STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

7 Horrifying Sea Monsters From The Depths Of The Ocean

Here’s 7 of the most weird and wonderful sea creatures in the world! From the jelly-like Blobfish to the terrifying and bizarre Angler Fish, the ocean is home to some truly amazing and surreal critters.

1. Angler Fish

This fish has its own illuminated spine-come-fishing-rod used for attacking its prey. The angler you see is a female, the males are much smaller and attach themselves to the females, becoming parasites that are fused to their host for life. When the female is ready to get it on, the male mates with her on the spot in exchange for complete dependency and a shared circulatory system!

2. Blobfish

This gelatinous mass has been dubbed the worlds ugliest animal.

3. Flamingo Tongue Snail

Bright and beautiful, this patterned snail likes to dine on toxic sea fans that would poison most. Absorbing the toxin, this gorgeous assassin becomes a killer itself.

4. Hatchetfish

These teeny tiny fish are honestly terrifying to look at. Razor thin and resembling a hatchet (funny that), it’s lucky for us they’re only 1-5 inches long.

5. Goblin Shark

Ghoulish, ghastly and incredibly ancient, the Goblin Shark is one scary looking fish. Living in the deepest parts of the ocean, this “living fossil” is the only survivor of a 125 million year old family of sharks.

6. Sea Cuke

As mindless as the particles of food it eats (seriously though, it has no brain) the Sea Cuke is like a living recycling plant, constantly processing nutrients and breaking down the waste floating around it. Did I mention it also has super powers? Well, kind of. Its high levels of collagen allow it to liquify its body, enabling it to seep into tight spots – kinda like Alex Mack!

7. Fangtooth

This guy looks way tougher than he is. He might have terrifyingly sharp fangs, but believe it or not, he’s blind as a bat! He literally has to run into his prey to find it.

[MIKA27]

Mexico’s Haunted Island Of The Dolls Is Actually Terrifying

Just to the south of Mexico City is a rural area named Xochimilco (so-chee-meel-koh) which translates into ‘a place of flowers’ – it paints of picturesque scene of calm and serenity doesn’t it? But hidden away deep within its myriad of canals, is ‘The Island Of The Dolls’ a place allegedly home to the supernatural and certainly one of the creepiest places on earth.

Local folklore tells of tale involving a man named Don Julián Santana who chose to live on the island, away from his wife and kids, for 50 years before he passed away in 2001. Isolated and with scarcely any human interaction, he became convinced that the spirit of a young girl was haunting him. A wandering and restless spirit who had perished in the watery depths of the canals.

Today his cousin Anastasio maintains the island and his former home, allowing tourists to visit Don Julián Santana dwelling and obsessions with dolls for a small fee.

“There are many stories about why the dolls are here. Some people claim Don Julián was mad, and that he’d fish dolls out of the canal believing they were real children, and that he could nurse them back to life. But the real story is that, soon after Don Julián arrived on the island, he came to believe this place was haunted by the spirit of a poor young girl who drowned in the canal. So when he saw a doll floating past he took it and put it on a tree, both to protect himself from evil and make the dead girl happy. But one doll wasn’t enough; soon Don Julián had made the entire island into a shrine.”

But after 5 decades, those dolls that were once a beacon of comfort and innocent, have degraded and rotten into something more akin to a horror movie props. They are scattered all over the island, left in various positions and strange places by Don Julián to be forgotten by time……until now.

Don’t be surprised if you see a movie titled ‘The Island Of The Dolls’ based on true events in the near future

[MIKA27]

THE DASH | WIRELESS SMART EARPHONES

The Dash is the name given to the world´s first wireless smart in ear-headphones. The sleek earphones can be paired with a smartphone or mp3 player, or if you can´t be bothered to carry a device, you can use the embedded 4GB/1000 song music player.

It also works as a fitness tracker, tracking your pace, steps, cadence and distance, and as a hart rate monitor measuring your heart rate, oxygen saturation and energy spent. It also doubles as a Bluetooth Headset, with clear voice quality delivered through the embedded ear bone microphone. You can also enable or disable noise isolation with a swipe on the capacitive touch surface.

Oh, and it works underwater!

[MIKA27]

BRUNTON HYDROGEN REACTOR

Meet the future of portable recharging - the Hydrogen Reactor by Brunton.

The hi-tech device combines hydrogen in the core with oxygen in the air to generate power! With the Hydrogen Reactor you´re not tied to anything, no waiting for the sun to cooperate, no bulky batteries to carry, no power pack to charge, simply lock the rechargeable core into the Hydrogen Reactor and create power on the spot. watch the video

Learn more at Brunton

[MIKA27]

IN1CASE

Keeping a multitool in your pocket isn't that big of a deal, but there are times when it's nice to be as unencumbered as possible.

That typically means leaving behind everything but your ID, cards, and phone at home. With the In1Case, you can retain some of the multitool utility without having anything extra in your pocket. Hidden in slots built into the polycarbonate case are blue and red pens, phillips and flathead screwdrivers, a nail file, tweezers, scissors, and a toothpick, as well as a kickstand for viewing video. All that's missing is a flashlight camera radio — on other hand, that pretty much covers everything.

[MIKA27]

Cancer-Spotting Glasses Light Up The Bad Cells For Surgeons

Cancer surgery is tough. Even with high-powered microscopes, surgeons have a very difficult time distinguishing cancer cells from healthy cells. But these new glasses developed by Washington University, St Louis could change all that.

Put simply, the glasses make cancer cells glow blue, after the patient is injected with a special dye that targets the cancer cells. Because cancer is so notoriously difficult to spot, it’s not uncommon for patients to require a second surgery to cut out the cancer that the surgeon missed the first time around. Doctors hope these glasses will fix all that. “Imagine what it would mean if these glasses eliminated the need for follow-up surgery and the associated pain, inconvenience and anxiety,” said Dr Julie Margenthaler, a breast surgeon at WashU.

Sight isn’t the only sense that scientists are hoping might solve the second surgery problem. Last year, Dr Zoltan Takats invented the so-called iKnife system — essentially, a sophisticated scalpel equipped with a mass spectrometer that literally sniffs out cancer cells. While WashU’s glasses are too new to be named, the iKnife is already being used to save lives in the United Kingdom. And, hey, when it comes to tools to fight cancer, we’ll take all we can get.

[MIKA27]

'Brazil Is Not A Civilized Country' Says The Country's Most Controversial News Anchor

Brazil is a violent country, in both urban and rural areas. The issue of violence in the South American nation has become so deep rooted that it is now an obstacle to growth, as a 2013 study by the Center for Hemispheric Policy of the University of Miami pointed out. “As in most of Latin America, the police and security forces [in Brazil] are poorly paid and poorly trained,” the study said.

“During the 2013 protests, it was clear that the security forces used unnecessary force to confront the mostly peaceful crowds. A disturbing development has been the appearance of young people wearing black masks, who are unafraid to confront the police with force,” says the study, authored by Professor Riordan Roett, a political scientist whose focus is Latin America.

