"Black Swan" director Darren Aronofsky has bowed out of shooting 20th Century Fox's sequel "The Wolverine," starring Hugh Jackman, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In a joint statement with Fox, Aronofsky told THR Thursday: "As I talked more about the film with my collaborators at Fox, it became clear that the production of The Wolverine would keep me out of the country for almost a year," Aronofsky said in a joint statement with Fox Thursday. "I was not comfortable being away from my family for that length of time. I am sad that I won't be able to see the project through, as it is a terrific script and I was very much looking forward to working with my friend, Hugh Jackman, again."
A Fox spokesperson said the studio is "disappointed," but noted: "Having done both 'The Wrestler' and 'Black Swan' with Darren, we know he is an extraordinary talent and we look forward to working with him on other projects in the future."'
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Fox hadn't yet greenlit the sequel, which was set to take place in Japan as the Marvel Comics character faces an inner battle between his killer animal instincts and his sense as a noble Samurai. (Christopher McQuarrie, known for his work on 1995's "The Usual Suspects," is penning the script).
No official word on how Aronofsky's exit will affect shooting --- which was to take place overseas (including Japan, which has been ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami) -- or the film's release (it never had an official date but was rumored to hit screens in 2012).
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Aronofsky's sudden departure also raises a big question for Jackman, who recently spoke out about how the Oscar-nominated director ordered him to bulk up for the role.
Just last month Jackman told The Los Angeles Times he was on a 6,000 calorie-a-day diet and weighed 210 lbs.
"I don't know how much I want to give away about it, but Darren said with the last one, 'Hey you looked great, but you're so tall that in those long shots you looked kind of like Clint Eastwood, and that's not Wolverine,''" Jackman said. "He said that Wolverine, in the comics, is powerful, stocky, you know, he's short and thick. So he said, 'I want you to go there, get bigger.'"
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It remains to be seen whether Jackman will have keep the weight on.
In its statement, the Fox spokesperson stressed that both Jackman and the studio remain "fully committed to making 'The Wolverine.' We will regroup and move forward aggressively."
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On Thursday, the space shuttle Discovery blasted into space for its final mission. People around the world watched the liftoff, but only a lucky few got to see the shuttle from the skies.
Passengers on a flight from Orlando, Florida to Richmond, Virginia were treated to an unexpected kind of entertainment when they saw the Shuttle off of the left side of the plane.One quick-thinking man named Neil Monday captured the experience on his iPhone. After he uploaded the two-minute clip to the Web, searches shot into the stratosphere. The video has been featured by multiple blogs and news agencies, including MSNBC.
Monday almost never got the chance. The flight he was on was scheduled to leave two hours earlier, but a delay kept it grounded. It's probably the first time in history passengers were happy about being delayed.
The video, which you can watch below, is, of course, visually stunning, but it also contains a pretty good joke, if you listen hard enough. While Neil records the shuttle's launch, the captain can be heard over the loudspeaker saying, "Those on the right side can see the space shuttle. Those on the left side can probably see the people on the right side looking at the space shuttle."
You gotta love airplane humor.
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A 7-year-old Serbian boy named Bogdan is attracting media attention for his apparent ability to attract other things, such as silverware, remote controls, plates and even a large frying pan. The objects seem to miraculously stick to the boy's skin. Bogdan's family claims he's magnetic, and an MSNBC reporter who filmed him in action says it's true.
This isn't the first time a person has claimed to possess magnetic powers. In fact, YouTube is strewn with demonstrations of bodily magnetism. But are they real?
No. According to Benjamin Radford, renowned skeptic and managing editor of the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, there are several clues in the videos as to what's really going on.
"A lot of times when you see these videos, the people are leaning back slightly," Radford told Life's Little Mysteries. "If there really is some magnetic attraction, the person should be able to lean over. If a magnetic force is overcoming gravity, we should see that. That's one strong clue that what we're seeing is not any sort of magnetism."Second, glass plates and a non-metallic remote control, as well as metal objects, are shown sticking to Bogdan's chest. "Glass is not magnetic. If a smooth piece of glass is sticking to him and a smooth piece of metal, what do those have in common? A very smooth surface. Not magnetism."
That shows that quite a different physical effect is at play. "These people aren't magnetic, it's just that things that have smooth surfaces stick to skin," said Radford, adding, "Often these magnetic people have smooth skin and hairless chests."
Bogdan, shirtless in the MSNBC video, is quite devoid of chest hair.
According to Radford, scientists and paranormal skeptics have often tested alleged attractors to see whether they are generating magnetic fields, and they aren't. For example, Radford said, when a compass is hung around their necks, it doesn't point toward them, as it would if they were magnetic enough to attract spoons. Instead, it points due north to the Earth's magnetic pole.
