'Argo' producer scours for the next stranger-than-fiction story

Hunched over a desk in his spartan Westwood apartment, David Klawans squints at his computer monitor and knits his brow in concentration. "I'm perusing," he says.

His eyes dart between headlines almost indecipherable on a Web page displaying about 800 stamp-sized images of newspapers from 90 different countries.

"Two kids running? What's that?" he exclaims before clicking on a photo. "Oh, it's refugees. Whatever. Moving on."

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Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.

His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and two Golden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.

"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."

Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."

Indefatigable in his quest to root out oddball, overlooked true-life stories, Klawans spins material most others ignore into cinematic gold.

OSCAR WATCH: "ARGO"

"Argo" took nearly 14 years to reach the big screen after Klawans read about CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez's rescue of six American diplomats hiding in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez (portrayed in the movie by "Argo's" director, Ben Affleck) posed the group as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, created a fictitious production company and planted articles about the bogus project in Hollywood trade papers.

Throughout the '90s Klawans was scraping by as a production assistant for an L.A.-based Japanese TV commercial firm. He didn't own a car, so he bicycled to UCLA's magazine archive to check the story. In microfiche files, he came across the CIA's planted articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety from January 1980. "My jaw dropped," he says.

Problem was, Mendez already had representation at Creative Artists Agency and was preparing to publish a memoir, "The Master of Disguise." Even so, Klawans persuaded Mendez to let him attempt to set up a movie project. He eventually bought the rights to Mendez's life story as well.

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"I'm cycling to pitch meetings wearing a backpack with a change of clothes. It's summertime and I'm sweating. And I'm getting to know studio security. They call me 'bike boy,'" remembers Klawans, who would switch from bike to business attire outside the studio gates. "I would basically throw my backpack behind a bush — I was embarrassed to look like a messenger guy."

The New York University film school graduate was born in Chicago. His family moved to Belgium when he was 2 and he grew up in Europe and the U.S. consuming a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy films including "Star Wars."

He came close to setting up the "Argo" project as a cable TV movie. But when that deal fell through, Klawans says, "it hit me that Tony had planted stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter as a cover. For the CIA, it's all about illusions and perception. I thought, 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to plant an "Argo" story in a magazine.'"

The producer had met former L.A. Weekly staff writer and "This American Life" contributor Joshuah Bearman through friends who thought the two shared an appreciation for offbeat material. Bearman also had experience turning a magazine story into a movie; an article he reported for Harper's became the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," about two die-hard video game players vying for the world's highest score in the vintage arcade game "Donkey Kong."

Klawans handed over his research and contacts to Bearman and proposed that the journalist write "Argo" as a magazine article that would entice movie backers.

Bearman landed an assignment from Wired magazine, then interviewed everyone he could: Mendez, officials in the State Department with knowledge of the exfiltration and Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who housed some of the fugitive American diplomats, as well as the six embassy "houseguests."

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Craft Brewing: Etsy Sales Jump 70 Percent in 2012

Etsy, the site that brought craft shows online, had a banner year in 2012, with sales from its community of handmade and vintage goods sellers up more than 70 percent, the company said Monday. Though CEO Chad Dickerson has said he’s not gunning for an Etsy IPO in 2013, the New York-based company’s recent CFO hiring of Fidelity’s Kristina Salen, plus a huge jump in sales, puts Etsy in an ideal place to go public whenever it desires.

Sales on the handmade marketplace climbed from $525.6 million in 2011 to $895.1 million in 2012. Jewelry continued to hold the top spot for the most sales in 2012, while wedding goods, clothing, and home decor sales were also on the rise. For a place where you’d normally search for needlepoint crafts, handmade jewelry, and oil paintings, it’s surprising that furniture (mostly vintage and repurposed) was the fastest growing category, up 134 percent from 2011.

While Etsy sellers in U.S. and Canada fetched the highest earnings, shop owners in China, the UK, Australia, and India followed closely behind, though Etsy wouldn’t divulge exact numbers. Shoppers in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and most of Europe made the most purchases on the site. Those shoppers and shop owners have been helped by the fact that Etsy added five new versions of its site translated into French, Dutch, British English, Italian and Spanish last year.