The study goes on to note that due to the proximity of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, “the discontent in Brazil is widespread but there does not appear to be a consensus on what should be done first and who should do it,” since Brazilians are dealing with two choices: accepting cutbacks in overgenerous handouts or continuing to put up with appalling infrastructure and public services.

According to official statistics, between 2007 and 2013 more than 33,000 people were murdered, about 1,070 of those as consequence of being mugged. Some 5,412 people died in conflicts with the police — and that’s only in Rio de Janeiro. Earlier this month a group of so-called vigilantes beat up and stripped a boy who allegedly tried to mug a pedestrian in the Flamengo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. The image of the teenage boy ambushed made news all over the world.

In Brazil, the case became even more notorious after being addressed by news anchor Rachel Scheherazade, who hosts the most watched news show on SBT, Brazil’s third-largest network. In an Op-Ed broadcast last week, Sheherazade said their actions were “understandable,” and those who were pro-human rights and felt sorry for the boy should “do Brazil a favor and adopt a thief”.

She was bombarded with criticism, but praised for her comments by many. Now a household name in her native country, Sheherazade — whose salary is pegged by Brazilian media at south of $1 million per year — has a point of view about mostly everything, from Brazil’s famous Carnival (“

“) and Justin Bieber (“

“).

Even former President Lula da Silva was reportedly uncomfortable with Sheherazade’s criticism of his Worker’s Party government.

In an exclusive interview with FORBES, Sheherazade explains her point of view. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

From a civilized standpoint and within what is expected of a civilized country, what happened to the teenage boy ambushed by the vigilantes is wrong. Why do you consider it “understandable”?

Brazilians are unarmed and unattended; they don’t have any means to defend themselves. In extreme situations like this, where there’s no order or the presence of the state, it is understandable that people will try to protect themselves. To unite against crime is not a crime, it is self defense. What I don’t approve is the insanity of the justice by the hands of vigilantes. There is a big difference between self defense and justice. Moreover, Brazil is not

a civilized country. Nobody believes in that anymore. Just read the news and you will find out what Brazil is really like. Children burned on buses, prisoners being beheaded, tourists being raped collectively… And what the media reports is just the tip of the iceberg. In what comes to civility we have reached rock bottom.

You are in a position where everything you say will influence people in a way or another, and you have recently said that Brazil’s democracy is “at risk.” Do you think there is a lack of opinions in Brazil?

I don’t think so. What is lacking is more room for counterpoint. The problem is anybody who says something that differs from what most people think, or what most people are taught to think, ends up suffering all sorts of persecution. There are already threats to control the media with the sole purpose of silencing those who promote a free speech.

Your remarks about that teenage boy were quite polarizing. Apparently, a lot of regular people seemed to have agreed with you, while many in the media and other sectors strongly condemned what you said. How to explain this?

Some members of the Brazilian media are still playing by the rules of leftists. There are several blogs and websites which are financed with public money, they are paid to promote an “official speech” and to vilify anybody who says anything against the government. It is a dirty, unfair and undemocratic game.

The case of the “Mensalao” scandal is widely accepted by members of the ruling Workers’ Party as “ acceptable for the greater good.” What is the difference between addressing this crime as “acceptable” and the crime committed against the teenage boy as “understandable”?

Understand that there are many good people within the Workers’ Party, as in any other party. But there also many leftists in the party who are inclined to justify anything, even a crime, in order to stay in power. That’s what happened with the Mensalao. They say it’s all about political persecution, which in fact never existed. It’s also disrespectful to Brazil’s judicial system. As for the boy, he ended up becoming an escape goat for dubious speeches and for opportunistic politicians who falsely use it to defend human rights.

I would like these people and the government to feel the same way about the people and to take actions to bring safety to a society that has become a victim of the banditry that has gripped Brazil.

[MIKA27]

West Coast apocalypse: How “earthquake storms” could devastate California

The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, in the vicinity of Post St. and Grant Ave.

It is often hard to see the obvious, unless you are someone who brings a new perspective to a problem. Stanford professor Amos Nur, an expert on earthquakes and in the more general field of how rocks fracture when subjected to high pressure, saw something at the ancient Greek city of Mycenae that countless others had simply overlooked.

It was 1993 and Nur was attending a conference on archaeo-seismology, a relatively new term to describe how archaeologists and seismologists were trying to join forces and benefit from each other’s work. But as Nur later recounted, the conference was a disappointment. The archaeologists and the seismologists seldom mixed, except during short breaks when both groups would indulge in drinking strong Greek coffee, and during an occasional day trip when they were taken to see one of the nearby ancient sites. It was during one such trip that Nur and the others visited Mycenae.

Here a quick diversion explains an unexpected circumstance that links Mycenae to California and its geology. In 1851, Heinrich Schliemann, then a German businessman, made a trip to California to claim his dead brother’s estate. His brother had been one of the first to arrive in the gold fields, though instead of searching for gold, the brother made a quick fortune buying and selling claims.

When Schliemann arrived, he too sensed an opportunity and opened a bank in Sacramento, where he traded in gold dust. The venture was short-lived; local agents were soon complaining that they were receiving short-weight consignments, and Schliemann, feigning illness, quickly left. He eventually made his way to the eastern Mediterranean, where he used his brother’s fortune—and whatever additional money he had accumulated while in California—to finance archaeological work at Mycenae and Troy and other soon-to-be-famous sites. More than a century later, Nur, standing at Mycenae, recognized a feature that Schliemann had unearthed that would change the way seismologists determine earthquake risk in California.

What Nur saw is along the entranceway to the ancient city and within sight of the famous Lion Gate, where a stone relief depicts two lionesses in upright heraldic positions. It was through this gate, so tradition says, that Agamemnon, a Mycenaean king and one of the main characters in Homer’s Iliad, marched his army and led them on a ten-year siege of Troy. Just outside the gate is an immense stone wall that sits atop a head-high steep incline of highly polished rock. To most people, the incline conveys a sense of rock-solid security. To Nur, it was evidence of a past calamity.

Nur recognized the rock incline as a fault scarp—a line along which a past earthquake had fractured and thrust the ground upward.

That meant the Mycenaeans had built their city over an active fault. Fortunately for them, this particular fault has not moved in thousands of years, but earthquakes are common in the region. Nur realized that the ancient city of Mycenae, which was at its greatest influence during the Bronze Age, must have been subjected to repeated seismic shakings. But what effect might such subterranean activity have had on the city’s history? Might the sudden abandonment of Mycenae around 1200 B.C. have been caused by an earthquake?

Archaeologists said no. Though many major cities in the eastern Mediterranean—including Thebes in Greece, Knossos on Crete, and Troy in western Turkey—were also destroyed around 1200 B.C., and though every major site—from Pylos on the Peloponnese Peninsula, to Aleppo in Syria, and Ashkelon in southern Israel—shows some damage consistent with seismic shaking happening around 1200 B.C., the widespread destruction that brought about the end of the Bronze Age—“the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire,” according to one noted classicist—was not instantaneous but had occurred over several decades.

For that reason, archaeologists argued that the end of the Bronze Age was probably caused by several factors, including invasions by foreign peoples and by internal political strife. But Nur proposed another idea.

