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[MIKA27]

The ancient art of honey hunting in Nepal - in pictures

The Gurung tribespeople of Nepal have been collecting honey from Himalayan cliffs for centuries, but now their lifestyle is under threat from commercialisation and tours offering visitors a chance to 'join a honey hunt'. Photographer Andrew Newey spent two weeks living with the Gurung in central Nepal, documenting the risks and skill involved in this dying tradition

In December 2013, photographer Andrew Newey spent two weeks living with the Gurung in a remote hilltop village in central Nepal’s Kaski district, joining the three-day autumn honey hunt, which was six weeks later than normal due to a changing climate and reduced bee population. Before a hunt can commence the honey hunters are required to perform a ceremony to placate the cliff gods. This involves sacrificing a sheep, offering flowers, fruits and rice, and praying to the cliff gods to ensure a safe hunt.

A honey hunter clings precariously to a rope ladder while he waits for the rising smoke to drive thousands of angry Apis Laboriosa, the largest honey bee in the world, out of their nests. Despite this being a team effort – up to a dozen men are drafted in to support the hunter or ‘kuiche’ - there is silence, pressure and precision.

Engulfed by the thick, acrid smoke, the hunter jousts tentatively at a nest with a bamboo stick with a sickle or wooden plate at one end, cutting the exposed honeycomb away from the cliff face. Using another stick to guide the basket hanging beside him, he catches the honeycomb as it falls before the basket is then lowered to the ground.

One major threat to traditional, responsible honey hunting comes from the growing medicinal reputation of Himalayan honey, which is increasingly exported for use in Japanese, Chinese and Korean traditional medicines and to treat infections and injuries. Spring ‘Red’ honey is the most sought after, costing upwards of $US15 per kilogram. This demand has resulted in a shift in ownership of the cliffs away from the indigenous communities to the government, allowing them to open honey-harvesting rights to contractors. At the same time the younger generation's reluctance to follow in the footsteps of their elders, due to the risks involved, limited income and moving away to cities, is also contributing to the dwindling numbers of traditional honey hunters.

One of the Gurung men watches from the base of the cliff as the cutter repositions himself on the rope ladder 200ft above. An influx of tourists trekking the world famous Annapurna circuit has stimulated interest among trekking agencies in organising ‘staged’ honey hunting events in areas such as Ghandruk, Manang and Lamjung. They charge US$250-$1,500 for one honey-hunting event, very little of which is paid to the indigenous communities. Honey hunters are tempted by this short-term financial benefit to harvest outside of the normal season with tourists using climbing gear to accompany them, damaging the cliff face and nesting sites in the process.

As the honey hunter descends the rope ladder, the blood, blisters and bee stings that are synonymous with this treacherous tradition become visible.

After a three-hour trek back up to the village carrying approximately 20kg of honey, this hunter enjoyed a hard earned piece of honeycomb by the fire.

The honey is divided up among the villagers and one of the first uses is for a cup of honey tea. Newey arranged to visit a honey-hunting site well away from the popular Annapurna circuit. Despite this, he was frequently asked by the hunters how he had found out when and where the hunt would take place: "Because these are responsible hunters they were concerned about their cliffs suffering from this unwanted tourist activity if the location was disclosed."

With funding from the Austrian government, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is addressing problems arising from commercialisation of honey hunting and the impact of tourism through the Himalayan Honeybees project.

Coordinators of the project aim to work with traditional honey hunters to preserve their sustainable harvesting techniques. They also hope to find an effective way of regulating harvests by only licensing those with proven knowledge and experience, limiting the number of nests harvested and implementing a system of fines and punishment.

The overall aim is to help communities reap financial benefit from an indigenous resource while preserving a bee species that will ensure the pollination of crops and maintenance of plant biodiversity in the long term.

[MIKA27]

An Astronaut's View of the North Korean Electricity Black Hole

North Korea may be a horribly repressive dictatorship by day. At night, it also does a good impression of being nothing – a barren wasteland, an expanse of ocean, a light-devouring black hole.

That's if you look at it from space, as one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station recently did. This photo from more than 200 miles above the planet's surface shows just what a difference a robust electric grid can make on a country's appearance. To the north is China, blazing out of the darkness like a sea of fire. Below is South Korea, its borders defined as clearly as patterns on a Lite-Brite. And between these two is a big sandwich of darkness with Pyongyang, a city of more than 3 million people, emitting only the faintest smudge of fluorescence.

North Korea's invisibility cloak is due to mandatory power cuts at night, part of the country's struggle to conserve its precious energy. Comparing its capital city to other nearby fixtures, NASA says it shows a light signature that's "equivalent to the smaller towns in South Korea."

Unlike daylight images, city lights at night illustrate dramatically the relative economic importance of cities, as gauged by relative size. In this north-looking view, it is immediately obvious that greater Seoul is a major city and that the port of Gunsan is minor by comparison. There are 25.6 million people in the Seoul metropolitan area – more than half of South Korea’s citizens – while Gunsan’s population is 280,000....

Coastlines are often very apparent in night imagery, as shown by South Korea’s eastern shoreline. But the coast of North Korea is difficult to detect. These differences are illustrated in per capita power consumption in the two countries, with South Korea at 10,162 kilowatt hours and North Korea at 739 kilowatt hours.

North Korea has flickered like a candle among klieg lights since the early 90s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union limited its access to inexpensive, Communist-approved fuel. A subsequent energy deal with the Americans fell apart, leaving many North Koreans resentful to this day toward the United States. The once-developed nation now ranks 71st in power consumption; it's so dark at night people out for a stroll sometimes can't even see the buildings on either side of them.

[Fuzz]

Apple’s New Car System Turns Your Dashboard Into an iPhone Accessory

After nearly being side-swiped yesterday by an idiotic driver on the M4, who was mucking around with his phone, I seriously hope this gets banned in Aus. There are already too many distractions on the road to add another to the mix.

If it doesn't get banned, hopefully they will be sensible enough to lock out much of the functionality whilst the car is in motion.

[Fuzz]

This Titanfall Ad Makes Me Want My Own Personal Mech

Who hasn’t wanted a giant robot to follow them around all the time?

This ad for Xbox One-exclusive game Titanfall (Also on PC) shows that life is indeed more fun with a mech by your side that can grab you and stuff you inside it for some gunfighting skirmishes.

Parking it in the city might be an issue though…

MIKA: Already pre-ordered

The Mech or the game?

[OkieJoe]

I want the desk bad

[MIKA27]

I wish it were the Mech mate - would make heading into work peak-hour traffic, a lot easier!

[MIKA27]

I want the desk bad

Go for it!! Only $9K

[MIKA27]

Roku Challenges Google’s Chromecast With Tiny New TV Streamer

The Roku set-top box is one of our favorite streamers. Now it’s shrinking down and moving to the back of your TV.

The new Roku Streaming Stick, like Google’s Chromecast, is a 1080p streaming stick that plugs directly into an HDMI port. The stick has the same streaming media software features as the rest of the current Roku line, with multiple apps arranged as a grid and persistent search available across channels like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and Hulu Plus. Like Roku’s previous boxes, it also comes with an RF remote. This, along with the massive library of apps, is really what sets Roku’s new streamer apart from Google’s offering.

While Google has released an open SDK for the Chromecast, the pickings are still pretty slim. Roku meanwhile has over 1,200 content-streaming apps. The latter’s physical remote also reduces the steps needed to watch TV. Just point and click. If you’re still a fan of flinging content from your phone to your TV, Roku does this with the Netflix and YouTube apps. Like the Chromecast, it’s powered by a mini USB port. If your TV doesn’t have one, a power supply is included.

At $50, the Roku Streaming Stick is $15 more than the Chromecast. But if you’re a fan of just sitting on the couch and enjoying your streaming content without having to be tied to your smartphone, the Streaming Stick is probably $15 well spent.

It’s worth nothing that Roku does have another streaming stick. The Roku Ready uses an proprietary MHL port that resembles HDMI and only works on certified TVs. This new Streaming Stick works on anything with an HDMI port. So yeah, it’s much better.

The Roku Streaming Stick (HDMI) is available for pre-order order today and will ship in April.

