Dudes: are you looking to get that Baywatch body without all the pumping of iron? All you need is a little “MovieReshape” and you can be virtually buff! Just don’t let anyone see you in person.

MovieReshape is a program created by Christian Theobalt at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. The program will digitally alter your appearance (including height, weight, and muscle tone) in any movie clip. Women can even get a digital boob job or liposuction to automatically enhance body size and shape on the fly.

Earlier approaches to body manipulation on film required retouching of every frame, a very laborious process when you’re talking about 30 frames per second. But this approach is different–it works from a 3D body plan made from the scans of 120 different men and women of different shapes and sizes, and in many different positions.

Using off-the-shelf software the team then identifies the person to be manipulated, and tweaks parameters like height, waist girth, leg length, muscularity, and breast girth. Check out a video explanation (with some creepy demonstrations) after the jump:
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These days, professors are well acquainted with the threat of plagiarism from their students. But teachers quickly learned to enlist computer programs to help them catch cheaters. And now, a University of London literature professor, Sir Brian Vickers, is expanding the use of plagiarism software to determine the authors of literature that remains un-bylined.

The program, aptly named Pl@giarism, compared the play The Reign of Edward III to Shakespeare’s collection of work by looking for patterns in the number of times similar phrases appeared in both. The plagiarism software counted the number of times at least three strings of “trademark” Shakespeare words appeared in the play, such as “art thy self.” The program doesn’t look for a predetermined set of words, but looks for patterns. So when Edward III was compared to the works of other authors, the program only determined a match of 20 strings, while it found 200 strings in common with the Bard’s work, making it clear that Edward III was, indeed, written by Shakespeare.

Time reports:

Among Shakespeare’s recycled bits of phrases: “come in person hither,” “pale queene of night,” “thou art thy selfe,” “author of my blood” and even the whole phrase “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Other matching strings are less compelling, but are nevertheless an essential part of distinguishing the author’s linguistic fingerprint, says Vickers. The professor also matched more than 200 strings of words between Edward III and Kyd’s earlier works — at this point in his career, he had only three plays to his name.

Therefore, it appears Kyd wrote 60 percent of the play, and Shakespeare wrote the rest.

That said, don’t expect non-literature buffs to take on the task of deciphering un-attributed works anytime soon: It took Vickers 40 years of learning about Shakespeare and two whole years to crack the Edward III case.

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Image: flickr/ Tonynetone