Look closer at just the U.S. and you’ll see that people in Alaska and Massachusetts are making more purchases per capita on Etsy than any other state. And most of those goods are hailing from sellers in Oregon and Utah, the two states with the top earnings for 2012.

The marketplace is up to 22 million members (up 10 million from 2011), and the number of new people who signed up and purchased something in 2012 grew by 83 percent. In the seven years that Etsy has been around, 14 million people have made 100 million purchases from the site. Etsy earns between three and three and half percent per transaction, plus 20 cents per listing.

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Singer Chris Brown to be questioned over alleged punch: police

(Reuters) – R&B singer Chris Brown will be questioned as part of an investigation into allegations that he punched a man during a fight over a parking space in West Hollywood, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said on Monday.

Deputies responded to a call on Sunday about a fight involving six men on Santa Monica Boulevard, the department said. Witnesses said the Grammy-winning singer had assaulted a man during the brief altercation.

No arrests were made. The alleged victim was not named in a department statement that said Brown and his entourage had left the scene before deputies arrived.

Investigators plan to contact the singer about the incident at a later time, according to the department.

Brown, 23, is serving a five-year probation sentence after pleading guilty to assaulting fellow R&B star and former girlfriend Rihanna on the eve of the 2009 Grammy awards.

(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

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Observatory: Viagra as Diet Pill?

New evidence suggests that the erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra might have another use: helping burn away excess fat.

The drug, generically known as sildenafil, helped convert undesirable white fat cells to energy-burning beige fat cells in laboratory mice, researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany report in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

It was already known that mice fed Viagra became less prone to obesity when fed a high-fat diet. What was not clear was why.

Dr. Alexander Pfeifer, director of the university’s Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, said he already had some clues: Viagra works by preventing the degradation of the intercellular messenger cGMP. Dr. Pfeifer has long been testing the effects of cGMP on fat cells.

So he fed the drug to mice for seven days and monitored their fat cells. As it turned out, the troublesome white fat cells, which are associated with human problems like the dreaded spare tire, were being converted to the beneficial type of fat cells at a higher rate than usual. Dr. Pfeifer called the results “very promising.”

Still, he cautions against taking the drug purely for dieting purposes. “The idea to have one pill and then obesity goes away, that is a dream, but not easy to come by,” he said. “What we are up to is basic research in mice. This pill is approved by the F.D.A. for a particular purpose for a reason.” 

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A Conversation With Nick Goldman: Using DNA to Store Digital Information

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Nick Goldman, a molecular biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, used a technique with error-correction software to store and retrieve data in synthetic DNA molecules.

Last Wednesday, a group of researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute reported in the journal Nature that they had managed to store digital information in synthetic DNA molecules, then recreated the original digital files without error.

The amount of data, 739 kilobytes all told, is hardly prodigious by today’s microelectronic storage standards: all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a scientific paper, a color digital photo of the researchers’ laboratory, a 26-second excerpt from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and a software algorithm. Nor is this the first time digital information has been stored in DNA.

But the researchers said their new technique, which includes error-correction software, was a step toward a digital archival storage medium of immense scale. Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years.

If the new technology proves workable, it will have arrived just in time. The lead author, the British molecular biologist Nick Goldman, said he had conceived the idea with a colleague, Ewan Birney, while the two sat in a pub pondering the digital fire hose of genetic information their institute is now receiving — and the likelihood that it would soon outpace even today’s chips and disk drives, whose capacity continues to double roughly every two years, as predicted by Moore’s law.

The telephone interview with Dr. Goldman, from his laboratory in Hinxton, near Cambridge, has been edited and condensed.

Does your experiment suggest that DNA is a reasonable alternative for archiving digital information?

It’s too far beyond us at the moment because of the price. I don’t know if there are enough machines to write DNA in big quantities. I suspect not. The experiment we did converted about three-quarters of a megabyte of information off a hard disk drive into DNA. We showed it worked on a large scale, and part of what we published is an analysis of how that might scale up, at least theoretically. But we couldn’t do the scale-up experiments.