[MIKA27]

Inside the New Arms Race to Control Bandwidth on the Battlefield

An electromagnetic mystery in northern Iraq changed the course of Jesse Potter’s life. A chemical-weapons specialist with the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, Potter was deployed to Kirkuk in late 2007, right as the oil-rich city was experiencing a grievous spike in violence. He was already weary upon his arrival, having recently completed an arduous tour in Afghanistan, which left him suffering from multiple injuries that would eventually require surgery. In the rare moments of peace he could find in Kirkuk, Potter began to contemplate whether it was time to trade in his uniform for a more tranquil existence back home—perhaps as a schoolteacher. Of more immediate concern, though, was a technical glitch that was jeopardizing his platoon: The jammers on the unit’s armored vehicles were on the fritz. Jammers clog specific radio frequencies by flooding them with signals, rendering cell phones, radios, and remote control devices useless. They were now a crucial weapon in the American arsenal; in Kirkuk, as in the rest of Iraq, insurgents frequently used cell phones and other wireless devices to detonate IEDs. But Potter’s jammers weren’t working.

“In the marketplaces, when we would drive through, there’d still be people able to talk on their cell phones,” he says. “If the jamming systems had been effective, they shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

A self-described tech guy at heart, Potter relished the chance to study the jammers. It turned out that, among other problems, they weren’t emitting powerful enough radio waves along the threat frequencies—those that carried much of the city’s mobile traffic. Once the necessary tweaks were made, Potter was elated to witness the immediate, lifesaving results on the streets of Kirkuk, where several of his friends had been maimed or killed.

“To see an IED detonate safely behind our convoy—that was a win for me,” he says. It was so thrilling, in fact, that when Potter returned from Iraq in 2008, he dedicated himself to becoming one of the Army’s first new specialists in spectrum warfare—the means by which a military seizes and controls the electromagnetic radiation that makes all wireless communication possible.

It is well known that America’s military dominates both the air and the sea. What’s less celebrated is that the US has also dominated the spectrum, a feat that is just as critical to the success of operations.

Communications, navigation, battlefield logistics, precision munitions—all of these depend on complete and unfettered access to the spectrum, territory that must be vigilantly defended from enemy combatants. Having command of electromagnetic waves allows US forces to operate drones from a hemisphere away, guide cruise missiles inland from the sea, and alert patrols to danger on the road ahead. Just as important, blocking enemies from using the spectrum is critical to hindering their ability to cause mayhem, from detonating roadside bombs to organizing ambushes.

As tablet computers and semi-autonomous robots proliferate on battlefields in the years to come, spectrum dominance will only become more critical. Without clear and reliable access to the electromagnetic realm, many of America’s most effective weapons simply won’t work.

THE PENTAGON FAILED TO FORESEE HOW MUCH THE WIRELESS REVOLUTION WOULD ALTER WARFARE.

Yet despite the importance of this crucial resource, America’s grip on the spectrum has never been more tenuous. Insurgencies and rogue nations cannot hope to match our multibillion-dollar expenditures on aircraft carriers and stealth bombers, but they are increasingly able to afford the devices necessary to wage spectrum warfare, which are becoming cheaper and more powerful at the same exponential pace as all electronics.

“Now anybody can go to a store and buy equipment for $10,000 that can mimic our capability,” says Robert Elder, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who today is a research professor at George Mason University.

Communications jammers are abundant on global markets or can be assembled from scratch using power amplifiers and other off-the-shelf components. And GPS spoofers, with the potential to disrupt everything from navigation to drones, are simple to construct for anyone with a modicum of engineering expertise.

Stateless actors aren’t the only—or even most troubling—challenge to America’s spectrum dominance. The greater an opponent’s size and wealth, the more electromagnetic trouble it can cause. A nation like China, for example, has the capability to stage elaborate electronic assaults that could result in nightmare scenarios on the battlefield: radios that abruptly fall silent in the thick of combat, drones that plummet from the sky, smart bombs that can’t find their targets. The US may very well never engage in a head-to-head shooting war in the Far East, but the ability to effectively control the spectrum is already becoming a new type of arms race, one that is just as volatile as the ICBM race during the Cold War—and one that can have just as big an impact on global diplomacy.

The American military is scrambling to develop new tools and techniques that will help it preserve its electromagnetic edge. But that edge continues to shrink by the day, and very soon our inability to completely control the spectrum might result in a different kind of war.

Any old crow will gladly tell you that spectrum warfare is nothing new. The men and women who go by that avian moniker, which derives from a World War II code name, are veterans of the American military’s decades-old efforts to attack and defend the electromagnetic domain. Their secretive trade dates back to the Russo-Japanese War: While facing an impending naval bombardment in 1904, a Russian telegraph operator used his spark-gap transmitter to jam the radio of a Japanese ship that was orchestrating the assault. Though this electronic gamesmanship worked wonders—the Japanese were unable to complete their bombardment—the czar’s military brain trust failed to learn from the experience.

The following year at the Battle of Tsushima, Russian admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky foolishly declined to jam his opponent’s radios, allegedly because he didn’t trust that his own transmitters would work. The Japanese, whose ships were outfitted with the latest Marconi wireless equipment, used their communications superiority to outmaneuver and destroy the majority of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.

Four decades later, during World War II, the advent of radar spurred both Axis and Allied powers to invent ways to cloak the true natures of their aerial exploits. One of the most famous innovations was Moonshine, a British system that absorbed, amplified, and then echoed German radar waves, so that a group of just a few planes could mimic an armada of hundreds. When the Cold War commenced, the US focused on refining and improving these early methods of electronic bamboozlement.

During the latter stages of the Korean War, for example, American B-29 bombers were outfitted with primitive jammers that befuddled the radar on antiaircraft guns. And starting in 1965, Navy jets in Vietnam were equipped with torpedo-shaped jamming pods that knocked out early-warning systems with torrents of electronic noise.

“The next war will be won by the side that best exploits the electromagnetic spectrum,” a Soviet admiral observed in 1973, shortly after Israel used jamming techniques to outwit Syrian guided missiles during the Yom Kippur War. Clearly in agreement with that prognostication, the US Air Force spent a good chunk of the Reagan era developing the EF-111A Raven, an electronic jamming plane that would play a key role in shutting down Iraq’s radar stations during the early hours of Operation Desert Storm.

But after that emphatic victory, the American military lost interest in the Old Crows’ geeky specialty. This was due partly to a vogue for stealth technology: Since aircraft like the B-2 bomber were designed to evade radar by virtue of their sleek shapes, jamming equipment seemed superfluous. But the Pentagon also failed to foresee just how much the new millennium’s wireless revolution would alter warfare—by making unmanned vehicles pervasive and giving asymmetric forces new means to coordinate and execute attacks.

The folly of this strategic myopia became apparent soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Insurgents quickly mastered the art of constructing radio-controlled IEDs, which they set off with a range of common gadgets—cell phones, of course, but also more basic devices such as garage-door openers and toy-car remotes. The Army lacked the technical expertise to prevent the insurgents from using the spectrum, so it turned to the Navy and Air Force for assistance. But those branches hadn’t done enough to update their spectrum-warfare capabilities over the preceding decade. Their jammers were designed to affect large-scale radar installations, not the narrow slivers of spectrum used by civilians. And much of this equipment was ancient: The Navy’s preeminent jamming pod, the ALQ-99, had debuted in the early 1970s and was plagued by reliability problems related to its age. (The ALQ-99 will remain the state of the art in the Navy’s arsenal until at least 2020, when it’s scheduled to be replaced by the yet-to-be-built Next Generation Jammer.)

When the Army finally began to equip its armored vehicles with hacked-together jammers, a new set of problems arose. The systems’ antennas blasted out radio waves with such reckless abandon that plenty of friendly communications links got zapped in the process—a problem that the military terms “signal fratricide.” These jammers were so unruly, in fact, that they often forced vehicle commanders to deal with a potentially lethal conundrum. “I had a choice as a guy driving down the road—do I want to communicate, or do I want to conduct a defensive electronic attack against a potential IED?” says colonel Jim Ekvall, chief of the Army’s Electronic Warfare Division. Wrong decisions led to lost lives.