Since a single catastrophic earthquake could not have been the cause, Nur suggested that several major earthquakes had struck a broad region of the eastern Mediterranean over a period of several decades. But was there any evidence that such a sequence of major earthquakes anywhere in the world had occurred in quick succession? Nur pored through catalogues of ancient earthquakes and discovered that, indeed, there was.

One such period of increased seismic activity had started in A.D. 343, when an earthquake struck northeast Turkey. Then in A.D. 358, a second earthquake happened to the west. Others followed, also in northern Turkey, in 362 and 368. Then between 394 and 412 A.D., six earthquakes occurred near Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. Also during the late fourth and early fifth centuries, major earthquakes shook the southern Italian peninsula, the island of Sicily, and Libya in northern Africa, as well as the Holy land and Cyprus. One of the largest events occurred in 365, when the southern shoreline of Crete was pushed up as much as 27 feet, comparable to the maximum amount of uplift recorded along the coast of Alaska in 1964—meaning the 365 earthquake had been a colossal event. In all, during the second half of the fourth century and the first few decades of the fifth century A.D., at least a dozen damaging earthquakes hit the central and eastern Mediterranean region. Nur’s examination of earthquake catalogues also showed that the centuries immediately before and after were periods of relative seismic quiet.

But was there a more recent—a more obvious—example of a series of major earthquakes that had detailed information about the location and size of individual events? Yes, there was.

In 1939, after two centuries of quiescence, the North Anatolian Fault, which runs across northern Turkey roughly parallel to the coastline of the Black Sea and which is a boundary between the African and Eurasian plates, came to life. By 1999, 13 major earthquakes had occurred. What is even more remarkable, 7 of the 13 ruptured the North Anatolian Fault in a systematic way: Each successive earthquake ruptured a segment of the fault that was immediately west of the previous earthquake.

The sequence began in northeast Turkey—as it had in A.D. 343—near the city of Erzincan, where, on December 26, 1939, the shaking was so severe and the damage so great that the old part of Erzincan was abandoned and a new city center was soon built to the north. Then three years later, in 1942, the next earthquake happened, immediately west of Erzincan, and a year later yet another earthquake west of the 1942 event. In all, the sequence of seven west-migrating earthquakes ruptured a 600-mile-long continuous segment of the North Anatolian Fault.

Each of these prolonged releases of seismic energy—in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and again in the 20th century— lasted several decades and occurred after a millennium of relative seismic quiescence. This supported Nur’s suggestion that a similar series of major earthquakes could have occurred over several decades around 1200 B.C., nearly a millennium before the recorded quakes of the fourth and fifth centuries. It was a new phenomenon, one that Nur called “an earthquake storm.”

But why would seismic energy be released as a series of large earthquakes lasting for decades?

Nur had an answer: stress transfer.

I once spent an intriguing afternoon watching an artisan prepare colored glass panes for a stained-glass window. The secret, he revealed, was not to cut completely through a thick pane, which could shatter the glass into shards, but to etch each one with a cutting tool that left the geometric curve he wanted the edge of a pane to have. Then, by the appropriate application of heat and cold, by twisting the pane ever so slightly, and by relying on the weakness of an etched curve, he could induce a glass pane to break as a series of arcuate cracks and produce a pane of any desired shape.

The purpose of the application of heat and cold and of the twisting was to induce a specific pattern of concentrated stress that enabled the artisan to control where the pane was mostly likely to break.

It is an art that few people have ever mastered. If one substituted the induced thermal and twisting stresses for the buildup of stress in the earth’s crust by the movement of tectonic plates, and substituted the sequence of cracks produced in the glass panes for earthquakes, then one can understand how an earthquake storm could be produced.

Think of it in another way. Imagine that a giant zipper is holding together two tectonic plates. As the two plates tug against each other, a segment of the zipper sudden slides open, but, as a zipper is apt to do, it snags occasionally. As the tugging continues, the zipper again slides, then snags again. Each time, the sliding zipper represents an earthquake and the tugging of the plates becomes concentrated at another place along the zipper.

Or consider another example—one that Nur prefers. Take a wide rubber band and cut a few short slits in it. As the band is stretched, each slit in turn opens up and the ends of the slits lengthen. The sequence that the slits open and by how much depends on how the stress pattern gets transferred and concentrated at new locations across the rubber band.

If this seems complicated, rest assured it can all be explained mathematically by applying what is known as the Coulomb-Navier failure criterion, a well-established physical law widely used by engineers to design buildings, bridges, and other monumental structures. The Coulomb-Navier failure criterion tells how much an object—or the Earth’s crust—can be pushed or pulled, twisted or sheared, before it breaks. And the criterion has probably never been more thankfully applied—at least in a geologic application—than during the recent earthquake storm along the North Anatolian Fault in northern Turkey.

In 1997, using the Coulomb-Navier failure criterion, a forecast was made, based on the sequence of recent earthquake ruptures, that there was a 12% chance that a magnitude-7 or larger earthquake would strike near the city of Izmit, 40 miles east of Istanbul, during the next 30 years. Two years later, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake did devastate Izmit, killing more than 25,000 people and causing $65 billion in damages. Within months after that earthquake, another forecast was made, this time for the area around Düzce, 60 miles east of Izmit. Some school buildings, thought to be in danger of collapse by seismic shaking, were closed. Then on November 17, 1999, another earthquake hit, flattening school buildings.

Such success gives credibility to earthquake forecasting, or rather to the idea that the probability of a future earthquake—identifying the magnitude and a time period—can be given based on stress transfer. It also prompted a search for other examples of earthquake storms throughout the Earth’s history.

An earthquake storm probably ran up and down the Italian peninsula during the late 17th and throughout most of the 18th centuries. It began with two damaging earthquakes that originated beneath the Apennine Mountains east of Naples in 1694 and 1702. The activity then migrated north to a region east of Rome with three major earthquakes in early 1703. By the second half of the 18th century, activity had returned to southern Italy, where five major shakings occurred along the toe of the Italian boot, in Reggio Calabria.

A more recent storm occurred in eastern Mongolia between 1905 and 1957, when four magnitude-8 events struck. And an earthquake storm is happening now along the Xianshuihe and adjacent faults along the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau in southwest China, where 11 major earthquakes have happened in the last 120 years.

After decades of almost no seismic activity, the Xianshuihe Fault became active in 1893 when an earthquake rocked the Tibetan district of Kada, destroying the Dalai Lama’s Grand Monastery of Hueiyuan and seven smaller monasteries. In all, 74 Buddhist priests and 137 Chinese and Tibetan soldiers were killed. Since then, ten more strong shakings have occurred, including a magnitude-8.0 shock on the nearby Longmenshan Fault in 2008. The most recent event occurred on April 14, 2010, in Qinghai Province when many Buddhists were killed when a 12th-century monastery collapsed.

This, of course, raises the question: Has an earthquake storm ever occurred in California? Here we are hampered by a historical record that spans barely 200 years. But using the techniques of paleoseismology, evidence has been revealed that two storms may have occurred in a place that few people associate with devastating earthquakes—Hollywood.

