Steve Jobs' Pixar has closed its TV unit and will concentrate on full-length movies. The company is being forced into ever-more-difficult projects as competitors learn to duplicate Pixar's special effects. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7/11/96, B8. EDUPAGE.]

CMU's Jose Moura claims their interframe video compressions scheme -- using segmented scenes -- offers up to 10,000:1 compression. Unfortunately, the encoding side can't yet be done in real time. [Data Communications, 7/96, p. 18. NewtNews.]

Scientists at UCB and the Hungarian Computer and Automation Institute have a low-power retina chip with 500 programmable analog processors -- a cellular neural network -- capable of 1T operations/second. Early trials showed success in locating small tumors in x-ray images. The US Navy financed part of the $1M project. Another $5M is needed to commercialize the technology, to produce $300 chips ten years from now. [clari.tw.computers.pc.hardware. Bill Park , 7/9/96.] (Carver Mead's Synaptics also makes retina chips.)