Over time the Army learned how to fine-tune its jammers to target only the most worrisome portions of spectrum, rather than enormous swaths that included Americans’ preferred frequencies. To make this possible, soldiers known as spectrum managers created detailed maps of all of Iraq’s electromagnetic activity, a chore that required laborious intelligence work. In addition to tracking and recording the emissions of every piece of friendly military hardware, the managers had to compile a list of which frequencies were used by a galaxy of cheap civilian devices.

This mountain of data was incorporated into spectrum usage plans that likely helped reduce both signal fratricide and roadside bombings: Between June 2007 and June 2009, monthly IED attacks in Iraq decreased by 90 percent. The campaign’s success awakened the Army to the need to cultivate as many spectrum-savvy soldiers as possible. In 2009 it made electronic warfare a distinct career for enlisted soldiers, who could elect to study the craft in a new program at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Jesse Potter, the master sergeant who helped solve the 2007 jammer mystery in Kirkuk, was among the program’s first graduates, thereby earning the right to wear a special insignia featuring a lightning bolt crossed with a skeleton key.

Master Sergent Jesse Potter, one of America’s first dedicated spectrum soldiers.

These newly minted spectrum warriors found that their skills were much in demand in Afghanistan, where the Taliban recovered from its initial defeat in part by learning how to hack mobile technology—not only to detonate IEDs but also to maintain communications while on the run. To stay in touch with one another in the nation’s hinterlands, Taliban operatives often extend the range of existing mobile networks.

“They pay some guy 10 bucks and say, ‘Go climb up that mountain over there and put up this repeater,’” says Brian Filibeck, a chief warrant officer who picks candidates for the electronic warfare school at Fort Sill. Many Taliban ambushes were planned using those simple bundles of antennas and amplifiers.

US forces had to rapidly come up with solutions to this challenge.

Tasked with dominating the spectrum in regions largely inaccessible to ground vehicles, the Army built Ceasar, a modified version of a Navy jammer that can be affixed to a C-12 Huron turboprop airplane. Ceasar can sense the emissions of the Taliban’s repeaters, then jam their signals. The Army is now trying to miniaturize the system so it can be loaded onto unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Gray Eagle or even the hand-launched Wasp.

The Taliban and its ideological brethren are constantly trying to improve their spectrum-warfare weaponry. Chief among their goals is to reduce the threats posed by American drones. In 2009, US forces discovered that Iraqi insurgents were using a commercial program called SkyGrabber to intercept video feeds from Predator UAVs. The software allowed the insurgents to use ordinary satellite dishes to capture data as it was being transmitted back to base; because the data was unencrypted, SkyGrabber was then able to convert it into watchable media files. The US has since begun encrypting the drones’ video feeds. But according to a classified report leaked to The Washington Post by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and then published last September, al Qaeda is also trying to figure out how to sever the links between drones and their human operators, who can be stationed half a world away. One of the organization’s most promising lines of inquiry has involved the construction of GPS jammers, which could theoretically be used to corrupt a drone’s navigation and missile-guidance capabilities. Analysts with the Defense Intelligence Agency observed that such systems, if further developed, “probably would be highly disruptive for US operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

The building that houses the army’s spectrum elite is fittingly tough to locate without help from GPS. The bland redbrick edifice is perched on a hilly corner of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, far beyond the 187-year-old Army base’s horse stables and forested picnic area. From down below on McClellan Avenue, the place is easy to mistake for a dormitory or unusually dour day-care center. But the Electronic Warfare Proponent Office (EWPO) is actually a hotbed of classified activity, all geared toward building US spectrum dominance—an already difficult task that keeps getting harder by the year.

Life was much simpler for the Army back when ruling the skies, rather than the electromagnetic waves, was its chief prerequisite for success. Gaining air supremacy may require colossal amounts of fuel and bombs, but it’s easy to define and hard to overcome once established. When Army general Norman Schwarzkopf declared that coalition forces had secured total control of Iraq’s airspace just two weeks after the start of Operation Desert Storm, he was able to cite indisputable evidence: A significant chunk of Iraq’s air force had been annihilated, along with the aviation infrastructure that supported it. There was no chance that Saddam Hussein would be able to field a fleet of replacement MiGs in a matter of weeks.

Spectrum supremacy, by contrast, can never be more than fragile. For starters, it is tricky to ascertain when it has even been attained—there is no quick formula for evaluating when an enemy has been entirely ejected from an immense, invisible battlespace. More important, even a reeling opponent can rebound quickly in the spectrum: Launching an electromagnetic counterattack doesn’t require hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of jets, just a handful of gadgets and some basic engineering skills.

“For a warlord to go and get their hands on a piece of equipment that can create a huge communications black hole and create serious havoc, that’s very cheap, very realistic,” says Filibeck, one of the top officers with the EWPO.

As al Qaeda has discovered, waging do-it-yourself spectrum warfare against the US is not quite as easy as jamming a cell phone tower. American communications devices are fortified to resist elementary attempts at electromagnetic meddling. The next generation of military radios, for example, will feature an antijam mode in which signal power is automatically increased in response to perceived electronic threats. Yet weaknesses still abound, particularly in systems that use GPS data—notably the drones that now make up more than 40 percent of the US military’s aerial fleet.

GPS relies on a technique called direct-sequence spread spectrum to fend off jamming. But DSSS, which involves the scrambling of data into hard-to-guess patterns, is far from foolproof. In early 2012, for example, when North Korea spent 16 days emitting signals from truck-sized GPS jammers, more than 1,000 South Korean aircraft reported feeling the effects. And that June a University of Texas at Austin team managed to hijack a drone by sending it counterfeit GPS instructions. Incidents like these recently spurred a Department of Homeland Security official to warn that “a single well-placed low-power GPS jammer or spoofer could disrupt an entire region [of the US].” (To prevent the smuggling of these devices, which are illegal in the US, the Air Force Research Laboratory is developing a jammer detector that can be installed at border crossings.)

Nor would it take much for even relatively unsophisticated enemies to develop those tools.

“You can go onto the Internet and Google how to build low-cost GPS denial-of-service devices,” Jesse Potter says.

“They’re about the size of a small computer. If an enemy can build a thousand of those and place them all over the battlefield so I can’t find them all, then I’ve got a problem.”

One of those problems could involve an Army convoy suddenly losing its navigation and communication capabilities right as it’s crossing a perilous stretch of enemy-held territory—soldiers isolated in such a manner would be vulnerable to attacks from guerrillas who know the terrain. Or the enemy could ****** a drone out of the sky and crash it or even take it over.

And if an enemy truly lacks the technological wherewithal to pull this off? Then they can simply buy it. Plug-and-play jammers and electromagnetic analyzers are widely available for purchase, as are software packages designed to identify and defend against electronic threats on the battlefield. The Israeli firm Your Total Security, for instance, sells entire vehicles tricked out with all the gadgets necessary “to block a wide spectrum of radio and wireless communications frequencies.” And the French company ATDI offers HTZ Warfare, a “comprehensive radio planning solution” that promises to help forces avoid signal fratricide, intercept enemy communications, and repel attempts at jamming. A rogue nation equipped with this sort of technology could challenge American troops across the spectrum, hindering if not completely eliminating their ability to use their electronics during an invasion. And the road to Tehran or Bamako is a terrible place to lose every last bit of situational awareness.

With its time in Afghanistan finally coming to an end, the American military is in the early stages of the Pacific Pivot—a long-term strategy to counter China’s growing influence in Asia. The US is keen to deploy more troops to places like Australia and Guam, to station more Navy ships in Singapore, and to offer more cooperation to key regional allies such as the Philippines, all in the name of keeping pressure on the region’s heavyweight.

The nature of the geography in that sprawling part of the world, where strips of land are separated by vast expanses of water, will create fresh vulnerabilities in our military’s communications networks. “Things get much harder against Far East targets when we don’t have a dominating US military footprint in the region as we did with Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Charles Clancy, director of the Hume Center for National Security and Technology at Virginia Tech. “Command and control become even more exposed to attack, because we lack the resources on the ground to protect it. Also, without a physical footprint we rely even more greatly on unmanned systems.”

