It’s Tool Time for Weird Al in His Iggy Azalea ‘Fancy’ Parody

Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” was only just ousted from the Billboard Hot 100′s No. 1 spot after seven weeks of Song of Summer dominance, but that beat is still just so hot! Sitting at No. 2 on the charts hardly means a song has gone stale (“Fancy” will literally never get tired), but with Weird Al Yankovic on the mic we can keep that Invisible Men/Arcade production fresh with some new-god-level flow in the form of “Handy,” which marks the halfway point in his eight-video offload.

“Handy” is the best showcase yet of Yankovic’s dance-like-no-one-is-watching-style moves and it’s a classic work of Weird in that it gives us our wordsmith fully creating a single character and giving his first-person micro narrative in song, a la “Fat” and “White & Nerdy.” Never one to choose the half measure, Yankovic goes fully Iggy for “Handy” and nails all the background “yeahs” and “huhs,” elevating the song from simple aping to embodying. By the end of the track, you trust this handy man for all of your caulking and hardwiring needs. You’re more than welcome to be our stripper, Al.

How Google’s New Font Tries to Anticipate the Future

In the photo, you can see the notations made by the design team on an earlier iteration. Google

In the beginning, there was Apple. When Steve & Co. were obsessing about how to make computers feel as beautiful as possible, typography was singled out for special attention. They wanted type on the screen to look just as perfect as it could in print—a grand plan to make computer interfaces into crafted objects every bit as beautifully considered as a hand-cut letter or a perfectly proportioned chair. And they won. Today we see more care being piled onto pixels than ever.

But there remains a gap. While so many typefaces have been designed to render beautifully, very few have been designed to perform beautifully. Which is why Google has spent the last year and half sweating over a sweeping overhaul of its UI font, Roboto. This new version is designed to scale across an entire universe of products, from smart-watches to TV’s. It is the star in Google’s ambitious plan to redesign its entire product ecosystem—a visual and interactive language they’re calling Material Design. “UI’s are crafted from images and type,” Matias Duarte, Android’s head of design tells WIRED. “But the idea of having a typeface that’s thought out as a UI typeface—that’s not been done before.”

Friendliness Serves a Function

But the new Roboto is a workhorse, not a show horse. The face itself isn’t designed to grab attention, but rather, to perform well in many contexts. It sports a rounder, friendlier look. Dots in the i and j have changed from rectangles to circles; letters like the B, C, and D now sport softer curves; and the stark angles of some letters, like the R, have been straightened. With this more casual vibe, the hope is to create a face that won’t be jarring when seen blown up huge on a 65-inch TV seen from three feet away, or a tiny screen on your wrist.

Thus, Google’s type team, led by Christian Robertson, labored to anticipate the weird juxtapositions created across platforms. For example, they’ve made sure that bold and regular letterforms sport similar widths, and introduced monowidth numerals, because those textures inevitably get thrown together and contrasted when you’re swiping between screens or clicking between tabs.

How the letters compare, with the new Roboto outlined in red. Black denotes the overlap. Note the increasing rounded-ness throughout. Google

“When you design type, all of that work is going to be used by another designer, in contexts and ways that’s hard to imagine,” says Robertson. So they’ve created more weights and styles, judging them together and laying out rigorous usage guidelines, so that the shear number of combinations ensures that interface designers will be able to do everything they need to do without creating chaos.

No Rest for the Weary

Testing all of those font styles against each other was itself probably the most complex part of the process. Each one was viewed on a pile of devices rigged to simulate hundreds of different screen resolutions. And that’s just for tablets, PCs, and phones. In addition, the team tested Roboto for the car, using LCD shutters that testers wear like sunglasses, and which force the wearer to look at a UI in only glance-able fragments—just like you would in a car sporting Android.

