Latest news with #Nostromo
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
John Travolta To Star In Orca Survival Thriller ‘Black Tides' For Director Renny Harlin, Spain's Nostromo & The Solution — Cannes Market
EXCLUSIVE: Screen icon John Travolta (Pulp Fiction) is to star in Black Tides, the orca survival thriller we told you about last week from director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2). Travolta takes on the lead role of Bill Pierce, an estranged father whose attempt to reconnect with his daughter and grandson turns into a harrowing battle for survival when their boat is attacked by rogue orcas off the southern coast of Spain. More from Deadline 'Dossier 137' Review: Léa Drucker Superb In Dominik Moll's Sober Police Drama - Cannes Film Festival 'Waltzing With Brando', Starring Billy Zane As Brando, Gets North America Deal - Cannes Market EST N8 Acquires Philippine Eco-Horror 'The Caretakers' By Shugo Praico - Cannes Market Pic is written by Chris Sparling (Buried) and Ángel Agudo (Prime Video's Apocalypse Z), and produced by Adrián Guerra and Nuria Valls's Nostromo Pictures (Buried). The film, which is due to shoot at the end of the summer, will be 'shot old-school, with in-camera effects and real water work'. The Solution Entertainment Group is handling worldwide sales excluding Spain at the Cannes market. 'John Travolta brings the perfect combination of grit, depth, vulnerability and charisma to the character of Bill Pierce, the estranged father, that achingly captures the tragedies of family dynamics,' said Harlin. 'I can't wait to show fans of big screen cinema how his movie star presence and physicality will add gravity to the epic action sequences and deeply emotional personal drama. As a director, I consider myself fortunate to join a list of acclaimed filmmakers who've had the privilege of getting to know John as an artist and a person.' Harlin, also known for Deep Blue Sea, most recently directed box office hit The Strangers: Chapter 1 and has Nostromo-produced shark survival thriller Deep Water and The Strangers: Chapter 2 upcoming. 'You build a film like this around very few people. John's one of them. He brings the history, the craft, and the instinct that lets a character land in a way that lasts,' added producer Adrián Guerra. Adrián Guerra and Núria Valls' Spanish film and TV outfit Nostromo had their breakthrough success with Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds. Recent releases include Netflix hit trilogy Through My Window and Bird Box Barcelona, Prime's video's Apocalypse Z, and The Penguin Lessons. Currently, Nostromo is filming the international co-production Day Drinker, starring Madelyn Cline, Johnny Depp, and Penélope Cruz, while projects in post-production include The Night Manager season 2 and The Map That Leads to You, directed by Lasse Hallström. Best of Deadline Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far 'Bridgerton' Season 4: Everything We Know So Far
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Successfully Revived Brain Tissue from Suspended Animation
This is the first time that brain tissue has been cryogenically frozen and revived without damage. In a process called vitrification, researchers treated slices of mouse brains with cryoprotectants which protected ice crystals from forming and destroying the tissue When the slices of brain were revived, they showed a return to electrical activity, and it is possible they may have even held on to memories Putting humans into a state of suspended animation have been a sci-fi aspiration for decades. In Ridley Scott's iconic film Alien, the crew of the Nostromo emerge from cryo-pods as they approach a distant exoplanet, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series sees some characters in a state of cryo-sleep for decades, sometimes more than a century. But none of that is remotely realistic—right? Not so fast. Researcher Alexander German of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany has now found a way to cryogenically induce a state of suspended animation in hippocampus slices from mouse brains—and then revive them. German and his team put the brain segments in a deep freeze for a week and then warmed them back up to find that electrical activity had returned to almost normal levels. This step forward builds on previous experiments that have tried to revive cryogenically frozen mammalian tissue. A 2006 study that attempted to freeze and revive hippocampal slices from rat brains came close, but there was not enough evidence for the level of reanimation that German has now achieved. Until now, whether living brain tissue could be shut down by freezing and then regain function was unknown. Cryopreservation involves more than just freezing. Tissue frozen without cryoprotectants is susceptible to damage from the formation of ice crystals, ultimately resulting in loss of function and cell death. This is why German's team used a method known as vitrification. Since the early 1980s, vitrification experiments have been found to preserve tissues with cryoprotectants that prevent the crystallization of ice and turn supercooled bodily fluids into a glassy, amorphous solid. 