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I took a behind-the-scenes tour Friday of the new Transformers ride opening in a few weeks at Universal Studios Hollywood. PHOTOS: Behind-the-scenes tour of Transformers ride For those of you who have never experienced Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey or the rebooted Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Florida's Universal Orlando (or traveled to Universal Studios Singapore where Transformers opened in December), you're in for a real treat when the new motion-simulator dark ride with high-definition 3-D images officially debuts on May 25. For the better part of a decade, the Spider-Man ride was widely considered the best theme park attraction in the world, until the Wizarding World of Harry Potter came along and the Forbidden Journey reset the bar for attraction supremacy.

Sony Pictures Releasing International will distribute "Stalingrad," the first Russian-made feature film to be shot in the IMAX 3-D format, in the picture's home country. A teaser trailer for the film from director Fedor Bondarchuk will be screened at Sony Pictures Entertainment's CinemaCon presentation on Wednesday. "Stalingrad" is a love story set in 1942 against the backdrop of the devastating World War II battle of the same name. The Battle of Stalingrad, in which the Soviet Union finally prevailed, lasted more than five months and resulted in the deaths of nearly two million people.

The San Fernando Valley is 260 square miles of suburbia. Actually, make that suburbia on nutritional supplements. And antidepressants. With perhaps a little cosmetic surgery south of Ventura Boulevard, where the big money is. Or maybe - now that it's grown to more than 1.7 million people in nearly three dozen cities and neighborhoods rich and poor - the Valley isn't even a suburb anymore. It begins just 10 miles northwest of Los Angeles City Hall, sprawling west to the Simi Hills, north to the Santa Susana Mountains, and east to the Verdugo and San Gabriel mountains.

Scientists at Stanford University on Wednesday released a video of a three-dimensional tour of a mouse brain, using a technique that made the brain see-through. The development could lead to rapid advances in research into Alzheimer's disease and other brain maladies. The researchers also made part of a human brain transparent, and used it to produce sharp imagery of deformed neurons that may be associated with Down syndrome and autism. It took six years for engineers and biochemists to remove the matrix of fats from a brain and replace it with a plastic gel. Imagine taking the binder out of a casserole and replacing it with Jell-O and you're close to what they've done.

It's hard to believe, but there was a time not long ago when everyone walked around (in public!) with naturally colored teeth. Today, with so many whitening gels, strips and trays out there, yellowish grins aren't as common — nor the natural look as appealing — as they used to be. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Dr. Vincent Mayher, a dentist, as being based in Philadelphia. Whitening mania is especially obvious in the toothpaste aisle.

When the Cannes Film Festival announced Monday that it would open on May 15 with Baz Luhrmann's  “The Great Gatsby,” it raised more than a few eyebrows. The Cannes opening-night film is almost always a world premiere, as both the festival and Hollywood studios seek the most publicity bang for their buck. But Warner Bros.' “Gatsby” comes out in North America on May 10. Why would Cannes open its high-profile festival with a movie many tastemakers and filmgoers in the U.S. will have already weighed in on?

In a case of history repeating itself, Ang Lee nabbed the directing Oscar for his film "Life of Pi" at the 85th Academy Awards on Sunday, beating Steven Spielberg as he did back in 2006 when the two were last nominated. Back then, Lee's work on "Brokeback Mountain" bested Spielberg's drama "Munich. " This time, Lee beat him for his work on "Lincoln. "  Lee, 59, also bested Austrian Michael Haneke ("Amour"), Benh Zeitlin ("Beasts of the Southern Wild") and David O. Russell ("Silver Linings Playbook")

At a cinema in San Francisco, about 100 people recently showed up for a free screening of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and a presentation of a kind of Netflix for movie theaters. The service, called MoviePass, would allow consumers to watch all the movies they want for a $50 monthly fee, using their smartphones to download codes that could be redeemed for tickets at theaters. With the backing of AOL Ventures, the New York start-up had planned a national rollout of the service this fall with online ticket firm MovieTickets.com.

Walt Disney Co. believes that World of Cars, its new subscription-based online community aimed at boys and based on the Pixar movie "Cars," won't get lost in the traffic of virtual worlds. Things are already a bit congested. Some 200 virtual worlds target children under 12. Each competes for a slice of the 10 hours and 45 minutes a day the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that kids spend viewing media, simultaneously vying for screen time against a growing number of portable media players and smart phones that offer their own diversions.