Though it is one of the most densely populated regions of California, Hollywood offers an unusual opportunity to recognize and walk along an active fault. The area was urbanized in the 1920s, before the widespread use of mechanized earth-moving equipment, so much of the original topography is still intact, even subtle features such as alignments of low hills and shallow troughs that record the trace of recent earthquakes. In essence, the network of winding streets and the placement at odd angles of apartment buildings and commercial enterprises, as well as the occasional abrupt slope across one of the sprawling lawns in Hollywood and nearby Beverly Hills, are subtle evidence of an original jumbled ground surface. And by finding the appropriate steep incline, one can follow the Hollywood Fault.

Begin at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and look north along Vine Street beyond the 13-storied cylindrical tower that houses Capitol Records. Just beyond Capitol Records, just before Vine Street reaches the Hollywood Freeway, the roadway ramps up a steep hill. The hill is there because the ground was pushed up by repeated earthquakes. Along the base of the hill is the Hollywood Fault.

From that point, the fault can be followed west along the base of the same hill, running parallel to and maintaining a distance of a few blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard. It runs along the base of the low hill where the Magic Castle, a private club of magicians and the home of the Academy of Magical Arts, is located. Farther west, the fault runs directly beneath the house where the Nelson family lived and where the opening scene of their famous 1960s sitcom—the series was called “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”—was filmed.

Continuing west, close to where Hollywood Boulevard ends, the fault angles to the southwest and crosses just south of the busy intersection of Sunset and La Cienega Boulevards. This is a neighborhood of fine restaurants and fashionable boutiques. On the north side of Sunset Boulevard one can find, after considerable searching through the urban construction, an occasional outcrop of hard granite. This is the rock that comprises the Santa Monica Mountains to the north; high up the mountainside is the famous hollywood sign. South of Sunset Boulevard, there are no rocky outcrops; instead, one stands on a deep layer, several hundred feet thick, of loose sediments that washed out of the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains and that fill the Hollywood Basin. It is this discontinuity—granite outcrops north of Sunset Boulevard and deep sedimentary fill to the south—that, here, defines the Hollywood Fault.

The western end of the fault lies somewhere near the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel, just north of the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. From there, if one walks a mile or so south along Rodeo Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard, then turns right and continues to Wilshire Boulevard, one will now be standing at the eastern end of another fault—the Santa Monica Fault—which continues to the ocean’s edge and beyond.

Now return to where the Hollywood Fault crosses under Vine Street and head east. From here, the fault runs close to Franklin Avenue, then along Los Feliz Boulevard. At the east end of the Santa Monica Mountains—that is, at the southeast corner of Griffith Park, home of the Los Angeles Zoo and Griffith Observatory—the fault disappears under the floodplain of the Los Angeles River. What lies on the other side?

There is another fault—the Raymond Fault—which is, perhaps, a continuation of the Hollywood Fault and which runs eastward through southern Glendale and across the San Gabriel Valley, through South Pasadena to the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Kinks in the Raymond fault are responsible for the low hill where the luxurious Langham Hotel—formerly Ritz-Carlton—is perched and for the shallow depression that is Lacy Park. The Raymond Fault is also responsible for the low hills on the north side of the Santa Anita Racetrack, visible from the grandstand.

What do the Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Raymond Faults have in common? Besides lying along what seems to be a continuous line, all three ruptured about 10,000 years ago and again about 1,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, paleoseismologists have not yet determined whether the earthquakes along the Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Raymond Faults occurred as a single colossal event or as a series of relatively quick earthquakes, happening over years to centuries, the latter being an earthquake storm. (Unfortunately, the techniques used in paleoseismology are not yet sufficiently refined to distinguish, in this case, between years and centuries.) But there is a curious coincidence: All three faults did rupture at about the same time; then, after a period of several thousand years, all three ruptured again, lending further credence to Richter’s statement: “When you get a lot of earthquakes, you get a lot of earthquakes.”

Moreover, other nearby faults have a similar history.

James Dolan at the University of Southern California has dug trenches and sunk holes large enough for him to climb down to examine the Hollywood Fault. He has also dug trenches and sunk holes into the Puente Hills Fault that runs southeast from Griffith Park, the Whittier Fault that runs east of downtown Los Angeles, and the Newport-Inglewood Fault that runs south from close to the Beverly Hills Hotel to the city of Long Beach and may merge with the Rose Canyon Fault that continues to San Diego. At all of these faults, Dolan has determined a similar rupture history: major earthquakes along each one about 10,000 years ago and again about 1,000 years ago. And in each case, the earthquakes that ruptured these faults were much larger than the most recent damaging earthquake to strike the Los Angeles area, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which killed 60 people, injured more than 7,000, and caused $44 billion in damages. In short, according to Dolan, there have been two “bursts” of seismic activity in Los Angeles and the immediate surroundings in the last 10,000 years.

Fortunately, the time interval between such “bursts,” or earthquake storms, in this particular region of California is thousands of years, so it is highly unlikely that one will occur in the near future; thus this region is in a “seismic lull.” But that is not true elsewhere in California.

In 2008, a report was issued by the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities—a group that then consisted of about 50 geologists, geodesists, and seismologists—that said it was “virtually assured” that California would be struck by a magnitude-6.7 or larger earthquake during the next 30 years. Such a claim is not profound when one considers that a dozen such events occurred somewhere in California during the previous 100 years. What was profound was that the group was able to identify which faults were the most likely to rupture. The 2008 report has now been updated to indicate how severe the ground shaking might be and the chance of multiple earthquakes.

In northern California, the most probable destructive seismic event is along the Hayward Fault, which runs along the east side of San Francisco Bay. The previous event, in 1868, occurred when only 24,000 people lived near the fault. Today more than 1,000,000 people live within five miles of the fault trace. Hundreds of homes and other structures are built close to the fault, and freeways, water lines, and power lines cross it at several points.

The 1868 event was a moderate earthquake, based on the extent of the damage, probably a magnitude-6.8 earthquake. According to the Working Group, which considered, among other things, how fast stress is accumulating along the Hayward Fault, there is a 31% chance of a repeat of the 1868 earthquake or a larger event in the next 30 years. A larger event would probably involve rupture along the Rodgers Creek and possibly the Maacama Faults to the north, or rupture along the Green Valley-Concord and the Greenville Faults to the east, or the Calaveras Fault to the south. The group also noted that the city of San Francisco is almost equal distance from the Hayward and San Andreas Faults, so a significant earthquake along the Hayward Fault could produce shaking in San Francisco as severe as in 1906.

Elsewhere in northern California, a major earthquake along the subduction zone between Cape Mendocino and Vancouver Island—a region known to geologists and seismologists as Cascadia and which the Working Group gave a 10% chance of rupturing in the next 30 years—will almost certainly be followed within decades, perhaps even within hours, by a major earthquake along the northern segment of the San Andreas. Such an earthquake-pair sequence—rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone followed by rupture of the northern San Andreas Fault—has happened 14 times in the last 3,000 years.