China is well aware that the Pacific Pivot will strain the US military’s ability to protect its networks against electromagnetic sabotage.

The People’s Liberation Army is thus pumping tremendous resources into beefing up its spectrum-warfare operations, much as it has funded the formation of an elite hacker corps to wage cyberwar against its rivals. Thanks to this investment, the scientific literature now teems with Chinese-authored papers on topics like how to design better simulation software for aircraft that jams electronic signals. This research is supporting the development of devices that will make China our most formidable opponent in the spectrum.

Even if a full-on military confrontation is unlikely, there are still real benefits to gaining the technological upper hand. The ability to anticipate and counter an opponent’s weapons is valuable even if no attack ever comes—it gives a country leverage in the broader geopolitical sphere. And China is working hard to gain this leverage through the electromagnetic realm.

Some of its devices are designed to confuse guided weapons, which often rely on radar to home in on their targets.

“We are now painfully aware of the jamming systems for their aircraft, some of which have the potential of making systems like air-to-air missiles inoperable,” says Richard Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. There is every reason to believe that this technology could be adapted to bewilder active guided cruise missiles, a weapon essential to American naval might.

The Chinese are also working on ways they could, in a pinch, take out GPS, which would likely let them control the skies above Taiwan or the Korean Peninsula in the event of war. China’s fighters, bombers, and drones won’t suffer if GPS goes down: By 2020, the country will have completed work on Compass, its own 35-satellite navigation system. (Presumably, the US is working on a plan to jam it.) The US air fleet, by contrast, will be significantly handicapped without precise guidance from above. The Air Force takes the threat of a Chinese electromagnetic assault so seriously that it’s stepping up efforts to train its pilots how to fly without the aid of GPS, radar, or even radio communications. The Navy, meanwhile, is testing an antenna that will hopefully allow drones to quickly reestablish links with GPS satellites in the wake of a significant jamming attack.

But American air-power will not suffer alone if the Chinese win the battle for spectrum—ground power will also take a hit. Congress has mandated that two-thirds of the military’s ground vehicles be unmanned by 2025, and these machines are the ideal candidates to lead amphibious assaults along the Pacific Rim. But like aerial drones, ground-based drones will not be able to function without a dash of human guidance and a steady stream of navigational data. If Chinese jammers can overwhelm their systems, any robot vehicles racing up a beach in occupied Taiwan would simply fall idle.

In true Cold War fashion, Chinese-made spectrum-warfare technologies are likely to spread far beyond East Asia.

“Everything that China manufactures is eventually offered for sale, up to and including nuclear weapons technology and ICBM technology,” Fisher says.

“If they have a jamming system, it’s likely comparable or even superior to whatever alternatives are out there, and it’s likely to be sold.”

The China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a government-affiliated company that produces much of the nation’s spectrum-warfare hardware, is a fixture at major arms trade shows such as Peru’s Sitdef. If and when the US military is pulled into future missions in the steppes of East Africa or the forests of Central America, it may run into opponents armed with jammers that were manufactured in greater Shanghai. And if our military gets bogged down in those conflicts because it can’t dominate the spectrum to its liking, the Pacific Pivot will become significantly harder to pull off—much to China’s joy.

The orbit test bed looks vaguely ominous, like an interrogation chamber from an avant-garde sci-fi film. The room is cavernous and stark, with gleaming white floors and barren walls. The ceiling is lined with orderly rows of what look like upside-down Ikea standing lamps. Inside each hangs a yellow box emblazoned with the word winlab—the name of the Rutgers University laboratory where this curious array is located. The boxes, 400 of them in total, are radio nodes, all part of a robust network for putting experimental communications protocols and applications through their paces. Orbit is where wireless-technology researchers go to test new methods for sending data across cellular and wireless networks. It’s also where the US military hopes to find the algorithms that will tilt the spectrum-warfare playing field in its favor.

That precious code is emerging as part of the Spectrum Challenge, a tournament sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. With $150,000 in prize money at stake, 18 teams are vying to create software that can recognize when radio waves are smacking into interference, then route them around the obstacles by adapting their waveforms and the frequencies they use.

The challenge uses Orbit to host one-on-one clashes in which teams score points by successfully delivering packets of data from one end of the network to the other, a task complicated by the fact that competitors are allowed to jam one another at will.

“We first concentrate on denying the other team, then we try to push our trickle of packets through,” says Peter Volgyesi, head of the Vanderbilt University squad that won a $25,000 prize in a preliminary round last September. The jamming has been unexpectedly ferocious: Darpa was hoping that the winning team would be able to transmit 15,000 packets of data, but Volgyesi and his colleagues won the round by sneaking through just around 100 packets. In preparation for the tournament’s final round in March, the competitors are now modifying their code with an eye toward making it stronger and more agile; the algorithms need to be heavily redundant so information can still get through when faced with a barrage of electromagnetic noise. It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game in which opponents must try to outwit one another in new and innovative ways.

Darpa stresses that the Spectrum Challenge is primarily intended to elicit solutions to problems on the home front: With the American spectrum increasingly clogged by civilian traffic, the military is worried about interference around bases and testing grounds. But the tournament also has obvious implications for the future of combat. In a world where every opponent has the ability to conduct electronic attacks, the US knows that software is its one big advantage. If the challenge yields algorithms that can elegantly guide signals past jamming attempts, the American military will be immeasurably more confident in its future strategies.

The widespread adoption of tablet computers is one example of those plans. The Army recently awarded a $455 million contract for the development of ruggedized tablets, to be mounted in more than three dozen types of vehicles and weapon systems. Soldiers will rely on these computers to receive critical updates about the locations of threats or the movements of friendly forces. If those updates don’t arrive as intended because the Army’s mastery of the spectrum has been degraded, the results could be deadly.

Software will also help spectrum warriors do a better job of explaining their work to superiors. A big challenge they’ve faced is how to talk to commanders who know all about pounding targets with munitions but are puzzled by the abstractness of spectrum warfare. Jesse Potter jokingly disparages these officers as “meat eaters” who don’t readily process why their fortunes depend on the reliable transmission of radiation from one node to another.

This expository task should become easier in 2015, when the Army is set to roll out software that will create more user-friendly visualizations of the spectrum’s real-time status on the battlefield. Soldiers like Potter will be able to point out which locations are securely in American electromagnetic hands and which are susceptible to electronic attack.

Perhaps this effort will succeed in making the meat eaters understand the importance of spectrum. Perhaps the brains at the Electronic Warfare Proponent Office can keep a step ahead of their foes. If not, the US military will discover that no amount of firepower can assure its dominance.

[MIKA27]

The Standoff at Belbek: Inside the First Clash of the Second Crimean War

The Ukrainian troops kept the bonfires burning all night on Monday, kicking stones into the embers and waiting for the sun to rise over the Belbek air force base in southern Ukraine.

Five days had passed since the start of the siege against them and the strain on the troops was starting to show. The previous day, the Russian forces surrounding their base had issued another ultimatum – surrender your weapons that night and sign an oath of allegiance to Russia or face an assault by 5:00 a.m. The commanders had refused. Some of the troops had defected. The rest stood around the garrison, smoking cigarettes and twitching when the logs popped in the fires. They only understood that the Russians had been bluffing when the roosters started to crow.

The next bluff came soon after, and it marked a turning point in the week-old conflict that has brought Russia and Ukraine to the edge of a fratricidal war. Just before morning reveille, Colonel Yuli Mamchur, the base commander, got word from one of his lieutenants that the Russian officer in charge of the siege, a lieutenant colonel of the special forces who only identified himself as Dima, had called again. His terms were the same, only the deadline was different – surrender by 4:00 pm on Tuesday or the Russians would cut off the power and the gas lines to the base.

“What they’re trying to do is make us snap,” Mamchur told TIME.

“It’s a mind game.” He decided to call Dima back. Without consulting his ranking officers, Mamchur told the Russian officer that the men under his command – Ukraine’s 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade – was about to march on the Belbek air field that the Russians had occupied. Then he hung up the phone.