Aging baby boomers are feathering their empty nests with bent plywood chairs from Design Within Reach and bubble lamps fondly remembered from childhood. Their own offspring, who likely set up their first apartments with IKEA sofas and tables, are now shopping for kids' furniture inspired by midcentury design. It doesn't seem premature to say it: For some consumers, modern is quickly becoming the new traditional.

Scientists have built a 3-D printer that creates material resembling human tissues. The novel substance, a deceptively simple network of water droplets coated in lipids, could one day be used to deliver drugs to the body -- or perhaps even to replace damaged tissue in living organs. The creation, described in the journal Science, consists of lipid bilayers separating droplets of water -- rather like cell membranes, whose double layers allow the body's cells to mesh with their watery environments while still protecting their contents.

This post has been corrected. See note below for details. Director Jon Chu only gets slightly wild-eyed nowadays thinking back to last spring when Paramount Pictures dropped its "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" bombshell. Little more than a month before Chu's $130-million action-thriller was set to besiege multiplexes last June, studio executives made a rare 11th-hour blockbuster scheduling switcheroo. They punted its release from a prime summer slot into the lower-rent movie real estate of March 2013.

It's not a good omen for "The Croods," about a likable family of Paleolithic cave dwellers, when a joke about "the first joke" falls flat. I don't fault the actors. The character voices provided by Nicolas Cage as the Croods' cautious dad, Grug; Emma Stone as Eep, his rebellious teenager, desperate to get out of the cave; Ryan Reynolds as Guy, the outsider who sees the future; Catherine Keener as ever-patient mom Ugga; and Cloris Leachman as cranky Gran are spot on. But "The Croods" was primed for problems before its 3-D characters found themselves right in the middle of the first continental divide.

In May 2005, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Animations announced that, following their collaborations on "Chicken Run," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Flushed Away," their next joint venture would be "Crood Awakening," a stop-motion comedy about a caveman living in a small village with a prehistoric genius. John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Kirk DeMicco ("Racing Stripes") were hired to write the script. And now nearly eight years later, a vastly different version of the tale is opening Friday.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Leap Motion and its tiny 3-D gesture-control device stole the show at the annual South by Southwest Interactive festival this year, and we got a one-on-one demo of the controller with co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald. The 3-inch-long device, which the company is calling a “new frontier for hands and fingers,” sits in front of a computer and can track gestures within an 8-cubic-foot area. It has a sensitivity said to be 200 times that of Microsoft's Kinect or Nintendo's Wii and can even track different finger movements.

Despite the chicken-in-every-pot hype over consumer-level 3-D printers, the technology still has a long way to go to be usable, or useful, for the average Joe. Designing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional computer screen is no simple task, especially for those unskilled in computer-assisted design or software. And for most people, there's no compelling reason to make a unique object from scratch when mass-produced equivalents are cheaper and simpler. But for some artists, 3-D printing has been a revelation.

3D Systems Corp., which makes three-dimensional imaging systems, said it received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission for documents as part of a formal investigation of the company. 3D on June 30 said the SEC was checking into how the Valencia-based company recognized revenue, according to a regulatory filing. The company "intends to continue to cooperate fully with the SEC," it said in a filing.

Following weak box office performances for re-releases of "Monsters, Inc.," "Finding Nemo" and "Beauty and the Beast" in 3-D, Walt Disney Studios has canceled plans for   a 3-D "The Little Mermaid" in September. The underwater animated hit from 1989 was the fourth and final 3-D re-release for which Disney announced plans in late 2011 after "The Lion King" proved a surprise hit in the format, grossing nearly $100 million in the U.S. and Canada. But "The Lion King" turned out to be an anomaly, as the three follow-ups grossed far less.

Some are fascinated with 3-D printing. One man can't get it out of his head. An unidentified man had 75% of his skull replaced with a 3-D printed implant made by Oxford Performance Materials, a Connecticut company. The surgery this week was the first time a patient received an implant made specifically for him using 3-D printing technology. The patient, whose name and injury OPM would not disclose, had his head scanned as part of the procedure. The operation marks a big step in the advancement of 3-D printing technology, the company said.

Walt Disney Studios has agreed to a content license agreement with Sensio Technologies Inc. for the distribution of 3-D films via a new video-on-demand television service, the companies announced Monday. Sensio's on-demand rental service, called 3DGo, is to go live this month, though initially it will be limited to 22 Vizio television models that have both 3-D and Internet capabilities. Disney titles that will be available on 3DGo include the animated films "Brave" and "Frankenweenie.