(Contrary to popular opinion, when a major earthquake happens, the chance of another major event happening soon after does not decrease, but increases dramatically. For example, for any three-day period, the chance of a major earthquake occurring somewhere in California is 1 in 100,000; however, if a major earthquake has just happened, then the chance of another earthquake of equal or greater magnitude striking in the next three days is 1 in 10, a sobering statistic and one that needs to be known by anyone involved in rescue operations after a major seismic event.)

Before considering where the seismic risk is highest in the densely populated regions of California, it is important to note that there is a significant risk of one or more major earthquakes along the Walker Lane Seismic Zone in the eastern part of the state. In particular, the Working Group identified the Carson Range, Mammoth Lakes, Owens Valley, and Death Valley as places where one or more major earthquakes might occur—giving a probability of 4% in the next 30 years—potentially causing damage in the greater Reno or greater Las Vegas areas.

In southern California, the San Jacinto Fault, which runs from Cajon Pass through Riverside and continues to the southeast, was identified by the group as a “tectonic time bomb.” In fact, according to the 2008 report, the probability that this fault will rupture in the next 30 years is the same as for the Hayward Fault—31%. In either case, the result will cause extensive damage and disrupt millions of lives.

But neither the Hayward nor the San Jacinto Fault represents the greatest seismic risk in the state. That distinction, so say the experts in the Working Group—who have evaluated the geologic and paleoseismic work, examined the current levels of seismicity, have conducted extensive geodetic surveys checking to see how fast the North American and Pacific plates are moving today, and have done calculations using Coulomb-Navier stress equations—belongs to another feature, one that, according to the same experts, is “the most dangerous fault” in California.

The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, the steepest cable ride in the United States, carries passengers up 6,000 feet from the sweltering heat of Palm Springs to the refreshingly cool and at times snow-covered hillsides close to the summit of Mount San Jacinto. The 12-minute ride gives one ample opportunity to study the mountain face and take note of the rapid change in flora from a desert floor to an alpine peak. One is also given the opportunity to look in the other direction—the entire floor of the tramcar rotates, making two revolutions during the ascent—so one is treated to an increasingly expansive view of the rugged Sonoran Desert. In the distance, from the top of the tramway one can see Mount Charleston 200 miles away near Las Vegas. To the south is the Salton Sea.

Immediately in front, seemingly at one’s feet, is the broad Coachella Valley, the northern extension of the Salton Trough. And running close to the axis of Coachella Valley is the San Andreas Fault.

The fault is easy to see. To the northeast, on the valley floor, is a dark green patch, the community of Desert Hot Springs. This and many other oases in Coachella Valley exist because impermeable fault gouge along the San Andreas Fault has forced groundwater to rise close to the surface.

South of Desert Hot Springs is a 20-mile-long ridge, Indio Hills. Here the San Andreas Fault consists of two strands, running on either side of the ridge. Indio Hills exists because earthquakes along both strands have pushed up the ridge.

Near the southern end of Indio Hills, the two strands merge at another oasis, Biskra Palms. From there, the San Andreas Fault is a single strand, its trace easily identified by following the eastern edge of the dark patch of irrigated fields that surround the farming communities of Indio, Coachella, Thermal, and Mecca. South of Mecca, the fault continues in a straight line to its southern end at Bombay Beach on the east side of the Salton Sea.

In all, nearly 100 miles of the San Andreas Fault can be seen from the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. It is this, the southernmost segment of the fault, that worries seismologists because this is the only segment that has not ruptured in historical time. And there are additional reasons to be concerned.

Four deep trenches have been dug across this segment, and from a detailed examination of the walls, paleoseismologists have identified five, possibly seven, major ruptures that have occurred during the last 1,100 years, the most recent in 1690.

Moreover, this is one of the most seismically active segments of the San Andreas Fault. More than a dozen moderate earthquakes have occurred since 1935. Such persistent activity could presage a major event—in the same way that a wooden board broken over a knee begins to crack before it breaks.

(More than a dozen moderate earthquakes occurred in the San Francisco area during the 70 years before the 1906 earthquake, but only one during the 70 years after the event.)

To add to the concern, geodetic measurements across this segment of the fault show that points on opposites sides of the fault are sliding slowly and continuously—those on the west side of the fault moving to the north and those on the east side to the south—at an average rate of 1.5 inches a year. This means that, since the last major earthquake in 1690, 27 feet of crustal movement has accumulated on opposites sides of the fault—without any movement yet along this part of the fault. That is a buildup of an enormous amount of seismic energy that has yet to be released.

All in all, the paleoseismic evidence of five or seven major earthquakes in the last 1,100 years—showing that large events are not unusual—and the current high level of seismicity and the steady buildup of seismic energy along the fault point to one thing: A major earthquake will occur soon along the southernmost segment of the San Andreas Fault.

Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California located in Los Angeles, and a member of the group that produced the 2008 report and an update, has put it bluntly: This segment of “the San Andreas Fault is locked and loaded and ready to rumble.”

But when?

Jordan and others say there is a 59% chance that a magnitude-6.7 or larger earthquake will occur along the Desert Hot Springs–Salton Sea segment of the San Andreas Fault in the next 30 years. That is almost twice the probability for a comparable earthquake happening on the nearby San Jacinto Fault or on the Hayward Fault.

Jordan and others have also considered what they have termed a “doomsday” scenario in which the entire southern half of the San Andreas Fault—from the Salton Sea to Parkfield—ruptures as a single earthquake. Parkfield is considered the northern limit because the rupture of a single event will probably not be able to propagate farther north where the stress on the fault is being relieved constantly by fault creep—evident by the slow pulling apart of the walls of the DeRose Winery—and by the frequent occurrence of magnitude-6 earthquakes, four in the last 100 years with the most recent in 2004.

Such a “wall-to-wall” rupture would involve 350 miles of the fault, considerably more than the 270 miles that ruptured in 1906, and the earthquake would be proportionally much bigger. Jordan and others estimate that such a cataclysmic event would correspond to a magnitude-8.2 earthquake and release about ten times more energy than the one in 1906.

Fortunately, the probability of such an event is low: less than 1% during the next 30 years. But considering that shaking would last more than a minute and be severe both close to the fault and in communities built over sedimentary basins—which would include but not be limited to San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and many towns in Ventura County, where, according to Jordan, the ground will shake “like a bowl of jelly”—there is still reason for concern.

Because small earthquakes are more common than large ones, a more likely scenario is that only the southernmost segment of the San Andreas Fault will rupture, at least at first, relieving some of the built-up seismic energy but not all. To understand what may follow, it is important to return to the North Anatolian and the Xiashuihe Faults and compare them to the San Andreas Fault.

All three are transform faults along plate boundaries. In all three cases, the relative plate motions on either side of the faults are the same, about 1.5 inches a year, so stress is increasing along the faults in all three places at the same rate. All three have significant strands that split off a main strand—in California, the Hayward and the San Jacinto Faults; in China, the Longmenshan; and in Turkey, north and south strands that run west of the city of Düzce and that are responsible for the creation of the sea lane known as the Dardanelles. There is also a segment of the North Anatolian Fault that creeps, just as the San Andreas Fault does north of Parkfield. Whether the Xiashuihe Fault also has a creeping segment is not known; that fault has not been studied as intensely as the other two. And two of these faults have had earthquake storms. By analogy, it seems a third earthquake storm along the San Andreas is possible.

