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Someday, I will see the trailer for a new Star Wars movie and not get completely gooey inside. Today is not that day. Here’s the briefer “TV spot” (don’t call it a trailer!) that aired during the Super Bowl last night.
I think my insides and outsides briefly switched places when they showed Donald Glover as Lando.
Tags: movies Solo Star Wars trailers video
via kottke.org
Solo, A Star Wars Story
Last night, we finally got our first look at the next chapter in Star Wars’ spinoff saga, the standalone Han Solo movie. Now, we’ve got an even better look at the past of one of the series’ most beloved characters, before he truly became the snarky smuggler we all know and love.
This trailer gives off a much better vibe of the film is going to be like, in comparison to the short Super Bowl spot that dropped last night—not just a chance to see more of the young Han himself (Alden Ehrenreich), but better glimpses at the new cast of characters that will be joining him and Chewbacca (now played by Joonas Suotamo) on a wild adventure that will see Han transform from cocky Corellian racer, to… well, a still cocky racer, that just happens to sit at the helm of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
It won’t be long until we see more: Solo: A Star Wars Story, directed by Ron Howard, hits theaters May 25.
via Gizmodo
In the First Trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story, a Familiar Legend Begins
The next Star Wars movie is out in three months. THREE MONTHS. But up until now, we haven’t seen a single image from it. That changed during the Super Bowl, though, as Disney, finally, revealed the first look at Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Here it is.
I mean – that looks pretty great, right? Definitely has that Star Wars feel. Lando looks awesome. It gave me chills.
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Directed by Ron Howard, Solo stars Alden Ehrenreich, alongside Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Woody Harrelson, Joonas Suotamo, and Paul Bettany.
Expect a full trailer Monday morning.
Solo: A Star Wars Story opens May 22.
via Gizmodo
There Is Now Official Footage From Solo: A Star Wars Story
Is there a point when investors will turn off the spigots for giant unicorn funding rounds? If so, we haven’t reached that threshold yet.
Last year, investors put a record amount of capital into members of the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard, a list of private venture-backed companies valued at more than $1 billion.
Globally, a staggering $66 billion went into unicorn companies in 2017, up 39 percent year-over-year, according to an analysis of Crunchbase data. The ride-hailing space was the single largest recipient of investor dollars, with several rivals in the space raising billions. Investors also poured copious sums into co-working, consumer internet and augmented reality.
Newcomers also joined the unicorn club for the first time in 2017, albeit at a slightly slower pace than the preceding two years. For all of 2017, 60 new startups were added to the unicorn list. This compares to 66 newly minted unicorns in 2016 and the record-setting 2015 with 99 newcomers.
Below, we break down the leading locations for new and existing unicorns, top sectors for investment capital, exits and a few other trends affecting the space.
The vast majority of unicorns are headquartered in either the U.S. or China, and that’s also the case for newcomers to the Unicorn Leaderboard.
In 2017, both the U.S. and China continued to mint new unicorns at a steady clip. A total of 29 U.S. companies inked their first funding round at a valuation of a billion dollars or more, up from 22 the prior year. In China, 24 new unicorns joined the leaderboard, down from 32 in 2016. Europe and Southeast Asia, meanwhile, also contributed a few unicorns.
In the chart below, we look at new entrants, categorized by country:
The newcomers were a pretty diverse bunch, spanning industries from agtech to enterprise software, including no-cost stock buying platform Robinhood, online education provider VIPKID and cryptocurrency buying and selling platform Coinbase.
Unicorn investors showed a particularly strong appetite, however, for companies in a handful of sectors.
Ridesharing, in particular, had a strong funding year, with companies in the space taking more than 10 percent of all unicorn investment. That was largely attributable to billion and multi-billion dollar rounds for Lyft, Grab, Ola and Didi Chuxing.
Bike-sharing was also big. Two new entrants onto the unicorn list came from that space: Ofo and Mobike. However, concerns arose later in the year over whether consumer demand could support the ballooning bike supply.
Other recipients of really substantial funding rounds, even by unicorn standards, include U.S. co-working giant WeWork and China-based consumer internet players Toutiao and Koubei.
So a lot of unicorns are raising big rounds. But is there any sign members of the group will eventually produce returns for investors?
Overall, 2017 provided some modestly positive news for unicorn exit watchers. Fifteen venture-funded companies with private valuations of a billion dollars or more went public last year, more than double 2016 levels and the highest total since Crunchbase began tracking the asset class.
Acquisition activity, meanwhile, was weaker. There were just seven recorded M&A exits involving unicorns in 2017, down from 10 in 2016. AppDynamics was the highest-performing exit at 95 percent over its last private valuation. For the remaining companies that exited, all appear to have been below or at their last private valuation.
