

N.W.A. in the late 1980s. Three different versions of the marketing campaign for the band's biopic Straight Outta Compton appeared on Facebook: one for white audiences, one for black audiences, and one for Hispanic audiences. (credit: EMI)

If you saw a trailer for Straight Outta Compton on Facebook, it was targeted at you based on your race—or, at least, based on what Facebook thinks is your race. People identified by the company as white, black, or Hispanic were shown different versions of the trailer. This is part of Facebook's new "ethnic affiliation" marketing, which effectively resembles racial profiling with a big data advertising twist.

Universal digital marketing exec Doug Neil described the race-based marketing for Straight Outta Compton at South by Southwest. Business Insider sums it up:

Neil credited part of [the film's success] to a specialized Facebook marketing effort led by Universal’s “multicultural team” in conjunction with its Facebook team. They created tailored trailers for different segments of the population....The “general population” (non-African American, non-Hispanic) wasn’t familiar with N.W.A., or with the musical catalog of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, according to Neil. They connected to Ice Cube as an actor and Dr. Dre as the face of Beats, he said. The trailer marketed to them on Facebook had no mention of N.W.A. but sold the movie as a story of the rise of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.

The trailer marketed to African Americans was completely different. Universal assumed this segment of the population had a baseline familiarity with N.W.A. “They put Compton on the map,” Neil said. This trailer opens with the word N.W.A. and continues to lean on it heavily throughout.

The two trailers aren't just mildly different—they look like they are advertising two completely different films. The version for white users, below, comes across like a gangster movie. It emphasizes the violence of the group, showing them brandishing semi-automatics, clashing with police, and walking through what appear to be riots. We only see the actors without seeing any of the actual members of N.W.A. who appear in the film. It looks like a scripted drama and not a biography of real people.

Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. OGT knock out made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof)

After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it.

When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just quickly stopped eating so much. Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science, suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans.

The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about the how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role.