The plan he had was reckless if not suicidal. He wanted his men to leave their Kalashnikovs at the base, get into formation and march behind him into the Russian checkpoint about a kilometer up the road. Practically all of them volunteered, but he left half his men behind to guard the base and took the other half with him in a column. He intended to answer the Russian ultimatums with his own psychological attack. His men would be unarmed, and leading their column would be a flagman with a Soviet relic – the banner of the 62nd Fighter Aviation Regiment that had been based in Belbek during World War II. Any soldier born in the Soviet Union would have heard the stories of its legendary pilots, the ones who had taken on the Nazi Luftwaffe in 1941 then went on to guard the skies above the Yalta Conference in 1945. Mamchur reckoned that no soldier with any respect for the heroes of the Soviet Union would shoot at a column carrying that banner.

He guessed right. As he approached the Russian checkpoint with his men trailing behind, three troops came forward and raised the barrels of their assault rifles. They ordered Mamchur to stop, and when he refused, they began firing bursts into the air, one after another, screaming that they would shoot to kill. They were the first shots fired since the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula began last week, so at the sound of the gunfire, the column wobbled. Some of the men ducked but they all kept marching. Only when Mamchur was a few paces from the Russian troops with a Kalashnikov pointed directly at his face did he order his men to stop.

What followed was a stand-off lasting well into the afternoon. Mumchar put forward a simple demand.

“It is our duty to the constitution of Ukraine to guard this base,” he said.

The Russians could remain in control, as no one had the fire power to evict them. But the Ukrainians insisted on taking their positions beside the fighter jets and radar stations of their occupied base. The Russians asked for two hours to consult with their commanding officers, and the Ukrainian brigade began to wait in the middle of the road. All around them, in the bushes of the surrounding fields, Russian snipers and machine gunners had taken up positions, training their sights directly at the Ukrainians.

Not long before noon, many of their cell phones began to ring. Colonel Viktor Kukharchenko, the deputy commander of the Belbek base, got a call from an old friend from the Russian army, Colonel Maxim Obidnik, and turned on the speaker phone so that the assembled journalists and troops could have a listen. “Putin’s on TV,” said a frantic voice on the other end of the receiver. “He’s ordered his troops to pull back.”

In his residence outside Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin was just then giving a press conference, his first appearance before the media since Russian troops began taking control of Crimea five days earlier. Amid his rambling and self-contradictory statements – Putin denied, for one thing, that any Russian forces were occupying Crimea – the Russian commander-in-chief ordered the troops playing war games near Ukraine’s eastern border to go back to their bases. That did not mean the occupation of Crimea was over, but it was a clear deescalation of the conflict. Without troops massed in western Russia, it was a lot less likely that Putin would follow up the occupation of Crimea with an invasion of eastern Ukraine.

“You’re heroes!” shouted the voice on the line to Colonel Kukharchenko. “You made Putin back down!” That most likely wasn’t true. No one can say what made Putin back away from his preparations to invade Ukraine’s eastern provinces. But as the officers of the Belbek base stood there on that road, it felt to many of them like they had just defeated a nuclear superpower with nothing but an old, red banner. In some ways the upset made a lot of sense. That banner symbolized all the insanity of conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

“The only soldiers who’ve ever fired in anger on this base were the Germans,” says Major Vladislav Kardash, a deputy squadron commander at Belbek.

“Now we have Russians shooting their weapons here to scare Ukrainians. It’s lunacy. Putin’s gone completely paranoid. He’s lost his mind.”

Since the occupation of Crimea began, Kardash says his friends in the Russian Black Sea fleet, which lies within marching distance of the Ukrainian base at Belbek, had stopped taking his phone calls. None of the men at the Ukrainian base are happy, he says, with the new government that came to power in Kiev after last month’s revolution. The nationalists involved in that uprising worried the men of Belbek just as much as they worry the Russians. But because the Ukrainian air force must take its orders from the newly appointed Minister of Defense, says Kardash, “my own Russian friends call me a traitor, a fascist.”

Still, at the end of the standoff on Tuesday, the Russians agreed to grant Mamchur and his men a concession. They allowed a group of ten Ukrainian troops to take up positions in the occupied base, a symbolic gesture but a crucial one in a conflict that has so far seen considerable bluster and intimidation from the side of the Russians. Before dusk, Mamchur decided to turn his men around and march back toward their garrison. When he arrived he learned that the Russian forces had not made good on their threat to shut off the power and gas. But that didn’t make him feel like much of a winner. He was still besieged, outgunned and outnumbered, facing charges of treason in Kiev if he abandoned his base and winning enemies among the new pro-Russian leaders of Crimea if he stood his ground.

“I’m still between two fires,” he said Wednesday evening. But at least he had won a moral victory, even if a military one still looks a long way off.

[MIKA27]

Gold Coin Stash May Have Been Stolen from U.S. Mint

It may not be “finders, keepers” after all for a Northern California couple who discovered a $10 million gold coin stash on their property last last month while walking their dog. As it turns out, the mint-condition coins may actually be the property of the U.S. Mint.

A recently surfaced news story details a heist of gold coins from the San Francisco Mint in 1900, and the stolen coins have many similarities to the ones discovered last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The original face value of the coins was about $27,000 at the turn of the century, according to experts, which is approximate value of the gold stolen in 1900. Furthermore, the coins were mostly in chronological order, suggesting they were unused.

The story was discovered in the Haithi Trust Digital Library by historian and coin collector Jack Trout, who also identified another suspicious piece of evidence linking the newly discovered gold to the 1900 heist: One of the coins in the stash was an 1866 Liberty $20 gold piece. “I don’t believe that coin ever left The Mint until the robbery,” he says.

[MIKA27]

30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life'

An ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say.

It was found frozen in a deep layer of the Siberian permafrost, but after it thawed it became infectious once again.

The French scientists say the contagion poses no danger to humans or animals, but other viruses could be unleashed as the ground becomes exposed.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Professor Jean-Michel Claverie, from the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Aix-Marseille in France, said: "This is the first time we've seen a virus that's still infectious after this length of time."

Biggest virus

The ancient pathogen was discovered buried 30m (100ft) down in the frozen ground.

Called Pithovirus sibericum, it belongs to a class of giant viruses that were discovered 10 years ago.

The virus infects amoebas but does not attack human or animal cells

These are all so large that, unlike other viruses, they can be seen under a microscope. And this one, measuring 1.5 micrometres in length, is the biggest that has ever been found.

The last time it infected anything was more than 30,000 years ago, but in the laboratory it has sprung to life once again.

Tests show that it attacks amoebas, which are single-celled organisms, but does not infect humans or other animals.

Co-author Dr Chantal Abergel, also from the CNRS, said: "It comes into the cell, multiplies and finally kills the cell. It is able to kill the amoeba - but it won't infect a human cell."

However, the researchers believe that other more deadly pathogens could be locked in Siberia's permafrost.

"We are addressing this issue by sequencing the DNA that is present in those layers," said Dr Abergel.

"This would be the best way to work out what is dangerous in there."

'Recipe for disaster'

The researchers say this region is under threat. Since the 1970s, the permafrost has retreated and reduced in thickness, and climate change projections suggest it will decrease further.

It has also become more accessible, and is being eyed for its natural resources.

Prof Claverie warns that exposing the deep layers could expose new viral threats.

He said: "It is a recipe for disaster. If you start having industrial explorations, people will start to move around the deep permafrost layers. Through mining and drilling, those old layers will be penetrated and this is where the danger is coming from."

He told BBC News that ancient strains of the smallpox virus, which was declared eradicated 30 years ago, could pose a risk.

"If it is true that these viruses survive in the same way those amoeba viruses survive, then smallpox is not eradicated from the planet - only the surface," he said.

"By going deeper we may reactivate the possibility that smallpox could become again a disease of humans in modern times."

However, it is not yet clear whether all viruses could become active again after being frozen for thousands or even millions of years.

"That's the six million dollar question," said Professor Jonathan Ball, a virologist from the University of Nottingham, who was commenting on the research.

"Finding a virus still capable of infecting its host after such a long time is still pretty astounding - but just how long other viruses could remain viable in permafrost is anyone's guess. It will depend a lot on the actual virus. I doubt they are all as robust as this one."

