UConn women’s basketball won another national championship last night, extending its win streak to a record 78 games. Does this support my thesis that “evil is in” this year in sports? Geno’s smug grin says yes.

UConn women’s basketball won another national championship last night, extending its win streak to a record 78 games. Does this support my thesis that “evil is in” this year in sports? Geno’s smug grin says yes.

ONE!
On Monday, Internet giants Amazon and IMDB announced that they would make available over 6,000 films and TV shows for free-and-legal streaming. It’s certainly an interesting development in modern media, especially after the recent WGA strike, which was concerned over the amount writers would recieve from Internet-streaming content and downloads.

TWO!
Director Alex Cox, the man behind ’80s cult films like “Repo Man” and “Sid and Nancy,” as well as polarizing, political films like “Walker” and “Searchers: 2.0″ delivers his memoirs in the form of X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker. Cox tells the story of his struggles as a young British ex-pat filmmaker up through his most recent endeavors, harking back to the days when independent films were, well, more independent, more political and less cutesy, in addition to ruminating on the state of film today and the direction it’s headed.

THREE!
He may have released his long-awaited magnum opus — SMiLE — a couple years ago, but master pop craftsman Brian Wilson’s latest album proves the man still has a lot left in him. That Lucky Old Sun is the perfect accompaniment to the waning days of a beautiful summer here in Santa Barbara, full of Wilson’s signature swelling harmonies and optimistic, yet melancholy lyrics.

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If you haven’t already made it to Hatlen Theater to attend the Dept. of Theatre and Dance’s sixth-annual UCSB New Plays Festival, you still have a chance. The festival runs through May 31, and features original plays penned by UCSB playwrights. Tickets to the festival are $13 for UCSB students. Call (805) 893-7221 for more information.

Prolific lyricist Robert Pollard – also known as the man behind indie rock heroes Guided By Voices, releases yet another album, Robert Pollard Is Off to Business on his own label this Monday. Tuesday brings us new stuff from Aimee Mann, Fleet Foxes and everybody’s favorite trashy TV bachelor, Mr. Bret Michaels.

Director Anton Corbijn’s film “Control,” a biopic about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, comes out on DVD on Tuesday. The film, which chronicles Curtis’ early life, musical career, struggles with epilepsy and depression and untimely death, won rave reviews and a multitude of critics last year.

Insomniac Cinema presents Aaron Katz’s 2007 film, “Quiet City” in I.V. Theater on Thursday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m. The film, as part of the appropriately awkwardly termed “mumblecore” genre, depicts a meandering but momentous day shared by two twentysomethings in Brooklyn. Katz will be on hand after the screening to take questions.

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While a game of Monopoly is the closest many students have ever been to experiencing a businesslike environment, a group of UCSB students took the commerce game to a whole new level, competing in teams with novel ideas in a contest that could have been dreamed up by The Donald himself.

Last Tuesday, the ninth annual New Venture Competition was held at the UCen’s Corwin Pavilion. Finalists presented their business plans to a panel of capitalists, serial entrepreneurs and technology business leaders. The contest consists of five distinguished categories, of which $10,000 is awarded for the Most Fundable Idea, $5000 for Dow Materials Use, $4000 for Best Pitch and $2000 for Audience Choice.

Teams were rated on a number of characteristics, including their likelihood to succeed as a team and the clarity of their funding and growth strategies. The award for the Most Fundable Idea category went to Nitride Solutions. The team plans to manufacture highly efficient and long lasting ultraviolet light emitting diodes, which will have the potential to sterilize water and process food and are not currently available for commercial use.

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UCSB biologists and engineers attempt to understand the unusual composition of the strong, sharp Humboldt squid beak and its applications in the world of science.

According to Herbert Waite, UCSB biology professor and co-author of the study, the structure of the Humboldt squid’s beak allows the sharp tip to coexist with its fragile body, while preventing damage to the squid itself.

“The squid has made a strategy to interface its beak and buccal mass so that the contact damage between the two is minimized,” Waite said. “This boils down to the gradient that is observed, where the beak is hard on one end and soft on the other.”