The real question, then, is why smooth objects like spoons and dishes stick to some people's skin.
Sadie Crabtree of the James Randi Education Foundation (JREF), an organization that funds the scientific investigation of paranormal claims, said the effect is actually quite simple. "Skin is naturally slightly sticky, and some types of skin are probably stickier than others," Crabtree told Life's Little Mysteries. "But this is really no different than the trick where someone hangs a spoon from the end of their nose. It's just sticking through friction."
The Science of Stickiness
To find out what's happening on the scale of atoms, Life's Little Mysteries turned to Gabor Somorjai, a leading surface scientist and chemistry professor at University of California, Berkeley. Though three physicists contacted previously had no idea what was happening, Somorjai described the effect as "very simple."
"Your skin is covered with grease and oils," he told us. "You can clean them off with soap, but within less than a minute it will again be covered with oils."
The grease on your skin has a very low surface energy, due to the fact that it is a liquid. "Its atoms are only connected with weak bonds," he said.
By contrast, metals, with their strong, hard-to-break atomic bonds, have very high surface energies. "Things that have high surface energies want to go into a lower energy state. And so they want to be covered with a low surface-energy material," he said.
And that means things like spoons stick to grease.
Furthermore, the smoother the spoon (or other object), and the larger its surface area, the more contact it will make with the skin, and so the more it will stick.
According to Elmar Kroner, a German materials scientist who has studied gecko feet, the elasticity of skin also affects its stickiness, and sweat makes it less elastic. "The sweat has a crucial function: With increasing wetness of the skin, its mechanical properties change. The skin becomes softer, and this reduces the elastically-stored energy of the skin and again leads to higher adhesion," Kroner told Life's Little Mysteries. So, sweaty skin is stickier.
James Randi, the famous skeptic who founded the JREF, has in the past demonstrated that "magnetic" people's miraculous powers disperse when they are doused in talcum powder, a product that cuts grease.
The science suggests that Bogdan is not magnetic, but rather just an exceptionally smooth, particularly sticky boy.
This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
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Looking for a job? Try to find one with a fast-growing employer. We have a list of them: 16 companies with a history of steadily rising payrolls and the prospect of strong top-line growth over the next four years.The winning companies on this list range from giants like discounter Costco Wholesale and pleasure boat operator Royal Caribbean down to unfamiliar outfits like medevac specialist Air Methods and contract manufacturer Labarge. What they all have is a career opportunity where promotions are more likely than pink slips.
Imagine that you were an engineer 20 years ago contemplating job offers from Cisco Systems and General Motors. With one, your destiny might have been advancement and stock option riches. With the other, in all likelihood, something bad.
Moral: When you are shopping for a job, don't just look at the salary and the benefits. Do some financial digging, the way a stock analyst would. Increase the odds that you will wind up with a Cisco instead of a GM.
To create a list of winning employers I worked with Scott DeCarlo of our Statistics Department to screen publicly traded companies for these attributes:
Company Employment Future Integrity
recent growth % growth % rating
Under Armour 3,000 39 20 85
VSE Corp. 2,809 31 5 76
Leap Wireless Int'l 4,202 25 11 81
NII Holdings 13,673 23 11 77
CBeyond 1,944 23 7 97
BJ's Restaurants 11,000 22 21 93
TNS 1,163 19 10 80
NetApp 8,333 17 14 87
CommVault Systems 1,240 16 11 82
Tractor Supply 7,600 13 13 84
Air Methods Corp. 2,718 11 11 94
United Natural Foods 6,500 10 10 80
Royal Caribbean Cruises 59,500 9 11 87
American Eagle Outfitters 6,400 7 5 88
Labarge 1,536 5 11 95
Costco Wholesale Corp. 82,000 5 8 82
• a 5% or better annual growth rate in the employee count over the past five years, with no year-to-year dips bigger than 10%. We considered only companies with at least 1,000 employees.
• a consensus Wall Street forecast for 5% or better top-line growth over the next three to five years.
• a top-quartile rating from Audit Integrity, which scorecards companies on such measures as transparency, corporate governance and absence of insider trading. The point here: You should avoid companies that are pushing the envelope with their accounting, attracting shareholder lawsuits or engaging in a flurry of acquisitions and divestitures. These are risky places to work.
The resulting tabulation is a far cry from the Best Companies to Work For lists you will see elsewhere. Those rankings put a premium on the warm and fuzzy things in a workplace. My thinking: In a booming economy you can fuss over on-site day care and free pizza on Fridays, but in a tough job market you should think about survival.
These days companies with shrinking revenue don't hesitate to engage in mass layoffs. Forget the pizza. Calculate the probability of getting axed. It's lower in a fast-growing company.