He added: "We freeze viruses in the laboratory to preserve them for the future. If they have a lipid envelope - like flu or HIV, for example - then they are a bit more fragile, but the viruses with an external protein shell - like foot and mouth and common cold viruses - survive better.

"But it's the freezing-thawing that poses the problems, because as the ice forms then melts there's a physical damaging effect. If they do survive this, then they need to find a host to infect and they need to find them pretty fast."

[MIKA27]

Snake bursts after gobbling gator

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.

The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps.

The python's remains were found with the victim's tail protruding from its burst midsection. The head of the python was missing.

"Encounters like that are almost never seen in the wild... And here we are," Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

"They were probably evenly matched in size. If the python got a good grip on the alligator before the alligator got a good grip on him, he could win," Professor Mazzotti said.

He said the alligator may have clawed at the python's stomach, leading it to burst.

"Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species," Prof Mazzotti said.

He said that there had been four known encounters between the two species in the past. In the other cases, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw.

Burmese pythons - many of whom have been dumped by their owners - have thrived in the wet and hot climate of Florida's swamps over the past 20 years.

[MIKA27]

A Better Look At The Samsung Galaxy S5

http://youtu.be/-XseHZyvGtg

Feel like ogling your next Android purchase for a bit? Try this video of the Samsung Galaxy S5.

If you’re an Android or a Galaxy junkie, this is basically four-minutes of pure gadget pornography.

It covers off on everything including the design, the colours available, the features and how they work.

If you feel like getting into the wearables, then Samsung has you covered there too. There’s a deep-dive into the features of the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo and the genuinely impressive Gear Fit.

http://youtu.be/rZLvv0q8ltw

[MIKA27]

Explore 5000km Of Tunnels Beneath Montreal

Andrew Emond, a Montreal-based photographer, amateur geographer and DIY gonzo spelunker of the city’s sewers and lost rivers, has just re-launched his excellent website, Under Montreal. The revamped site now comes complete with a fascinating, interactive map of the city’s subterranean streams, documenting Montreal’s invisible rivers for all to see.

“Beneath Montreal, Canada,” Emond’s site explains, “lies a sewer system encompassing a combined distance of over 5000km. With some sections dating back to 1832, this network offers a unique framework through which one can explore a city and its history.”

These buried waterways — and the infrastructure that holds them — are thus a history lesson in spatial form, Emond suggests.

Luckily for us, they are also spectacular.

The Cote St Paul Collector, for example, is a like a sewer from another world.

Emond describes its extraordinary geological formations as a kind of quasi-natural cave in the making: “I’ve encountered calcite deposits inside sewers in the past. Stalactites, stalagmites, ‘soda straws‘ and flowstones are all to be found in just about any sewer or storm drain that is more than a decade or so old. Caused partially by the limestone in cement, these formations can help turn a run-of-the-mill system into something quite wonderful.”

But the Cote St Paul system takes it to another level: “In fact,” Emond adds, “I’ve never seen anything else like it… For roughly 100 metres, the walls of this century-old sewer make for a breathtaking spectacle. Nature has completely taken over to the point where you’re easily tricked into believing you’re not inside a man-made structure anymore. Instead, you are in a cave deep beneath the surface of the earth in some exotic country.”

In fact, I’m reminded of an amazing description in Peter Ackroyd’s recommended (and refreshingly short) book, Under London, where he describes the tunnels beneath the city as kind of tropical wonderland, a Borneo of the subcity.

Referring to the humid sewers and overgrown streams of London, Ackroyd suggests that any attempt to describe the city’s underside, its shadow self, “might be a narrative from the swamps of Borneo rather than the City of London.”

Ackroyd’s own depiction of this urban netherworld is worth re-reading, describing underground cathedrals and titanic architectural forms that, in the shadows and grime, resemble “a subterranean monastery”:

The underground chambers are compared to cathedrals, complete with pillars and buttresses, arches and crypts. One visitor, discovering an archway through which a cataract tumbled, remarked that it was as fantastic a scene as “a dream of a subterranean monastery.” The travellers walk along tunnels that may reach a height of 17 feet, the cool tainted water lapping at about knee-height around their waders. Many are disconcerted by the pull of the water, and feel disoriented; they lose their equilibrium. They feel the sediment beneath their feet, as if they were walking on a beach at low tide. Great iron doors loom up at intervals, actings as valves. The noise of roaring water, somewhere in the distance, can generally be heard. It is the sound of cataracts and waterfalls.

This rush — both of adrenalin and of distant water cascading down artificial waterfalls — is something Andrew Emond is quite familiar with, having stood amidst these intersections of rivers and cataracts armed only with a torch, boots and digital camera.

Emond, of course, is already widely known for his work. He was featured in the recent film, Lost Rivers, for example, which was very recently released on DVD by Catbird Productions (and is worth seeking out).

That film, a long look at attempts around the world to “daylight” lost urban rivers — that is, to rescue and uncover them from beneath the pavement — spends several scenes exploring Montreal alongside Emond, making it abundantly clear how a city’s history can be found in this, least likely of places.

After all, Emond’s work is motivated not just by the thrill of it all, but by a deep interest in the city’s historical geography.

Like his compatriot, Toronto’s Michael Cook, author of Vanishing Point, who also treats his long journeys underground as a kind of cartographic ground-truthing of the city’s riverine past, Emond is literally casting light on the forgotten, buried landscapes of the city, from its earliest colonial days to its industrial heyday.

His multi-part exploration of the Rivière St Pierre is a good example of this.

We begin, for instance, with some historical context and old maps of the city, before progressing horizontally up the drainage pipes, passing beneath the landscape into Emond’s own speleology of the caves and tunnels beneath the streets.

In fact, the Rivière St Pierre actually passes underneath another canal, turning it into a delirious, M.C. Escher-like knot of waterways passing beneath waterways, more topology than municipal infrastructure.

“In a golf course to the west of downtown Montreal,” he writes,

“you’ll find the last remaining portion of Rivière Saint-Pierre that still exists above ground. 200 metres are all that are left of a river system that once flowed freely over the landscape. The rest of it’s been retrofitted into the city’s sewer system or lost entirely.”

Lost, that is, yet Emond has made it a point to help uncover this dimension of the city for us to see.

And what he shows us is extraordinary, like some shining and mysterious portal to another world.

Divorced of their historic context, Emond’s photos quickly take on the narrative feel of an unreleased Andrei Tarkovsky film.

Seen purely as urban sci-fi, these photos suggest a gang of anonymous urban explorers marching ahead through the crossing streams, a light-free zone of reservoirs and tombs.

We watch as human beings — almost always in the same Caspar David Friedrich-like pose, seen from behind as so-called Rückenfiguren looking out at some beautifully strange and intimidating landscape — wander through this maze of strangely compressed spaces, following echoes, ducking beneath monumental overhangs and arched entryways.

Always pressing forward, they wander on, further and further up toward the source of these underground waters.

Turning corners, taking photographs, unsure of what they’ll find.

In any case, Emond’s revamped site is worth a long look, especially for the detailed historical context supplied for each river and stream; go check it out.

MIKA: I'd love to explore that system/network!!

[MIKA27]

What The Ukrainian Crisis Means For Astronauts In Space

Ever since NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011, the only way to get up to the International Space Station is on a Russian Soyuz. That’s why the six humans currently orbiting in space — including two Americans and three Russians — might be paying attention to what’s happening on earth 320km below. As tensions run high between the US and Russia over the situation in Ukraine, geopolitics may find its way into space again.

Over at the blog Looking Up, Duncan Geere has written an excellent piece laying out possible astro-political scenarios in space.

While all-out war remains unlikely, astronauts could become a point of leverage for Vladimir Putin in a larger conflict. “It’s not inconceivable that the International Space Station may play some part in this  —  either by denying the US the use of Soyuz, or simply by charging exorbitant amounts for it,” Geere writes. With ISS trips planned years in advance, there are only 10 Soyuz launches scheduled from now until 2016.

In addition, NASA has to be granted special exemptions to the Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act, which normally prohibits the US from buying space-related goods and services from Russia while it’s selling nuclear technology to Iran. NASA’s exemption expires in 2016, and, if the relationship between the US and Russia worsens, this could become a tougher sell.