“Not only did we have a number of designers, but we had producers and assistants layered on top of those,” says Duarte. “It was bigger than any design project we’ve ever had.” And all for a font. But that’s perhaps not surprising, as type has become one of the hardest working elements in today’s interfaces, which have been stripped of ornamentation in order to create breathing room for the increasingly complex functions they have to perform. The work, of course, isn’t done. You can expect Roboto to keep evolving as Google’s offerings on TV’s and wearables mature—but by building some rationality into the entire system, the hope is to buy as much time as possible before the next big thing arrives.

The full breadth of styles, which is meant to allow for hundreds of possible combinations, on countless devices. Google

Airbnb Is Quietly Building the Smartest Travel Agent of All Time

Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco. Emily Hagopian

Airbnb overhauled its logo, its website, and its mobile app this morning. But there’s something deeper going on with the sharing economy’s most popular travel site.

Under the covers, Airbnb has quietly begun an ambitious effort to painstakingly mine the treasure trove of data contained in the site’s customer reviews and host descriptions to create a smarter way of traveling. It turns outs Airbnb is more than a travel website—it’s a stealth big data company.

“For a long time now, Airbnb has been an awesome place to go if you know where you’re going and you know when you’re going,” says Mike Curtis, Airbnb’s vice president of engineering. “But we realized that we have all of this data that other people don’t have. We have travel patterns. We have the reviews. We have the descriptions of the listings. We know a lot about neighborhoods that we can infer from the text in there.”

To do this, the company has formed an eight-person Discovery team. Their mission? To build language processing software that mines Airbnb’s data and figures out what’s really happening out there in the travel world. In other words, Airbnb is building a kind of omniscient, machine-powered travel agent of the future.

‘We realized that we have all of this data that other people don’t have. We have travel patterns, we have the reviews, we have the descriptions of the listings.’

You can see the early hints of this in the new recommendations that debut on the site today. Airbnb figures out where you’re from, and then drops you a few travel ideas. “We try to figure out exactly where you are and who the people are around you and where they like to travel,” says Surabhi Gupta, an engineer on the Discovery team.

If you’re booking from Knoxville, Tennessee, for example, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll want to take in the sights in Washington, DC. If you’re from the San Francisco or Brooklyn, you may very well be looking for a booking in the same city (folks in these places are more likely to be using Airbnb to book accommodations for friends or relatives).

Airbnb’s Discovery team, from left: Phillippe Siclait, Nasseem Hakim, Frank Lin, Gauri Manglik, Surabhi Gupta, Lu Cheng Airbnb

The Discovery team figures this out by extracting interesting words from the site’s reviews and descriptions. An open-source tool called the Stanford Part of Speech Tagger comes in handy for this. It then uses custom-build algorithms to assign 150 different attributes—beaches, hiking, sunsets, and so on—to different locations.

What you see on the homepage is a start, but Airbnb wants to get to the point where it can give very specific recommendations based on who you are, not just where you live. “A lot of what we’re doing is the foundational work for user-level personalization,” says Lu Cheng, another Discovery team engineer. That means, in a few years, you may very well be using Airbnb to not only book your next vacation, but to figure out where the heck you want to go.

Why Airbnb’s Redesign Is All About People, Not Places

Today, Airbnb is pulling the wrapper off of a redesign that encompasses the company’s entire digital footprint, including the logo and branding, the mobile experience, and, in particular, the desktop. And while these tweaks are individually quite small, Airbnb is quick to emphasize they’re all grounded in a new focus that they hope will broaden the company’s horizons. The first thing you’ll notice: On the homepage, and in the app, they’re intentionally emphasizing fewer of the homes you might stay in, and more of the lifestyle you might have.

Thus, the site is now papered with short videos of people grilling out or lounging on the couch—the beauty shot is no longer an image of some insanely expensive or kooky vacation home. Meanwhile, the community of Airbnb hosts has become central to the experience. You’ll see smiling host faces on every house listing you see. “This is part of the larger story we’ve been talking about,” says Katie Dill, Airbnb’s recently appointed head of design and a former Frog creative director. “We want users to understand the experience and the relationships behind it.”