In the chart below, we look at IPO and M&A counts for unicorns over the past seven years:
Unicorn IPOs weren’t just more common in 2017. Performance was often quite good, too. Many of last year’s newly public companies sustained market caps far higher than their last private valuations. Top performers by this metric include several China-based unicorns, led by investment manager Qudian and search engine Sogou. Other standouts include gaming hardware provider Razer and app developer software provider MuleSoft.
In the chart below, we look at some of the top performers based on the post-IPO percentage gains over their last private valuations:
Lately, going public seems to be a better option for investor returns. If the company goes out below its last private valuation, that multiple can improve if it grows its market and public shareholders boost the stock. For an M&A transaction, the price is set and either late-stage investors have built in protections or are losing money at those exit prices.
For the 45 unicorn companies that have gone public, the average time to go public has been 26 months after first being valued at $1 billion. For the 25 companies that have been acquired, the average time to get acquired is 24 months after first being valued at $1 billion.
So what does that say about the current crop of still-private companies? Because more than 150 companies out of 263 have been on the Unicorn Leaderboard for more than two years, we expect exits to increase, given the backlog.
Special thanks to Steven Rossi who manages the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard.
Featured Image: Li-Anne Dias
via TechCrunch
Unicorns gorge as investors dish up bigger rounds, more capital
Injecting small amounts of two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors in mice eliminated all traces of cancer, including distant, untreated metastases, according to a new study.
The approach works for many different types of cancers, including those that arise spontaneously, the study finds.
The researchers believe the local application of very small amounts of the agents could serve as a rapid and relatively inexpensive cancer therapy that is unlikely to cause the adverse side effects often seen with body-wide immune stimulation.
“When we use these two agents together, we see the elimination of tumors all over the body,” says Ronald Levy, professor of oncology at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which appears in Science Translational Medicine.
“This approach bypasses the need to identify tumor-specific immune targets and doesn’t require wholesale activation of the immune system or customization of a patient’s immune cells.”
“…we saw amazing, body-wide effects, including the elimination of tumors all over the animal.”
One of the agents is already approved for use in humans; and the other has been tested for human use in several unrelated clinical trials. A clinical trial was launched in January to test the effect of the treatment in patients with lymphoma.
Levy works in the field of cancer immunotherapy, in which researchers try to harness the immune system to combat cancer. Work in his lab led to the development of rituximab, one of the first monoclonal antibodies approved for use as an anticancer treatment in humans.
Some immunotherapy approaches rely on stimulating the immune system throughout the body. Others target naturally occurring checkpoints that limit the anti-cancer activity of immune cells. Still others, like the CAR T-cell therapy recently approved to treat some types of leukemia and lymphomas, require a patient’s immune cells to be removed from the body and genetically engineered to attack the tumor cells.
Many of these approaches have been successful, but they each have downsides—such as difficult-to-handle side effects and high-cost and lengthy preparation or treatment times.
“All of these immunotherapy advances are changing medical practice,” Levy says. “Our approach uses a one-time application of very small amounts of two agents to stimulate the immune cells only within the tumor itself. In the mice, we saw amazing, body-wide effects, including the elimination of tumors all over the animal.”
Cancers often exist in a strange kind of limbo with regard to the immune system. Immune cells like T cells recognize the abnormal proteins often present on cancer cells and infiltrate to attack the tumor. However, as the tumor grows, it often devises ways to suppress the activity of the T cells.
The new method works to reactivate the cancer-specific T cells by injecting microgram amounts of two agents directly into the tumor site. (A microgram is one-millionth of a gram).
The first, a short stretch of DNA called a CpG oligonucleotide, works with other nearby immune cells to amplify the expression of an activating receptor called OX40 on the surface of the T cells. The second, an antibody that binds to OX40, activates the T cells to lead the charge against the cancer cells.
Because the two agents are injected directly into the tumor, only T cells that have infiltrated it are activated. In effect, these T cells are “prescreened” by the body to recognize only cancer-specific proteins.
Some of these tumor-specific, activated T cells then leave the original tumor to find and destroy other identical tumors throughout the body.
The approach worked startlingly well in laboratory mice with transplanted mouse lymphoma tumors in two sites on their bodies. Injecting one tumor site with the two agents caused the regression not just of the treated tumor, but also of the second, untreated tumor.
In this way, 87 of 90 mice were cured of the cancer. Although the cancer recurred in three of the mice, the tumors again regressed after a second treatment. The researchers saw similar results in mice with breast, colon, and melanoma tumors.