How would such a storm evolve?

Again, from studies of the North Anatolian and the Xiashuihe Faults, it would probably begin at one end, perhaps by a rupture of the southernmost segment of the San Andreas, and proceed along the main strand and some adjacent faults.

The initial rupture would change the stress pattern—just as the 1992 Landers earthquake did and which led to the 1999 Hector Mine earthquake—so that there would be new places where stress was now concentrated. Eventually, because so much stress would be released in southern California, stress concentrations would form in northern California, jumping the 100-mile-long creeping section north of Parkfield. So the northern segment of the San Andreas Fault would also be involved.

Here a new concern arises. As the stress pattern along the San Andreas Fault changes with each successive earthquake, so does the stress pattern change along adjacent faults, causing some of them to rupture out of their previous “pattern.” For example, in 1939, the earthquake that leveled the city of Erzincan broke along the main strand of the North Anatolian Fault, as well as the nearby Sungurlu-Ezinepazari fault. In China in 2008, after decades of earthquakes along the Xiashuihe Fault, a rupture occurred along a nearby parallel fault, the Longmenshan Fault. The same would happen in California.

In particular, in southern California, the Cucamonga Fault, which runs west from Cajon Pass and along the southern base of the San Gabriel Mountains, could rupture simultaneously with or soon after a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. And that would lead to stress changes along the Raymond Fault—which is at the western end of the Cucamonga Fault—and from that to other faults in the Los Angeles region.

In northern California, the Calaveras Fault splits off the main strand of the San Andreas just south of San Juan Bautista. So a rupture of the northern San Andreas Fault could lead to a rupture of the Calaveras—or the Hayward or the Greenville or the San Gregorio Fault.

All this is to emphasize an important point: The exact sequence of future ruptures, and hence major earthquakes, along the San Andreas and its many adjacent faults cannot be predicted—which is why Jordan and others issued probabilities in their reports. The series of quakes would not disseminate out in a necessarily coherent direction.

But one thing is certain: The last 100 years in California—which happen to correspond to a period of rapid urban growth—have been a period of seismic calm. That cannot continue.

The damaging earthquakes that have occurred—1925 Santa Barbara, 1933 Long Beach, 1952 Long Beach, 1952 south of Bakersfield, 1971 San Fernando, 1989 Loma Prieta, 1992 Landers, and 1994 Northridge—were moderate events, seismically speaking; they released only a minuscule amount of the stress that has built up between the North American and Pacific plates. This enormous amount of stress and, thus, seismic energy can only be relieved one way: as a series of large earthquakes.

And that could occur as an earthquake storm.

[MIKA27]

Luxury Submarine Hotel Offers Romantic Undersea Getaway

Lovers Deep is a luxury submarine offered by Oliver's Travels for couples to go on a romantic getaway, deep in the ocean, and perhaps join what they're coining as the "Mile Low Club" (an undersea alternative to the Mile High Club that so many have participated in on airplanes). Each watercraft in the various packages that are offered is a minimum of 40 feet long and provides a number of amenities and perks, one of which includes the option of where to dock or dive the mobile vessel.

From a personal butler and VIP Concierge service to an aphrodisiac tasting menu and free champagne on arrival, the extraordinary experience is one for romantic couples eager to spend a unique night together. Oliver's Travels says, "The stunning views of the marine world will take your breath away and the vessel comes fully staffed with your very own team who are on hand to make sure you never have to take your eyes off the view, or each other."

Those interested in the lavish experience should expect high-end prices. It's reportedly $140,000 per person for one night.

[MIKA27]

Nike Designer Says Marty McFly's Power Laces Are Coming Next Year

If there was one disappointment about Nike’s awesome Back to the Future II Air Mag, it’s that the shoes didn’t have Marty’s power laces (and that they only made 1500 and neither you nor I own a pair). But Nike designer Tinker Hatfield says that’s about to change — power laces are coming in 2015. The future is here!

Yes, as Sole Collector tells it, designer Tinker Hatfield showed up at the Jordan Brand’s Flight Lab space in New Orleans yesterday. When asked about power laces, his answer was pretty unequivocal:

“Are we gonna see power laces in 2015? To that, I say YES!”

Sole Collector points out that Hatfield didn’t specify whether power laces will show up on the Nike Mag, or some other product, but who cares? POWER LACES PEOPLE. And there’s some meaningful chronology here: Marty’s self-lacing sneaks, you’ll recall were from the year 2015.

Was Nike was holding out, making sure they didn’t create a time paradox that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe? If so, smart move. 2015 is gonna be awesome.

[MIKA27]

How NASA's Plan To Capture An Asteroid Is Crucial To Human Survival

NASA is committed to grab an asteroid and put it into lunar orbit in the next decade, using a robotic system to put a 12 metre rock into a space shopping bag, and then tow it to the Moon. This apparently useless mission is actually crucial to the survival of humankind.

The space agency calls it the Asteroid Redirect Mission. The image above shows how NASA envisions one of the missions after capture: It will send astronauts to the asteroid in an Orion spacecraft to take samples and return them to Earth. The rings on the bag are hooks for the astronauts to move safely across the asteroid’s surface.

Two paths

NASA has two ideas in mind to capture the asteroid. The first is to “retrieve a large, boulder-like mass from a larger asteroid and return it” to lunar orbit. Imagine it: Send robotic ship to rendezvous with an asteroid, have it remove a chunk that is about 12 metres in diameter, put it inside a bag, and tow it to the Moon. It seems awfully hard and dangerous.

The easier alternative is to “capture and redirect an entire very small asteroid.” There’s only one problem with this, according to Paul Chodas, a senior scientist at JPL’s Near-Earth Object Program Office:

There are hundreds of millions of objects out there in this size range, but they are small and don’t reflect a lot of sunlight, so they can be hard to spot. The best time to discover them is when they are brightest, when they are close to Earth.

NASA is already working to identify targets for ARM. The international community has small teams of astronomers dedicated to spot these small objects in the sky using optical telescopes. They send their findings to a computer at the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

This computer calculates their orbit and size, adding them to a database. Another automated system constantly scans this database for potential candidates, sending an email with the subject line “New ARM Candidate” every time it finds one. According to Chodas this “has happened several dozen times since we implemented the system in March of 2013.”

With that data in hand, Chodas contacts NASA’s Deep Space Network station at Goldstone, California, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Combining these stations, scientists can obtain precise “size and rotation information, and at times, even generating detailed images of an asteroid’s surface” as well as “wealth of detailed data on spectral type, reflectivity and expected composition.” This is when the scientists made their final assessment and put the asteroid in the target list.

The list is way too short so far. With the current budget, NASA can only get about two ARM targets per year.

Why this is important for all of us

According to NASA, the agency has a tiny “$US20 million per year in the search for potentially hazardous asteroids through the Near Earth Object Observation Program.” They added $US105 million to ARM in 2014 and it is actively working with other companies and organisations to accelerate the program as much as possible.