The Humboldt squid, also known as Dosidicus gigas, or Red Devil, is a predatory squid well known for its fighting spirit, according to Waite.

“[The squid] is not only voracious, but has a personality that runs hot and cold,” he said. “So it can be abruptly aggressive.”

The squid hunts both in packs and alone, according to Waite. They can grow up to four meters (13 feet) long and have been found to wander into unusually shallow waters. As a result, divers and fishermen often become targets and are sometimes attacked.

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1. From “Fawlty Towers,” to “Will & Grace,” to “Shrek the Third,” “Monty Python” co-creator John Cleese has had quite the comedy career. See him speak about “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and see a screening of the film tonight at Campbell Hall. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are just $10 for students.

2. Mark Morris Dance Group is world-renowned for its mastery of modern dance. See them performing at Santa Barbara’s very own Granada Theater on May 20. The show starts at 8 p.m.

3. Laotian poet Bryan Thao Worra is the author of the first full-length Laotian American book of poetry, and has been featured in over 70 other publications from around the world. See him perform his poetry live at the MCC Lounge on May 20 at 5 p.m.

4. Don’t laugh at your camera, but NBC announced this week that former SNL star Jimmy Fallon will succeed Conan O’Brien as the host of “Late Night” next year. Although the exact date of the change has not been announced, NBC has made public its plans to move O’Brien to the “Tonight Show,” where he will take over for Jay Leno.

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Testing military-grade steel for battleships, analyzing composite materials for sealants used in nuclear power plants and constructing 500-mile-per-gallon vehicles are just a few of the many exciting projects carried out in the College of Engineering Machine Shop.

Located in room 249 of the UCSB Arts Building, this highly sophisticated facility houses some of the very latest state-of-the-art equipment, used by both researchers and students.

Two seasoned professionals, Shop Superintendent Andy Weinberg and Student Shop Superintendent Nelson Bednersh, oversee the facility. Open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays, the shop has served students and faculty members for 20 years and continues to do so with its doors open and its machinery humming.

The Greasy Life

The shop has highly complex machinery, ranging anywhere from Electrical Discharge Machines, which remove metal from workpieces using electric sparks to wear away material, to Computer Numerical Control Mills – machines used to drill and shape prototype parts. While open to the needs and rigorous demands of research teams and engineering students, the equipment in the Machine Shop requires high skill and knowledge to operate, Weinberg said.

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When it comes to infectious diseases, no line exists between wild animals and humans.

Jonathan Davies, a scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UCSB, said he and a team of researchers discovered that closely related species — such as humans and chimpanzees — often share similar pathogens, which is a disease holding organism, ranging from bacterium to viruses. Davies, who was also the lead author of the study, said pathogens often jump species barriers, which he said explains how AIDS spread from chimpanzees to humans.

The team also found that viruses are more likely to jump to species living in close proximity, which means they can jump between distantly related species, Davies said.

“Viruses evolve much faster, so they can adapt more rapidly from different hosts, so they have short generation times, so they can find cracks in the new hosts’ armor and infect them,” he said.

Therefore, because avian influenza is a bird flu virus, it was easily able jump from birds to humans, Davies said. In addition, he said an increase in outbreaks is likely due to new viral diseases in previously sparsely populated areas, particularly in Central and West Africa.

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As part of a $14.4 million campaign, UCSB’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies is working with five institutions to discover unprecedented ways in treating and preventing diabetes.

Together, UCSB, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts, Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, and Entelos, a physiological modeling company, will collaborate on the Insulin Resistance Pathway Project.

IRP is a three-year venture aiming to meet a major need in modern medicine to help fight diabetes and obesity, Senior Director in Pfizer’s Worldwide Exploratory Science and Technology organization Preston Hensley said. This has been a crucial problem for not only the West, but for the rest of the developing world, he said.

“Every pharmaceutical company has the same need,” Hensley said. “Diabetes and obesity are epidemic in the Western world and are becoming an epidemic in India and China. The problem stemming from this research, though, is that the government funds the basic research on which the pharmaceutical industry is built. They fund the research for the pursuit of knowledge, so the economy of the nation can take advantage of it and make money.”