You’ve proved something. What’s next?

We’ve got a couple of ideas to pursue to make this a bit more likely to be something to turn up in the real world. One is to improve the coding and the decoding to see if we can get more information into the same amount of DNA. Hopefully if we can store twice as much information, that will halve our costs.

We were quite conservative in the approach we took. We really wanted to make sure that it worked, and so we used quite a lot of error-correction code. We could maybe sacrifice less to the error-correction part and use more actual information.

The other thing to make it work on a scale that the world would really be interested in is to automate and miniaturize. All the technologies exist — they’re all commercially available. But they’re not all in one place, and they’re not designed to work with each other as such.

If you wanted to do it properly you’d invest in the site, you’d have DNA synthesis at the site, you’d have the storage there, you’d have the reading back in one place, and you’d miniaturize it all. You’d have micro-fluidics to do what is currently lab science — even to the level of having robots to do the filing of the test tubes onto shelves. Robots are used in magnetic tape archive centers now, and you’d just want a smaller version of the same.

How similar is what you’ve done to what is involved in today’s gene-sequencing systems, which read and store the proteins in a DNA molecule?

The sequencing, or reading it back, that we did is exactly the same. We designed it that way. We designed it so that it would work in the standard protocols that we and our laboratory collaborators are familiar with, day in day out. It is really exactly the same process. We use an Illumina sequencing machine.

The writing of the information is a technology I’m a little bit less familiar with. But Agilent Technologies, whom we worked with, is one of the world leaders in developing this, and it is, I believe, very much like an inkjet printing system. But you’re not using colored dyes on paper — you’re using chemical solutions that include in them the nucleotides, the basis of DNA, fired very accurately onto a glass slide so that each little spot on the slide you build up is a separate sequence.

Is there a category of information you were most interested in archiving?

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Deadly nightclub fire in Brazil may have been started by flare

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- A fire at a nightclub in southern Brazil may have been caused by a flare lit on stage by a live band, according to witnesses to the blaze, which killed at least 231 people early Sunday.

[Updated: 10:55 a.m. PST, Jan. 27: Authorities now put the death toll at 232.]

The flare, which may have been part of an on-stage pyrotechnics display, caused the roof of the nightclub to catch fire, witnesses said. Most of the victims died from asphyxiation and smoke inhalation, police said.

Authorities in the southern city of Santa Maria spent the morning rescuing survivors and wading through the tragic aftermath of one of the most deadly fires in a decade. Earlier reports had placed the death toll higher. There were indications that it could still rise.

"There are so many bodies that we couldn't get all the way to the back of the nightclub," Lieutenant Moisés da Silva Fuchs told local media, referring to the now-destroyed Kiss club in Santa Maria, near the Uruguayan and Argentine borders.

The country awoke to troubling images of firefighters and civilians pulling people from the smoking building, and the news has shocked the country.

A tearful President Dilma Rousseff announced she had canceled plans to attend a summit in Chile and would be traveling instead to Santa Maria.

"I'd like to tell the population of our country, and of Santa Maria, that we are all together in this moment," Rousseff said.

Many of the victims were students at local universities, according to witnesses. Fire officials told the Globo television station that the main door was locked when the fire started, but that was denied by Lucas Cauduro Peranzoni, also known as DJ Bolinha, the resident DJ at the club.

"Everyone was pushing one another," Paranzoni said. "I breathed in some of that smoke and I felt woozy. I collapsed at the door and the security guards pulled me out."

At nightclubs in Brazil, it's common for patrons to accumulate a bar tab throughout the night, which they pay in order to be able to exit.

Several of the worst fires around the world in recent decades have been at nightclubs.

A welding accident reportedly set off a Dec. 25, 2000, fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.

At least 194 people died at an overcrowded working-class nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004.

A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, broke out on Dec. 5, 2009, when an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches, killing 152.

A nightclub fire in Rhode Island in 2003 killed 100 people after pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the rock band Great White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling.

[For the Record, 10:55 a.m. PST, Jan. 27: A previous version of this post carried a Rio de Janeiro dateline. The post was filed from Sao Paulo.]

