It looks like Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company specializing in facial recognition software, is finally starting to pay off. Google Blogoscoped, a blog dedicated to everything related to Google, got a tip from a Google engineer that Google had secretly added some facial recognition abilities to its image search this week.

The feature remains unofficial and unannounced, but you can add a small query string to the end of your Google Image search URL to see the facial recognition software in action.

For example, do a normal Google image search for “Starbuck Battlestar” and your image results should produce images from the American SciFi TV show Battlestar Galactica. Then try adding “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL. Your new search results will only contain photos of people and tight shots of their faces. Cool right?

Last August, Google Picasa product manager Adrian Graham had this to say about Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision in the official Google blog:

“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.”

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No longer are our magnificent Monday night ‘Heroes’ going to be confined to merely mortal NBC TV (and SciFi Channel reruns). Our favorite Heroes and villains are coming to DVD this August with tons of bonus features.

The 7-disc set, available on DVD and HD DVD on August 28, 2007, will include the never-before-aired 73-minute premiere episode and over 50 deleted scenes.

The Heroes Season 1 DVD set is priced at $59.98 and is available for preorder on Amazon.com for $38.99 until July 24, 2007.

Here are some of the Heroes Season 1 DVD extras:

• Unaired Pilot: The Tim Kring cut with audio commentary — A full 73 uninterrupted minutes of the original, unaired, extended pilot episode, as Heroes’ creator Tim Kring first envisioned it, with a character never seen.

• The Making of “Heroes”: From concept to pop culture phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look at the hottest new series on television.
• Special Effects: The secrets behind the eye-popping visuals that give the Heroes their amazing powers.
• The Stunts: A backstage look at the show’s hair-raising stunts.
• Mind Reader: Matt Parkman’s mind reading abilities reveal your inner Hero with a series of simple tests.
• Profile of Artist Tim Sale: A look at the Eisner Award-winning comic book artist (Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil) behind much of the Manga-influenced artwork used in the show.
• The Score: Go behind the scenes with Wendy Melvin and Lisa Coleman (of Prince’s The Revolution) as they create their ASCAP Award-winning musical score.
• Extra Scenes: 50 deleted and extended scenes.

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Think He-Man and you will think Mattel action figures, “By the Power of GreySkull” and that campy 1987 movie that starred Dolph Lundgren. Now producer Joel Silver is hoping that he can develop a new film version of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for Warner Brothers but it must be approved by toymaker Mattel who owns the toy-based franchise.

The script is set to be written by Justin Marks if the film gets the go ahead but Mattel are reported to be wary of going Hollywood again and had already said no to an attempt by Fox 2000 and director John Woo.

The franchise has been reimagined by Silver and the writers and pitched to Mattel as a classic good-vs.-evil battle, using the kind of visual effects strategy employed in 300.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

The BBC has picked up hit sci fi drama Heroes as an exclusive for its second season. The broadcaster is thought to have paid around £400,000 an episode for the second season of the show.

The new deal represents a five-fold increase on the amount the corporation paid for season one, which will air on BBC Two over the summer.

Sci Fi Channel had first-run rights to season one, but was forced out of the bidding for season two as the price tag rose.

Season two will now air on both BBC Two and digital channel BBC Three from next year.

So is this good news? Hopefully yes. It’s the BBC so that means we get to watch the greatness that is Heroes but without annoying ad breaks and everyone can watch the show together without some having to wait longer (those who don’t have Sci FI).

Reference for posting: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk

After months of hype, we finally get to see Michelle Ryan in NBC’s new remake of the Bionic Woman. In this clip from Vmix.com, we get to see Jamie Sommers (Michelle Ryan) find out she has bionic parts and freak out. Those are some sexy bionic toes by the way.

It’s tough to tell from just a few scenes, but Bionic Woman looks like it’s going to be a fun show. With the success of sci-fi shows like Heroes and Lost, Bionic Woman might just be the next big hit. Plus David Eick from Battlestar Galactica is the Executive Producer. Here’s another clip of Eick talking about the strong women characters in his shows.