That’s a squishy concept, but for Airbnb, there is a thorough-going rationale. The company is still hellbent on being defined not just as the second-coming of the hotel, but as a lifestyle brand with all the potential product offerings that entails. And that plays out in the redesign.

A New Logo

Look at the new logo and you’ll see an upside down heart intertwined with the outline of a place pin. There are a few layers of corporate mythmaking in there. The pin shows what Airbnb does; the heart evokes this new, more readily surfaced emphasis on community and personal experience; and the outline of the whole thing harks to the “A” in Airbnb’s very first logos. “We wanted to develop a symbol of belonging,” says Dill. “You’re staying in someone’s home and sometimes with someone as well, and making a connection.” Airbnb calls the new mark a “Bélo”—short for “belong.”

As part and parcel of trying to make the symbol ubiquitous, Airbnb is creating a marketplace where hosts can create decals and such for their guests–the Airbnb equivalent to all the branded hotel swag that might grace a Four Seasons, for example. As Dill says, “You’re going to see that carried out in every part of the brand.” Which brings us to the actual user experience.

The new homepage. Note that none of the pictures are actually of spaces, per se. They’re all of people and activities—an art direction that’s part of a push to make Airbnb a lifestyle brand. Airbnb

New Ways to Surface the Places You Might Like to Visit

Users familiar with Airbnb will notice myriad smart changes throughout. Legibility in search results has gone up as has utility, thanks to simplified information and a map that accompanies every list showing where each one is in relation to the others; the presence of host head-shots in smart places throughout adds a definite feeling of friendliness to the entire service; and the options available every step of the way towards a booking have been refined and rationalized. None of it is revolutionary, but taken together these make for a more coherent user experience, which Dill points out has been stripped down in many places, to emphasize only the information that users want, at the times they want it.

Airbnb has two main examples of this. The first is that search listings are no longer just by keywords, but also driven by contextual information about your location. In that way, Airbnb is a big data company. They have a growing body of information about what people near where you are like to search for. For example, romantic weekend getaways aren’t as sought-after in searches originating in San Francisco. By contrast good places to hike are at a premium. (Hey, no judgment here, San Francisco!) As my colleague Bob McMillan reports, the listings that Airbnb serves up will take into account that kind of knowledge.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood guides, which were once a central plank in Airbnb’s quest to become less about listings and more about inspiring travel content, don’t exist in their own silo. Instead, information about neighborhoods is surfaced at the bottom of every listing, in a map of the immediate area. Key words such as “hipster,” “restaurants,” and “cafes” are served up in a curated list driven by user descriptions of the neighborhood. Just as with the search results, here’s a case of Airbnb using data not to create new content, but to create the right context for what someone wants.

This new art direction represents a big investment for Airbnb: It commits them to creating a raft of new content that serves as vignettes of life outside a hotel. Airbnb

A New Art Direction

What dominates the homepage now aren’t photos, but rather short video loops, which Dill calls “living photos.” (It’s like Hogwarts with mustaches and vintage furniture finds!) Again, it ties back to the idea that Airbnb is advertising just a place, but a kind of experience that’s far removed from that of a hotel. “These images have to be immersive and cinematic. It has to be people that are highlighted, and their lifestyles.”

Getting there, for Dill and Airbnb, required a ruthless stripping out of any design details that didn’t emphasize that point. In Airbnb’s searches, it could have surfaced 12 types of information; they ended up just four, one of which is the host. “When a guest or a host interacts with Airbnb, everything has to feel like it’s all a part of the same thing. That type of consistency is what gives you peace of mind, and it makes you feel like it’s a stable place to build a relationship. There’s not much more on many of our pages but imagery that tells a story about a community.”

Team studies immune response of Asian elephants infected with a human disease

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the organism that causes tuberculosis in humans, also afflicts Asian (and occasionally other) elephants. Diagnosing and treating elephants with TB is a challenge, however, as little is known about how their immune systems respond to the infection. A new study begins to address this knowledge gap, and offers new tools for detecting and monitoring TB in captive elephants.