ALSO:

More deaths of Afghan police; toll rises to 21

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Lace 'Em Up: 4 Running Shoes Reviewed

Hitting the streets to get fit by spring? We review four new specialty sneakers for runners.

Adidas' Adizero Feather 2.0 runners are so light (barely 7 ounces) and so responsive, running in them feels more like bouncing on fluffy clouds than pounding on pavement. OK, I'm exaggerating, but I was really blown away by the light weight when I took them out on long-distance runs. So effective was the feather-weight design on a 5-mile outing, I could actually notice the reduced effort in my legs.

The shoe is topped with a barely-there breathable mesh that runs from the toes all the way back to the heel. Ventilation is therefore excellent, with a constant flow of cool air delivered directly to your piggies. And, unlike most shoes that make use of fancy, lightweight materials, they're actually quite sturdy.

These sneaks are compatible with Adidas' miCoach data reporting system and its companion apps. So if you already have a miCoach Speed_Cell sensor, just lift up the shoe's insert and pop it in (You can also attach the sensor to your laces). The sensor can be synced with your iPhone to track your speed, acceleration, distance, and pace during runs.

The only problem is that the miCoach system needs some work, including the inconsistent syncing and the iPhone app's interface. If you're used to the Nike+ app, you'll be struggling to work your way through using Adidas' lesser creation. That said, it's an add-on to the shoe and not a primary feature, so miCoach's shortcomings don't detract from the sneaker's quality.

WIRED Obscenely light at only 7 ounces. Flexible mesh upper keeps your tootsies cool and dry. Durable, despite the lightweight design. miCoach-compatible for tracking your runs. Great styling. Affordable at $115. Men's and women's versions.

TIRED If you're not into light shoes, these aren't for you. The miCoach system needs a lot of work -- it's adequate, but could be so much better.

Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Rating: 8 out of 10

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Abrams on ‘Star Wars’: ‘surreal’ and ‘exciting’

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — J.J. Abrams calls getting assigned to direct the seventh live-action “Star Wars” film “as surreal as it is exciting.”

The director-producer-writer spoke with a handful of media outlets on the red carpet before darting into the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday night. Abrams was there to accept the Norman Lear Achievement Award for such television works as “Felicity” (1998-2002), “Alias” (2001-2006), “Lost” (2004-2010), “Fringe” (2008-2013) as well as the current series “Person of Interest” and “Revolution.”

Abrams also is proving to be a go-to director of successful new films for long-established franchises, such as “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible.”

Last week, Lucasfilm officially announced Abrams’ hiring for “Star Wars: Episode VII,” which has a tentative release date of 2015. “Star Wars” creator George Lucas personally endorsed Abrams in a statement: “I’ve consistently been impressed with J.J. as a filmmaker and storyteller. He’s an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn’t be in better hands.”

As for Abrams’ plans for “Episode VII”?

“You know, obviously, it’s so early,” he replied. “I can just say what I want to do: I want to do the fans proud. I want to make sure the story is something that touches people. And we’re just getting started. I’m very excited.”

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Brain Aging Linked to Sleep-Related Memory Decline

Scientists have known for decades that the ability to remember newly learned information declines with age, but it was not clear why. A new study may provide part of the answer.

The report, posted online on Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggests that structural brain changes occurring naturally over time interfere with sleep quality, which in turn blunts the ability to store memories for the long term.

Previous research had found that the prefrontal cortex, the brain region behind the forehead, tends to lose volume with age, and that part of this region helps sustain quality sleep, which is critical to consolidating new memories. But the new experiment, led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, is the first to directly link structural changes with sleep-related memory problems.

The findings suggest that one way to slow memory decline in aging adults is to improve sleep, specifically the so-called slow-wave phase, which constitutes about a quarter of a normal night’s slumber.

Doctors cannot reverse structural changes that occur with age any more than they can turn back time. But at least two groups are experimenting with electrical stimulation as a way to improve deep sleep in older people. By placing electrodes on the scalp, scientists can run a low current across the prefrontal area, essentially mimicking the shape of clean, high-quality slow waves.