It’s a pathetic budget, giving how important this is to the long term survival of humankind. It may sound dramatic, but the NEO and ARM programs are working both to protect us and to provide a path of expansion out of our resource-limited planet. The only path available, in fact.

So far, astronomers around the world have identified 10,713 known near-Earth objects. Obviously, the Near-Earth Object Program Office is not only identifying potential prey for the ARM hunters. It’s the main part of NASA’s planetary defence work.

Whatever route it chooses for ARM, NASA says that it will send “astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft [to] study the redirected asteroid mass in the vicinity of the moon and bring back samples.” Studying these asteroids will provide critical information for planetary defence too.

It will give us information about the composition and structure of these space bodies, which is crucial to understand the origin of the solar system, the role of asteroids in the formation of life, and, potentially, provide with important information about how to deflect potential threats like the meteor that explode dover Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Another important benefit of this mission is the future of space exploration. The experience and knowledge we gather from the capturing and towing will serve us to capture bigger asteroids for mining. Mining asteroids will be important to obtain resources for use on both Earth and space.

Many asteroids are rich in elements that is hard to find on Earth — materials that are essential for the development of Earth and space-based industries. From fuel for interplanetary spaceships to the construction of spacecraft and stations in space, the Moon, Mars, and beyond — asteroids can be mined more effectively in space, with no ecological risks. They can provide with the unlimited resources that our old Earth will not be able to offer.

Eventually, as our understanding of asteroids grow, we will be able to harness them entirely. The idea of hollowing a large asteroid to turn it into a spacecraft is not a crazy one, but one that future generations will most probably see.

Perhaps I’m thinking too big here or too far ahead. Maybe spending more than a stupidly low $US125 million in a program that is fundamental to understand where we come from, protect our world, and give humankind the only possible path to expand and survive, is crazy.

Something tells me that’s not the case. I’m sure that, in a hundred years, someone will look back at these days and will be really embarrassed by our myopic priorities. Those people will recognise NASA’s ARM program as the first step in the future of space exploration and humanity expansion to the stars.

[MIKA27]

A Tornado Of Fish Looks Like A Scary Sea Monster Demon

But it also looks sort of beautiful. In a if this school of fish surrounds you, your skin will melt, your flesh will be eaten raw and your bones will be cleaned dry kind of way. Real tornadoes are probably still scarier but fish tornadoes look like the sentient arm of some sick underworld cartoon monster.

Photographer Octavio Aburto is a master when it comes to taking pictures of the ocean. He took these shots at the Cabo Pulmo National Park in Mexico. He’s basically staring into the belly of the beast.

[MIKA27]

Watch This Guy Snowboarding Through The Streets Of New York

Casey Neitstat got out his snowboard yesterday, tied a rope to a Jeep, and zoomed through the streets of New York. He even went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and snowboarded down the stairs covered with snow. Same in Central Park.

[MIKA27]

Stunning Photos Taken By The Two Russian Daredevils Atop Shanghai Tower

Check out these incredible photos taken by Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov, the two Russian daredevils who climbed the second tallest building in the world — the 650m Shanghai Tower. The contrast of the lighted clouds and the sleek towers make it look like a snap from a futuristic Earth. I guess we areliving in the future, after all.

The duo also have some other incredible images from their many adventures:

Go to their sites and feast your eyes. Apart from their insane climbs they also have some other awesome urban exploration photographs.

[MIKA27]

46-Inch Touchscreen Coffee Table Anyone? Would You Like That With Windows Or Android?

The day we can all afford — and easily access — tables with built-in touchscreens, the world will be a happier place. Sure, you’ll have to take extra special care of it, lest a wayward coffee spill brings your dreams of touch-based, living room nirvana to a wet, caffeinated end, but think of the board games! One option that brings us closer to a consumer-practical option is Ideum’s tables, powered by Windows 8 (and soon Android).

Starting from $US6950, the tables come in two size varieties — 32 and 46 inches. They make use of “high-performance” multi-touch technology, courtesy of 3M, that allows for the display and applications to handle some 60 touches at once. Right now, the only supported operating system is Windows 8, but Ideum recently announced that Android versions will be coming later in the year.

I’ve always maintained that board games would be a killer app for this sort of thing, as long as you don’t mind the loss of the tactile sensation of holding actual tokens, cards and other play pieces. But imagine having hundreds of titles are your fingertips, without all the fuss of setting and packing up.

Yeah, I can get on board with that.

[MIKA27]

Video Of A Massive Octopus Wrestling With A Diver Underwater

In today’s heart-stopping undersea news, this is what it looks like when a camera-shy octopus just does not want its portrait taken. The poor thing was probably fed up with all the divers firing their flashes at him.

Diving partners David Malvestuto Warren Murray were about 80-feet below the surface of Bluefish Cove in Carmel, California, when this eight-legged freak emerged ready to tussle. It grabbed hold of the gear, but once Murray started snapping pics the flash freaked out the aggressive cephalopod and it swam away.

DAMN. This vid is great — total silence except for the sound of breathing — and the shots Murray managed to get are incredible. Jules Verne would be impressed.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: DARPA's Building Real Flying Transformers!

Between their remote locations and the ever present threat of ambush (or worse yet, IED), it’s simply getting too dangerous to deliver the average 45,000kg of supplies that far-flung American forward combat bases require each week. Air drops by cargo plane or helicopter are one option, but DARPA researchers may already have a better solution: shape-shifting, cargo-carrying UAVs.

DARPA, in collaboration with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, has been developing these prototype vehicles since 2009 through its Transformer (TX) program as a means of augmenting existing delivery methods.

“Many missions require dedicated vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) assets, but most ground units don’t have their own helicopters,” Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager, said in a press statement. “ARES would make organic and versatile VTOL capability available to many more individual units. Our goal is to provide flexible, terrain-independent transportation that avoids ground-based threats, in turn supporting expedited, cost-effective operations and improving the likelihood of mission success.”

Late last year, DARPA settled on the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) concept as the program’s winning design and the basis for future Transformer platforms. The ARES’ unique modular design will allow it to perform the wide variety of roles required. Its VTOL flight module would act as a standalone UAV — either remotely controlled by a ground unit’s tablet or smart phone, or in future iterations, capable of semi-autonomous flight — with its own power, control, and propulsion systems. A pair of ducted fans will provide vertical lift and convert to provide forward thrust, allowing the ARES to lift up to 3,000 pounds of cargo and land in spots half the size of traditional helicopter landing pads.

What that cargo is will depend on the kind of module the ARES is carrying. DARPA researchers hope to develop a number of mission-specific modules — cargo containers, casualty extraction, and reconnaissance payloads — that could be quickly swapped out for one another.

The importance of such a system can’t be understated. 1,389 American servicemen have lost their lives due to roadside bombs since 2001 in Afghanistan alone. Any system that can reduce those casualty rates can’t come soon enough.

[MIKA27]

London's Iconic Routemaster Buses Are Being Scrapped For Good

It’s one of the most iconic vehicles on London’s roads, but the ageing red Routemaster bus, currently serving two routes, is set to be replaced by the modern hybrid “Boris Bus” entirely.