Given that the space race was borne out of Cold War conflict, it can seem remarkable that collaboration between Americans with their Soviet and Russian counterparts ever happened in the first place.

Russian space scientist Roald Z. Sagdeev, former head of the Russian Space Research Institute, has written a long essay for NASA charting the ups and downs of space cooperation through the Cold War. The two space programs could only pursue serious collaboration after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When the ISS launched, it was hailed as a beacon of international cooperation.

But the dissolution of the Soviet Union caused its own problems for cosmonauts, too, as Geere points out. In 1992, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev (left) came back to earth after 313 surreal days stranded aboard the Mir space station. He had left the USSR; he returned to Kazakhstan.

The Soviet space complex known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was located in what became Kazakhstan, and the newly formed country decided to charge exorbitant fees for its use. A host of budget problems complicated Krikalev’s return. When he did, it was to a new government, a new country, and even a new name for his hometown — now called St. Petersburg.

In 1994, Krikalev became the first Russian to ride in an American shuttle. The New York Times called him a “symbol of new cooperation.” Twenty years ago, it was time to be optimistic — but that optimism may seem misplaced now, as the crisis in Ukraine puts Russia and the U.S. at odds once again.

[MIKA27]

The First Transformers 4 Trailer Is Here

The first real trailer for Transformers 4: Age Of Extinction is here, and it’s full of explosions, car robots, Dinobots and even more explosions.

The trailer opens on Marky Mark Wahlberg collecting junkers to flip in order keep his family going. His daughter (who looks only about 10 years younger than he does) urges him to stop, but nothing will keep him down.

Eventually, he works out that he’s found Optimus Prime, and that’s when the government thugs come down to Texas to play. Cue giant explosions, transforming cars and everyone’s favourite BWAAAAAAM sound effects.

The trailer ends with Optimus Prime punching a Dinobot in the middle of its face.

Transformers: Age Of Extinction hits theatres June 27.

[MIKA27]

Watch The Ballistic Lamborghini Huracan Barrel About In This First-Look

The Geneva Motor Show is on right now, and we’re seeing plenty of supercar announcements. Perhaps the most interesting one is for Lamborghini’s new rocket, the Huracan. The first-look video is pretty special.

From screeching its way around city streets to barreling along a mountain road, the Huracan is an amazing car. Can’t wait to see more of it in future.

[MIKA27]

This Futuristic Truck Was Actually Designed By Walmart

With 7000 tractor trailers currently in its fleet, it makes sense that Walmart would have a vested interest in designing more efficient delivery vehicles. The company’s new ultra-aerodynamic Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience — or WAVE — concept is lighter and more fuel efficient than other trucks on the market, and can run on almost any fuel short of nuclear power.

Testing has just begun on the WAVE truck, which is powered by a unique micro-turbine hybrid powertrain that’s capable of running on diesel, biodiesel, natural gas, and even fuels we haven’t come up with yet. And like the Tesla, it can even run like an electric car, relying on just a set of on-board batteries. But its electric-only range is obviously very limited.

The futuristic-looking cab is at least 20 per cent more aerodynamic than the current vehicles in Walmart’s fleet, and features a center-mounted driver’s seat wrapped in large windows as well as LCD displays providing views around the truck.

But even the WAVE’s trailer has been completely redesigned. Made almost exclusively from carbon fibre, including massive 16m panels, it’s close to 1800kg lighter than a conventional trailer, but actually has more capacity given its own aerodynamic curves.

Which means it can be used to haul more cargo in a single trip.

There’s no word on if or when the WAVE might ever become part of Walmart’s official fleet. And while it’s an initiative that’s primarily meant to boost the corporation’s bottom line, the innovations and research here could certainly find their way into your next vehicle.

[MIKA27]

Cone: A Speaker That Knows What You Want To Hear Before You Do

Music is personal. It’s tied to our identities, our emotions, even our friends. So the idea that a complex algorithm could make us smarter about music is counterintuitive. The creators of Cone, a wireless speaker that learns what you like and builds on it, think they’ve cracked the code.

Cone is the first product by Aether Things, a San Francisco-based company that draws on decades of research in machine learning to build “things that think.” When I met its Chief Product Officer Duncan Lamb last week, he summed up the company’s mission with a question: “How is it that we’ve got all this power and all this data, yet we still have to tell our machines, word for word, what we want them to do?”

That’s a tall order, but it’s not as tall as it would have been just a few years ago — before products like Twine, Automatic, and Nest Thermostat made the concept of thinking things accessible to the public. The Aether team comes from companies working on the edge of this burgeoning field: Nokia, IDEO, Google, Apple, and even a NASA alum who deals with Aether’s voice recognition (“he builds voice-controlled drones as a hobby,” says Lamb).

Lamb, who himself worked as Head of Product Design at Skype and Creative Director at Nokia, describes Aether as a group of people who go out “looking for trouble.” And Aether’s first product, Cone, responds to the first trouble they found: Streaming music.

Too Much Choice

So, what could possibly be wrong with services that make it possible to stream any song at any time?

That’s just it: With so many degrees of freedom, what used to be a simple act of flipping a dial on a radio set while you’re making coffee in the morning is complicated by toggling between computer and smartphone, making playlists, staring songs, and shuffling through choices.

“As stuff gets more capable, it gets more complex,” Lamb explains.

“And that complexity gets dumped straight onto us. TVs are a perfect example. In the ’50s, there was a nob for on and a nob for tuning. Now, we have four or five remotes.”

Cone wants to simplify the process down to a single action: Just turn the dial. The three-pound speaker has a circular face that functions like a big click wheel. Turn it to the right, and you hear music. Turn it one more time to change the song. If you want to be surprised, give it a big, Wheel of Fortune-style spin. If there’s something specific you want to hear, just press the button in the middle of the speaker and request it. At my demo, asking Cone to “play the Rolling Stones” had the Stones blasting within a few seconds of the request.

It’s also beautiful, with a smooth copper skin and a curving profile that hearkens back to antique phonographs without seeming corny. When it ships this spring, it’ll arrive with a 1GHz processor running on a Lithium ion battery that packs eight hours of play before it needs charging. Right now, setup is iOS and OS X compatible only, with Android coming down the road.

Most importantly, its three-inch woofer delivers crisp, warm sound — even at high volumes — which backs up its steep $400 price tag.

The Machine Behind the Music

Those details are about all you need to know to interact with Cone. But behind its copper skin, it’s hiding a complex piece of propriety software written over the past two years by Aether’s development team.

You see, Cone listens to what you like, what you skip, and what you request, and builds a profile based around your activity. Aether hasn’t confirmed exactly which streaming services Cone will pull from yet, but it says it’ll announce multiple content partners, along with podcasts and internet radio, before the device ships later this year.

Cone also learns from how you use it. Thanks to its built-in accelerometer, it generates data points about where you listen to what, as well as when you listen to certain things, and bases its playlist on that information.

For example, if you listen to NPR in the mornings in the kitchen, Cone will know to play that rather than music. If you’re particularly prone to instrumental electronic tracks while you work every afternoon, it will learn that too. Cone’s algorithms also include ambient data points. It might suggest something else if it’s raining, say, or if you turn up a particular song.

The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The idea, says Lamb, is to “take all this choice and all this power that exists and is available to us in different forms, and put it in a physical forms that are really simple, really natural, and really direct.”

A Teacher or a Tyrant?

The broader question about Cone is whether people are ready for a device that knows what they want to listen to before they even know it. We give other “connected” products control over aspects of our lives that we don’t want to think about, like the temperature of our house, our car’s fuel mileage, or when we should water our plants. Music, on the other hand, is bound up with our personalities, and is closely related to mood and emotion.

Aether’s decision to build a new piece of software from scratch, rather than partnering with a proven company like EchoNest, is a risky one. Existing services have millions of users and years of data to back up functionality. Cone, on the other hand, will by flying solo. That might not be a bad thing, depending on how sophisticated the algorithm is, but it could be a pitfall, too. Another issue for some users might be related to portability, since not everyone wants (or needs) a speaker that’s sensitive to its location.