Did you think manufacturing is dead? It's very alive at Labarge, a St. Louis, Mo. company that does contract electronics assembly for defense suppliers and for other manufacturers. It supplies machinery to Owens-Illinois bottle factories, for example.
If you have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and some experience in radio frequency testing, check out the opening at a Labarge site in Tulsa, Okla. The company has another 30 opportunities in sales, engineering and purchasing.
Do you have a facility with numbers and an interest in energy conservation? VSE, an Alexandria, Va. firm that does contract work for the federal government, is looking for an analyst with a physical sciences degree to handle an energy-related database. It has another 80 jobs posted.
Jobs are disappearing in some parts of the computer business. But they are growing in data management. Take a look at the mess of files you have on your home laptop and think about what goes on in corporate info departments. Now you know why CommVault is growing. This Oceanport, N.J. company creates software for archiving and backing up corporate data.
CommVault vice president William Beattie Jr. says the company will end its current fiscal year with 130 hires, a lot for a firm that now numbers 1,240. He wants to hear from you if you are a Unix or Windows developer with C or C++ experience. There are also openings for programmers good at Java-based user interfaces.
Employment growth is a compound annual rate over the last five years. Future growth is an IBES forecast of annual revenue growth over 3-5 years. On the AI integrity percentile scale, 100 is best; for this measure we average the two most recent AI ratings. Costco's employment count excludes 65,000 part-timers.
Best Companies For Job Offers
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©Rick Maiman/AP
Under Armour
Under Armour founder Kevin Plank turned the mundane business of athletic apparel into a hot growth company. Openings at the Baltimore, Md., headquarters include some in e-commerce and footwear design.
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©Mark Elias/Newscom
Royal Caribbean
Cruise operator Royal Caribbean has rebounded briskly from the recession. Apply if you know something about hotel management -- and don't get seasick.
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©Carolyn Chap/AP
American Eagle Outfitters
American Eagle Outfitters has some glamorous openings, such as in fashion design, but most of the hiring is in store and warehouse operation.
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©Chuck Burton/AP
Costco
Costco Wholesale's needs cover a wide range: Aviation, graphic design and property management are among the less obvious fields cited in its list of career opportunities.
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Courtesy of BJ's Restaurants
BJ's Restaurants
BJ's Restaurants is hiring cooks, bartenders, servers and dishwashers.
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VSE
Military contractor VSE has openings for geeks like aircraft mechanics and ship electronics technicians.
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©Newscom
Leap Wireless
Leap Wireless, which provides flat-rate wireless services in 35 states, began life as a spinoff of cellular engineering firm Qualcomm. Most of the openings are in retail sales.
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Courtesy of United Natural Foods
United Natural Foods
United Natural Foods is a wholesaler. There are jobs for accountants, drivers, purchasers and warehouse operators, among many others.
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CHICAGO (Reuters) – A new edition of one the most popular English-language Bibles will offer substitutes for words such as "booty" and "holocaust" to better reflect modern understanding, a Catholic group said on Wednesday.Nearly 50 scholars from all faiths and a committee of Roman Catholic bishops have labored since 1994 over the first fresh edition of the New American Bible since 1970, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said.
The annual best-seller to be issued by a dozen publishers beginning next week on Ash Wednesday "is a beautiful translation -- it's a new way to look at an old love," said Mary Sperry, who oversees Bible licensing for the bishops.
The changes go beyond a few words being altered, and include freshly-written notes that should help readers better understand the Catholic church's interpretation of biblical concepts, Sperry said. The Book of Psalms contains over 70,000 words, both text and notes, she said.
The revisions more accurately reflect translations of ancient Hebrew and Greek versions of the Old Testament and the constant evolution of modern-day language, Sperry said.
For example, the word "holocaust," which for most people refers to the World War Two genocide of Jews, was changed to "burnt offerings," which clarifies the original, positive idea of making offerings to God.
"Booty," which has come to have a sexual connotation, was changed to "spoils of war;" and "cereal," which many think of as breakfast food, became "grain" to reference loads of wheat.
In a change in a passage in Isaiah 7:14 that foretells the coming of Jesus and his birth to a virgin mother, the 1970 edition's reference to "the virgin" will become "the young woman," to better translate the Hebrew word "almah."
"The bishops and the Bible are not signaling any sort of change in the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus. None whatsoever," Sperry added.
The new edition will revert to more poetic versions of Psalm 23 to have it read, "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," instead of "dark valley." And "I will dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come" was changed to "for endless days," which Sperry said carried a more profound and hopeful meaning.
The current edition of the New American Bible sold more than one million copies last year, mostly in the United States, the Philippines, India, and Africa. The new version could spark a pickup in sales, Sperry predicted.
The edition will be available in many formats: as a family hardback, a basic paperback, as an "e-book," as an "app" for cell phones, and in a Braille version.
(Editing by Greg McCune)
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