The result: improved memory, at least in some studies. “There are also a number of other ways you can improve sleep, including exercise,” said Ken Paller, a professor of psychology and the director of the cognitive neuroscience program at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the research.

Dr. Paller said that a whole array of changes occurred across the brain during aging and that sleep was only one factor affecting memory function.

But Dr. Paller said the study told “a convincing story, I think: that atrophy is related to slow-wave sleep, which we know is related to memory performance. So it’s a contributing factor.”

In the study, the research team took brain images from 19 people of retirement age and from 18 people in their early 20s. It found that a brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex, roughly behind the middle of the forehead, was about one-third smaller on average in the older group than in the younger one — a difference due to natural atrophy over time, previous research suggests.

Before bedtime, the team had the two groups study a long list of words paired with nonsense syllables, like “action-siblis” and “arm-reconver.” The team used the nonwords because one type of memory that declines with age is for new, previously unseen information.

After training on the pairs for half an hour or so, the participants took a test on some of them. The young group outscored the older group by about 25 percent.

Then everyone went to bed — and bigger differences emerged. For one, the older group got only about a quarter of the amount of high-quality slow-wave sleep that the younger group did, as measured by the shape and consistency of electrical waves on an electroencephalogram machine, or EEG. It is thought that the brain moves memories from temporary to longer-term storage during this deep sleep.

On a second test, given in the morning, the younger group outscored the older group by about 55 percent. The estimated amount of atrophy in each person roughly predicted the difference between his or her evening and morning scores, the study found. Even seniors who were very sharp at night showed declines after sleeping.

“The analysis showed that the differences were due not to changes in capacity for memories, but to differences in sleep quality,” said Bryce A. Mander, a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley and the lead author of the study. His co-authors included researchers from the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco; the University of California, San Diego; and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The findings do not imply that medial prefrontal atrophy is the only age-related change causing memory problems, said Matthew P. Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Berkeley and a co-author of the study.

“Essentially, with age, you lose tissue in this prefrontal area,” Dr. Walker said. “You get less quality deep sleep, and have less opportunity to consolidate new memories.”

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Exam Finds Nothing Unusual About a Second Boeing 787 Battery

WASHINGTON — Although a fire destroyed one of two big batteries on a Boeing 787 parked at Logan Airport in Boston three weeks ago, a quick examination of the second battery found “no obvious anomalies,” the National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday.

The second battery was of identical design but used for a different purpose than the first, the agency said. Its report added scattered details to what is known about the incident, one of two battery problems that led to the grounding of all 50 of the 787s in airline service.

The board said that its laboratory was continuing to study the destroyed battery, whose function was to start the auxiliary power unit, a small jet engine used mostly on the ground. The battery, which was not being charged or discharged, caught fire on Jan. 7 while the plane was empty.

The undamaged battery on which the board reported Sunday was a backup for cockpit instruments, located near the nose. The board has released photos of the damaged and undamaged batteries.

On Jan. 16, on a different 787 on a domestic flight in Japan, the main battery began belching smoke a few minutes after takeoff, forcing an emergency landing. Investigators have not said whether it was being charged at the time. The planes were grounded shortly afterward.

The batteries use a lithium-ion chemistry, which has been in use for many years in many applications but is new in airplanes. Investigators say the problem could be the batteries or with the associated electronics used to manage them.

The board said Sunday that at the time of the fire at Logan, the plane, which belonged to Japan Airlines, had completed 22 flights and 169 flight hours.

The board’s update also said that investigators had completed a review of two systems associated with the auxiliary power unit, at two locations in Arizona, and found no problems.

The board said it had sent two additional investigators to Seattle, where the board was working with the Federal Aviation Administration to review work at Boeing. One investigator will work with a group reviewing Boeing’s corrective actions, and the other will work on how the lithium-ion batteries were approved by the F.A.A.

The safety board is an advisory body with no regulatory authority — that belongs to the F.A.A. — but it is in charge of safety investigations.

A team led by the safety board also examined circuit boards used to monitor the battery in the in-flight incident in Japan, the board said. The circuit boards were damaged in the incident, “which limited the information that could be obtained from tests,” the board said. It added that the team “found no significant discoveries.”

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