'Based on stereomicroscopy assessment of tissue swelling and crystallization, as well as the degree of electrophysical recovery, we optimized a vitrification procedure that minimizes damage,' the researchers said in a study recently posted on the preprint server bioArxiv. The cryoprotective agents German planned on using were designed to be nontoxic and minimize the risk of tissue injury from shrinking, swelling, crystallization and cracking. Once prepared with these cryoprotectants, the brain slices were cooled to -196 °C (about -321 °F) in liquid nitrogen. This is important because a direct transfer to liquid nitrogen without cryoprotective treatment would have caused the tissue to crack. They were then kept in a -150 °C (-238 °F) freezer for a week. When the slices of mouse hippocampus were taken out and brought up to -10 °C (14 °F), observations showed that there had been no crystallization during the cooling or rewarming phase. Tests showed that the revived brain tissue had just about fully recovered and had resume electrical activity. The fragile synapses that connect nerve cells and pass impulses through them were intact, and German thought it was even possible (although not yet proven) that memories could have been preserved. 'Normal spontaneous synaptic events revealed that brain activity re-initializes after cessation of all continuous dynamical process in the vitreous state,' he and his team said in the same study. 'Our work improves substantially upon previous attempts at cryopreserving adult brain tissue.' Tissue from other organs, such as rat hearts and livers, have also been successfully cryopreserved and revived before. Whether this could eventually translate to putting an entire organ, even an entire organism, in a state of suspended animation requires future research. Some animals produce their own cryoprotectants as they transition to a state of torpor to avoid harsh winters. This is something else scientists could learn from in the pursuit of artificial suspended animation. Alien and Foundation are onto something. Putting humans into a state of suspended animation during spaceflight would drastically reduce the risk of tissue damage caused by microgravity and extreme radiation. No one is trekking to Mars—at least not yet—so we still have time, but even just the thought is no less tantalizing. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
The Independent
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Colin Firth's ex-wife Livia sheds light on post-divorce relationship with Oscar winner
Colin Firth 's ex-wife Livia Giuggioli has given a glimpse into her relationship with the Oscar-winner six years after their divorce. Livia, an eco-activist, was 25 when she met Firth while working as a production assistant on the set of the 1996 BBC miniseries Nostromo. They married the following year and had two sons; Luca, 24 and Matteo, 22. The couple split briefly in 2015 but announced their permanent separation in December 2019, after 22 years of marriage. Despite many years apart, Livia has revealed in a new interview that the pair remain 'very, very close friends' and that they spent Christmas together in Italy with their family and Livia's new partner of two-and-a-half years, Callum Grieve, a Scottish climate activist. She told The Sunday Times that she watches all of Firth's films and that their relationship is 'very healthy', which she is 'incredibly proud of... We're very, very close. We love each other.' 'We're like this huge crazy family now,' she said. Asked whether she missed the glamour of Hollywood red carpets and film premieres, she said she didn't 'want to be part of that circus' anymore. 'Colin is very private, so we always separated public life from our life,' she said. 'When you take that approach, you become like an avatar. You go there, you do it, you call your mum to say you saw George Clooney… but your real life has nothing to do with that. So when you don't have it any more, it's actually much nicer, because it was never you in the first place.' Livia also credited her marriage to Firth for giving her the platform to launch her own business, Eco-Age, a luxury sustainability consultancy. 'If I wasn't Colin Firth's wife, I could never have done what I did with Eco-Age,' she said. 'I could only do it because I was Colin's wife. If you use that attention in the right way, it's fantastic. If you don't use it in the right way, it's almost dystopian, because you're getting attention but you're not using it.' Livia's company recently went into liquidation after it fell victim to what she called a 'very sophisticated crime which happened in various stages', beginning with a cyberattack two years ago. However, she now runs a sustainable farm in Città della Pieve, on the border of Umbria and Tuscany, with her two brothers. Livia revealed that she decided to move back to the family's holiday home Umbria after her split from Firth due to her connection to the location. 'We always came here for holidays, the kids grew up here,' Livia told the publication. 'I just thought, 'Why am I going back to London?' Città della Pieve was our holiday home and then it became my home.' Firth has been in a relationship with TV writer Maggie Cohn since 2022, after meeting on the set of the drama series, The Staircase.