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There was a bit of a surprise when Katee Sackhoff told reporters that her time on the new NBC series “Bionic Woman” went from “one episode” to “recurring.” But all of that can be explained in one simple sentence: Sackhoff simply wowed network executives.

“She absolutely steals the screen in ‘Bionic,’” Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, told TV Week’s James Hibberd.

Some of the clips featuring Sackhoff, best known to genre fans as Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in SciFi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica,” have been released to the Web by NBC Universal as a way to promote the series, which will make its debut this fall. In it, Sackhoff plays the original bionic woman who gets in a rooftop bionic battle with Jamie Sommers, played by series tar Michelle Ryan.

Sackhoff’s character originally was slated to be offed in the pilot, but executives liked her so much that she is now going to be pulling double duty between both shows which are filmed in Vancouver and produced by NBCU.

Sackhoff apparently isn’t the only BSG alum to be making the show either… two more actors familiar to “Battlestar” fans who have some type of role in the pilot.

The Bionic Woman airs Wednesdays this fall at 9/8c on NBC. See NBC.com’s Bionic Woman web page for more info.

[Via syfyportal.com]

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Less than a week after American broadcast network, CBS, pulled the plug on its post-Apocalyptic sci-fi series “Jericho,” fans have apparently been making contact with the network in droves, demanding that if nothing else, CBS find closure for the cliffhanger left at the end of Season 1.

That campaign has included letter writing and even the delivery of peanuts to the network, highlighting one of the final words of the series when Skeet Ulrich’s character of Jake Green tells the sheriff of the neighboring town of New Bern that is at war with Jericho, paying homage to a World War II story by his grandfather.

The campaign may have paid off, with CBS making an announcement on the official “Jericho” message boards that there could be plans in the works to at least wrap up the story.

“We have read your e-mails over the past few days and have been touched by the depth and passion with which you have expressed your disappointment,” wrote Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment.

“Please know that canceling a television series is a very difficult decision. Hundreds of people at the network, the production company and the incredibly talented creative team worked very hard to build and serve the community for this show — both on-air and online. It is a show we loved, too. Thank you for supporting ‘Jericho’ with such passion. We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment. In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure in the compelling drama that was the ‘Jericho’ story.”

While the series had a strong run of episodes early in the season, by the time it returned several weeks after its first part of the season, “Jericho” had stiff competition against “American Idol”- fueled programming on Fox among other places, but was still generating decent ratings for CBS.

[Via syfyportal.com]

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In another step to make us that cool Sci-Fi civilization of the future, Scientists have developed an artificial plastic blood which could act as a substitute in emergencies.

The artificial blood is made up of plastic molecules that have an iron atom at their core, like haemoglobin, that can carry oxygen through the body.

Hopefully the blood will be a huge advantage in war zones as it is light to carry, does not need to be kept cool and can be kept for longer. It could also be fairly inexpensive to produce.

A sample of the artificial blood prototype will be on display at the Science Museum in London from 22 May as part of an exhibition about the history of plastics.

Now all we need are robot doctors to administer the plastic blood.

Reference for posting: http://news.bbc.co.uk

I know that the whole “man goes back in time to alter events” idea has been done a lot and to various degrees of success but hopefully NBC’s Journeyman will be one of the better versions.

NBC has picked up the show which is about a man who can go back in time and alter events. It’s a romantic sci-fi fantasy so there is a different slant on the niche.

Scottish actor Kevin McKidd, most recently seen playing the role of Lucius Vorenus in the BBC-HBO co-production Rome, will play the lead role of Dan Vasser in the series. Moon Bloodgood (Day Break) is also on board in the starring role of Livia Beale.

Expect to find Journeyman in the 2007-08 TV season.

Reference for posting: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk

If you are a regular reader of Entertainment Weekly, then you might have seen the first photo of the upcoming Iron Man film they published last week. The picture got such a huge fan reaction in the blogosphere that Paramount decided to release a high resolution version of the photo.

Jon Favreau (Swingers) will direct Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr. (Less Than Zero) has the lead role of Tony Stark/Iron Man. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges have also been cast in the film. Iron Man is slated to hit theaters on May 2nd 2008.

The high rez photos are definitely worth checking out.

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