The study, reported in the journal Tuberculosis, is the work of researchers at the University of Illinois Zoological Pathology Program (ZPP), a division of the veterinary diagnostic lab at the College of Veterinary Medicine in Urbana-Champaign. ZPP is based in Chicago, serving zoos and wildlife in the region and beyond.

More than 50 elephants in captivity in the U.S. have been diagnosed with tuberculosis since 1994, the research team reports. The evidence suggests that humans can transmit the disease to elephants and that elephants also may serve as a source of exposure for humans.

When infected, elephants may appear healthy or only show general symptoms, such as weight loss, that could be associated with a variety of maladies, said Jennifer Landolfi, a veterinary pathologist who led the new research. Most cases are found as a result of routine tests which involve checking the blood for antibodies against TB, or collecting samples from an elephant's trunk and culturing the bacteria it harbors.

But these approaches are problematic, Landolfi said. Culturing mycobacteria takes time and is imprecise, while antibody responses may take weeks to develop and only indicate exposure, not necessarily infection or disease.

"We are always trying to improve and seek out new diagnostics that will allow for earlier, more accurate detection of this infection," she said. "We also need to find ways to monitor the treatment response."

In humans, exposure to tuberculosis rarely results in full-fledged disease. Most people's immune systems eradicate the bacterium or at least keep the disease at bay, Landolfi said.

"Less than 10 percent of the people who are exposed actually develop the disease," she said. In those cases, an inadequate immune response is almost always to blame. "Our hypothesis is that something similar is happening in the Asian elephants."

To test this, Landolfi and her colleagues looked at protein mediators that are part of an elephant's immune system. These small signaling molecules, called cytokines (SIGH-toe-kines), spur a cascade of cellular reactions that help the body fight infection. But detecting cytokines in elephants is difficult because antibodies that target elephant cytokines are not available.

"Instead of trying to detect the cytokines using antibodies, we said, 'why don't we take a step back and detect the nucleotides that code for those proteins?'" Landolfi said. "We're talking about messenger RNA (mRNA), which is used by the cell to synthesize these proteins."

After developing the tools to detect cytokine mRNA in elephants, the researchers collected blood from 8 TB-positive and 8 TB-negative Asian elephants, and isolated the white blood cells. They exposed the cells to proteins associated with TB and then analyzed the cell culture for expression of certain cytokines.

Their analysis showed that TB-positive and TB-negative elephants differed in their immune responses after exposure to TB bacterial proteins.

"The cytokines were at higher levels in the positive animals," Landolfi said. "That suggested that those animals had more of an immune reaction when they were exposed [to proteins associated with TB] than the animals that were negative."

If confirmed in future studies, the findings suggest a faster and more reliable way to diagnose TB in captive elephants, Landolfi said. The same kinds of tests are already used in humans.

"That is something that we want to move towards with elephants," she said. "Most of the elephants don't show us a lot of signs of disease, and even when they do appear to be sick, it's very non-specific."

This makes it difficult to diagnose them and to determine if treatment is working, she said. Having a new way to monitor the elephants' immune response would improve both tasks, she said.

CRISPR system can promote antibiotic resistance

CRISPR, a system of genes that bacteria use to fend off viruses, is involved in promoting antibiotic resistance in Francisella novicida, a close relative of the bacterium that causes tularemia. The finding contrasts with previous observations in other bacteria that the CRISPR system hinders the spread of antibiotic resistance genes.

The results are scheduled for publication in PNAS Early Edition.

The CRISPR system has attracted considerable attention for its potential uses in genetic engineering and biotechnology, but its roles in bacterial gene regulation are still surprising scientists. It was discovered by dairy industry researchers seeking to prevent phages, viruses that infect bacteria, from ruining the cultures used to make cheese and yogurt.

Bacteria incorporate small bits of DNA from phages into their CRISPR region and use that information to fight off the phages by chewing up their DNA. Cas9, an essential part of the CRISPR system, is a DNA-chewing enzyme that has been customized for use in biotechnology.