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Kids can do more than just clown around with the UCSB Physics Circus program.

The outreach program is just one of UCSB’s faculty and student group programs aimed at teaching science to local K-12 students. The Physics Circus, sponsored by faculty member Deborah Fygenson and overseen by program coordinator and graduate student Anne Wrigley, focuses on illustrating different concepts of physics to children in the neighboring communities through the use of fun-filled experiments and interactive demonstrations.

Fygenson said the group’s name came from a popular book written to excite the curiosity of children and get them involved in the everyday applications of physics.

“There is a book by Jearl Walker, and it’s called The Flying Circus of Physics,” Fygenson said. “Back when I was a kid, [Walker] used to write columns in the back of Scientific American about the cool thing you could build yourself to see the physics principles involved. He would suggest certain experiments you could do yourself to try and understand, and towards the end of his career, he compiled a lot of cool questions and answers in this book called The Flying Circus of Physics. The group was named after that. The idea being that we are trying to entertain as well as educate so that kids in school can share our enthusiasm for how cool physics is.”

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1. Renowned director Julian Schnabel garnered international acclaim for his recent hit “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” See the film about what happens when the editor-in-chief of French Elle has to deal with the aftermath of a sudden stroke at 7:30 p.m. on April 28 in Campbell Hall.

2. Child prodigy Pandit Chitresh Das is now a prolific performer, choreographer and dancer, who’s known for his unique take on classical North Indian choreography. See him at 8 p.m. on April 25 in the MultiCultural Center Theater.

3. Tickle your ivories with a conversation with pianist Margaret Leng Tan and various UCSB composers at 4 p.m. on April 29. The event takes place in the Old Little Theatre, and is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
4. If you liked Artsweek’s interview with John Cho and Kal Penn, then check out their new movie “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” when it debuts on April 25. It’s high time.

5. Look out ladies, Kanye West is now single. On Monday, “Access Hollywood” confirmed reports that the rapper and his fiancée of almost two years – Alexis Phifer – are no longer together. Hopefully, he’ll get to live the good life with plenty of drunk, hot girls now.

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Four years of shooting for stars has led a team of international scientists to discover 10 new extra-solar planets.

Rachel Street, UCSB postdoctoral fellow and scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network in Goleta, and Tim Lister, LCOGT project scientist, are working in collaboration with a team of astronomers from observatories and labs across the world in search of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system.

According to Street, determining whether or not a faint twinkle in the night sky is in fact a planet depends on characteristics such as its radius, size and mass.

“The 10 new planets are all of a type known as ‘gas giant’ planets, which means most of their radius is composed of a thick gaseous atmosphere,” Street said. “They vary in size but are roughly similar in mass and radius to Jupiter, one of our solar system’s gas giant planets. Since these planets orbit very close to their host stars, this class of planets are known collectively as ‘hot Jupiters.’”

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1. Wangechi Mutu is a world-renowned visual artist, with strong literal and aesthetic roots in Kenya. Hear her unique perspective on her own provocative pieces, as she speaks in Campbell Hall on April 23. The lecture starts at 8 p.m., and admission is free.

2. “Control” documents the career and eventual demise of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis – a seminal figure in the post-punk scene. It has also been hailed as one of the recent high points in British film, and it’s screening at 7 and 10 p.m. in I.V. Theater on Friday.

3. Soothe the savage beast with Russian pianist and newly appointed faculty member Natasha Kislenko’s first solo concert at UCSB. The program will feature works by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Chopin and Prokofiev, and it will take place in the Lotte Lehman Concert Hall at 8 p.m. on April 18. Admission is $7 for students.

4. Earlier this week, author J.K. Rowling testified in a New York courtoom to block the publication of Steven Vander Ark’s Harry Potter Lexicon, claiming that the encyclopedic guide to all things Potter infringes upon her copyrighted canon and is especially offensive since she, herself, is working on a similar tome at the moment. Now, it’s up to U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson, Jr. to spell out Vander Ark’s fate.

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