Mice genetically engineered to spontaneously develop breast cancers in all 10 of their mammary pads also responded to the treatment. Treating the first tumor that arose often prevented the occurrence of future tumors and significantly increased the animals’ life span.
Finally, lead author Idit Sagiv-Barfi, instructor of medicine, explored the specificity of the T cells by transplanting two types of tumors into the mice. She transplanted the same lymphoma cancer cells in two locations, and she transplanted a colon cancer cell line in a third location. Treatment of one of the lymphoma sites caused the regression of both lymphoma tumors but did not affect the growth of the colon cancer cells.
“This is a very targeted approach,” Levy says. “Only the tumor that shares the protein targets displayed by the treated site is affected. We’re attacking specific targets without having to identify exactly what proteins the T cells are recognizing.”
The current clinical trial is expected to recruit about 15 patients with low-grade lymphoma.
If successful, Levy believes the treatment could be useful for many tumor types. He envisions a future in which clinicians inject the two agents into solid tumors in humans prior to surgical removal of the cancer as a way to prevent recurrence due to unidentified metastases or lingering cancer cells, or even to head off the development of future tumors that arise due to genetic mutations like BRCA1 and 2.
“I don’t think there’s a limit to the type of tumor we could potentially treat, as long as it has been infiltrated by the immune system,” Levy says.
The National Institutes of Health, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Boaz and Varda Dotan Foundation, the Phil N. Allen Foundation, and Stanford’s department of medicine supported the work.
Source: Stanford University
The post ‘Vaccine’ kills cancer in mice appeared first on Futurity.
Back in 2009 when we didn’t expect too much from AI, Cognition IP co-founder Bryant Lee decided to go to law school after studying computer science — but he still wanted to one day try to bring those two together.
Fast forward to 2018, when AI has completely exploded and is pervasive in pretty much every industry, and Lee now has that chance. That’s why he and his co-founder started Cognition IP, a new-style law firm that helps clients more efficiently create and file patents and deal with other kinds of patent law. But instead of relying on the endless man hours for lawyers trying to figure out if a patent is already out there, Cognition IP leans on algorithms to create a kind of topic graph around a subject and see if anyone’s filed something on it already.
“I realized people didn’t want a way to find a lawyer, they just wanted a lawyer [right now],” Lee said. “The way to do that was to have our own firm but make that more efficient. People kept asking me, why don’t you take my case? I was getting a lot of demand for patent services. I realized that I should just try to make that firm more efficient with my own technology. I realized that’s where a lot of demand was and I wanted to build this tech to help with that.”
The client experience is still the same — someone comes in and works with the team to file their patents and deal with anything related to that. The inventor gets a pretty seamless experience of putting together the paperwork through a simple dashboard, and the tools recommend what to put in that application. Once all that’s in there, the firm files it. Cognition IP charges a flat firm, banking on the idea that if the firm can streamline the process, they can take more cases and build a more robust business.
Cognition IP’s core tech is on the back end, helping lawyers be more efficient about finding if there’s anything out there and detecting some of the subtle tricks that are sometimes implemented to get patents through. Over time, the engine becomes smarter as it determines which topics are associated with each other, making the searches more efficient and getting a better understanding of what kinds of filings are already out there. Often times a lawyer deals with around 100 patent clients, but Cognition IP looks to double that efficiency (or go even higher as the technology and firm become more sophisticated).
There are, of course, many challenges going into this as a lot of companies (like Google, even) race to figure out the best way to create a more seamless patent law experience, whether that’s on the filing front or anything that comes after. And there are regular search engines like Google Patents, which would help firms already find prior art. Cognition IP’s hope is that it can successfully build a topic graph for the universe of patents out there to quickly see if there are potential issues with the patents in order to head off problems down the road.
“There isn’t a lot of work on the search for actual factual information in cases,” Lee said. “For patents, there’s a lot of patent-specific knowledge to use — there’s a trick lawyers use where you try to change some of the words, and the patent office can’t find the relevant prior art to invalidate it. We’re working to find synonyms based on the patent database, something that’s domain specific. Instead of keyword related, they’re semantics and based on the whole document and not just the keywords.”
Cognition IP is launching out of Y Combinator’s 2018 winter batch.
via TechCrunch
Cognition IP looks to streamline the patent filing experience with a dose of smarter search
Price: $10 | Buy
Designed by former martial artist and self-defense specialist James Williams, CRKT’s Williams Tactical Key is an innocuous self-defense tool. It looks just like a key but offers a pointed end and a secure grip when needed. It also works as a Philips screwdriver.