F. novicida infects rodents and only rarely infects humans, but it is a model for studying the more dangerous F. tularensis, a potential biological weapon. The bacteria infect and replicate inside macrophages, a type of immune cell.

Researchers at the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Emory University School of Medicine and the Emory Vaccine Center were surprised to find that when the gene encoding Cas9 is mutated in F. novicida bacteria, they become more vulnerable to polymyxin B as well as standard antibiotic treatments such as streptomycin and kanamycin. They were able to trace the effects of the mutation back to a defect in "envelope integrity." Cas9 regulates production of a lipoprotein, which appears to alter membrane permeability.

"The mutant bacteria are more permeable to certain chemicals from the outside," says David Weiss, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases) at Emory University School of Medicine and Yerkes National Primate Research Center. "That increased permeability also seems to make them more likely to set off alarms when they are infecting mammalian cells."

Graduate student Timothy Sampson, working with Weiss, found that Cas9 mutant bacteria may be more likely to leak bits of their DNA, a trigger for immune cells to get excited. This is a large reason why Cas9 is necessary for F. novicida to evade the mammalian immune system, a finding published in a 2013 Nature paper.

The regulatory role for Cas9 does not appear to be restricted to F. novicida; Weiss's team found that a Cas9 mutant in Campylobacter jejuni, a bacterium that is a common cause of human gastroenteritis, also has increased permeability and impaired antibiotic resistance.

The findings add to recent discoveries where Cas9 has been found to be involved in virulence -- the ability to cause disease in a living animal or human -- in various pathogenic bacteria such as Campylobacter and Neisseria meningitides.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Emory Health Sciences . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Amazon Finally Tries Out the ‘Netflix for Books’ Craze

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Amazon is already a go-to place for people who love to binge on shopping, TV shows, and music, thanks to its all-you-can-consume Amazon Prime service. And now, it seems, the company wants to lure binge readers too.

According to Gigaom, the e-commerce giant is working on a subscription ebook service called Kindle Unlimited, which would offer unlimited ebook rentals for $9.99 a month. It’s a move that’s very much aligned with where both the tech and the publishing industry are headed.

While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap.

We tech-savvy consumers have grown accustomed to the unlimited buffet. Pay Netflix or Hulu a flat fee, and we can binge on all the movies and TV shows we could ever want to watch. For music lovers, there’s Spotify. And yet, among the tech giants, Amazon’s Kindle book store, is one of the last a la carte menus left. Users either buy a book at a time or, at best, rent a book a month for free through the company’s Amazon Prime service. As the Netflix model has grown, it’s become increasingly obvious that there should be a “Netflix for books” too.

While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap. The New York City startup, Oyster, for one, has raised $17 million for its all-you-can-read app. Scribd, which started as a publishing platform for long Web documents, launched a similar service last year. Even some publishers have tried it.

Clearly, Amazon has been listening. Not only is this activity in the startup community proof that the model is becoming popular with readers, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likely sees Kindle Unlimited as a lucrative revenue stream for Amazon. Right now, the company’s big moneymaker is Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited digital music, TV shows, and movies as well as unlimited shipping for physical goods—all at a cost of $99. Kindle Unlimited, by contrast, would cost users $120 a year, if the leaked price is right. Plus, it could also drive the sales of Kindle devices.

That said, Amazon may have to overcome one obstacle it’s not quite used to, and that is, competing with tiny startups. If Kindle Unlimited had launched last year, Oyster and Scribd might never had a chance of survival, as both companies were still building their libraries and striking deals with publishers. One year later, though, Oyster has partnerships with big names like Simon & Schuster, and more than 500,000 titles in its library. Screenshots of Kindle Unlimited’s test pages say the service offers 638,416 titles, not much more than Oyster. Plus, users don’t have to buy another device to get their books from Oyster. They can read them right from their phones.

No matter who wins the space, one thing is for sure: the publishing industry, already changed by the e-reader, is about to undergo another radical transformation.