The old-style jump-on Routemaster is in use on two “heritage” routes, the number 9 from Kensington High Street to Trafalgar Square and part of the 15 route from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill. Only five of the buses remain in service, and it looks as though TfL is now looking to phase them out completely, starting with those on the number 9 route from July, leading many to feel the demise of the heritage 15 route will follow shortly. They’ll be replaced by the hybrid “Boris buses”, which TfL claim have reduced the popularity of the older double deckers.

It’ll be a sad day when the Routemasters go. Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was quite right to introduce the heritage routes back in 2005, highlighting the bus design as a classic, and giving it a new lease of life as a tourist attraction in its own right after briefly being pulled from service. The new hybrid buses are great too — a perfect mix of new technology and inspiration from the older design — but as long as they’re safely operational, the old Routemaster is a lovely sight to behold. Farewell.

[MIKA27]

The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today

Take 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors, each 2m high and 3m wide. Control them with computers to focus the sun’s light to the top of 140m towers, where water is turned into steam to power turbines. Bingo: you have the world’s biggest solar power plant, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.

Long-mired by regulatory issues and legal tangles, the enormous solar plant — jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google — opened for business today.

From the official news release:

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers. At full capacity, the facility’s trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road.

Sprawling across a staggering 13sqkm of government land near the California-Nevada border, it looks goddamn beautiful. Just look at these amazing images.:

[MIKA27]

Earthquake Damage Has This Giant Telescope Hanging By A Thread

Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, should look familiar to anyone who watched GoldenEye or Contact a lot as a kid. But an earthquake near the observatory did some serious damage last month, nearly snapping one of the cables supporting the reflector platform hovering 140m in the air.

Located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the Cornell University-operated observatory is a monstrous device, the 300m diameter concave reflector steering incoming waves to the nearly 900-tonne platform suspended above. Eighteen cables strung between three concrete towers are tasked with the job, and when a 6.4-magnitude quake struck on 13 January, it did some serious damage to one of those cables.

In fact, the cable that got the most damage was a known weak point. During the observatory’s construction in 1962, a too-short cable was lengthened with a splice, and when the quake hit, that patched cable lost several strands. As Arecibo Observatory Director Bob Kerr told Universe Today, “you might say that our structural Achilles heel was exposed.”

Thankfully, the telescope remains functional, and it’s being used with a reduced range of motion while a New York bridge construction company and Arecibo’s maintenance staff plan a long-term repair. We sure hope they can fix it, and continue on a 50-year history of helping us learn about the universe around us.

[MIKA27]

This Is What A 40-Year-Old Foetus Inside An 80-Year-Old Woman Looks Like

Doctors have found a 44-year-old foetus inside the body of an 84-year-old Brazilian woman. But, surprisingly, this isn’t the first instance of a “stone baby” discovery. Above is a picture of a 40-year-old foetus, found in an 82-year-old Colombia woman last December.

Here are two reasons to never get pregnant. In the case of the Brazilian woman, she ended up in the hospital last Friday due to severe stomach pains and dizziness. Turns out she had a 20-week-old to 28-week-old foetus inside of her, even though the pregnancy was terminated more than four decades ago.

The phenomenon is called lithopedion, and in spite of these two reported cases in the past couple of months, there are only around 300 recorded instances ever. What happens is sometime between 14 weeks and full term, the foetus dies. It’s too big to be reabsorbed or miscarried, and for some reason it calcifies and protects the mother’s body from the dead tissue. This is almost exactly what happened to this elderly Brazilian woman after her foetus died. But it’s still in there, according to an ultrasound that showed a face and bones of the arms, legs, ribs and spine. And she has no plans to have the middle-aged foetus removed.

[OZCUBAN]

That's just Creepy and sad at the same time ,what is it about South America

[MIKA27]

A Rocket, A Meteor And The Milky Way, All In One Overwhelming Image

Pictures of rockets, meteors and the Milky Way are all amazing. But one with all three makes for an overwhelming image indeed.

This amazing picture shows the night sky over Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand. Within it, you can see the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, hovering surreally. But there’s more: just right of centre, there’s a lovely meteor streak, and just to the left of that a bright spot which is actually the rising Ariane 5 rocket,launched a few minutes before from Kourou,French Guiana.

Lucky coincidence? Nope: the image was timed to perfection to capture the rocket in flight. But the result was well worth the wait.

[OZCUBAN]

Earthquake Damage Has This Giant Telescope Hanging By A Thread

Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, should look familiar to anyone who watched GoldenEye or Contact a lot as a kid. But an earthquake near the observatory did some serious damage last month, nearly snapping one of the cables supporting the reflector platform hovering 140m in the air.

Located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the Cornell University-operated observatory is a monstrous device, the 300m diameter concave reflector steering incoming waves to the nearly 900-tonne platform suspended above. Eighteen cables strung between three concrete towers are tasked with the job, and when a 6.4-magnitude quake struck on 13 January, it did some serious damage to one of those cables.

In fact, the cable that got the most damage was a known weak point. During the observatory’s construction in 1962, a too-short cable was lengthened with a splice, and when the quake hit, that patched cable lost several strands. As Arecibo Observatory Director Bob Kerr told Universe Today, “you might say that our structural Achilles heel was exposed.”

Let's hope they get it fixed soon an invaluable piece of kit for astronomy,and the S.E.T.I org uses it quiet a lot

Thankfully, the telescope remains functional, and it’s being used with a reduced range of motion while a New York bridge construction company and Arecibo’s maintenance staff plan a long-term repair. We sure hope they can fix it, and continue on a 50-year history of helping us learn about the universe around us.

[MIKA27]

The Real World Maverick Doing One Of His Crazy Tomcat Stunts

Unlike Maverick, Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was a real F-14 Tomcat pilot. The Tomcat pilot, according to the US Navy: He’s considered the “highest time Tomcat pilot, with over 4800 hours and more than 1200 arrested carrier landings.” Like Maverick, however, he did some pretty crazy stuff.

Like this amazing pass here, taken during a demo in 1988 from the deck of the Kitty Hawk-class supercarrier USS America. It’s a pretty mad pass, extremely close to the ground and to the ship. But for Snodgrass it was business as usual:

It’s not risky at all with practice… [my emphasis] It was my opening pass to a Tomcat tactical demonstration at sea. I started from the starboard rear quarter of the ship, at or slightly below flight deck level. Airspeed was at about 250 knots with the wings swept forward. I selected afterburner at about ½ miles behind and the aircraft accelerated to about 325-330 knots. As I approached the ship, I rolled into an 85 degree angle of bank and did a 2-3 g turn, finishing about 10 — 20 degrees off of the ship’s axis. It was a very dramatic and, in my opinion, a very cool way to start a carrier demo. The photo was taken by an Aviation Boson’s Mate (by an ABE3 who was the petty officer of third class Sean E. Dunn that was in charge in Launching & Recovering Equipment) who worked the flight deck on the USS America. Just as an aside…the individual with his arms behind his back is Admiral Jay Johnson” who became the Chief of Naval Operations for the Navy.”

Here’s an image of the rehearsal:

Yeah, not risky at all!