Hopefully, Cone will feel like a trusted friend who likes the same bands as you and always seems to know about the next big album, and not like a tyrant who can’t be predicted or controlled.

From what I saw over the brief hour I spent with it, the results seemed promising. Still, without having had the time to let it “learn” about me, it’s hard to say anything definitive about how it’ll really work. But if it functions as it’s meant to, Cone could be a magical piece of hardware that hides a complex piece of software — designed not to be seen, but to be heard.

[MIKA27]

South Korea Is Building A Series Of Biodomes For Endangered Species

Planet Earth is falling apart. It sounds a bit dramatic when you put it in such stark terms, but, in many ways, it’s true. The list of endangered species grows every year as humans bulldoze more habitats and belch more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

What’s an environmentalist to do?

Build a biodome, of course! At least, that’s what South Korea’s doing as part of a broader effort to protect its native endangered species.

The country just unveiled striking new designs for its National Research Center for Endangered Species that will soon be built in Yeongyang-gun, one of the cleanest parts of the Korean peninsula.

The idea for the design by Seoul-based Samoo Architects & Engineers (SAMOO) is to blend the three-part compound harmoniously with the surrounding nature.

The main area, known as the Core Zone, will contain a visitors center, offices, and quarantine zone. Meanwhile, the main Research Zone includes a number of breeding farms and research facilities, including several biodomes. There’s also something called the Refresh Zone where researchers and visitors can stay.

The whole thing looks like a cross between the new Apple headquarters and that Pauly Shore movie. It also looks very similar to another Samoo biodome project for a few years ago, the Ecorium of the National Ecological Insitute. While this complex is supposed to built elsewhere, the two projects share similar missions. They also make one thing overwhelmingly clear: South Koreans are biodome fanatics.

[MIKA27]

Impressive Video Of A Massive Dolphin Stampede Shot Via Drone

Captain Dave Anderson recently took his DJI Phantom 2 for a spin off the coast of San Clemente, California and spotted something amazing. As the drone took flight, it captured the amazing sight of thousands of common dolphins stampeding towards the Pacific Ocean. And then came the humpback whales.

It’s not unusual for Capt. Dave to come across dolphins and whales. After all, he does run a business called Capt. Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Safari. But this time was different.

“This is the most beautiful and compelling five minute video I have ever put together,” Dave explained in his YouTube post.

“I learned so much about these whales and dolphins from this drone footage that it feels like I have entered a new dimension!”

Well, it looks like it, too. As if the dolphin stampede isn’t impressive enough, the uniquely intimate shots of humpback whales with their youths is nothing short of gorgeous. It took a bit of sacrifice to get them, too. Capt. Dave actually lost another one of his drones while trying to capture the dolphins and whales that day. It clipped an antennae on his boat and then sunk.

But a lost drone is worth it.

“I have not been this excited about a new technology since we built our underwater viewing pods on our whale watching boat,” Dave said.

“Drones are going to change how we view the animal world.” He added,

“My wife says no more drones if I lose this one. But she said that before I lost the other one.”

[MIKA27]

A Floating Arctic City Fuelled By Eating Icebergs

With glaciers firing off more icebergs into the Atlantic than ever before, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are envisioning futures that make the most of the dystopian realities a climate-changed world could bring. Cities that float around the arctic while eating icebergs are another one of those futures.

This Waterworld-esque living machine ship is called Arctic Harvester, and it is the brainchild of two French architecture students. The duo were inspired to design the floating community during unrelated studies on Greenland. They became captivated by the nation’s strange juxtaposition of natural resource abundance. “An iceberg is an oasis [of fresh water],” explains the design team. “We had what seemed to us a massive resource on one hand, and a massive lack — no local produce — on the other.”

Arctic Harvester capitalises on the abundance of fresh-water icebergs by capturing them with its circular shape. It’s covered in solar panels to make the most of the endless summertime sun. The duo believes these two things are nearly enough to fuel hydroponic gardens that would feed a crew of 800. During the darker, winter months, they suggest the Harvester could draw power from an onboard osmotic system, which takes energy from mixing salt and fresh water.

Arctic Harvester is made more sustainable by being propeller-less. “The vessel as a whole is designed to drift with the currents that carry the icebergs during the force of their lives, often circling on the ocean currents between Greenland and the coast of Labrador for up to two years, before heading south past the east coast of the United States,” says team member Meriem Chabani.

The Weather Channel’s Iceberg Hunters don’t need to worry yet, as the duo and Polarisk Analytics are only just beginning to look for investors to make the first generation prototypes. And even if they never come to float, it’s certainly a cool idea, which makes it more than fit for the arctic.

[MIKA27]

Nepal Will Force Each Everest Climber To Collect 8kg Of Rubbish

Mount Everest might be the be-all, end-all of mountaineering, but it’s also a dumping ground for the climbers striving upon its face — which is littered, as National Geographic puts it, “with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps.” This week, Nepal announced a new rule aimed at cleaning it up.

Right now, climbers on Mt Everest are, theoretically, required to bring back their own rubbish. But a combination of factors, including the challenge of enforcement and the sheer necessity of offloading weight in emergency situations, makes the rule little more than a suggestion. A host of new requirements introduced by the Nepalese tourism ministry this week are aiming to fix this decades-old problem.

Think of it as a garbage tax. According to the new rules, each climber will be required to bring back 8kg of refuse — in addition to their own rubbish. When each person who goes up the mountain comes back down, they’ll have to present their rubbish at a new government office that’s being set up at Base Camp, where their haul will be weighed and certified. What happens if they’re underweight? That’s not entirely clear yet — Nepal’s tourism ministry official says it will “take legal action against them”.

Everest’s trash problem has been growing for half a century. The fact that littering is so interwoven with survival is part of the problem — if it’s a choice between spending your last bit of energy to haul your empty oxygen tanks down the mountain and actually getting down safely, it’s hard to argue with climbers who chose the latter.

One cleanup group collected 13 tons of garbage over the past four years, but there’s more than 10 more tons still up there, the contents of which include everything from cans to broken gear to poop — not to mention hundreds of corpses of climbers who died on their treks.

British mountaineer Michael Westmacott testing an oxygen breathing apparatus equipment to be used on an attempt on Everest in 1953

If Nepal’s new rule does work, it will be interesting to see how it affects the culture surrounding the world’s top mountaineers. Right now, the emphasis is on climbing the fastest or without the added cushion of bottled oxygen. But, in the future, the challenge might be about how little you’re carrying.

That, in turn, will affect the companies that make gear for climbers. Maybe a few years down the road, climbers will use chemicals that can turn human waste into usable insulation, or tents that can double as extra layers of clothing.

[MIKA27]

Is This the Ghost of James Stanley?

Employees at the 763-year-old Ye Olde Man and Scythe, a pub in northwest England, say that they had a strange day at work on February 14th. After noticing that the security camera shut itself off early, they reviewed the last moments of the footage and saw something they didn’t expect to see:

The London Mirror has been covering the story. There’s no shortage of possible natural explanations—corruption from an old recording, car lights reflecting off bottles, a prowler, a hoax—but local scuttlebutt has it that we’re looking at James Stanley (1607-1651), Seventh Earl of Derby, who had a reputation for hanging around the place both before and after his death.

It’s hard not to enjoy the video at face value. Most ghost videos are pretty underwhelming, unless you’re into that sort of thing—an orb here, a shadow there—but this will catch your eye. If it’s a hoax, it’s a brilliant hoax. The figure is undeniably human, but he doesn’t move like a human; if you’ve ever experienced hypnagogic hallucinations, his shifting form and strange, unpredictable patterns of movement may look familiar.

Of course, shifting forms and unpredictable patterns of movement can also be characteristic of a wide range of natural phenomena. It would be interesting to know whether the tape had been previously used to record people walking around the pub, whether reflections of street traffic show up on video when cars drive by, and so forth. But for now, the videotape simply is what it is; whether it is evidence of something supernatural, evidence of something natural, or a brilliantly-constructed work of art, it looks like the wispy figures we almost see out of the corner of our eyes when we’ve put in a long day.